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1957 with the American horror and fantasy writer Richard Matheson, who was responsible for writing the novel in the first place, coming to Britain to prepare a screenplay adaptation for Hammer Films. Hammer had just had a notable success with its first colour gothic horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957), which starred Peter Cushing as the scientist and featured a then unknown Christopher Lee as the creature, and the company already had Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958), its next
upset (and occasionally delight) critics and, in the main, achieved huge box-office success. Many of these were directed by Fisher – including virtually all of the important earlier films such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Mummy (1959) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). For a while, up until the box-office flop of The Phantom of the Opera in 1962
magazine’s ‘Fang Mail’ section printed letters by readers, creating the possibility of dialogue and developing a sense of shared identity among horror enthusiasts that had in some senses lapsed since the demise of the horror comics industry of the 1940s and 1950s, when titles had carried their own letter pages. The existence of the monster kid subculture is evident in an advert for the toy company Aurora, taken from the DC title The House of Secrets #92 (1971). The advertised toy collection brings together a mad scientist, Vampirella, and Frankenstein’s monster, but
white male readership, many of whom, like Higgenbotham, were uncomfortable with images of female empowerment.20 Given their readership – and the persistence of many artists and writers who had been working twenty years previously – it is perhaps unsurprising that horror comics of the 1970s returned to some of the imagery of the 1950s. The September 1973 cover of Monster of Frankenstein #5, for example, features an image of the monster apparently menacing an imperilled woman in a red dress (Figure 57). The title, ‘The Monster Walks Among Us!’, is in itself another 1950
immortality, death, and morality. I explore the ways in which the writer-director applies his thesis on the importance of death to the horror genre, and examine how this subverts an understanding of death as the dark element to be feared. I go on to analyse how del Toro, through Cronos, establishes an auteurist identity, which will be developed with experience and access to larger budgets. I argue for the centrality of early horror filmmakers James Whale and Terence Fisher, and their interpretations of Dracula and Frankenstein. Finally, I consider traits which are common to
through the last part of the 1950s, into the 1960s and then on to the 1970s, British horror was one of the most commercially successful areas of British cinema. 2 As Wyndham indicates, easily the most prolific of horror producers was the relatively small company called Hammer Films, from which there emerged from 1956 onwards a series of gothic horrors, most notably those featuring Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, which were to become famous throughout much of the
: Tod Browning's Dracula ( 1931 ), followed by James Whale's Frankenstein ( 1931 ), both for Universal, and Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ( 1931 ) for Paramount Pictures. Of course, there were films made earlier that have come to be identified as examples of silent horror, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame , Phantom of the Opera , The Unknown , The Man Who Laughs , The Cat and the Canary . This is, however, a retrospective categorisation through a recognition of the tropes of horror as they have subsequently been established. In the silent
. In fact, I go so far as to suggest that Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are at the inception of a nascent mutation of the Gothic, what I term the Canadian ecoGothic. The chapter explores in particular the monsters in the texts – Jimmy/Snowman, the monstrous human survivor who cares for the Crakers; the humanoid Crakers, manufactured by the real Frankenstein of the text
the evil nature of the killers, unequivocal judgements were difficult to make. Perhaps the act, and the circumstances that surrounded it, were symptoms of the critical nature of the times. Much later, reviewing the case and its reverberations, Blake Morrison commented: ‘it is the age of the Bad Boys. And we’re the Frankensteins who made them. From the spring of 1993 can be dated this new horror, of
the emergence of legal personality and the development of its powers. The UN is neither a ‘super-state’ nor simply a ‘talking shop’, but does it have sufficient autonomy to become a type of ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, whereby the creature becomes more powerful than its creator? 32 Klabbers provocatively raises this spectre at the front of his textbook, 33 but a detailed assessment of the metaphor is given by Guzman: States sometimes create their own form of artificial life, the international organization (IO). Dr Frankenstein created his monster in an attempt