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From its earliest days, horror film has turned to examples of the horror genre in fiction, such as the Victorian Gothic, for source material. The horror film has continually responded to cultural pressures and ideological processes that resulted in new, mutated forms of the genre. Adaptation in horror cinema is a useful point of departure for articulating numerous socio-cultural trends. Adaptation for the purposes of survival proves the impetus for many horror movie monsters. This book engages generic and thematic adaptations in horror cinema from a wide range of aesthetic, cultural, political and theoretical perspectives. These diverse approaches further evidence the horror genre's obsession with corporeal transformation and narratological re-articulation. Many horror films such as Thomas Edison's Frankenstein, John S. Robertson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, David Cronenberg'sVideodrome, Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers, and Terence Fisher's The Gorgon are discussed in the book. The book sheds welcome light upon some of the more neglected horror films of cinema's first century, and interrogates the myriad alterations and re-envisionings filmmakers must negotiate as they transport tales of terror between very different modes of artistic expression. It extends the volume's examination of adaptation as both an aesthetic process and a thematic preoccupation by revealing the practice of self-reflexivity and addresses the remake as adaptation. The book analyses the visual anarchy of avant-garde works, deploys the psychoanalytic film theory to interpret how science and technology impact societal secularisation, and explores the experimental extremes of adaptation in horror film.
F RANKENSTEIN (1818/1823/1831) HAS A life of its own. It is perhaps our culture’s most adapted text, and also one of our most adaptable metaphors. The mere mention of the word conjures almost 200 years of versions, images, meanings, cautionary tales, and arguments. Specifically, Frankenstein’s Creature has been used as a metaphor for a motherless child, out-of-control technology, a vast number of ‘out-of-control’ Others such as ‘the mobs that were seen as threats to the established orders of society’ (Gupta xxxii), as well as a myriad
I T SEEMS FITTING , GIVEN Scotland’s featured role in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the site of the female monster’s creation, that two 3,000-year-old ‘Frankenstein bog bodies’, as they were dubbed by the press – one male, one female – were recently discovered on the island of South Uist off Scotland’s west coast. Rearticulated from the bones of as many as six unrelated corpses and buried in a symbolic foetal position as if in preparation for rebirth into the next world, these composite mummies, whose purpose remains shrouded in
the little cabinets of natural history, where the curiosities are disposed in the same manner as in the collections at Servox and Chamounix. The latter name made me tremble when pronounced by Henry, and I hastened to quit Matlock, with which that terrible scene was thus associated. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein ( 1986 : 430) Journeys of all sorts punctuate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831 ), from Captain Robert Walton’s scientific expedition to the North Pole to
Two great works of fiction at opposite ends of the nineteenth century continue to be paradigms of horror with the concept of ‘adaptation’ at their heart: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus ( 1818 ) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Both present mad scientists who experiment with adaptation in the sense of
many of the existential questions introduced above about the human relation to time, controlling outside forces, and the existence of a soul and afterlife. Although texts may romanticise the beautiful death rather than confronting us with sheeted forms and protruding horny feet, to borrow from Wallace Stevens, the corpse nevertheless invariably instantiates the fact of death and its consequences in a direct and inescapable way. Gothic texts with reanimated corpses at their centre, however, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and H
question that resounds with a multiplicity of past iterations: ‘Is this creature … alive?’ (179). Spoken without irony (but not without a wink of postmodern precognition) by the story’s nineteenth-century protagonist, the question immediately situates Chiang’s retrofuturistic laboratory, his creature, and his scientists within a long tradition of Frankenstein adaptations. This is not to suggest that readers of ‘Seventy-Two Letters’ would necessarily access this tradition through Mary Shelley’s novel. Fans of Chiang’s literature would be just
, while Dave Morris’s highly esteemed iPad ‘app’ adaptation of Frankenstein (2012) is an example of a maturing digital media format treatment. New media adaptations like these provide unique opportunities for generating thematic resonances between Shelley’s original printed work and newer technologies of reading. Both of these texts exhibit a marked preoccupation with the material conditions of Shelley’s original composition and explicitly incorporate them, whether thematically through Jackson’s equation of hypertext navigation with writing
period, before exploring how this links to a popular elegiac discourse of mourning as evidenced by Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets , the first edition of which was published in 1784. The construction of melancholy in Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831) develops these issues of mourning and the novel is granted an extended analysis here. However, the new secular psychology sketched by Mary Shelley
this perception of him inasmuch as they were all horror-related in some form or other. This was most obviously the case for the six remaining films at Hammer, all of which were gothics – The Gorgon (1964), Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), The Devil Rides Out (1968), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974); and, as we will see