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According to its director, Terence Fisher, The Gorgon (1964) was not a horror film at all, but a romantic fairy tale and ‘frustrated love story’ (Ringel, 1975a : 24). Although the film is set in Hammer’s usual stylised middle Europe, the Gorgon herself derives not from Gothic literature, like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, but from classical mythology – unfamiliar
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.
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
films, The Curse of Frankenstein (Hammer’s first colour horror, produced in 1956 and released in 1957) and The Gorgon (1964): these were, respectively, the first and last of the five Hammer films on which horror stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and principal Hammer director Terence Fisher collaborated. 1 This fact alone marks the 1956–64 period as a distinctive stage in Hammer’s development. Importantly, The Gorgon also represents a key point in a wider shifting of terms within the genre
1964–66 By the mid-1960s the British horror film, largely because of Hammer’s unprecedented success, had become firmly associated in the public’s mind with period settings. What one finds between 1964 (the year of The Gorgon ) and 1966 is a cluster of films which seek, presumably in the commercial interests of product differentiation, to relocate horror in a recognisable present-day world while at the same time appealing to the already established market for that period horror
’ shield (By which, my face aversed, in open field I slew the Gorgon) for an empty name. When Virtue cut off Terror, he gat Fame. And if when Fame was gotten Terror died, What black Erinyes or more hellish pride Durst arm these hags now she is grown and great, To think they could her glories once defeat: I was her parent and I am her
by his dumb manservant Jerusaleme, we move back in time to see Caravaggio purchase Jerusaleme, then a little boy of about six, from his peasant grandmother, while his mother looks on and weeps. On their return to Caravaggio’s studio, we see the first of the many paintings which will be represented during the film – the severed snake-haired head of the Gorgon Medusa. The little boy grimaces at it, then picks up the shield on
this country’, declared John Wade in the influential post-war weekly The Gorgon, and ‘it is by trading in the blood and bones of the journeymen and Chase 00_Tonra 01 22/01/2013 11:03 Page 5 Introduction labourers of England, that our merchants have derived their riches, and the country its glory and importance’.16 In April 1819 Wade had given up The Gorgon to begin an ambitious partwork, The Black Book, or, Corruption Unmasked!!! Upon its completion in February 1820, he dedicated it ‘to the Working, the Agricultural, the Commercial, and Manufacturing Classes of
Fisher’s The Gorgon (1964) as a meditation upon how science and technology impact societal secularisation. Similarly, by exploring the experimental extremes of adaptation in horror film, Murray Pomerance’s ‘Marion Crane Dies Twice’ reflects critically upon visionary director Gus Van Sant’s daring and controversial remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Finally, the five chapters that bring this
gorgonion entry shares with the mandrake a highlighting of bodily features, in this case sharply defined eyes, eyebrows, nose, and a mouth. Further, the Gorgons in classical mythology most typically had snakes for hair, and the secondary roots in the Cotton Vitellius C.iii gorgonion illustration indeed appear very snakelike. (See Figure 5.3. ) Figure 5.3 Entry for gorgonion , British Library MS Cotton Vitellius C.iii, f. 73v. Further