Wedding Bells

My first exposure to the story of the creation of Frankenstein was the prologue to The Bride of Frankenstein (1935, directed by James Whale), in which Lord Byron and Percy Shelley attend Mary Shelley as she works on her needlepoint. The night is appropriately stormy and Byron imagines an angry Jehovah hurling lightning bolts at his nose. Then Byron intones his disbelief that such a mild, delicate woman could have conjured horrors to make HIS blood run cold. He laments that the story ended at the windmill in the previous film, prompting Mary to tell them that that's not the end at all. And so it isn't. The Creature born from the hubris of that pale student of unhallowed arts shows no signs of letting go of the popular imagination. A dozen films or more from this decade alone revisit Frankenstein in one way or another. Perhaps more surprising, though, is the number of films that revisit that mad weekend at Lake Geneva where the Shelleys, Byron, Dr. Polidori, and Mary's stepsister Claire gathered to tell stories to ease the boredom of The Year Without A Summer. This, too, comes from Mary's imagination, forming a Gothic story all its own. It's not by accident that films like Gothic or A Nightmare Wakes or Haunted Summer present the weekend as a horror story. Shelley herself framed it that way in the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, and now it is a persistent narrative in the meme pool. I like to think when she described Frankenstein as a "pale student of unhallowed arts," she was also describing herself.

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Texting from Beyond

Longtime readers of this blog probably know that I am a deeply skeptical person. I am a pure existentialist. I believe this is all there is and we make our own meanings in this life. This might seem at odds with my appetite for horror movies, but I had an understanding about the willing suspension of disbelief from an early age. There are uses for fantasy even to an adult mind. It can be the valve on a pressure cooker. But even I have limits. I did not like 2014's Ouija, in part because Ouija boards are such obvious humbugs (in the original meaning of that word, not the Ebeneezer Scrooge version). They are so easy to debunk that I cannot believe that otherwise intelligent people fall for them. Maybe I'm giving reason too much credit, especially in the current political moment when a large portion of the body politic would love nothing more than to roll back the enlightenment. "It's just a game," is the riposte to my skepticism, but that hardly accounts for how seriously many people take them. P. T. Barnum would have recognized this age of credulity. Now, as in Barnum's time, there's a sucker born every minute. The film compounded my ingrained scorn by being a terrible film and I admit that my experience with it put me off seeing its sequel even though it is well-regarded by people whose tastes I respect. Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) has a director I like, too, though at the time of its release I didn't know Mike Flanagan from Adam. I like Flanagan's movies, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually get around to Origin of Evil. And here we are, ten years later.

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