The glut of horror movies on my TV once again started me reflecting on how shock entertainment can only escalate. The first horror flicks I ever saw were Hammer classics in which Christopher Lee’s bloodshot vampire eyes were enough to set the joint jumping. Now it takes a woman diving into a tub of syringes, and I can only wonder whither we go from there? Richard Holmes in his book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, illustrates how far we have come since Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein in the company of Lord Byron and her poet husband.
"On the bleak Mer de Glace glacier in the French Alps, the Creature appeals to his creator [Dr.] Frankenstein for sympathy, and for love. 'I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator would not call it murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts ... Oh! My creator, make me happy! Let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of one existing thing. Do not deny me my request!'… "His terrible corrosive and destructive solitude becomes the central theme of the second part of Mary Shelley's novel. Goaded by his misery, the Creature kills and destroys. Yet he also tries to take stock of his own violent actions and contradictory emotions. He concludes that his one hope of happiness lies in sexual companionship. The scene on the Mer de Glace in which he begs Frankenstein to create a wife for him is central to his search for human identity and happiness. The clear implication is that a fully human 'soul' can only be created through friendship and love."
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5 comments:
Farren, are you going soft on us?
I was never a splatter punk.
An interesting observation Mick and an equally poignant quote from Shelley's Frankenstein. And what of, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde? The first draft's sordid frightfulness which so alarmed his wife that she immediately threw it upon the drawing room fire. Shocking back then but baulked at now by the purveyors of the plethora of repeat gore-porn which caters for shock rather than genunine spine-tingling horror.
You aren't being fair... Paranormal Activity is the biggest film out there right now & it is running on simplicity of concept & misinformation, making people who think it is "real footage" jump in their seats. It isn't all just slasher suspense & gore sequences on the modern market, there is still something to be said of storytelling & immersion as an art in cinema.
Granted, I see the slasher, gore & blair witch styles as monotonous trash that exhibits precisely what is wrong with the silver screen & why film will inevitably die out in the future. Video games have done a far better job of storytelling with horror than film has in the last decade... in fact, some of the best selling films in horror were cheap & generic knock-offs of video games, such as Resident Evil & Silent Hill, both of which were far better & much more terrifying in their original mediums. Hollywood raped those name sakes & reformatted them into the age old architecture of cinematic garbage. I've expressed the opinion before & probably will again, nonetheless, if you aren't playing video games, you're missing out on some of the best entertainment available. There is a level of immersion & interactivity in the medium that sets it apart & elevates it above (in my mind & opinion) everything aside from literature. Literature is still on top because it incorporates the use of the readers' imagination & nothing can top imagination. Then again, I've said for a while now that, "preference is everything in entertainment," some people are going to like certain things & dislike others simply because of who they are & nothing will ever change that.
What a beautiful book. Leave us not forget that the great Mary Shelley was also a true and noble revolutionary. She went across Europe on foot and mule the year after Waterloo. Her father was "the English Rousseau," so she was quite used to being hated . . . .
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