Celebrate Stoker's 165th Birthday With These Reads

Google is celebrating Bram Stoker's 165th birthday with a doodle featuring the infamous count and his brides facing off against Harker and his band of merry vampire-hunters. Stoker is credited with creating the archetype of the vampire we all know and love--the blood-sucking aristocrat with a snazzy cape and Transylvanian accent-- but his other works, without the larger than life Count, are often overlooked. So get stoked and discover a new side of Stoker with these reading recommendations:

Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914) 
Published posthumously, this collection of Stoker short stories capitalized on the success of Stoker's novel Dracula. The story that makes this collection worth reading is the titular "Dracula's Guest." Intended to be the original first chapter of Dracula, it follows an unnamed Englishman (assumed to be Jonathan Harker) on his way to Dracula's castle when he makes a stop at a local graveyard. There he discovers the tomb of "Countess Dolingen of Gratz / in Styria / sought and found death / 1801" and inscribed on the back of her resting place the words "The dead travel fast." The Englishman is unsettled and falls into a swoon only to awake and find a wolf lapping at his neck. He is saved by Dracula's attendants who convey him to the castle. Stoker's Styrian countess is a reference to another literary vampire, the countess Mircalla Karnstein of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). In Le Fanu's novella she is the title vampire who preys on the young daughter of a family in Styria. By referencing this undead countess, Stoker places Count Dracula in a tradition of vampires that extends back to Le Fanu and even Polidori's "Vampyre" (1819).


The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903)
The basis for the Hammer horror film Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971), this novel follows an archaeologist's efforts to bring the ancient Egyptian mummy Queen Tera back from the dead. Click here for my review of the film and little more about the book.

The Lair of the White Worm, or The Garden of Evil (1911)
This novel is actually based on the folklore of the Lambton Worm. Legend says the lord of an estate went fishing on the Sabbath rather than go to church. He caught a lamprey-like creature, declared it to be the devil's spawn and disposed of it down a well. Like most good monsters, the worm came back to terrorize the countryside and was vanquished by the errant lord who put it in the well in the first place. Stoker's White Worm runs along the same lines of the myth with Adam Salton, the would be-heir of a country estate, coming into contact with a horrible worm-like creature with glowing green eyes. The creature lives in a well and is only destroyed after a thunderstorm ignites a charge of dynamite placed there by Adam.

Full-text works by Bram Stoker: 
The Lady of the Shroud 
The Jewel of the Seven Stars
The Lair of the White Worm

More Vampires on Monster Land:
The Year of the Vampire
Ten Unconventional Vampires
Transylvanian Concubines

My Life in Horror Gifs

The everday horror of my life presented in horror gifs.

When I give my students a pop quiz

When I realize I brought the wrong handouts to class.

When I tell my students about the final exam.

What the campus looks like the week after final exams.

When a student e-mails me to ask if we did anything important in class.

 What my office hours normally look like.

What my office hours look like the day before a big assignment is due.

When I tell a student they have to revise their entire paper.

My face when a student asks for an extension on their paper.

When I see my students after Spring Break

When I see former students off campus

When I can't go out with my friends because I'm grading.

When I realize I haven't worked on my dissertation in two weeks.

When I bump into my adviser and I haven't made any progress on my dissertation.

How I will feel when I finally finish my dissertation.

When I attend an academic seminar and I don't know anyone

 When my conference abstract gets accepted.

When I realize I have to write the conference paper.

When I find cookies/muffins/brownies in the break room.

When I think about getting a tenure-track job after I graduate.

A Visit to Mockingbird Lane

This update of the 1960's show The Munsters revisits the monstrous clan of Lily, Herman, Eddie, Marilyn and Grandpa as they move into the creepy "hobo-murder house" on a sunny street in quiet middle America. A lot of what you love about the campy original series survives including the stair trapdoor and the theme song.

The elements that do change are for the better. Marylin for instance is a lot creepier than I remember. Charity Wakefield plays her with a certain creepy innocence and despite her obvious handicap--sunny blond disposition and lack of obvious monstrosity--she is certainly a Munster through and through. Jerry O'Connell plays Herman like a modern version of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. He's a self-made monster with a bum ticker because he loves too hard. Finding Herman a replacement heart becomes one of the show's main conflicts.

Far and away, Edie Izzard steals the show as Grandpa. He rocks a version of Gary Oldman's imperial red robes in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and bakes blood cookies that turn the neighbors into his slaves. I have been a fan of Izzard since his stand-up days and he brings the same comedy to this role. His character is a departure from the original goofy Grandpa and he plays grandpa "D" with a suave, biting humor.

Overall, the aesthetics of the show remind me of another of my favorites, Pushing Daisies--and it turns out the show-turned-special was actually written by Pushing Daisies writer Bryan Fuller--but like that show I doubt this one would have succeeded past a few episodes.

For all it's charm, the episode did leave me wanting more. All the major action is resolved at the episode's end, but it felt more like a pilot that could have spawned more episodes, which is what it was originally intended to be, instead of a standalone piece. So much work and money ($10 million to be precise) went into the crafting the world of the show and I am disappointed that we won't be invited back to 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Or will we? 

Watch the special on Hulu

 

It's Alive!

Apologies, everyone, for the lack of action on this blog for the last month. I’m engaged in a large writing project that's eating up most of my intellectual energy. What little I have left over is spent drafting abstracts and trying to get an academic article published. In spite of this know that Monster Land is not abandoned, and hopefully posts will continue to come occasionally, if not constantly, for the next few months.

Cheers,

The Monster Scholar

Happy Thanksgiving! The Hunger Games and the Cornucopia of Death

Happy Turkey Day from Monster Land!

I'll leave you today with some musings on the The Hunger Games whose horrific re-interpretation of the cornucopia puts new twist on our ages-old horn of plenty.

The Hunger Games is a film adaptation of the wildly popular teen novel of the same name. Set in a futuristic version of the U.S., the country is divided into 12 districts ruled by the Panem. The Panem created the Hunger Games after a revolution that resulted in the destruction of the 13th district. A male and female tribute from each district are sent to compete in the Hunger Games, but only one will make it out alive. The winner's district will receive gifts of food and fuel for a single year while the other districts struggle to eke out a meager living. The plot is a cross between Lord of the Flies and Battle Royale as the tributes are trained to kill one another in the ultimate televised sporting event.

The cornucopia of The Hunger Games is a golden horn that contains food and weapons for tributes. Tributes have two options at the starting line: they can risk running to the golden horn and getting whacked by other tributes in a frenzied bloodbath or flee into the woods without a prayer.


May the odds be ever in your favor. The Hunger Games comes out March 2012

Sensualising Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment: Call for Papers

A shout out to all my academic peeps in Monsterland. This conference in Edinburgh, UK is calling for papers on monsters of all kinds, but especially medical freaks and how literature constructs the monstrous body. Should be a good time.  Check the CFP below and pay a visit to the conference's blog for more.

The University of Edinburgh

Sensualising Deformity: 
Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment

June 15-16, 2012

Image: Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine,
George Gould and Walter Pyle, 1901

Confirmed Plenary Speakers:

Prof. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
George Washington University, Washington D.C.

Dr. Peter Hutchings
Northumbria University, UK

Prof. Margrit Shildrick
Linköping University, Sweden

Prof. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

“Although he was already repellent enough, there arose from the fungous skin-growth with which he was almost covered a very sickening stench which was hard to tolerate... with the use of the [daily] bath the unpleasant odour... ceased to be noticeable”
~ Sir Frederick Treves

The prominent surgeon Frederic Treves’s description of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, exposes a body which is simultaneously an assault on the senses and one which has traditionally been de-sensualised. Deformity is sanitised and fitted into a structure of normality. The academy tends to obscure the complexity of the sensuous/sensual/sensed body of the deformed subject, and of the questions, anxieties, and denials which surround deformity when it is located within a continuum of sense.

From freak exhibitions and fairs, medical examinations and discoveries to various portrayals in arts and literature, images of deformity (or monstrosity, used separately or interchangeably depending on context) have captivated us for centuries. The result is a significant body of critical and artistic works where these bodies are dissected, politicized, exhibited, objectified or even beatified. Nonetheless, there remains a gap, an unexplored, unspoken or neglected aspect of this complex field of study which needs further consideration. This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to bring the senses and the sensuous back to the monstrous or deformed body from the early modern period through to the mid-twentieth century, and seeks to explore its implications in diverse academic fields.

We hope to bring together scholars and students from a wide range of disciplines to engage in a constructive dialogue, network, and exchange ideas and experiences, connecting a community of researchers who share a fascination with deformity, monstrosity, and freakery.

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

● Spectacle/fetishisation of monstrosity and deformity; monstrous sexuality/eroticisation

● The monster as a catalyst of progression/ historical perspectives

● Monstrous symbolism, prodigality, or beatification

● The racialised body; exoticising difference

● Monstrosity in medical literature; disability narratives

● Monstrous becoming; the ‘sensed’ body

● Deformed aesthetics; monstrosity in the visual arts

● (De) gendering the deformed body; humanisation vs objectification

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations from established scholars, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students from various teratological backgrounds, e.g. in literature, history, media and art studies, philosophy, religious studies, history of science,medical humanities, and critical and cultural theory. Proposals should be no more than 300 words, in .doc format, and should include a brief 50-word biography.

Please submit your abstracts no later than 31 January 2012 to sdefconference@ed.ac.uk

Dr. Karin Sellberg (The University of Edinburgh)

Ally Crockford (The University of Edinburgh)

Maja Milatovic (The University of Edinburgh)

The Victorian-Monster Art of Dan Hillier

I am head over heels for these art prints by Dan Hillier. They are the perfect mix of Victorian style etchings showing polite scenes of fashionable men and women and the grotesque.I love how the seemingly ordinary people sprout tentacles and snake transforming them into Cthulhu and lamia-like creatures. Great fun. If you act by December 10th Dan will send you a print of one of his beautiful grotesqueries in time for Christmas. Tis the season.