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The following is an article from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.
A few years ago one of our BRI writers saw the classic 1931 horror film Dracula for the first time …and thought it was terrible. He never knew there was a story behind why the film had so many problems -or even that other people agreed with him that this Hollywood classic was flawed- until he came across this story in a book called Hollywood Gothic by David J. Skal, a leading authority on the history of monster movies.
UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
One of the nice things about silent films is that everyone can understand them, regardless of what language they speak. Of course, they needed title cards to help explain the plot, but it was easy -and cheap- to write new cards for each foreign market.
As a result American films found their way into countries all over the world, and silent films became a truly universal art form: American studios made half of their revenues from foreign film sales; silent screen stars like Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan became the most recognized human beings on the face of the earth.
SILENT TREATMENT
But the advent of talking pictures changed everything -and not just for silent-screen stars whose thick accents quickly consigned them to the Hollywood scrap heap. Suddenly, American films became incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t speak English. American film studios faced the prospect of losing up to half of their business overnight.
Bela Lugosi
Foreign countries that had become used to a steady stream of Hollywood films found themselves left out in the cold; some threatened to retaliate by slapping tariffs on films with dialogue in English, or by boycotting American films entirely.
Making matters worse, sound recording and synchronization technology was still very primitive, and dubbing foreign-language dialogue onto English-language films was all but impossible. Besides, one of the things that attracted audiences to the first “talkies” was the thrill of hearing their favorite actors speak for the very first time. Even if dubbing had been practical, it might not have been very popular. There was no easy solution to the problem, and as a result many foreign language markets were left out of the early years of the talkie era -except for the Spanish-language market. Spanish was too popular, and Mexico, Central, and South America were too close for Hollywood to ignore.
THE DOPPELGÄNGER ERA
No film crew works 24 hours a day. At some point everyone goes home, leaving the soundstage and the expensive sets unused until morning. So, reasoned Hollywood studios, why not bring in a second cast and crew at night to film foreign-language versions of the same films that were being made in English during the day?
more …
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Move over, Twilight! Here’s the best vampire scene ever, from the amazing martial arts film Kung Fu Beyond The Grave
The second I heard "Count Dracula, come to my AID!" / "I’m COM-I-I-ING!" I knew it’d be a big hit!
Team Billy Chong FTW: Link [embedded YouTube clip]
Comments Off The following is an article from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.
It was a dark and stormy night… no, it really was. And that was the perfect setting for telling one of the scariest stories of all time. Here’s how it happened.
CABIN FEVER
It all started in the summer of 1816. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famed English poet, was vacationing along the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland with his 18-year-old future wife Mary Wollstonecraft. In adjoining villas were their friends, the poet Lord Byron, and Lord Byron’s personal physician Dr. John Polidori. “It was a wet, ungenial summer,” Mary Shelley later wrote, and then the rain “confined us for days.”
The group passed some of their time reading German horror stories. Then inspired by the tales, Lord Byron announced to the group, “We will each write a ghost story.” And with that challenge, two of the most enduring monsters in English literature came into being.
DYNAMIC DUO
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a tale about a mad scientist who assembles a monster out of body parts stolen from cadavers and then brings the monster to life. Polidori, she recounted later, “had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was punished for peeping through a keyhole.” Percy Shelley came up with a story “founded on the experiences of his early life” …and Lord Byron created a story about a vampire.
Wollstonecraft spent the rest of the summer turning her story into a novel-Frankenstein. Lord Byron never did complete his story, but Dr. Polidori was so intrigued by the vampire idea that he scrapped the skull-headed lady and, borrowing from Byron, later wrote The Vampyre, the first vampire novel of any substance to appear in English literature. The Vampyre was published in the 1819 edition of New Monthly Magazine, and earned Polidori £30.
REVENGE!
The Vampyre might have been just another simple retelling of the traditional vampire legends of Eastern Europe, were it not for the fact that Polidori and Lord Byron had once been lovers. Cooped up in the villa in Geneva that summer, they were driving each other crazy. Polidori was jealous of Byron’s increasingly close friendship with Percy Shelley, and, perhaps because of this, he decided to make the vampire character a parody of Lord Byron.
The vampires of Eastern European lore were not that different from today’s conception of werewolves: They were scary, uncivilized creatures, more animal than human. But Polidori’s character was different. His vampire was a nobleman, and an immoral, sinister antihero named Lord Ruthven-not unlike Lord Byron, whose numerous sexual liaisons were the scandal of English society.
The name Ruthven was another dig at Byron. Polidori took the name from Ruthven Glenarvon, the main character of Glenarvon, a popular novel, written by Lady Caroline Lamb, another of Byron’s former lovers. Lamb, too, had intended her character to be a satirical slap at Byron.
Nestled in a chest of drawers existed a list of names of those lives that succumb to the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory. For years, Bathory’s sadistic killing spree went unnoticed as she left a trail of blood from Cachtice Castle to her abode in Vienna.
In Bathory’s Vienna Mansion, her cellar acted as a sadistic torture chamber, fashioned with a cage of spikes. The spikes could be raised or lowered by using as a pulley. Peasant girls and seamstresses with ample bosoms were locked in the cage, while Elizabeth Bathory’s maid Dorothea Szentes prodded the girls with a red hot poker. Elizabeth Bathory would shout perverse words at the girls, forcing them to be impaled upon a spike. She would later bath in their blood, believing it would preserve her youth.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
The legend of Dracula was inspired by the 15th Century Romanian warlord Vlad the Impaler. Researchers at Ancestry.com recently discovered that Robert Pattinson, the actor who plays the sparkly vampire Edward in the Twilight series, is related to him:
Researchers at Ancestry.com discovered that Pattinson and the Transylvanian leader (real name: Vlad III Dracula) are connected through their relationship to the British royal family. Prince William and Prince Harry are Pattinson’s distant cousins; Vlad the Impaler was their distant uncle.
“Tracing Pattinson’s family back to Vlad was difficult research, but the pieces that unraveled created the perfect accompaniment to the Twilight Saga,” said Anastasia Tyler, a genealogist at Ancestry.com. “Without any myth or magic, we find royalty and vampires lurking in Pattinson’s life — making his story just as supernatural as the one he’s playing on screen.”
Link via Nerd Bastards | Images from Geek Tyrant, photo of Robert Pattinson originally from Summit Entertainment
Since Alfred Hitchcock was not an American college student or a baseball player, we can assume that when he posed for this studio photograph he was making the “sign of the horns” to ward off evil or bad luck.
The gesture has a long and complex history, undoubtedly originating as a manual representation of the Devil’s horns; Bram Stoker referred to it in his novel Dracula:
When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and pointed two fingers towards me. With some difficulty I got a fellow-passenger to tell me what they meant; he would not answer at first, but on learning that I was English, he explained that it was a charm or guard against the evil eye.
It has subsequently been co-opted by musicians, athletes, politicians, and celebrities for a variety of purposes and meanings. Students at several universities use the sign in support of their team. In baseball and football it can mean “two outs” or “second down.” It is even reportedly an unofficial sign for “B.S.” (as the horns of a bull) in American sign language!
Photo via Old Hollywood.
What if all our favorite pop culture vampires got together in the same room? Pretty much what you’d expect.
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The article above, written by Matt Soniak, appeared in Scatterbrained section of the Mar - Apr 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine (the excellent "The 25 Most Powerful Books of the Past 25 Years " issue). It is reprinted here with permission. Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today!
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Today marks the first day in the year (May 3rd) of what would be Jonathan Harker’s journal. Dracula Feed has started an experiment of blogging Jonathan’s journal in "real time", publishing each journal entry the day it would have happened.
Experience Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a new way — in real time. Dracula is an epistolary novel (a novel written as a series of letters or diary entries,) and this blog will publish each diary entry on the day that it was written by the narrator so that the audience may experience the drama as the characters would have.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by MonkeyDay.
