The Aviary

Because of Reasons, I watched Son of Frankenstein last night. I think I'd only watched that one once before, because, y'know, it doesn't have Colin Clive in it so what is even the point? Except that I have accidentally been having a weird Lionel Atwill solo film festival over the last month or so, so it turns out that the point is Lionel Atwill. Who is pretty great in Son of Frankenstein, not gonna lie.

Because of this, today my brain will focus on nothing but making up fluffy Universal Frankenstein fanfiction. Traditionally, the premise of all my mental Frankenstein fic has been, "But what if Henry Frankenstein was actually a Good Father?" Turns out, my brain is also happy to ruminate for hours on "But what if Wolf von Frankenstein was actually a Good Brother*?"

I'm having an excellent time.




*The secondary premise of this mental fic is "What if Wolf von Frankenstein is actually also a monster?" because it is much more reasonable to me to imagine that Henry "World's Most Sex Repulsed Mad Scientist" Frankenstein built himself a child using Forbidden Science than to imagine that he has ever fathered a child in the more standard way.

The other result of rewatching a lot of my classic monster movies is that I have, for the past few days, been musing on the idea of finding and playing some kind of Gothic/Universal/Hammer Horror solo rpg. I've looked at a couple horror-based games but haven't found any that really did what I wanted them to do. (Thousand Year Old Vampire looks cool, for example, but I'm not really looking for a journaling game at the moment.) I realized this morning that what I really wanted was for someone to have made a hack of Ironsworn based around Gothic/Universal/Hammer horror tropes.

And then, about an hour later, I realized, "Wait - I could make a hack of Ironsworn based around Gothic/Universal/Hammer horror tropes!"

So I've been noodling with that while work is slow today. Ironsworn is honestly pretty easy to hack for this purpose - the vast majority of the various assets are still applicable and I don't need to change the moves at all*. I'm borrowing some other assets from the Ironsworn: Badlands hack (mostly the gun-based combat talents) and I might draw up a few custom ones - I'd like to have path assets for being a dhampir or a mad scientist or (being me) a vampiric thrall. Plus I want some combat talents based around vampire and werewolf abilities.

It was going to be an rpg evening already but I think I'm going to take a break from my normal Ironsworn campaign and start this instead. I'll have to find a new notebook.








*I mean, I'm probably going to play using a mix of Ironsworn and Starforged moves - I like the way Starforged handles some things (like combat, or Bonds) a little better - but I could use vanilla Ironsworn and be fine.

This month, my library's Classic Book Group read Dracula and I was invited to their (virtual) meeting as the library vampire expert. This makes two meetings of this bookgroup I have attended. The last was in 2009. Both meetings were discussions of Dracula, because I am nothing if not consistent.

It was a super fun discussion that I enjoyed immensely. I was very restrained in my enthusiasm, only made one joke about train timetables, did no excited infodumping, and did not use the word "homoerotic" even once. The topic of "is vampirism oral sex?" was brought up but not by me. I did get to talk about magic blood transfusions, Renfield's weird fascinating religiosity, and the wonderful fact that Dracula calls himself "Count de Ville" at one point, which I had entirely forgotten. It is always wonderful to talk about this book with people who are new to it, and especially with people who are new to horror in general, because they always have some new and interesting thing to say that I have not considered and I love being able to once again see my favorite book with fresh eyes.

Also, I got to reread Dracula on work time and got paid to discuss it tonight, which I would absolutely have done for free.

Good times.

For my birthday, my Mom gave me a new board game: Horrified. We have just finished playing our first game. Mechanically, it's a lot like Arkham Horror, but it's a lot friendlier to new players, doesn't have a 60-page rulebook, and isn't too big to fit on my table. (I would play solo Arkham Horror a lot more often if I didn't have to play on the floor.) Also, it's about Universal Horror monsters. Two things that I find immensely charming:

1) The back of the board is the first thing you see when you open the box and written on it is a paraphrase of Edward Van Sloan's speech from the intro to Frankenstein, rewritten to be about this board game. That's fucking adorable.

2) So, there are seven monsters you can potentially be fighting in the game: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Bride, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Each of them has a unique way of defeating them. For Dracula, for example, you have to smash four of his coffins and then kill him. For the Creature, you have to move a boat token to find his hidden lair and then drive him away. For Frankenstein and the Bride, however, you defeat them by teaching them how to be human, after which they settle down and live peacefully with the surrounding humans. Why is this boardgame giving me feelings, you guys?


Really, the only thing wrong with this game is, unlike Arkham Horror, there will probably not be expansions with other, more obscure Universal Horror monsters and thus I will never be able to play against Kaye Caldwell or Marya Zaleska.

The ACT theater Dracula did several things that were super interesting:

1) The cast is highly condensed - only 7 actors. Most of the condensed characters were as per usual: though all three of Lucy's suitors wer mentioned, the only one we saw was Dr Seward. However! They also entirely cut Van Helsing and gave his role as vampire expert to Mina. I've never seen a Dracula without a Van Helsing before and it was weird and novel and pretty great.

2) Mina also got to kill Dracula, which I always approve of.

3) Until he reached England, Dracula was a super unsettling puppet.

4) The curtain call music was Cry Little Sister from The Lost Boys and I had to explain to all my siblings was I was suddenly laughing so hard.


We have a tradition of debriefing over gelato after theater and today I discovered that, despite knowing me and having to put up with my Dracula nonsense for years, none of my siblings are conversant with any version other than the 1931 film. I feel I really should rectify that.

Okay, so, I got an interlibrary loan book yesterday: The Mummy's Curse by Roger Luckhurst, which is nonfiction about, basically, the cultural history of mummy stories in England in the 1800's. This is super cool, because mummies are one of those areas of gothic horror I've never delved into too much and so don't know a lot about.

I started it this morning. The chapter headings are in Papyrus.

I think this is maybe the first time that has ever been appropriate.

Things:

- Thank you all for your kind wishes, but alas, I did not get the job. I am disappointed but not hugely broken up about it - there will be more opportunities in the future.

- Our old library is closed and we are beginning the process of moving to the new one! Yesterday, all the books got moved (by a moving company, not by us) and I got to go into the new branch for the first time. You guys, it is so big and bright and shiny! There are so many chairs and so many big windows and we have an actual break room that isn't anyone's office and an actual back room to do check in and processing and nothing smells like cabbage at all! I am very excited. Now we have to go through all the stuff that isn't books in the old library and decide what we need to keep. So much shredding to do, you guys. So much.

( - I do feel like we ought to do some sort of landtaking for the new library, or at least do something to invite the ghosts from the old building into the new one, but I'm not sure how to talk everyone else into it.)

- I have kinda been in a monster mood for the past few days, which is exciting because that hasn't happened in, like, a year. I kinda want to spend the day watching Dracula movies and thinking about my Marya Zaleska/Kay Caldwell au that someday really will be written down but, y'know, work. Have to do that instead.

- I should maybe find a new horror novel. Haven't done that in a while, either.

Today, I watched Son of Dracula for the first time in a while and now I want to talk to people about it.

You guys, this movie is so weird. And I don't mean that in terms of its subject matter - it's a fairly run-of-the-mill vampire story, to be honest - but the whole movie feels like the film makers thought they were making one film while the whole time they were, in fact, making a different one.

I spent most of today thinking about the film and trying to put my finger on what, exactly, felt so odd about it. And I think I finally figured it out. See, horror movies from this era are, as the author of the book I'm currently reading points out, like fairy tales or commedia dell'arte. You know who the characters are and what kinds of things they're likely to do before the story starts and the characters don't deviate from that - a wolf is always a wolf, a witch is always a witch, Jack is always Jack. It's the same with 30's and 40's horror film. Except in Son of Dracula, because there's no role that properly fits Kay Caldwell.

For convenience sake, I'm going to give you a brief plot synopsis of the film (because no one watches this movie). ( It's under here. )

Universal made two Dracula movies before this one. They both feature essentially the same cast of characters: the vampire, the young lovers, the wise old man, a few other intrepid vampire hunters, the vampire's minion, some comic relief, and assorted victims. Sometimes they get a little shuffled or a couple get combined - Dr Garth in Dracula's Daughter replaces both Dr Seward and Jonathan Harker - but the basic outline is there. (This is also the basic outline of The Mummy, btw.) But the outline doesn't work with Son of Dracula, because of Kay. Kay Caldwell doesn't properly fit any of these predetermined roles. She could be the young lover, but she marries someone else and her lover kills her rather than rescuing her. She could be the monster, but we never see her do anything monstrous and she's never presented as frightening. Honestly, the role she fits best - and even this isn't perfect - is the vampire's minion. But no one makes the vampire's minion the center of the film.

And that's why the movie feels so weird. The wrong character is in the spotlight and it warps everything else out of true. You can see where all the other players are supposed to go - you can almost tell what the movie would have been without that distortion. Frank and Claire are the young lovers, which provides a reason for Claire's existence in the film. Kay is Renfield, in which case Dracula has been a corrupting influence, or she's Sandor, in which case Dracula has a willing assistant. Either way, because he has control over her, Dracula appears more powerful, more of the monster we're used to instead of the soft-spoken passive milquetoast vampire the film gives us. Since Kay is either less rational or more evil, Dr Brewster seems more rational and less evil in his action towards her*. Kay and Dracula are more clearly antagonists, threatening Frank and Claire, and so we get the return of the status quo when the two of them are destroyed. Those characters fit into the framework we're familiar with.

But that's not what we get. Instead, we get Kay stepping forward, taking all the important actions, making all the important decisions. The movie still seems to think that Frank is the protagonist - his is the first name in the credits, he gets the last heroic shot - but it's clearly wrong. Kay is the character whose choices drive the film and one never really feels that the film makers meant for that to happen. It's really fascinating and is one of the major reasons that I love this movie far more than it deserves**.

I'd really love to learn more about the making of this film, because watching it feels like reading one of those stories where the author tells you that a character started making decisions on their own that the author hadn't planned. I want to know if Kay Caldwell was planned or if she just decided to happen, like she decides everything in the movie.




*Nope, never getting over the fact that Dr Brewster tries to get Kay committed for having a goth phase and wanting to marry Hungarian nobility instead of Frank.

**The other reason is Kay herself, who is splendid. Ladies get to be victims or monsters in Universal horror films and Kay chose monster. She chose. I love her for that.

So, I watched Dracula yesterday for the first time in a while, as I said. And, y'know, in many ways, it is not a good film. But it is also, kinda, a great one, in that it basically defined the vampire for our culture, at least in the 20th century. (All the film vampires I have seen post-1931 are either an emulation of or a reaction to this movie. Either your vampire has a cape or your vampire is shouting "Basingstoke!" at the murgatroyds*, but either way they are engaging with the image produced by this film.)

And yeah, the drawing room scenes are tedious and yeah, there are dangling plot threads galore to the point where sometimes the movie only makes sense if you have either read the book a lot or engaged in a lot of fanfic** and yeah, the famous Armadillo of Transylvania. But there is still absolutely something there, even if sometimes it seems to have happened by accident. And when I come back to it, I find new things.

For instance - I think we can all agree that the scenes in Dracula's castle are actually good, even with the armadillos and the spider on a string. But this time, my favorite thing about it is how stilted Dracula seems, how awkward. Nothing he says is quite right, none of his reactions make sense as part of a normal conversation. And it's wonderful, because once you've watched the movie way too many times and are intimately familiar with the story, you start to think, "Of course. He's been in this castle for gods know how long, with only those silent sepulchral women for company. Of course he doesn't know how to talk to people anymore." And that has a wonderful texture to it now, because Dracula is a story that we've told over and over throughout the last century, so that you can't see one version without having it take on flavors from every other version you've seen. So of course I think that and am immediately reminded of the wonderful bit in Shadow of a Vampire - "The loneliest part of the book comes when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table." It's a beautiful little touch, even if it wasn't at all deliberate.





*I read Anno Dracula at an impressionable age and have always found the term "murgatroyd" (meaning a vampire who presents as the stereotypical vampire) very useful.

**::raises hand::

I feel like today would be a great day to order pizza and then watch all the movies I own with Dwight Frye or Colin Clive in them.

(It's only 6 movies - Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride, Invisible Man, Mad Love and the 1931 Maltese Falcon - and I don't think any of them are over about 90 minutes. That's totally doable.)

I mean, I have to work and thus can't, but I still think it's a good idea.

Yesterday, Mom and I drove to Gig Harbor to do some thrifting and go to a community theater production of Dracula. I bought a scarf and a hot water bottle*, we had frozen yogurt, and there were vampires.

It was, bizarrely, the most book-accurate adaptation I've ever seen. To the point of having large swaths of dialogue taken directly from the original. They conflated all of Lucy's suitors into one character - Dr Seward, of course, because he's the one you have to keep - and they telescoped the timeline a little, so Mina and Jonathan were around for the Bloofer Lady, but everything else was there, even the absurd blood transfusions. It was community theater, of course, so the acting wasn't stellar and the guy who played Renfield was over the top for my tastes but still, it was a lot of fun.

It's amazing to me how much I still love this story. It's one of the oldest of my fandoms that's still around - only Sherlock Holmes and Phantom of the Opera are older - and I still want to spend time revisiting it, reimagining it, expanding on it. It's still absurdly important to me and every time I think that I'm totally over vampires, totally done with them, I find some new and ridiculous Dracula-related thing and the love comes back.

Anyway. I totally put the audiobook on my ipod to listen to today. 8)


*Because I had been looking for one for a while - they are surprisingly difficult to find in brick-and-mortar stores where I live. Also, it is the best thing ever, OMG. So ridiculously cozy!

Things:

- A patron came in and told me that she was glad I was here because she had just heard an interview with Anne Rice where people who practice IRL vampirism were talked about and she figured, if anyone knew anything about that particular subculture, it would be me. I'm not entirely certain how I feel about that. (For the record: I have read about people who practice IRL vampirism - there is a chapter about them in David Skal's The Monster Show - but I've never personally met any. Also, YKINMKBYKIOK and all that.)

- Last night was movie night at Bainbridge and we watched The Scarlet Empress. About which three things. 1) Hey, wow, pre-Code film. There are totally naked ladies in this movie. I did not expect that. 2) One of the really neat things about the film is the way that it's so clearly a transitional work between silent movies and talkies. There are long stretches with no dialogue and much broader acting than you get later, and there are intertitle screens every five minutes or so. Often hilarious intertitle screens. Even though it was made years later than, say, Frankenstein, it feels older because of that. 3) I kinda want the entire Imperial Russian palace from this movie. Not quite as much as I want the castle from Son of Frankenstein or Hjalmar Poelzig's house from The Black Cat, but the furniture is just amazing.

- We have a sub today - one I've worked with a lot - who was not around while I was reading Les Miz. (Which, no, I still haven't finished. Someday!) And somehow, we ended up talking about it. Apparently, my sales pitch for getting people to read Les Miz is totally the wacky dead nun shenanigans. I think this is because I figure that everyone knows the book is sad but no one ever told me that it was also occasionally really really funny.

- So, I am currently listening to an audiobook of Clash of Kings. It is not a bad audiobook, so much, as an audiobook in which the reader makes decisions that I do not understand. For instance: Tyrion is inexplicably Welsh. I understand that with a cast that large you have to do what you can to distinguish characters but none of the other Lannisters are in any way Welsh and so it throws me out of the performance every time Tyrion talks. (On the other hand, the reader has at least remembered that maybe Stannis and Renly should have similar accents and thus is one up on the show.)

- Starting next Thursday, the parentals are going to California to visit my sisters. And I have that Friday through Tuesday off. I am counting down.

Friends and neighbors, I have been listening to Dracula on audiobook. It is some new version that audible.com sent me an email about, and apparently has Tim Curry and Alan Cumming in it somewhere, so of course I had to download it. I am assuming that it's going to be like the weird Dune audiobooks where there's a narrator for the narration and different speakers for the dialogue...in some chapters. Though, we haven't actually had a chapter like that yet. I am only 2 chapters in, though, and so far it is all Simon Vance all the time. Which is okay, because Simon Vance is the audiobook reader that always makes me think, "Hey, it's the guy who sounds vaguely like David Collings!" and I like his Dracula voice.

You guys, I really do like this book immensely. I mean, I make fun of it a lot and the characters do a lot of stupid things (OMG, the journey of the Demeter - so scary and yet so dumb), but it's pretty awesome. Revisiting it is a lot of fun and I'm enjoying having an audio version. Maybe it will eventually become a bedtime audiobook.

Other vampire-related things I am enjoying: Dark Shadows! I think what I like most about it at this point is that it is old enough to be able to play its ridiculous vampires completely straight. Nowadays, if you want to make a story about vampires, it feels like you have to be ironic about it, you have to wink at the audience. And that's fun, a lot of the time, but I get tired of it too. It's nice to go back to something old enough where, by god, if we want an entranced woman in a flimsy white nightgown wandering out into the cemetery at night, we're going to have one. Let's have the doctor wonder if the marks on her neck could be from an accidental poke with a piece of costume jewelry. Let's have the at-home blood transfusion from her boyfriend. (Though, thank god, they did manage to check blood types first.) Let's surround her house with howling wolves dogs. That's awesome. Do it. It fills my heart with glee.

Old school vampires makes me so happy.