Author: crbernard

It can be easy to dismiss big-budget movie franchises as bereft of artistic merit. I’ve seen words like “bloated” and “formulaic” tossed around, and such disparagement is not always undeserved (although the most egregious entries in franchises tend to be presented with tongue quite obviously in cheek). Still, there’s something to be said for an imaginary world capable of sustaining 40 years of multimillion dollar investments as a sort of artistic achievement in its own right – particularly when that imaginary world has been crafted with an aesthetic that is immediately identified as its “trademark.”

n a previous post here, I wrote about the connection between cosmic horror and stories of deep-ocean terror. I focused on films like Underwater, Sea Fever, and The Beach House. These are films that use the depths of the ocean as a stand-in for the vastness of the cosmos when executing the time-worn Lovecraftian trope of “a terror from beyond.” The antagonists in these films remain either diffuse and (at least partially) metaphorical, as in Sea Fever and The Beach House, or seldom-glimpsed (Underwater). The stories are less creature features than they are tales about the human response to a threat that is, in some sense, incomprehensible or unknowable.

(Content warning: discussion of sexual violence. In Part 1 of this two-part examination of werewolf movies and the 1980s, I touched on the ability of werewolf stories to express social anxieties over the years, and on the unusually large number of these stories that 1980s horror cinema produced.)

Hannah Arendt is one of the greatest political theorists of all time. Arendt was a German-American Jew who fled the Nazi regime in 1937 following an arrest, and two of her books in particular – 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and 1963’s Eichmann in Jerusalem – remain among the best ever written about World War Two and the unspeakable horrors of Hitler’s regime. These were phenomenon that, given her brilliance and her life experience, she was so uniquely qualified to analyze that one almost could believe that she was born for this specific purpose. Of course, this is an idea that Arendt, given her wry cynicism and existentialist bent, would have vigorously disputed.

In a previous post for Madness Heart (“Ink Stained: Two Memories of Horror Comics”) I wrote about my love affair with horror comics, which began in my middle school years and continues to this day. In particular, pioneering horror comic company EC Comics made an impact on me – and not just on me. As I wrote:

Blessed are those with a voice. If dolls could speak, no doubt they would scream, “I didn’t want to be human!”

– Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

The oldest undisputed depiction of a human being is the so-called Venus of Hohle Fels, which was crafted between 33,000 and 40,000 years ago. The zoomorphic, lion-headed Löwenmensch figurine is even older, being between 35,000 and 40,000 years old. Dolls – which is to say, human figures carved as toys rather than objects of veneration – date to at least the 21^st century BCE, with examples scattered throughout the world’s ancient archeological sites. For practically as long as our species has biologically been human, we have crafted self-representations: replications of the human form in wood, stone, mammoth tusk, and every other medium available to us.

The genesis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is sometimes traced to the 15^th Century – specifically, to 1462, when Vlad Drăculea, Voivode (Warlord) of Wallachia seized a Saxon town called Târgoviște and murdered the entire populace in the most gruesome manner imaginable. This, however, is a mistake: other than his name and his potent cocktail of aristocracy and cruelty, Drăculea lent very little to Dracula. The real genesis of Stoker’s masterpiece can perhaps be traced to the earliest German “best sellers,” many of which contained legendary accounts of Vlad’s sadism – and those accounts no doubt influenced Stoker when he was researching Dracula between 1890 and 1897 (although Stoker first heard the Vlad Drăculea legend in 1881).

(This is part five of a five-part series on Hell and horror – you can read the other posts in this series here.)

Down and down we fell like lightning into depths unplumbed and dark, two falling flames amidst an endless void. I called to David Bowie, trusted guide and ghostly muse: “Are we to fall forever?”

“No,” said he, “our destination now is near.” And within moments we had touched down lightly on the dark and sunless core of Hell. The rocky ground was bare; the air cold, stale, and thick. Around us implements of torture stood unused, in cobwebs shrouded like forgotten wedding gowns. No sinner was in sight, no demon there to greet or caution us, no flames, no punishment.