Dangerous Minds has a piece that draws attention to the paintings used to introduce the stories in the television series Night Gallery. The essay includes a little background information, and images from several of the paintings, including the one above titled “Escape Route.” All of the paintings can be seen at the Rod Serling’s Night Gallery website.
A new documentary on practical effects is coming. It’s called Creature Designers: The Frankenstein Complex. See the trailer above. Beyond the general subject matter that connects to my passions, for me, the initial quotes were priceless in connecting to the broader themes of this blog. Guillermo del Toro says, ““I think we need monsters to explain the world, because without them, we cannot explain our place in the universe.” Alec Gillis rightly notes that “Every culture and religion has had their dark force and their evil entity.”
Visit the documentary’s Facebook page for news and updates.
AtlasObscura has a nice piece on memento mori art that includes some photos of different approaches to this. I am fascinated by macabre art and memento mori, and those similarly inclined can find the piece titled “In the 16th Century, the Best Office Decor Was a Tiny Rotting Corpse.” On the sculpture in the photo accompanying this post:
One of the more striking full-sized memento moris of the era is the statue of René de Chalon, a French prince who died at 25 in the 1544 siege of Saint-Dizier. Known as a transi — for its depiction of human transience — the sculpture shows the prince’s desiccated corpse holding his own heart aloft.
I recently came across two items that made me give new attention to Island of Lost Souls (1932). The first was a commentary on the film that involved John Landis, Rick Baker, and Bob Burns. Their discussion makes for an interesting take on a neglected classic horror film. The second was a series of news items that circulated and reported on current scientific experiments where animal-human hybrid embryos have been created in the search for the cure of disease. See NPR’s reporting on this here. UPDATE: The Huffington Post has an interesting podcast discussing this in “The Island of Dr. Moreau for Real.” The idea of these hybrid experiments immediately brought to mind a line from Island of Lost Souls uttered by one of Dr. Moreau’s creatures played by Bela Lugosi:
Dr. Moreau:
Have you forgotten the house of pain?
Sayer of the Law:
You! You made us in the house of pain! You made us… things! Not men! Not beasts! Part man… part beast! Things!
It is frightening when life imitates art in this fashion. But it provides interested readers with an opportunity to watch Island of Lost Souls, available for free on YouTube.
Kaiju and Pop Culture Anthology
CFP deadline: July 1, 2016
Camille D. G. Mustachio
contact: kaijupopculture@gmail.com
Kaiju is a familiar trope in film and television that places giant monsters in direct conflict with fellow monsters and/or everyday citizens. While a larger-than-life creature that attacks Tokyo is likely the most familiar form of kaiju, additional iterations include apes, dragons, dinosaurs, and even robots. Kaiju as a genre has evolved along with cinema; technical developments no longer require men stomping around in rubber costumes as CGI enables bigger and more frightening monsters to haunt our screens. With a timeless kitsch quality, kaiju is solidly placed within our collective pop culture psyche. We seek to create an anthology of original essays that explores technical, thematic, mythological, cultural, and historical aspects of various kaiju.
Some potential topics may include:
*individual monsters including but not limited to Godzilla, Mothra, and Daimajin
*folklore
*regional kaiju
*parody
*fandom
*cosplay
*merchandise
*translation
*adaptation from page to screen
*American pop culture endurance
*nostalgia
*development of film, television, comics, and gaming
Send abstracts of 200 words to kaijupopculture@gmail.com no later than Friday, July 1, 2016. Final articles of 5,000-6,000 words are to be MLA formatted (8th edition) with American English styles and spellings. Refrain from using images from Toho films.
An exhibit from 2014 showed up today in my Google news feed from a Quartz piece called “Five hundred years of Satanic art” that draws attention to an
“exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, ‘Sympathy for the Devil: Satan, Sin, and the Underworld,’ [that] traces Lucifer’s visual history, from his emergence in the Middle Ages as a horned, cloven-hoofed, foul-smelling, diabolical creature of the night to his denuded and largely ironic image today.”
The Quartz link above features images of some of the artwork on display, and the Stanford link above includes a description of the exhibit.
Fan cultures have existed for decades and have produced their own versions and variations of expression as they drew upon pre-existing genre fiction elements. Star Trek is perhaps one of the best examples of this. Fan fiction production went on without the concern of the entities that owned the material. It was largely seen as harmless expressions of fan devotion, and it no doubt helped keep the material alive and contributed to the ongoing financial income of those that owned the copyrights to the materials as fan fiction pointed toward merchandise that could be purchased from the copyright holders.
Things have changed. Technology has leveled the playing field between fans and Hollywood studios. Now crowdfunding on the Internet enables fans to raise large amounts of money for use in fan fiction production, and film making technology for special effects available for amateurs rivals that of multi-million dollar budgets for big name studios. This has come to a head with Paramount Studios suing the makers of Star Trek: Anaxar. As NEWSWEEK reported:
Axanar’s budget and boasts may have been too much for Paramount and CBS, and in December, the two companies sued Axanar Productions, claiming that its work “infringe[s] Plaintiffs’ works by using innumerable copyrighted elements of Star Trek, including its settings, characters, species, and themes.” The suit named the production company, studio head Alec Peters, and “Does 1-20,” an unnamed group that could expand to include personnel such as director Robert Meyer Burnett, an industry professional who had previously produced featurettes for CBS’ Star Trek Blu-ray releases.
I appreciate Paramount’s concerns over various copyright elements, but given the quality of the trailer for Axanar in contrast with J.J. Abrams’ franchise reboot, in my view the studio’s real fears are that this fan fiction effort has surpassed Paramount’s own production efforts.
Today I came across an item that is a couple of years old, but it’s worth taking a look at. It involves an essay by Jeffrey Kripal, who has been interviewed here at TheoFantastique previously on two occasions, once on his book on the paranormal and the sacred, and the second time on his book on comics and the paranormal. Kripal wrote a piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Embracing the Unexplained, Part 2.” This essay responds in part to a critical piece that Jeffrey Coyne wrote for The New Republic in response to Kripal’s first essay, “Visions of the Impossible”, also written for the Chronicle. In his part of the critical exchange, Coyne accuses Kripal of being anti-science. In response, Kripal says that Coyne wrote a “materialist screed” that “effortlessly conflated science, rationalism, and materialism, as if there were no ways to be scientific and rational without adopting his own particular brand of antireligious materialism.” Kripal goes on to point out how Coyne has misrepresented what he wrote, and sought to cut off argument and dialogue between science and the humanities. For those interested in the paranormal and how it is discussed among academics, this is an interesting exchange.
CALL FOR PAPERS
An area of multiple panels for the 2016 Film & History Conference:
Gods and Heretics: Figures of Power and Subversion in Film and Television
October 26-October 30, 2016
The Milwaukee Hilton
Milwaukee, WI (USA)
DEADLINE for abstracts: June 1, 2016
AREA: From Infinity to the Abyss: Gods and Monsters in Science Fiction Film
Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, reputedly said “I looked and looked but didn’t see God.” When Stanley Kubrick looked, he saw a cosmic star child. Ridley Scott found massive opportunities for capitalism to go awry. Whether capitalist entrepreneurs, monstrous aliens, colonial neo-gods, monsters from the id, or God waging war against communism, clearly the vacuum of space needs to be filled with a transcendent signifier.
This area welcomes proposals for 20-minute papers that focus on a broad range of depictions and interpretations of the monstrous, heretical, and divine in science fiction film. We encourage papers that examine how physical space relates to, alters or replaces religious space in modernity—from silent to postmillennial science fiction film. We welcome and encourage papers focused on the transcendental nature of human experiences in outer space from a wide range of moving picture types; animation to live action, films from different nations and cultures, independent films, as well as films and television programming produced by major studios.
Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:
Imaginings of extra-terrestrial Hell, and/or outer space transcendent as Heaven
The 1950s space film and godless atheism
Post-humanist visions of human gods or radioactive demons
Geometrical extraterrestrials in futuristic films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey
Deep-space industrial production in 1980s science fiction film
Superhero gods from outer space
Nano- and biotech creations of sentient environments and their implications
Aliens as gods or heretics
The monstrous as transcendent in outer space
Capitalist and colonialist appropriation of terrestrial space, and beyond
The Nietzschean Superman and looking into the abyss in dystopian science fiction
Proposals for complete panels (three related presentations) are also welcome, but they must include an abstract and contact information, including an e-mail address, for each presenter. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.filmandhistory.org).
Please e-mail your 200-word proposal by 1 June 2016 to the area chairs:
Wendy Sterba
College of St. Benedict/ John’s University
Brandon Chitwood
St. Paul College
wsterba@csbsju.edu
chitwood74@yahoo.com
The Federalist.com and the Politics of Horror Fiction