Dracula Quiz

Posted on 14th June 2015 by William the Bloody

The Gothic scholar Roger Lockhurst has set a quiz here to test your knowledge of Dracula. I made s a silly mistake and only got 9/10!

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My Twilight Years

Posted on 13th June 2015 by William the Bloody

This is the marvellously appropriate birthday present I received from my friend Hilary last week.

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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Xavier Aldana Reyes: Tribute to Christopher Lee

Posted on 13th June 2015 by William the Bloody

Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University and a contributor to the OGOM special issue of Gothic Studies, pays tribute to the late Christopher Lee here.

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Every Age Embraces the Vampire it Needs: RIP Christopher Lee

Posted on 11th June 2015 by Sam George

Sad news about the passing of Sir Christopher Lee. I had some lively discussions with Sir Chris Frayling at the BFI’s Gothic season about his portrayal of Dracula I remember. I took my PhD students Matt, Kaja and Jillian to an afterdark screening of the newly restored 1958 Dracula in the grounds of the British Museum where we were treated to glimpses of the iconic Dracula cloak as seen in the Hammer Horror films. Seems he parted with his cloak whereas Lugosi was buried in his! I always liked Lee’s macabre yet mesmerising Dracula. Looking back he was truly extraordinary as the Count. Stacey Abbott discusses the significance of the casting of Lee as Dracula in Open Graves, Open Minds, pp. 109-110. He was not portrayed as racially of culturally Other in the manner of Max Schrek or Bela Lugosi. Auerbach famously said that ‘every age embraces the vampire it needs’- I would argue every age gets the vampire it deserves.  I guess we want our vampires to be sympathetic others which is why as Depp observed they tend to look more like underwear models than hundred year old dead people now. Lee is a nostalgic reminder of how things were. He scared me out of my wits and I loved him for it.

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Some worthwhile articles and obituaries:

Firstly,  friend and contributor to the original OGOM conference and star of MMU Gothic Studies Centre, Xavier Aldana Reyes, lamenting the loss of his favourite Count . Jonathon Rigby is also worth reading on the Ten best Christopher Lee Movies. A nicely phrased tribute in The Telegraph (extract below)

The thing about Sir Christopher Lee being dead is that it doesn’t immediately strike you as being much of a career setback. For as long as he was an actor (which was a very long time indeed; his first film role was a one-line part in Terence Young’s baroquely strange romance Corridor of Mirrors, in 1948), his characters have often exuded – not immortality, exactly, but a kind of ennobled deathlessness. You always sensed they’d been around for longer than was perhaps entirely natural, and would more than likely outlast you.

BBC Looks Back at the Life of Christopher Lee

Jonathan Rigby’s obituary in Sight and Sound  (the best press one so far)

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Fairy Tales, Wolf Children and Victorian Fairy Art

Posted on 10th June 2015 by Sam George

Those attending the Company of Wolves conference in September may be familiar with the work of Michael Newton, Senior Lecturer, Department of English, University of Leiden. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (Faber, 2003)

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Newton has also just published a book of Victorian Fairy Tales

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Authors range from those best-known for their work as writers of fairy tales, and others central to the nineteenth-century literary canon such as Thackeray and Ford Madox Ford. The book includes a selection of original illustrations by some of the greatest figures of Victorian fairy art such as Richard Doyle, Arthur Hughes, and Walter Crane. Newton’s introduction explores the impulses behind the stories and their connection to national identity and debates over scepticism and belief, their centrality to the literary output of the period and interest in the irrational and dreaming mind. The work also contains historically informed notes and biographies of the authors, a chronology of Victorian fairy tales, and an appendix in which some of the included authors discuss the nature of fairy tale and its importance, plus a full fairy tale bibliography.

Both Newton’s books open up interesting debates and are useful background reading for the conference. Animal parented children have fascinated down the centuries and there will be a panel on their representation at Company of Wolves, during which I will also be in conversation with the writer Marcus Sedgwick. Marcus has been a generous contributor to the Open Graves, Open Minds project since its beginnings in 2010. He has depicted wolf children, such as Mouse, a young girl who was snatched from the wolves, in his deeply compelling novel Dark Horse

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New trends in YA fiction

Posted on 30th May 2015 by William the Bloody

This article by Sue Corbett on the latest trends in YA fiction is very interesting, highlighting the genre of horror, narratives of mental illness and gender identity, and the continuing appeal of dystopias, including religious apocalypse.

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CFP Edited Collection: Monstrous Moral Messengers: Supernatural Figures in Children’s Picture Books and Early Readings

Posted on 30th May 2015 by William the Bloody

Call for articles for this edited collection. I’ve posted it a bit late but there’s still time!

Please submit a 300 word abstract and a brief scholarly bio to Leslie Ormandy at monstrousmessengers@gmail.com . The closing date for submissions is June 10, 2015.

Picture books and early readers carry all the weight of parental authority, and are essential tools in the learning process for our children. With their bright pictures, they perform their function of holding the child’s attention quite well, and they are accessed freely and repeatedly. They offer children not only hours of sanctioned entertainment and carefully chosen words and concepts, they also introduce our youngest children to specific cultural norms and belief systems. What role then does the supernatural character play for children learning to “read” and interpret the values in the interplay of images, words, and authority? Is there a difference, for the child, when the protagonist shown in the picture is a werewolf, fairy, or ghost? What message is offered to a viewing child when the image of the antagonist is a vampire, troll, or god? Does the very fact that the character is supernatural alter the reading? And is it meant to alter the meaning? At this point, there is no text addressing these questions; although there is an increasing amount of scholarship regarding how the various supernatural characters (and monstrous children) reflect various adult issues when they appear within film and television. I think it is perhaps more important to understand what messages are being offered our children through the same, albeit simplified, medium of pictorial texts which offer a sanctioned teaching medium for learning the semiotics which children are praised for interpreting. This book is meant to begin the exploration of what cultural norms and morals are being offered our children in images via this medium since picture books and early readers are not just sanctioned, but encouraged.

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Inside the Bloody Chamber at OGOM Company of Wolves

Posted on 29th May 2015 by Sam George

In response to Bill’s post on Angela Carter I just wanted to remind everyone that Sir Christopher Frayling will be speaking exclusively on Angela Carter at the OGOM Company of Wolves Conference. He will be drawing directly on his friendship with Carter which he muses on in his new book, Inside the Bloody Chamber, published just a couple of days before the conference. Delegates will have the opportunity to get a copy signed by Sir Chris at the event. I can’t wait to hear more about the dialogue between them. carter Angela Carter’s influence on ‘the contemporary Gothic’ is both wide-ranging and profound. Sir Christopher Frayling knew Angela very well, when she lived in Bath in the 1970s, and when her key works – The Bloody Chamber, The Sadeian Woman, The Passion of New Eve – were being written. He was researching and writing his study of The Vampyre in literature, at this time, and he and Angela shared a lot of conversations, ideas and inspiration, often at the very witching hour. In fact, one of the stories in The Bloody Chamber – ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ – is based on his research visit to Transylvania in the spring of 1976; Frayling became ‘Hero’, a fine upstanding public school chap who encounters all sorts of erotic surprises on his travels…Angela published New Eve on the same day as The Vampyre, both with Victor Gollancz. Published to mark the 25th anniversary of her untimely death, Inside the Bloody Chamber gathers together some of Frayling’s articles, essays and lectures written since the 1980s on aspects of the Gothic – several in hard-to-find places, many never published before, but all revised for this new book. The subjects loosely match Angela’s interests – mirrored in the stories within The Bloody Chamber – and they mesh with his memories of the 1970s in Bath.

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CFP Global Fantastika: An Interdisciplinary Conference, 4-5 July 2016, Lancaster University

Posted on 29th May 2015 by William the Bloody

Sadly, I was unable to attend this year’s Locating Fantastika Conference at Lancaster University in July (though Kaja is presenting there and I’m sure she’ll report back!). However, the CFP is out for the follow-up Global Fantastika conference in 2016:

“Fantastika”, coined by John Clute, is an umbrella term which incorporates the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but can also include alternative histories, steampunk, young adult fiction, or any other imaginative space. The 3rd annual Fantastika conference will focus on productions of Fantastika globally, as well as considering themes of contact across nations and borders within Fantastika. It is our hope to draw together academics with an interest in Fantastika from an international audience to share and disseminate Fantastika-related research globally.

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The Promise

Posted on 29th May 2015 by William the Bloody

I’ve not watched this yet, but this short film, The Promise, directed by Gabriele Salvatores, looks very relevant to our Company of Wolves conference themes of wolves, sociality, and animality. It’s now online.

The Promise talks about the relationship between man and dog that is retraced in its thousand-year history by the Oscar-winning director through the selection of evocative images remembering that in the beginning it was the wolf and not the dog. At the base of this story there is, in fact, the idea of Pier Giovanni Capellino, founder of Almo Nature, who ran back in time, seeing humans in difficulty that promise wolves perennial respect in exchange for agreeing the pack because some of them became dogs.

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