What Scares You?

2. What Scares You? Monster Movies Today and Yesterday

3. Overview • One: Where do Monsters Come From? – Myth, Folklore & SciFi. • Two: History and Technology of Monster Movies – 1900 to 1950’s. • Three: History and Technology of Monster Movies – 1950 to Today. • Four: Fear and Reason – Why do we enjoy being scared/ Hidden meanings.

4. Quiz • “Know Your Movie Monster”

5. Discussion Point • What is a movie monster?

6. What makes a monster? • A giant: someone or something that is abnormally large and powerful. • freak: a person or animal that is markedly unusual or deformed. • a cruel, wicked and inhuman person • For our purposes a movie monster is not a person.

7. “Know Your Movie Monsters” Quiz

8. Movie Monster Quiz (Continued)

9. So what is a Monster Movie?(also known as a “Creature Feature”) • No specific academic genre (‘zhän-rə) of that name. • Term is usually applied to films in the horror, fantasy or science fiction genres that involve fictional creatures. Especially applies if creature is gigantic or powerful. • Movie monsters differ from traditional villains in that they are often not evil, but in circumstances beyond their control. • Often audiences will feel sorry for the monster.

10. A Monster Movie is(for the purposes of our class) • Any film that centers around a fictional creature(s) who finds themselves in conflict with humans. • Especially if the creature is in circumstances beyond its control. • Humans only count if they have been changed physically in someway that makes them freakish or deformed to the point of being non-human. • Fictional creature: one from myth, or imagination or is an oversized version of a real animal.

11. Where do Monster Movie Ideas come from? • Myth • Folklore • Science Fiction • Usually before a monster story makes it to the screen it had been dramatized in a book or a stage show (or both).

12. Monsters in Myth • A myth is a traditional story accepted as history. • Often serves to explain the world view of a people. • The ancient Greeks pictured a number of monsters and mythological animals in their stories.

13. Cyclops • A one-eyed race of giants fathered by the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon.

14. Origin of Cyclops • One theory is that prehistoric dwarf elephant skulls – about twice the size of a human skull – that may have been found by the Greeks.

15. Cyclops • In the Greek poet Homer’s Odyssey, the hero Odysseus has a confrontation with Polyphemus (pol-a-fem-us), a cyclops.

16. Odysseus and the Cyclops

17. Scylla & CharYbdis • Scylla (sil-ah) and Charybdis (ker-rib-des) are two sea monsters of Greek mythology. • They lived on opposite sides of the Strait of Messina. • Presented sailors with an “impossible choice.”

18. Medusa • A female monster, with snakes for hair. • Anybody looking directly at her face would turn to stone. • Perseus killed her by watching her reflection in a mirror-like shield.

19. Medusa and Perseus

20. Monsters in Folklore • Folklore :The tales, legends and superstitions of a particular people. • Many folktales include supernatural monsters. • Many folktales have roots in Roman/Greek myth.

21. Dragons • The word can be traced back to Roman times. • The root is word draco in Latin. • To the Romans this word referred to any giant snake, such as a python from India or Africa

22. European Dragons • Reptile creature with bat-like wings and two or four legs. • Live in an underground lair or cave. • Usually portrayed as evil.

23. Oriental Dragons • Usually depicted as snake-like. • Associated with water. • Thought to be good and wise. • Sometimes capable of human speech.

24. Dragon Dance

25. Dragons (Cont.) • Dinosaur fossils were occasionally mistaken for the bones of dragons.

26. Dragons in Fiction • Bram Stoker (who also wrote Dracula) wrote tale, The Lair of the White Worm, based on the legend of an English dragon. • The 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbitby J.R.R. Tolkien, featured a dragon named Smaug.

27. Vampires • Tales have existed from ancient times about demons that would drink blood. • Most of things we associate with vampire legends come from the Balkans countries and South-Eastern Europe

28. Vampires • Folktales hold that Vampires are people who return from the dead (sometimes they are referred to as “the living dead” or the “undead.”) • To continue to exist they must drink the blood of others.

29. Vampire Causes • A vampire might be created if a animal jumped over a corpse. • A body with a wound that had not been treated with boiling water. • Someone who had been a witch or rebelled against the church.

30. Vampires (cont.) • In the 18th century, there was a vampire panic in Eastern Europe, and many graves were dug up and corpses damaged to prevent them from returning from death. • Driving a stake though the body or beheading were considered ways to keep a vampire in his grave.

31. 16th Century 'Vampire' Grave Discovered • Italy: The grave of a woman, apparently believed to be a vampire at the time of her death, has been discovered in a mass grave on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio. The woman had been buried with a brick in her mouth. • The wisdom of the time was that female vampires were responsible for the devastating black death which swept across Europe. It was thought that these vampires fed on other corpses to gather the required strength to rise again.

32. It was the job of gravediggers to identify these 'vampires' and ram a brick into their mouth so they couldn't feed. According to Dr Matteo Borrini the trickle of blood that came from some plague victim's mouths at death probably started the fallacy.

33. Vampires (cont.) • The short story "The Vampyre" published on 1819 by John William Polidori was the first modern “romantic” vampire story. • Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula provided the basis of modern vampire fiction.

34. Discussion Point • List everything you know about Werewolves! • (Example: How do you become one? What kills one?, etc.)

35. Werewolves • A werewolf is an animal from folklore. These creatures can change from human to wolf form and back again. It is believed to consume human flesh or blood.

36. Half-man, Half Beast • The root of the word werewolf goes back to the old German word wer which means man. A werewolf is therefore a man-wolf: part human, part beast

37. How to Make a Werewolf • People originally became werewolves by covering their bodies in a salve or though some pack with the devil. • It has been suggested that the salve may have contained chemicals that gave the person a hallucination that they had turned into a wolf.

38. Werewolf Legends • Most of our werewolf legends came from Europe where the wolf was the most feared predator. • In England, were wolves were wolves were eradicated in the 1500’s, werewolf legends are very rare.

39. Beast of Gevaudan(j-vau-dan) • Some werewolf tales may have roots in real events: Between 1764 – 1767 a huge wolf terrorized parts of France killing a number of people. • The wolf was shot several times but did not die. • The king was forced to send French soldiers to hunt down and kill the beast.

40. Medical Conditions • Individuals that suffer from the genetic disorder known as hypertrichosis (hīpər-trĭ-kōsĭs) may grow hair all over their bodies. • The psychological condition of believing you are a werewolf is known as lycanthropy (ly-KAN-thruh-pee). • In 1589 a man named Stubbe Peeter was convicted of a series of murders and cannibalism. He claimed he did these murders as a wolf.

41. hypertrichosis

42. Fear of Werewolves • Fear of werewolves was very real in the middle ages. • Records show that in France alone between the years of 1520 and 1630 over 30,000 people were suspected of being werewolves. • Many people found themselves accused of being werewolves, then investigated and even tortured into confession.

43. Fear of the Full Moon

44. Modern Additions to Legend • Some 19th century writers of werewolf tales added many of the conventions we associate the legends including fear of silver bullets, fear of wolfbane and changing under a full moon.

45. Zombies • A zombie is a creature in folklore that appears as a reanimated corpse or a mindless human being. • Stories of zombies originated in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief system of Vodou. In the stories zombies are people being controlled as laborers by a powerful sorcerer.

46. Zombie Powder • In 1985 a scientist named Wade Davis wrote a book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, claiming Vodou priests used a strong drug that include the poison from puffer fish to put people into the Zombie condition.

47. The Narcisse Case • Davis claimed he had investigated the case of Clairvius Narcisse who was drugged by his brother, a Vodou priest, to simulate death. • After his burial the brother dug the grave up, revived Narcisse and then drugged him into a zombie while he worked as a slave on his farm. • Narcisse only returned to his normal state after his brother died and the drugs wore off.

48. Zombie • In 1988 The Serpent and the Rainbow was made into a horror film loosely based on Davis’s book. • This origin of Zombies is different that those found in most recent Zombie films

49. Scifi - anOther Source of Monsters • Science fiction - A form of fiction that draws imaginatively on scientific knowledge and/or speculation. • Science fiction has provided us with a number of more modern monsters in the form of aliens, dinosaurs, etc.

50. Science Fiction Roots • Probably the first true science fiction story was Somnium (Latin for The Dream) written around 1625 by the scientist Johannes Kepler. It describes a trip to the moon.