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Wanted Undead or Alive:. Джонатан Мэйберри
Читать онлайн.Название Wanted Undead or Alive:
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780806534336
Автор произведения Джонатан Мэйберри
Жанр Эзотерика
Издательство Ingram
The classic example is Frankenstein’s monster. He has no true identity; he’s a composite being with a damaged brain. Many literary scholars have debated over whether such a creature would have a soul—though I tend to think so. The possession—or lack thereof—of a soul was never the creature’s issue. It was his damaged brain and awareness of his hideous and unique nature. This was most poignantly portrayed by Boris Karloff in the James Whale movie of 1931. Karloff gave humanity to the creature and highlighted its pitiable state.
Misunderstood Monsters
“I always sympathize with the monster, because the most interesting ones are simply misunderstood when you get right down to it. They really just want one thing: love! All the classics like Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Wolf-man are simply looking for a hug from a lovely gyno-American! I have always wanted Frankenstein’s monster to live, and instead of a little girl with a daisy, I made sure Toxie caught the blind eye of a gorgeous blond bombshell!”—Lloyd Kaufman is president of Troma Films and creator (with Joe Ritter) of the Toxic Avenger.
Universal Pictures made a number of films with a similar theme. In both versions of their take on werewolves, The Wolf Man (1941) and The Wolfman (2010), Larry Talbot is a tragic figure who is by no means evil and is unable to control the violence of the monster that lives beneath his skin. Each morning following the full moon, when Talbot becomes aware of what the werewolf has done, he is torn by remorse. Genuine remorse.
Twas Beauty Killed the Beast
“King Kong was always my favorite. He was taken away from what he knew, his home and life, to a place where he was a monster, a novelty and a tragic victim of his captors. The love story is there to humanize the beast so we can relate better with his loss and solidify the monster to our own perspectives. Most great stories involve a monster who is a hero and a hero who is a monster.”—Doug Schooner is an artist, poet, and animator.
King Kong is another twist. Kong has the intelligence of a great ape, or perhaps a smidge more, but he isn’t a human and cannot reason (we assume) like a human. However, he shows compassion when protecting Anne Darrow from pterodactyls and tyrannosaurs, and he believes he’s protecting her when he breaks out of the New York theater and carries her to the top of the Empire State Building. At the same time, the mayor, the governor, and the flyers from Roosevelt Field are justified in doing what they do to protect the city from the monster. They kill him the way they would kill a lion loose in the streets. Has either character acted with evil? No. The true villain of the piece is Carl Denham, the blowhard show-man who captures Kong and brings him to America. Every death in the movie can be laid at his feet, and yet none of the film versions really paint him as evil. Corrupt, self-important, egocentric…but not evil; yet he shows no remorse for all the deaths he’s caused. It’s weird, and it’s also disturbing.
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IT DIDN’T START WITH VAN HELSING
Alan F. Beck, Draculmouse
“The image of the old classic black-and-white horror movie characters being portrayed is charming and hilarious. Imagine little mice dressed up in little suits acting out the scenes of grand horror films. I can hear Draculmouse saying in a squeaky voice: ‘I do not drink…wine.’ And…vampire bats are essentially flying mice, so it’s not even that much of a stretch.”
—Alan F. Beck is an award-winning artist and illustrator whose work is exhibited at science fiction and fantasy conventions coast to coast.
FANGS A LOT
Along with ghosts and demons, vampires are incredibly common in the beliefs and legends of cultures worldwide. Even today there are people who believe that vampires exist, and people who believe that they are vampires. However, here in the modern twenty-first-century Western world we tend to have a somewhat distorted image of what exactly a vampire is.
In world myth and legend, vampires come in all shapes and sizes, from the stereotypical pale-skinned risen corpse to fiery balls of light. Even the label “vampire” is only used here for convenience because vampirism isn’t limited to the bloodsucking living dead. In fact barely a third of folkloric vampires are hematophagous (bloodsuckers).
With each cultural twist on the vampire model the vampire hunter is also tweaked. Rarely are the hunters sophisticated and learned scholars like Abraham Van Helsing. More often they’re clerics of one kind or another, or family members who are driven to heroic extremes in order to put their risen relative to final rest and thereby protect the rest of the family. There are also professional monster hunters and even monsters who hunt other monsters. It takes all kinds to spin this weird world.
NATURE OF THE BEAST
So what is a vampire?
About the only overarching similarity between the disparate vampire types is that they are, by their nature, takers of something precious that we do not want to share. The blood drinkers are the most famous of this group, but many vampires attack humans in order to feed off life essence, breath, or sexual essence. A few feed on emotions, others on faith, fidelity, and even knowledge. And quite a few vampires are necrophagous (flesh eaters).
Many vampires spread disease and pestilence. In fact the word “nosferatu” means “plague carrier”—not “undead” as Bram Stoker mistakenly insists in Dracula. It’s very common for plagues and diseases to be blamed on some evil spiritual force.
Some vampires can affect the weather, causing mists and storms. The Romanian Varcolaci was reported to be able to cause eclipses, though this would involve forceful rearranging of the solar system and would probably result in the destruction of Earth…so we can discount that as one of the taller tall tales.
Not all vampires are dead. Some are risen corpses, sure, but there are living vampires, vampire gods, and otherwise ordinary humans who transform into vampire-like creatures at certain times.
About half of the world’s vampires are theriomorphs, or shape-shifters. Funnily enough, it’s exceedingly rare for any vampire to turn into a bat. More often they turn into fireballs, birds of various kinds, insects, dogs, dragons, cats, and a host of other critters. But bats? Not really. Shape-shifting in wolves is also rare, and is probably an overlap with werewolf legends.
It’s impossible to create a definitive list of vampiric powers or vulnerabilities because they vary from culture to culture. Most vampires from folklore do not fear sunlight or the cross. Stakes won’t kill them, they can cross running water, mirrors are irrelevant, and they don’t have to obtain permission before entering a house.1 Those qualities were added to the lore of the vampire by writers in order to make the vampire more mysterious, more directly tied to universal good and evil, and in some ways more vulnerable.
The connection between vampires and religion varies, too. When fiction writers began telling tales of vampirism, they took the position that supernatural beings were in direct opposition to the church and established new “traditions” to retell the stories of vampires in relation to purely Catholic concepts. For example, the idea of a vampire trading blood with its victim to create a new vampire was a twisted variation on the ritual of communion, where Christians drink wine that symbolizes the blood of Christ and as a result are “reborn.” The transformation from human victim to newborn vampire taking three days is clearly modeled after the three days it took Jesus to rise from the dead after his crucifixion.2
Such concepts have since been adopted as established legend largely because most people learn about vampires through books and movies rather than from a study of folklore. As a result,