THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 16, 1994 TAG: 9406160690
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Craig A. Shapiro
DATELINE: 940616 LENGTH: Long
They endure, prowling our movie houses since the turn of the century, menacing us in literature way before then.
{REST} We wouldn't have it any other way.
Every generation, every decade, sees a new chapter in the horror show. Sixty-three years ago, as America buckled under the Great Depression, ``Dracula'' and ``Frankenstein,'' arm in arm with ``Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,'' terrified willing audiences. ``The Wolf Man'' signed on in 1941, with our anxieties about the coming war mirrored in poor Lawrence Talbot's quest for his own peace.
They didn't stop there. Body snatchers and atomic mutants in the 1950s. A new rash of vampire movies, paralleling the escalation of the AIDS crisis, in the late '70s and '80s.
The most recent resurrection began last year with ``Bram Stoker's Dracula,'' Francis Ford Coppola's lavish and lavishly embellished re-creation of the legend.
But the cycle really gets rolling with Friday's opening of the mega-hyped ``Wolf,'' with Jack Nicholson going through his werewolf paces opposite Michelle Pfeiffer. Mike Nichols (``The Graduate'') directs. Due this fall is the eagerly awaited adaptation of Anne Rice's ``Interview With the Vampire,'' with Tom Cruise as Lestat. And by year's end, Kenneth Branagh directs, stars in and makes a monster out of Robert De Niro in ``Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,'' with Copolla producing.
That's not all. Set to roll for release in 1995 is ``Mary Reilly,'' which revisits Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde through the housemaid's eyes. Stephen Frears (``Dangerous Liaisons'') directs Julia Roberts and John Malkovich.
Taken with monsters, Coppolla is developing yet another project, ``The Van Helsing Chronicles,'' a spin on the Dracula legend told by the Prince of Darkness' Dutch nemesis. Anthony Hopkins again plays the fearless vampire hunter.
Has a tic in our collective psyches triggered a new round of creature features? Do we need monsters to face the horrors of real life - crime, an unjust economy - without going over the edge? Could be Hollywood smells easy money.
``They sure have gone legit, haven't they?'' said Leonard Maltin, film critic for TV's ``Entertainment Tonight'' and a noted film historian. ``I don't want to be incorrect here, but this is virtually the first time in Hollywood history that horror has gone big time. That's sort of interesting. That is new.
``When Universal made `The Wolf Man,' they had a prestigious cast. For a horror film, that was an A cast. So that was a deliberate attempt to do a classy horror film. And it was.''
Maltin believes the reasons for the big names in the 1994 monster parade aren't as noble. Example: Anne Rice reportedly favored Daniel Day-Lewis for the lead in ``Interview.'' Producer David Geffen said Cruise got it because he will sell tickets.
``On the crassest level, it's just that they're rehashing everything,'' said Maltin, speaking from his Los Angeles office. ``They're going to make a `Gilligan's Island' movie, so why not a Dracula movie or a Frankenstein movie? They're looking for proven properties - proven, presold ideas. No one needs to be told what Frankenstein is.
``I hate to sound mundane, but it's just a cyclical thing. Hollywood is looking for stuff to do that they haven't done in a while.''
Author David J. Skal agrees - he calls it ``this big untapped potential in the Halloween season'' - but the genre's cyclical nature, and thus the indestructibility of its players, are assets. Both were key premises he made last year in ``The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror'' (W.W. Norton).
So, why now? Skal points to the end of the millennium.
``I think this typically happens at the end of centuries: We get preoccupied with images of death,'' he said from his Greenwich Village apartment. ``The thing about monsters is they're images both of death and rebirth. Very frequently in the monster formula there's this idea of transcending death and also transformation.
``In very stressful times, and the end of a century or a millennium is a culturally stressful time, these things seem to happen. . . . There's the sense we're not living in a safe or predictable world. The ground is not really firm.''
Enter Dracula. Or Frankenstein. And most often, both. Skal's ``dark twins'' have been traveling in tandem since the early 1800s. Monsters of superstition and science - together, he said, they hold each other in cultural check.
``We imaginatively start engaging these monster characters,'' he said, ``these fantastic characters who can navigate around this stuff. They can't be killed. They can change into something else and so they embody a kind of cultural yearning or transcendence of the hand we've been dealt.''
But if monsters help us cope, Skal doesn't believe they provide a true catharsis.
``It's similar to what we do with dreams,'' he said. ``We would go crazy if we didn't provide some kind of dream language for all the information and images we take in each day. And I think on a kind of daydreamy level, this goes on with these kinds of monsters.
``They're controlled rituals - that's the other important thing. We're terrified of death, but in a monster movie the image of death is controllable. The object of all the anxiety can be dispelled if you adhere to the proper rituals.
``In the real world, these anxieties don't have a form. We can't control them.''
About those rituals: They may be hard and fast, but the equation changes.
In ``Wolf,'' Nicholson plays a Manhattan book editor about to lose his job. His wife is an adulteress. The actor told Vanity Fair that the film says something about male sexuality, that it can't be suppressed. Audiences saw broader implications in Lon Chaney Jr.'s classic performance.
It's that very ambiguity, though, that has let the monsters endure.
``If they revealed all their meanings, they'd be a lot less interesting,'' Skal said. ``Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree by endlessly deconstructing them, but I think a lot of their psychological use has to do with them being a buffer between us and what's really bugging us.
``We get to shiver and shake and scream a little bit, then get on with our lives, however compromised and difficult they are.''
Raymond McNally, a history professor at Boston College, goes a step further: It's those people who won't watch monster movies who worry him. McNally, who has written five books on Dracula and vampires and was a consultant on ``Bram Stoker's Dracula,'' said he is asked often about his attraction to the fantastic.
``People say to me, `Why don't you deal with real horror? Concentration camps. The gulag,' '' McNally said from Boston. ``I do deal with those, too, but I deal with imaginary horror in order to deal with real horror.
``As a matter of fact, I think of it as therapy almost, in the sense (that) if I see a monster walk across the silver screen, then it doesn't have to walk down the streets of Boston. You get used to dealing with horror if you deal with it in an imaginary way.''
The tradition started with grandmothers telling horror stories around a campfire. And nearly every night at bedtime, tradition is observed.
``Why do children like stories about giants? Because they live in a world of giants,'' he said. ``They identify with these people who are oppressed by giants. And that's healthy, because they're able to deal with these subconscious feelings in a kind of conscious way.''
The perennial appeal of Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man is just a natural extension, McNally said, a rite of passage masquerading as a dare in a darkened theater.
``It's like a roller coaster. How much can you take? Taking it proves you can endure. And there is something to that.
``Another part of it is the further we get along the road of technology, the more we are interested in the scientifically impossible,'' he said. ``We like to stretch our minds to think about the unthinkable. Like the transplant. Who would ever have thought we could take parts of dead bodies and put them into live bodies? That's Frankenstein.''
But why now? The answers, he said, are what you make of them.
``I think this way. These horror movies reflect what the public wants, and they have to because they have to make money. They hit a deep chord, but they also reflect.
``The question I really don't know, I'll be honest with you, is what is this telling us specifically? I know what it's telling us generally about our civilization, but it's got to be telling us something specific. I haven't figured it out yet.''
by CNB