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Sunday, February 16, 2003

Take a Monster Walk in New York City

Check out this wonderful site by Amelia Wilson that offers walking tours of the gargoyles, green men, and other grotesques that populate the walls and roofs of the original Gotham City.

Discuss

Castle Dracula Overrun with Possums and Armadillos

I recently watched the original 1931 Universal Studios version of Dracula on DVD. I'd already seen it of course—probably several times as a kid—but it had been a long time and it's such a classic. I was looking forward to seeing it with the quality of DVD and particularly to hearing the new soundtrack composed by Philip Glass and performed by the Kronos Quartet.

Well the movie was about what I remembered. The acting and pacing were a bit dated, but the film was full of wonderfully spooky imagery. The addition of a soundtrack helped the slower scenes and added to the creepy atmosphere. My wife, who (unlike me) has musical training, commented that the instrument voices were just enough off the beat with each other to produce a feeling of wrongness and disquiet but not enough to be syncopated. (If I said that wrong, it was my mistake not hers.)

What surprised me though were some of the details I had forgotten (or never noticed). Remember the early scene in the crypt at Castle Dracula in which Dracula and his women rise from their coffins? Do you remember a large rat crawling about? Well, that ain't no rat, that's a possum! I must admit that it didn't look out of place—a possum with its naked tail and reptilian grin does make a creepy giant rat—but you're about as likely to see a possum in Transylvania as a cowboy. Possums are New World animals and definitely not found anywhere in Europe.

I'm not sure about the European status of another creepy-crawly. Also in the crypt scene, is a nice close-up of a mole cricket crawling about. My wife, who knows them as potato bugs from her childhood, finds mole crickets entirely appropriate for a horror movie. They're completely harmless, but I have to admit that they do have a certain pallid fleshiness that, combined with their huge round heads and beady little black eyes, provides some justification for my wife's distaste. They look like something you'd find feeding on a rotting corpse.

The biggest surprise was the armadillos seen scurrying about on the floor of Castle Dracula in a later scene. Yup, didn't you know that Transylvania's a county in Texas? Again, armadillos are New World animals but they look right at home amidst the rubble of Castle Dracula.

Discuss