Frankenstein

Why Christmas Ghost Stories Have Such Enduring Appeal

The jolt of fear and dread such stories convey make the Christmas lights glitter even more brightly.

Our fascination with ghostly tales around Christmas time goes back thousands of years and is rooted in ancient celebrations of the winter solstice. In the depths of winter, pagan traditions included a belief in a ghostly procession across the sky, known as the Wild Hunt. Recounting tales of heroism and monstrous and supernatural beings became a midwinter tradition. Dark tales were deployed to entertain on dark nights.

Ghosts have been associated with winter cold since those ancient times. According to art historian Susan Owens, author of The Ghost, A Cultural History, the ode of Beowulf is one of the oldest surviving ghost stories, probably composed in the eighth century. This is the tale of a Scandinavian prince who fights the monster Grendel. Evil and terrifying, Grendel has many ghostly qualities, and is described as a “grimma gaest” or spirit, and a death shadow or shifting fog, gliding across the land.

In 1611, Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale, which includes the line: “A sad tale’s best for winter, I have one of sprites and goblins.” Two centuries later, the teenage Mary Shelley set her influential horror story Frankenstein in a snowy wasteland, although she wrote it during a wet summer in Switzerland.

The Victorians invented many familiar British Christmas traditions, including Christmas trees, cards, crackers and roast turkey. They also customised the winter ghost story, relating it specifically to the festive season – the idea of something dreadful lurking beyond the light and laughter inspired some chilling tales.

Both Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins published stories in this genre, but the most notable and enduring story of the period was Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). In this vivid and atmospheric fable, gloomy miser Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted first by the spirit of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, and thereafter by a succession of Christmas ghosts.

Their revelations about his own past and future and the lives of those close to him lead to a festive redemption which has spawned a host of imitations and adaptations.

Dickens wrote the story to entertain, drawing on the tradition of the ghostly midwinter tale, but his aim was also to highlight the plight of the poor at Christmas. His genius for manipulating sentiment was never used to better effect, but perhaps the most enjoyable elements of the story are the atmospheric descriptions of the hauntings themselves – the door knocker which transforms into Marley’s face and the sinister, hooded figure of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

The tradition was further developed in the stories of M R James, a medieval scholar who published Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904. His chilling Gothic yarns focused on scholars or clergymen who discovered ancient texts or objects with terrifying supernatural consequences.

Chilling tales

Typically, James used the framing device of a group of friends telling stories around a roaring fire. In the introduction to Ghost Stories he said: “I wrote these stories at long intervals, and most of them were read to patient friends, usually at the seasons of Christmas.”

Seminal stories in his oeuvre include Number 13, Oh Whistle & I’ll Come to You and A School Story. Like Dickens, James has been widely imitated and adapted, with Stephen King citing him as an influence. King’s The Shining certainly fits into to the genre of ice-bound chiller.

Christmas ghost stories morph into new forms as time passes, like ectoplasm. Spin offs of A Christmas Carol include Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life, in which the story is transposed to small town America, and the 2019 film Last Christmas, the tale of a dysfunctional young woman permanently dressed as a Christmas elf, ripe for Yuletide redemption. This contemporary version conveys messages about integration and the value of diversity.

Also read: Money is Central to BBC’s ‘A Christmas Carol’

A new, high-octane version of A Christmas Carol will be shown on TV this Christmas, written by Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight. And M R James’ Martin’s Close, the story of a 17th century murder and its supernatural outcome, has also been adapted for the small screen.

So it seems the atavistic desire to lose oneself in tales of the supernatural is still with us. Christmas ghost stories enhance our enjoyment of the mince pies and mulled wine, and the frisson of a paranormal tale offsets the “feel-good” festive spirit that might otherwise be cloying.

Some things never change – we still have a fear of the unknown, a yearning for what is lost and a desire to be secure. In an uncertain, fast-paced world, mediated through smartphones and social media, the seasonal ghost story is here to stay. The jolt of fear and dread such stories convey make the Christmas lights glitter even more brightly.

Sally O’Reilly is Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dracula: A Short History of World’s Favourite Vampire

BBC and Netflix have co-produced a new series on Dracula. It will reportedly hit screens early in 2020.

British screenwriters Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are dipping their toes in the waters of late-Victorian fiction again. Following the success of their take on the most famous of all detectives, Sherlock Holmes, the pair have turned their sights on the most famous of vampires: Dracula. A new series based on the novel and co-produced by the BBC and Netflix will reportedly hit screens early in 2020.

Like those of Holmes, this will hardly be the first adaptation of Dracula (1897). Bram Stoker’s novel is 122 years old, and the character has appeared on screen nearly 350 times. This might leave us to wonder: what new ground could they possibly cover?

Yet, each incarnation of Dracula offers a new story and a new vampire, no matter how closely the script follows the novel. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Moffat and Gatiss won’t be using a modern setting for Dracula, but there is no doubt that his story will be modernised. He will be transformed to suit the interests and needs of a 21st-century audience.

Gothic fiction has always had the power to both respond to and transcend its own historical moment. Dracula can be said to be “about” a number of very specific social contexts of the mid-1890s – such as the political turmoil in the Transylvania region which followed the 1877 Russo-Turkish war. Yet, year after year people read and enjoy Dracula who have never heard of these political events.

This is because displacement is at the heart of Gothic literature’s cathartic function. Gothic fiction projects contemporary anxieties (the church, new science, the crumbling empire) onto supernatural monsters, allowing for a safe exploration of social and political fears. They are given embodied form – a villain that can be confronted, fought, and killed.

This displacement also allows Gothic works longevity past their own historical moment. Because these monsters are distanced from the actual source of anxiety that may have inspired them, they can be reinterpreted by subsequent generations to represent any number of anxieties.

And Dracula is uniquely well suited to reinterpretation.

Unlike other eponymous Gothic villains of the 19th century (Frankenstein’s Creature, Dr Jekyll, Dorian Gray), Dracula does not narrate any portion of his own story. The epistolary novel presents us with diary entries, newspaper clippings, and ship’s logs, which give us insight into the thoughts of everyone except for the titular vampire. We know his movements, but never his motives. It is this inscrutability that has allowed filmmakers to reshape and redefine Dracula since the first unlicensed adaptation of the novel in 1922 (Nosferatu).

Bela Lugosi (Dracula, 1931) transformed the unattractive Count into a suave and handsome aristocrat, who all the women find “fascinating”.

Subsequent iterations of Dracula, including by directors Dan Curtis (1973), John Badham (1979) and Francis Ford Coppola (1992) followed suit, with Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula providing Gary Oldman with a tragic backstory (a dead wife), an all-consuming passion for Mina, and transforming the novel’s sexual assault into a love scene.

Hammer nails it

By contrast, the years between Lugosi and Oldman were dominated by Hammer Horror’s Dracula, portrayed by Christopher Lee across six films. Violent, animalistic and practically non-verbal – the Count does not speak at all in Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966) – Lee’s Dracula is far from a hero. Instead he seems to represent the threat of Eastern powers during the Cold War era.

Each generation’s interpretation of Dracula reflects its own political climate.

Second-wave feminists in the 1970s saw the novel as a misogynistic rape fantasy that punished women for their sexual liberation (an interpretation that quickly lead to sexploitation films like Vampyros Lesbos, 1971, and Vampire Hookers, 1978). Queer theorists responded to the climate of LGBT activism and the AIDS crisis in the 1980s by reading suppressed homosexuality into the novel (primarily between Jonathan Harker and Dracula, but sometimes also Mina and Lucy).

Post-colonial scholars shifted their focus from sex to race, and suggested that the novel reflects similar concerns to those they saw in the wake of increased immigration in the 1990s: fears of mass migration and anxieties about rapidly multiplying numbers of foreigners. This interpretation lingers into 2014’s Dracula Untold, which has been called “Dracula for the ISIS age”.

The dizzying pace of technological change at the millennium led scholars of this period to read the novel through its technology, as telegraphs, phonographs, and typewriters form the principal “weapons” mobilised against Dracula. These concerns are apparent in films such as Dracula 3000 (2004), which sends the vampire to space.

Modern monster

So what will Dracula mean to us (or at least to Moffat and Gatiss) in 2020? Maybe a combination of all the above – the anxieties that scholars have traced in the novel still remain at the fore of our political landscape. Attempts are still made to police women’s bodily autonomy, evidenced by a political campaign against the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland in 2019.

Other familiar themes are resurfacing – “immigration panic” in the West in the wake of Brexit and the rise of US president, Donald Trump – whose base obsesses over alt-right claims of “white genocide”. We’re bothered by technology, too, which is increasingly seen as out of control, finding endless new ways to invade our privacy. A new Dracula has the potential to engage with all of these contemporary anxieties.

The teaser trailer from Gatiss and Moffat hasn’t told us much. Reminiscent of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, but less stylised and more gruesome, it seems we can expect a show that doesn’t flinch from violence.

“It’s really hard” to drag a shadowy villain into the spotlight of the hero, Moffat and Gatiss admitted. It will be interesting to see if they succeed.

Jordan Kistler, Lecturer in Victorian literature, School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image credit: Netflix

Why We’ll Always Be Obsessed With – and Afraid of – Monsters

All the popular monsters you’ll see out trick-or-treating, from Frankenstein to Dracula, were born out of fear and anxiety about change and technology.

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. Credit: Insomnia Cured Here/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Fear continues to saturate our lives: fear of nuclear destruction, fear of climate change, fear of the subversive, and fear of foreigners.

But a recent Rolling Stone article about our “age of fear” notes that most Americans are living “in the safest place at the safest time in human history.”

It continues – around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the US, life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it’s been in a decade and, despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991.

So why are we still so afraid?

Emerging technology and media could play a role. But in a sense, these have always played a role.

The title page of Cotton Mather’s ‘Wonders of the Invisible World,’ which describes the execution of witches in Salem, Massachusetts. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the past, rumour and a rudimentary press coverage could fan the fires. Now, with the rise of social media, fears and fads and fancies race instantly through entire populations. Sometimes the specifics vanish almost as quickly as they arose, but the addiction to sensation, to fear and fantasy, persists, like a low-grade fever.

People often create symbols for that emotions are fleeting, abstract and hard to describe. (Look no further than the recent rise of the emoji.)

For over the last three centuries, Europeans and Americans, in particular, have shaped anxiety and paranoia into the mythic figure of the monster – the embodiment of fear, disorder and abnormality – a history that I detail in my new book, “Haunted.”

There are four main types of monsters. But a fifth – a nameless one – may best represent the anxieties of the 21st century.

Rejecting rationality

The 1700s and 1800s were an era of revolutionary uprisings that trumpeted a limitless future, when the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment proclaimed that reason had the power to change the world. Emotion was pushed out of the intellectual sphere by scientific reasoning; awestruck spirituality had been repressed in favor of the Clockmaker God who set the universal laws into motion.

Of course, humans have always been afraid. But while the fears of the demonic and the diabolical characterised medieval times, the changes wrought by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution created a whole new set of fears tied to advancements in science and technology, and an increasingly crowded and complex world.

During this age of political upheavals and aggressive modernisation, tales of Gothic horror, haunted castles, secret compartments and rotting corpses were the rage. The novels and stories of writers such as Horace Walpole, Matthew G. Lewis, Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley soon became bestsellers. These writers – and many others – tapped into something pervasive, giving names and bodies to a universal emotion: fear.

The fictional monsters created during this period can be categorised into four types. Each corresponds to a deep-seated anxiety about progress, the future and the human ability to achieve anything like control over the world.

“The monster from nature” represents a power that humans only think they have harnessed, but haven’t. The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, King Kong and Godzilla are all examples of this type. An awesome abnormality that we can’t predict and scramble to understand, it strikes without warning – like the shark in “Jaws.” While the obvious inspiration are real ferocious animals, they could also be thought of as embodied versions of natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

“The created monster,” like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, is the monster we have built and believe we can control – until it turns against us. His descendants are the robots, androids and cyborgs of today, with their potential to become all too human – and threatening.

“The monster from within” is the monster generated by our own repressed dark psychology, the other side of our otherwise bland and blameless human nature (think the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll). When nondescript and seemingly harmless young men turn into mass-murdering killers or suicide bombers, the “monster from within” has shown his face.

“The monster from the past,” like Dracula, comes out of a pagan world and offers an alternative to ordinary Christianity with his promise of a blood feast that will confer immortality. Like a Nietzschean superman, he represents the fear that the ordinary consolations of religion are bankrupt and that the only answer to the chaos of modern life is the securing of power.

Zombies: A vague, nameless danger

Recently, our culture has become fixated on the zombie. The recent explosion of zombie films and stories illustrates how fear – while it may be a basic human trait – assumes the shape of particular eras and cultures.

The zombie emerged from the brutal Caribbean slave plantations of the 17th and 18th centuries. They were the soulless bodies of undead slaves who stalked plantations grounds – so the myth went. But director George Romero’s pioneering films, like “Dawn of the Dead” (1978), generalised the figure into an unthinking member of a mass consumer society.

The central distinction between the traditional monsters – such as the Frankenstein monster, Dracula or Mr Hyde – is that the zombie exists primarily as part of a group. Unlike earlier monsters, who all stand alone, even in a kind of grandeur, one zombie is barely distinguishable from another.

What might the horrific image of mindless hordes out to eat our brains represent in the 21st century? It could symbolise whatever we fear will overwhelm and engulf us: epidemic disease, globalisation, Islamic fundamentalists, illegal immigrants and refugees. Or it could be something less tangible and more existential: the loss of anonymity and individuality in a complex world, the threat of impersonal technology that makes each of us just another number in an electronic list.

In 1918, German sociologist Max Weber announced the triumph of reason: “There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play,” he wrote in Science as a Vocation. “One can, in principle, master all things by calculation.”

“The world,” he continued, “is disenchanted.”

Weber may have been a bit optimistic. Yes, we are committed, in many ways, to reason and analytic thinking. But it seems that we need our monsters and our sense of enchantment as well.

Author Leo Braudy discusses his new book ‘Haunted.’

Leo Braudy, Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.