What Scares You?

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(No Transcript)
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What Scares You?

• Monster Movies Today and Yesterday

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Overview

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

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Quiz

• Know Your Movie Monster

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Discussion Point

• What is a movie monster?

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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.

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Know Your Movie Monsters Quiz

Frankenstein's Creation Godzilla Miss Swamp, your 5th grade teacher The Mummy

Charles Manson (Mass murderer) Malevolent robot King Kong Tiger
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Movie Monster Quiz (Continued)

Muppet with Cookie fixation Bridge Eating Octopus Your spoiled Niece Alien

Shark from the movie Jaws Undead skeleton warriors Ted Bundy (Serial Killer) Colossal Squid
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So what is a Monster Movie?(also known as a
Creature Feature)

• No specific academic genre (zhän-r?) 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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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Cyclops

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

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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.

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Cyclops

• In the Greek poet Homers Odyssey, the hero
  Odysseus has a confrontation with Polyphemus
  (pol-a-fem-us), a cyclops.

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Odysseus and the Cyclops
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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.

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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.

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Medusa and Perseus
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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.

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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

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European Dragons

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

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Oriental Dragons

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

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Dragon Dance
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Dragons (Cont.)

• Dinosaur fossils were occasionally mistaken for
  the bones of dragons.

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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 Hobbit by J.R.R.
  Tolkien, featured a dragon named Smaug.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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Discussion Point

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 1500s, werewolf legends are
  very rare.

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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.

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Medical Conditions

• Individuals that suffer from the genetic disorder
  known as hypertrichosis (hip?r-tri-kosis) 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.

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hypertrichosis
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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.

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Fear of the Full Moon
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Zombie

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

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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.

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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.

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Mary Shellys Frankenstein

• Another early example of Science Fiction was Mary
  Shelley's novel Frankenstein.
• It tells the tale of a scientist the creates a
  man by stitching together parts of dead bodies.
• Shelly was only 19 when it was published in 1818.

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Jules Verne

• Verne (1828 1905) was a French author who helped
  pioneer science-fiction with books like From
  Earth to Moon, Journey to the Center of the Earth
  and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

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Nautilus Squid

• 20,000 Under the Sea gave us the ultra giant
  squid seen in the 1954 movie. The Verne book
  actually pictures an attack by several smaller
  squid.

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H. G.Wells

• Herbert George Wells (1866 1946) was an English
  author, best known for his work in the science
  fiction genre.
• He is best remembered for The War of the Worlds.
  The story of an attack on Earth by Martians.

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Golden Era of Science Fiction

• Is sometimes recognized as the period from the
  late 1930s through the 1950s during which the
  genre gained wide public attention and many
  classic stories were published.

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Science Fiction Today

• Science Fiction remains an important genre today
  with sub-genre including
• Hard SciFi
• Social SciFi
• Cyberpunk
• Steampunk
• Time Travel.
• Space Opera.

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A Monster Movie Proposal

• Over the next four lessons we will work in groups
  to create proposal for a monster movie.
• Todays objective will be to select a monster.
• Each group will have a packet they will work on
  to complete the movie proposal.

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Homework Reading, etc.

• Read the short story The Fog Horn by Ray
  Bradbury.
• View a Creature Feature of your choice and fill
  out the study guide (Not due to the last class in
  this unit on Nov. 3rd)