Return to
the House of Franklin-Stein, Part 1
It’s
BACK!!! Chris and Cindy return
to the House of Franklin-Stein!!!
Our Halloween Horror series kicks
off with a look at the classic Hammer
film, The Vampire Lovers! Based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”, Ingrid Pitt stars as a vampire with a lust for love…and blood! She targets young girls who
she longs to make her own…in her own
vampiric image, that is! Will Peter
Cushing and a group of vampire hunters stop her in time?
Then
we dig into the cobweb covered comic long boxes to read Action Comics Annual #1,
by John Byrne, Art Adams and Dick
Giordano. In this early Post-Crisis
tale, the World’s Finest team of Superman and Batman must unite to face
the unholy threat of a seemingly innocent young girl named “Skeeter”!
Listen
on!
Let
us know what you think! We’d love to read it aloud in an upcoming episode. Drop
us a line in our comments section, or email us at supermatespodcast@gmail.com. If you're
listening on iTunes, please consider leaving a review of our show! We’re also
on Facebook!
Chris
(aka Earth 2 Chris) co-hosts the Power Records Podcast with the esteemed Rob
Kelly over at the Fire
and Water Podcast feed!
Next time: Hollywood’s
favorite lycanthrope Larry Talbot, aka the Wolf Man returns! And this time he’s
got company! Bela Lugosi dons the neck bolts and flattop to battle Lon Chaney,
Jr. in the Universal Horror classic, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man! Plus a
comic featuring one of these creepy creatures!
This might have been your best episode yet, Chris and Cindy--and given that I was on your last two episodes, that's saying something! ;)
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a Freshman in college I was fortunate enough to take a seminar course on the Vampire in Literature and Film. Among our first readings were Keats' poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", John Polidori's story "The Vampyre", and Le Fanu's "Carmilla", and how each of them borrowed from myths and folklore and then influenced Dracula.
One thing that's clear when you study Stoker's novel and Carmilla is you see how the vampire was used as a vehicle for authors to write about sex in a super repressed Victorian England. Back then, if a writer described a woman's bare ankle, he as well have been directing a soft core for Cinemax.
Anyway, all that is to say it's funny how the subtleties of sexuality and lesbianism that were supposed to be subtextual in Carmilla are made obvious in "The Vampire Lovers". As you two pointed out, there were two kinds of Hammer films. The '50s/'60s era that was more classical, more elegant, that teased sexuality without making it obvious; and then there was the '70s Hammer films that had boobies.
I think we all agree the latter was better. ;)
Thanks Ryan! It's all downhill from here.
DeleteMan, I would have loved to have taken that course! I almost went more scholarly with this episode, but Cindy and I started having fun, and I just rolled with it. I've always been fascinated by the origins of vampire myth, and how authors adapted them into those works, and how one work informed the other etc. It's a far cry from werewolves, where you can thank Curt Siodmak for nearly everything we know about them.
Yeah, Vampire Lovers is anything but subtle. But I love it for it.
Yes, despite my love for the early films, the pig in my enjoys the latter.
Chris (ducks a smack from Cindy)