Here Come the Brides
I've been watching some of the movies from my Hammer Horror DVD pack. Brides of Dracula, The Curse of the Werewolf, The Kiss of the Vampire, and Nightmare. Still to be seen: Phantom of the Opera, Paranoiac, Night Creatures, and The Evil of Frankenstein.
It's been really great getting this. I have some of the movies on VHS, but I haven't been able to use my VCR since it developed an appetite for eating tapes, and these films aren't exactly easy to get at the local video rental place. I haven't even seen some of them before, ever. What a treat!
Sitting down watching so many of them, I wonder why I haven't before clued in on all of the brides in these flicks. The blushing, doomed bride on her honeymoon, drawn in to evil. The young innocent forced to become a handmaiden to the monster. The woman betrothed to the old, rich, heartless boor, but who is worthy of much greater love. The woman who helps her lover kill off his wife, and then replaces her. Hmmm. The relationships are much more explicit than the earlier Universal pics (ah, such innocent times!) but still a step down from the "sex is punishable by death" rule of later slasher flicks. Just noting this.
Anyway, the films look great, much better than when I saw them on TV as a kid, in the middle of nowhere (lousy reception!), in the middle of the night. It's easy to dismiss Hammer productions as cheesy, second-rate horror, but I think people do that without paying attention to them, trying to ignore why they might be a trifle uneasy with the monsters, human and not. But then, I have a well-developed sense of what Lovecraft called "the suspension of disbelief," meaning, I can have a lot of fun watching these movies! Sorry if you're missing out on that.
(16 September 2006)
It's been really great getting this. I have some of the movies on VHS, but I haven't been able to use my VCR since it developed an appetite for eating tapes, and these films aren't exactly easy to get at the local video rental place. I haven't even seen some of them before, ever. What a treat!
Sitting down watching so many of them, I wonder why I haven't before clued in on all of the brides in these flicks. The blushing, doomed bride on her honeymoon, drawn in to evil. The young innocent forced to become a handmaiden to the monster. The woman betrothed to the old, rich, heartless boor, but who is worthy of much greater love. The woman who helps her lover kill off his wife, and then replaces her. Hmmm. The relationships are much more explicit than the earlier Universal pics (ah, such innocent times!) but still a step down from the "sex is punishable by death" rule of later slasher flicks. Just noting this.
Anyway, the films look great, much better than when I saw them on TV as a kid, in the middle of nowhere (lousy reception!), in the middle of the night. It's easy to dismiss Hammer productions as cheesy, second-rate horror, but I think people do that without paying attention to them, trying to ignore why they might be a trifle uneasy with the monsters, human and not. But then, I have a well-developed sense of what Lovecraft called "the suspension of disbelief," meaning, I can have a lot of fun watching these movies! Sorry if you're missing out on that.
(16 September 2006)
posted by silvereyz at 5:15 PM
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