Monster Scholar

Google is celebrating Bram Stoker's 165th birthday with a doodle featuring the infamous count and his brides facing off against Harker and his band of merry vampire-hunters. Stoker is credited with creating the archetype of the vampire we all know and love--the blood-sucking aristocrat with a snazzy cape and Transylvanian accent-- but his other works, without the larger than life Count, are often overlooked. So get stoked and discover a new side of Stoker with these reading recommendations: Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914)  Published posthumously, this collection of Stoker short stories capitalized on the success of Stoker's novel Dracula . The story that makes this collection worth reading is the titular "Dracula's Guest." Intended to be the original first chapter of Dracula , it follows an unnamed Englishman (assumed to be Jonathan Harker) on his way to Dracula's castle when he makes a stop at a local graveyard. There he discovers th

The everday horror of my life presented in horror gifs. When I give my students a pop quiz When I realize I brought the wrong handouts to class. When I tell my students about the final exam. What the campus looks like the week after final exams. When a student e-mails me to ask if we did anything important in class.  What my office hours normally look like. What my office hours look like the day before a big assignment is due. When I tell a student they have to revise their entire paper. My face when a student asks for an extension on their paper. When I see my students after Spring Break When I see former students off campus When I can't go out with my friends because I'm grading. When I realize I haven't worked on my dissertation in two weeks. When I bump into my adviser and I haven't made any progress on my dissertation. How I will feel when I finally finish my dissertation.

This update of the 1960's show The Munsters revisits the monstrous clan of Lily, Herman, Eddie, Marilyn and Grandpa as they move into the creepy "hobo-murder house" on a sunny street in quiet middle America. A lot of what you love about the campy original series survives including the stair trapdoor and the theme song. The elements that do change are for the better. Marylin for instance is a lot creepier than I remember. Charity Wakefield plays her with a certain creepy innocence and despite her obvious handicap--sunny blond disposition and lack of obvious monstrosity--she is certainly a Munster through and through. Jerry O'Connell plays Herman like a modern version of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz . He's a self-made monster with a bum ticker because he loves too hard. Finding Herman a replacement heart becomes one of the show's main conflicts. Far and away, Edie Izzard steals the show as Grandpa. He rocks a version of Gary Oldman's imperial red

Happy Turkey Day from Monster Land! I'll leave you today with some musings on the The Hunger Game s whose horrific re-interpretation of the cornucopia puts new twist on our ages-old horn of plenty. The Hunger Games is a film adaptation of the wildly popular teen novel of the same name. Set in a futuristic version of the U.S., the country is divided into 12 districts ruled by the Panem. The Panem created the Hunger Games after a revolution that resulted in the destruction of the 13th district. A male and female tribute from each district are sent to compete in the Hunger Games, but only one will make it out alive. The winner's district will receive gifts of food and fuel for a single year while the other districts struggle to eke out a meager living. The plot is a cross between Lord of the Flies and Battle Royale as the tributes are trained to kill one another in the ultimate televised sporting event. The cornucopia of The Hunger Games is a golden horn that contains food

I am head over heels for these art prints by Dan Hillier . They are the perfect mix of Victorian style etchings showing polite scenes of fashionable men and women and the grotesque.I love how the seemingly ordinary people sprout tentacles and snake transforming them into Cthulhu and lamia-like creatures. Great fun. If you act by December 10th Dan will send you a print of one of his beautiful grotesqueries in time for Christmas. Tis the season.

I was thinking on my favorite subject—monsters—when I realized that these creatures mostly rise out of folklore, find their way into literature then blossom onto both the big and small screen. This shouldn’t surprise us considering that monsters have been around or ages and only the way in which we tell their stories has changed with time. In this three part series, I will explore the origins of three classic monsters—vampires, werewolves and zombies—that have endured the past and continue to haunt our present. Zombies have been around since the earliest forms of writing. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh the vengeful goddess Ishtar vows: I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! The revolt of the dead against the living has been a popular image of horror and zombies can trace their folkloric lineage back to West African Voudon and Haitian voodoo. In both relig