Abstract for Edited Collection: “Digital Nightmares”

“Whatever Happened to Grandma Lois?: House Anxiety and the Horror of the Video Archive in the Paranormal Activity Films”

            Since the mid-1970s, the paranormal family horror film has articulated various forms of trauma originating within the unstable middle-class American family. Underlying these articulations of trauma is an anxiety over home ownership and the price of maintaining a family and home in times of recession, inflation, record unemployment, and rising fuel costs. Paranormal Activity and its sequels articulate the precarious economic situation faced by many present-day American families, deriving horror from digital and analog video archives dating back to similar anxieties occurring in the 1980s. Paranormal Activity and its sequels present feature-length archives: each consisting of “found footage,” often what could at times be taken as unremarkable scenes from what appear to be unremarkable families living in houses that are anything but “unremarkable.”

            A horror of the family archive and what it can yield frames paranormal family horror through archival materials (oral and print histories, digital and analog video). This “horror of the archive” has always been an important part of paranormal family horror, providing some motivation for the haunting as a means of calling the family to rally or flee. In order to explain and counter the haunting, family members talk to eccentric locals, they consult newspapers, land records, death records, journal entries, etc. Yet these are the oral and print archives, joined now by visual archives made possible by technologies emerging in the late 20^th century:  home video, personal computers, and the Internet, among others.

            The footage found in these new media archives isn’t necessarily horrific by itself (we never see a ghost or demon, nor any gore). Instead, the horror springs from the home video archive, which tells us another story. What we see in lieu of ghosts is a multigenerational saga of family trauma and paranormal horror, one depicted in economic terms through the family’s inherited wealth having resulted from a grandmother’s pact with a demon. The found footage format delimits how much we know at any given time about this American horror story: we are teased, we are not always made privy to some events or information or are only made privy in part. It’s never enough and we go through it again in the next installment, searching the horrific home video archive for answers to where it all went wrong.

Writing Sample Intro

I start teaching as a postdoc tomorrow at noon. And I’ve been working all day to clear business before the quarter starts. Finishing touches now and my next task is to pick out what I’m wearing tomorrow. Getting three job applications out by the end of the week. I spent this evening fashioning what I hope is a lucid introduction to my writing sample, an article I have under review at a journal. Read it and weep. Tomorrow, I start teaching full-time for the first time. Eep.

The following article, under review at Camera Obscura, draws primarily from the third and fourth chapters of my dissertation, Horror Begins at Home: Family Trauma in Paranormal Reality TV. Providing a brief overview of the “paranormal reality” television subgenre and its emergence in recent years, I then describe how cable programs such as Paranormal State and A Haunting, articulate trauma in the family. Family trauma (violence and abuse, alcoholism and mental illness, along with others) is articulated through the paranormal, a process described by cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall as “postmodern articulation,” a process deeply informed by gender, sexuality, race, and other forms of difference. This process establishes connections between two elements, suggesting coherence between the paranormal and family trauma, a tradition most immediately traced back to the late 1970s and early 1980s and “paranormal family horror” in films including The Amityville Horror (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, US, 1979), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, US, 1980), and Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, US, 1982). As a subgenre, however, paranormal reality is especially suited for the uncanny medium of television, given paranormal reality’s generic hybridity (family melodrama colliding with horror), its dependence on aesthetics of reality television, and television itself’s long-standing relationship with the American family. What many refer to as paranormal reality’s “lack of ghosts” contributes to the subgenre’s articulation of family trauma through the paranormal, suggesting what we are truly afraid of in paranormal reality television.

“Only Horror”

This is probably no shock of consequence, but if I’m going to pay nigh on to $15 to see a movie, I better not come away totally disappointed. For this reason, it is almost impossible to get me to go see anything but horror films. Yes, horror movies can suck as much as anything else but usually, I’ll at least go home with something to think about, write about, talk to myself while home alone, etc. Earlier this year, I went to see The Devil Inside, which had its moments but wasted my goodwill with its abrupt ending, which was clearly intended to set up a sequel (I had thought the movie had a big opening, which makes me surprised that I have yet to hear of a sequel in the works). Outside of the theater, in the lobby, I was waiting for a friend and had a teenaged theater employee ask if she could survey me about my moviegoing habits. Since I’d just had a gin and tonic and since I was at Bridgeport Village and the people there freak me out, I agreed to speak to her.
I was shown a rather obnoxious trailer for some upcoming movie (I believe it was Chronicle) and then she wanted my opinions and I was all too keen to provide them. When I asked if I would see the movie, I said no. When asked why, I drawled that it looked to be about young people and their problems, “and I don’t care about young people and their problems.” When asked if anything else displeased me (she didn’t use those particular words, she was very polite) about the trailer, I thought about it and then said that I resented the director naming what looked to be the film’s antagonist “Andrew.” That, of course, is my full name and I complained that it got used for demonic types too often (I have no idea what I meant by that, I can only think of one movie where that was true, 1981′s Fear No Evil). The whole thing ended when she asked if there were any other genres I liked, I thought about it (much as my little brother used to furrow his brow and think carefully before he spoke) and declared “No, I only like horror. Only horror.”

People often assume that because I’m a horror fan, I must like gore (I don’t, at all) or have a screw loose (which I do, but only the right screws that should be loose). The truth is, I first became acquainted with horror because I was sick of being scared. The year was 1988, and I was turning nine years old. I was aware of horror (mainly from Disney movies, because those things are full of horror, and the occasional made-for-TV product like Mr. Boogedy or my mom randomly renting Poltergeist and watching it on a Saturday morning). Back then, I thought ghosts looked like skeletons and I avoided that kind of thing like the plague (although I did like Halloween, loved it).

This would have been all it took to send me from the room screaming.

The previous winter, I had somehow brought home from the library a book called America’s Monsters or some such. My guess is that I figured it was “safe” because it was about monsters, not ghosts or vampires (I was also quite opposed to vampires, as I believed in them fervently). Some twenty years later, I was able to go back and read this book and I must say that the stories were pretty scary. Mothman, Bigfoot, Nessie, they were all there. Sure, the stories played the devil with me when I went to bed at night, but I enjoyed them enough to check out some other books, most of them about America’s Favorite Ghosts or some such thing, so you got a history lesson along with your ghost story (and I was one of those irritating kids who enjoyed history and geography and such).  These were a good start (and shortly I would start reading children’s books that offered truncated versions of the Universal Monsters films, illustrated with stills from the movies) but things took a definite turn in the spring of 1988.
My sisters and my brother had conspired to make me believe that our 1950s-era ranch house was formerly the home of a midget (their words, not mine) and that his much taller wife had cheated on him with a muscle man and they killed the midget to take his house and his money (one of them had to have seen Freaks). Now, the midget’s ghost was set to return and hated people who could grow to full size and this return involved my brother covered in jackets (he was maybe 6) and making scary noises.  Anyhow, I went to my mother about it and she told me that the only way to avoid being scared by my siblings was to stop letting them do it. And maybe learn to scare them back.

Mother, you had no idea.

In the years that followed, I read every ghost story collection I could find, watched any horror movie that I was allowed to rent or tune in, and even read my way through some of my stepmother’s Stephen King novels. By the time I was in high school, I was scaring the hell out of the other kids in the family and was actually forbidden to tell any more “stories.”

One of my best stories involved convincing my younger siblings that our detached garage was built on the site of an old house where a crazy old lady had lived, one Mrs. Hermes. She kidnapped neighborhood children and cooked them in a cauldron and ate them. And I told them her hungry ghost lived in the loft space above the garage itself. Finest hour. I based her appearance on Mombi from the Oz books and took her last name from the author of my sister’s My Girl novelization that she wouldn’t let me read that summer.

Revenge is sweet. And so are horror stories.

English 380: Film, Media, and History (The Big 80s)

Draft of a course summary (for syllabus purposes) for this fall’s English 380, “Film, Media, and History.”

“This course establishes the importance of historical context in studying film and media. Our chosen decade, the 1980s, has had a profound influence on how we live now. Political, social, and cultural shifts during the decade, perhaps best symbolized by the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan, changed how movies were made, sold, and consumed in the U.S. At the same time, U.S. cinema in the 1980s largely demonstrated Hollywood’s shift away from the “New Hollywood” of the 1960s and 70s to the “blockbuster” model associated with the films of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and others, despite an increase in the production of independent films. Lingering shame over the Vietnam War, the continued “Cold War” against the Soviet Union, covert intervention in Central America, anxiety surrounding women’s liberation, class warfare, the aging of the “Baby Boomer” generation, and renewed patriotism (following the cynicism and paranoia of the 1970s) all inform the films we’ll be watching over the next ten weeks. In addition, nostalgia runs throughout the decade and its cinematic output, with the transformative aspects of Reagan’s proclaimed “Morning in America” turning up in the throwback action-adventure of Raiders of the Lost Ark, fantasy/melodrama hybrids such as Poltergeist and Back to the Future, and Field of Dreams, intensely introspective ensemble drama in the style of The Big Chill or Hannah and Her Sisters, or the “male melodrama” of Die Hard, among others.

She has a gun in her purse.

Having studied films from the 1980s, students completing English 380 will recognize how historical context has helped to shape U.S. cinema in this period, and will be able to perform their own analysis by drawing on class lecture and discussion, readings, and screenings. Students will also develop a historical framework by helping to construct a class wiki, reconstructing the decade by posting and analyzing various artifacts from each year and connecting them to the films under discussion.”

Giving Up the Ghost: Family Trauma and Audience Reception of Paranormal Reality TV

Part of a “Paranormal Media” panel I’m putting together with Carter Soles and submitting for SCMS 2013 in Chicago.

Giving Up the Ghost: Family Trauma and Audience Reception of

Paranormal Reality TV

Drew Beard, University of Oregon

Paranormal reality television, a subgenre including such programs as Paranormal State and Ghost Hunters, presents a seemingly endless series of haunted family homes, depicting each family’s traumatic encounters with and attempts to expel occult forces from their home (through either their own efforts of the intervention of outside authorities, whether religious or “ghost hunters”). Documenting families in turmoil, paranormal reality often contains accounts of family trauma, most notably in the form of domestic violence.

Informed by this trauma studies perspective, this paper examines how the family hauntings of paranormal reality are received by viewers, as subtle representations of oppressive domesticity or as campy horror stories? Examining online fan interaction and commentary at web sites such as Television without Pity, I will suggest that, much as these programs themselves, paranormal reality’s reception by viewers proves complex and contradictory, especially regarding viewers’ belief in the paranormal. First-person accounts of both paranormal and family trauma are all too many times subjected to contestation, their reception heavily predicated upon questions of belief (“there’s no such thing as ghosts,” “there must have been another explanation,” “he or she is lying/deranged”). Accounts of hauntings and paranormal trauma often follow narrative patterns similar to those employed by survivors of rape and domestic violence: the subject underwent a terrifying experience that deeply impacted his or her life, leading the individual to become isolated and increasingly doubtful of her or his own sanity, reluctant to share his or her experience with others or seek help. However, it is within the realm of the paranormal that this denial of abuse is granted particular power, even as it is made particularly visible.

Drawing upon media reception studies work by Janet Staiger and others, along with scholarship on paranormal popular culture by Annette Hill and Avery F. Gordon, this paper offers a brief consideration of how viewers receive the narratives of family and trauma that manifest in these programs. Textual analysis can yield observations of paranormal reality television’s potential for articulating trauma and critiquing the nuclear family, yet it is only through interrogating discourses of audience and reception that suggestions can be made regarding the subgenre’s appeal and function in this cultural moment.

Drew Beard completed his PhD in English at the University of Oregon; his dissertation was titled Horror Begins at Home: Family Trauma in Paranormal Reality TV. Currently teaching film and media courses at the University of Oregon, Drew has previously contributed to Scope, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and Horror Studies.

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. 131-50. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Hill, Annette. Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits, and Magic in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Staiger, Janet. Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

CFP for SCMS 2013 on “Paranormal Media”

Call for Papers for Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Conference, 2013

Paranormal Media

Annette Hill, in Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture, observes that in recent years, paranormal beliefs have entered the mainstream. Although the paranormal had a presence in popular culture and various media forms for centuries, the past decade has reflected a proliferation across media, from paranormal romance fiction (in the form of the Twilight series and its many imitators) to a resurgence in the paranormal horror film, witnessed in the success of such films as Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) and Insidious (James Wan, 2011). Television has also proved a beneficial medium for paranormal narratives, particularly (but not limited to) dramas (True Blood, American Horror Story, Supernatural, The Walking Dead) and reality television (Ghost Hunters, Paranormal State). As a panel, “Paranormal Media” investigates the unique relationship between the paranormal and media, including its connections to the horror genre and the possibilities it offers in film, television, and new media.

Panel papers may examine questions of genre, production, paratexts, reception, etc. Although we are particularly interested in media dealing with ghosts, we also welcome scholarship on texts featuring demons, aliens, witches, vampires, werewolves, and assorted “things that go bump in the night,” demonstrating the diversity of paranormal media and its study.

 

* Generic hybridity
* Representations of gender and sexuality
* Representations of social class and race, including whiteness
* Convergences between the horror genre, reality TV, and “found footage”
* Reception/audience studies
* Relationship between the paranormal and issues of medium/apparatus
* Historical approaches (previous manifestations of the paranormal in media)

Abstracts should be approximately 500 words in length, and accompanied by a brief bibliography (five items maximum) and a short biography of the author. Please email your abstract as a .doc file to Drew Beard (abeard3@uoregon.edu) by August 15, 2012. All will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 20, 2012.

 

Call for Papers: Special issue of Horror Studies “Paranormal TV”

Call for Papers: Special issue of Horror Studies

“Paranormal TV”

Helen Wheatley, in Gothic Television, argues that beginning in the early 1990s, gothic texts became particularly visible in television; like the gothic, paranormal-themed television became especially prevalent beginning in the 1990s and, again like the gothic, paranormal television has cut across genres, with particular visibility in paranormal reality television (starting with UK programs such as Most Haunted and then becoming popular in the United States with Ghost Hunters and similar fare), along with the procedural and the recently cancelled Medium and The Ghost Whisperer as well as family melodrama (American Horror Story, Supernatural).

While a great number of scholars have produced important work on horror and television, my proposed issue of Horror Studies represents the first collection  of scholarship concerning itself solely with paranormal horror in the medium of television. Taking both a contemporary and historical approach, articles appearing in this issue will present rigorous yet lively explorations of paranormal-themed television programs as generic hybrids drawing upon established genres, while also potentially examining questions of production, paratexts, reception, etc.

Although I am particularly interested in television dealing with ghosts, I also welcome scholarship on texts featuring demons, aliens, witches, vampires, werewolves, and assorted “things that go bump in the night,” demonstrating the diversity of paranormal television and its study. Horror Studies is an interdisciplinary journal, and I am accepting submissions from a wide range of disciplines and theoretical perspectives.

The proposed issue will consist of approximately six articles, including a short editorial introduction, along with 2-3 reviews of recent works pertinent to the study of horror, particularly paranormal horror.

Articles will be 5,000-8,000 words and make use of Harvard reference style . Contributors should send a 500-700 word abstract for their article, with a title, to guest editor Drew Beard at abeard3@uoregon.edu. The deadline for submitting abstracts is September 1, 2012.

Book reviews will be 1,000-2,000 words in length. Queries can be sent to abeard3@uoregon.edu.

Horror Studies:
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=151/

Horror Studies is a journal devoted to the study of horror. This journal will publish in all fields of the humanities, provided the scholarship deals centrally with a work or works generally connected to horror. While we anticipate that fields traditionally concerned with horror such as film studies and literary studies will inform the bulk of the journal’s articles, we also intend to solicit and cultivate study in allied fields such as art history, musicology, theatre history, and dance history. The goal of the journal will be to promote excellence in the scholarly study of horror in expressive culture, and interaction between scholars interested in the study of horror from diverse disciplines.

Halloween 4 and 5

My friend Sean made the mistake of asking if I had Halloween 3 and 4, so I managed to convince him that he needed to skip directly to 4 and 5 as he just saw Halloween II (dir. Rick Rosenthal, 1981) and the third film has no connection to the films before or after (you have to preserve the continuity, it’s tenuous as it is). Halloween III: Season of the Witch (dir. Tommy Lee Wallace, 1982) is a fine movie taken on its own merits, but we have thus settled in for a balmy summer night in Portland, Oregon, watching movies set in late autumn in rural Illinois. Makes perfect sense.

The night he came home again.

Paranormal Activity and the Archival Horror

Trying to write my first from-scratch article after grad school (it was “official” on July 6, they accepted my few revisions to my dissertation and that baby is on its way to Proquest). Close to my interest, paranormal family horror, but coming at it from a different direction, taking a committee member’s advice and looking more at the economic stuff going on in these movies. This is my introductory section; I had to spend a lot of time on it tonight, but I think I have something hammered out and a general idea of where I want to go. I’ll be working on it into early fall, planning to send both this and revise and resubmit out by September 1, and beginning Monday I’m teaching four days a week, my queer horror course (which I am prepped and ready for, which is a mighty nice feeling because for my most of my last year of graduate school, I was flying by the seat of my pants. Anyway, here is my intro.

 

“That’s a Bad Business”: Paranormal Activity, House Anxiety, and

the Horror of the Archive

A little over halfway through Paranormal Activity 2 (dir. Tod Williams, US, 2010), Kristi Rey (Sprague Grayden) confides in her sister Katie (Katie Featherston) regarding her fears that the house in which Kristi lives with her husband Daniel (Brian Boland) and their children might be haunted. Earlier in the film, there had been mention made of the sisters’ having experienced paranormal activity during their childhood; however, neither Kristi nor Katie had been forthcoming with details concerning their previous encounters with the paranormal. After the activity in Kristi’s home escalates, Kristi once again raises the issue and wonders to her sister if there could be some connection to their previous ordeal, a possibility that the previously warm and sympathetic Katie denies vehemently, even while sharing her own memories of that time: “You know what I remember? I remember you crying all the time. I remember you couldn’t sleep and you got anxiety attacks, I remember that you stopped talking for months, I remember weird people came to our house and our mom was upset all the time. That’s what I remember.” Katie goes on to warn Kristi that “whatever it was, it thrived on fear. The more we paid attention to it, the worse it got. You need to leave this alone.” As a means of protection, Katie demands that Kristi divest herself of any memory of childhood trauma, turning herself away from the archive and the horrors it may hold, even as the viewers are forced to engage with this same horrific archive through the “found footage” format utilized by all three Paranormal Activity films. Beyond the traditional archive (documents, community members, graves), these videotaped slices of mundane life punctuated by slamming doors and “did you just hear that?” form the archive of horror that Katie, in Paranormal Activity 2, warns sister Kristi  against thinking or talking about.
Elsewhere, I have considered at length the articulation of family trauma and violence in paranormal reality television and well as the early paranormal family horror film. In this article, I shift my emphasis to the economic aspects of paranormal family horror, a subgenre originating in the recessionary 1970s and continuing to be active and relevant more than thirty years later. Following the economic crises of the past several years, with home ownership and the price of caring for a family soaring ever higher, the paranormal family horror film articulates various forms of trauma in the family, but underlying these articulations of trauma is an anxiety over home ownership and the price of maintaining a family and a home. As the George Lutz character in The Amityville Horror grumbles: “They’ll nickel and dime you to death.” The early 1980s also marked a time of  economic recession, social and political conservatism, and class warfare, as Douglas Keller notes in his article “Poltergeists, Gender, and Class in the Age of Reagan and Bush.” Kellner’s work on Poltergeist and the 1980s, as well as work on family and horror by Tony Williams and Bernice Murphy, proves foundational in examining significant economically turbulent narratives in contemporary paranormal family horror, with the first three Paranormal Activity films providing examples.
Ghost stories, it seems, have money on their mind and always have; many is the legend or short story of some wayfarer forced to sleep in a haunted house for shelter, and many of these movies answer the question posed to those dwelling in a haunted house: why not just move? They can’t afford to. They’re also terrified of anyone “out there” who is going to take away what they already have, in an era of vanished pensions, reduced benefits, and home foreclosures. Expressed through home ownership and material consumption, this is a lifestyle defined through square footage, brand-new furniture, servants, sole-income families, and swimming pools and other forms of conspicuous consumption (particularly in the current economic climate). In the Paranormal Activity trilogy, horror is configured to threaten not only the family but also their property and possessions; in other words, it isn’t just the family in danger, it’s an entire  way of life in danger. Paranormal Activityand its sequels articulate contemporary anxieties surrounding the precarious economic situation faced by American families, deriving horror from digital and analog archives dating back to similar anxieties occurring in the 1980s.

“Honey? I’m not sure we can afford this place.”

“I Started To Talk To Her, Then I Remembered She Was Dead”: Universal’s Dracula Franchise

Stone me if you will, but I must confess: I don’t entirely get the Dracula franchise as produced by Universal Pictures in the 1930s and 40s. Frankenstein has its moments (a solid start in the 1931 original, perfection in the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, a respectable second sequel in 1939′s Son of Frankenstein, the passable Ghost of Frankenstein from 1942, and then the monster rally House of Frankenstein in 1944), but Dracula, in all honesty, begins to deteriorate about twenty minutes into the first film, released in 1931.

Bela Lugosi’s Dead.

I’m not denying Dracula‘s influence; to do so would be at my own peril. It was the first “talking” horror film, it determined in many ways how vampires would be thought of for generations to come, and without its success, it’s hard to say whether horror would have found much of a foothold in classical Hollywood (as Frankenstein might not have been made). But I wish the entire film (in its 75 minute running time) could have sustained the atmosphere of the film’s first quarter. Renfield’s journey through the Borgo Pass to Castle Dracula is rendered extremely well considering the state-of-the art (it’s one of my favorite openings to a novel, but I never entirely understood why Renfield was made to substitute for Harker in the film, although I guess it helped to condense the narrative). This remains true through Dracula’s seduction of Renfield (Dwight Frye is just so QUEER) and into the shipboard voyage to England. Unfortunately, the film falls apart as soon as that ship of the dead sails into Whitby (which is, ironically, where the novel really picks up the pace, or at least it did for me; I’m re-reading Dracula this summer, it’s on the list).

The rest of the movie is dreadfully talky, little more than a filmed stage play (this was probably the result of Hollywood’s continuing adjustment to sound film as well as the success of theatrical adaptations of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel). Lots of talking, and Lugosi’s Dracula seems ten times hammier in the drawing rooms of England than he did in the gothic settings of Transylvania. The movie also has an incredibly abrupt ending, and the whole conclusion just feels half-baked, a pale echo of the novel (I feel like James Whale definitely learned from this, because Frankenstein, released that same year, does not suffer from this).

Dracula’s Daughter, from 1936, suffers from a similar problem. It picks up where the last one left off, with Van Helsing being arrested following his staking of Dracula in the cellar of Carfax Abbey. There is some spookiness with Dracula’s body being taken by the authorities and then stolen by his enigmatic daughter, the Countess Maria Zaleska. She burns his body on a funeral pyre and hopes that his death will release her and allow her to live as a woman, but nothin’ doing, missy. She still feeds (primarily on women, giving the film a lesbian subtext that it seems to be known for) and seeks reparative therapy from a bland leading man-type doctor. When she becomes jealous of his spunky assistant, she kidnaps her and takes her back to Transylvania where she meets her doom (along with her equally queer manservant) and the rather nondescript heterosexual couple is free to do their thing, whatever that may be. Much like the original, Dracula’s Daughter starts off strong with a decent premise, but very quickly the sympathetic or at least ambivalent “monster” becomes a vicious dyke-figure, whose death is mandated in the film’s closing.

This brings us to Son of Dracula, which hit theaters in 1943, seven years after the last installment. By this time, Universal wasn’t exactly giving their horror pictures the A-treatment. Along with The Mummy (don’t get me started on The Mummy movies, god, they are awful), they insisted on transplanting their horrors to U.S. soil (I’m guessing even the vaguest of European settings were too much for wartime audiences) and having Dracula go by, get this… Count “Alucard.” That’s Dracula backwards. That’s clever. Like when Days of Our Lives had most of its cast travel to the town of Aremid (which, spelled backwards, read Dimera, the name of the show’s primary villain, Stefano Dimera, so did he own the town or found it?). A few years later, House of Dracula (1945) entered the monster rally game, and that was pretty much the end of it. I just find it interesting that people seem to think that crappy sequels and rapidly disintegrating franchises started in the 1980s… no, no, Gretel. Unlike Frankenstein (which had heights to fall from) and The Mummy (which stank to begin with… oh, it’s so scary, some raggedy man, shuffling along, chasing me, he’s from Egypt. oh noes), Dracula went bad from the very beginning. A shame, really.