Frankenstein and personal identity
We’ve encountered Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) here at Erotic Mad Science before, but surely if any movie would deserve a second post here, it would be this one. And not just because it has a swell mad-lab setup, though it certainly does.
The deeper reason is that this movie constitutes a fine early example of personal identity porn with an erotic twist. An explanation: Baron Frankenstein in this movie has moved beyond just trying to make creatures and is now trying to defeat death by using a sort of force-field to keep the soul from leaving the body at death. (Okay, it’s a lunatic premise but of course this is mad science we’re talking about here.)
Meanwhile in whatever little burg or dorf in which Frankenstein has set up shop, young man Hans is framed for the murder of a tavern-keeper with connivance of the actual murders, a trio of loathsome young dandies. He’s guillotined at the edge of town — thus providing useful experimental material for Frankenstein.
But what to do with Hans’s soul when he’s trapped it? In a human tragedy that works out well for mad science, when Hans’s lover Chritina sees his execution she promptly drowns herself. More material for Frankenstein.
What he creates is a composite creature, Hans’s soul somehow transferred into Christina’s repaired (and improved) body. Quite an advance on the old poetic conceit of two lovers united in death! Her first sentence on revival is that most philosophical of questions: “Please…who am I?”
And indeed, who is she? She’s not a composite like Jireen, the owner of the memories of both her progenitors. But at the same time, she seems in some ways continuous with both of them, as her subsequent actions will show.
The resulting being is quite the seductress, and proceeds to use this ability to execute a program of revenge on the young dandies, giving us in the audience something to ogle.
Definitely not a movie to miss for the thaumatophile.
Frankenstein Venus
Awesome blog Wicked Halo has put together this gallery of images of the Bride of the Monster as created by Elsa Lanchester, a subject we’ve broached before here at Erotic Mad Science. All are worthy of your attention, but my personal second favorite was probably this one:
Thematically this falls into a line with one of the very first posts done here.
The hat tip goes to PZ Myers at Pharyngula, whose personal favorite coincides with mine. If you look at the Wicked Halo post I’ll bet you can guess which one that is (but no extra points if you peek at PZ’s post first).
Origins of tube girl meme?
I’ve done a lot of posts here at Erotic Mad Science about what I call the “tube girl meme,” the visual depiction of a pretty woman, often nude or scantily clad, sealed in some sort of transparent tube (often suspended in fluid) for the purpose of preservation, experiment, or some perverted purpose — let your imagination run free there. It’s clearly a pretty prominent visual motif in the mad science genre and really takes off with pulp covers after the Second World War. But where did it come from?
I’ll offer a conjecture, and kindly keep in mind that it’s only a conjecture so if any of you who read this blog know of an earlier or better one by all means please comment. It goes back to a locus classicus of cinematic mad science, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
In this film, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, one of Frankenstein’s former teachers, demonstrates to Frankenstein a set of experiments in creating life, in this case Pretorius’s creation of a set of homunculi that live in cylindrical glass jars. It’s a pretty good effect, given that it’s 1935.
Among these are a dancer, (who, Pretorius laments, will only dance to Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song”)…
..and, perhaps more on visual point, a mermaid.
Origin of the concept? Maybe. I’m willing to bet that all those pulp artists and the public that patronized their work both watched Bride of Frankenstein a lot.
Bonus erotic trivia: The mermaid in the jar is played by Josephine McKim, a swimmer who won a gold medal in 1932 Olympics and who was the body double for Maureen O’Sullivan during her famous pre-code “nude swim” sequence in Tarzan and His Mate (1934).
Is there video? You betcha!
Of course we have also visited the contributions of Olympic swimmers to erotica on this blog before.
Aesthetics of not-the-Fly
The thought of people turning into flies means that now I just have to post this disturbing comix advertisement, to which my attention was directed by Bacchus and which appears on the tumblr blog Comically Vintage.
“She’ll turn into a fly, heh heh.” Well, that’s at least thematically apropos this week. My initial reaction to the ad was a lighthearted “it’s Poser for the pre-computer era!” But there are naturally some darker strains here.
There’s a wealth of weird in this ad, beginning with the strange cast of characters: Vampirella, Frankenstein’s Monster (misidentified as “Frankenstein” in the ad) and an obscure mad scientist called “Dr. Deadly.” (Guess his experiments don’t work so well.) I wonder how disturbed we should be that there’s a specific action figure designated as “Girl Victim,” or that these are apparently action figures meant as children’s toys.
The line “Don’t Worry, this is New York, no one will help her” marks a special (and, to my mind, ugly) cultural moment, perhaps an indication of the long shadow cast by the 1964 Kitty Genovese incident, which of course has its own deep comics resonance — awful real life intersecting with popular culture.
In a children’s toy, a reflection of the “New York = hell” meme that would be so common in the popular culture of the 1970s. (One manifestation of which would be the 1974 movie Death Wish, which would mark — you guessed it — the first screen appearance of Jeff Goldblum, so it all comes full circle, yes?)
On a side note: isn’t Vampirella supposed to be a heroine? If not entirely benign, then at least certainly not the sort who would help kidnap innocent young women into horrible mad-science experiments. Am I misssing something here? Perhaps someone more familiar with the history of the character can set me straight in the comments.
Electrical effects
Time for another little breather while I get to work putting together Invisible Girl, Heroine for publication to the wider world. In the meantime, for your enjoyment…
I suggested a little while back that Fred Olen Ray might have something to offer us thaumatophiles in the form of a new movie called Bikini Frankenstein. I plunked down the cash and I had high hopes, but on the whole, meh… Not that there isn’t lots of well-filmed and enthusiastically-acted softcore sex involving very pretty people. Fine if you like that sort of thing, but I couldn’t help somehow feeling like the whole mad-scientist angle was underdeveloped.
Save for one scene, though, in which Dr. Frankenstein brings his creature, played by Jayden Cole to life, which involves some nice…electrical effects.
And you know how us would-be mad scientist types really like electrical effects!
On the whole, though, I think I still prefer a rather more classic sort of Frankenstein parody.
Ah, now that’s more like it.
Welcome
Welcome to all and sundry. I am your host; kindly call me Dr. Faustus.
Do cheesy science fiction movies do something for you? Would you go (or have you ever gone) to see a midnight performance of Invasion of the Bee Girls? Have you ever shared the monster’s point of view in Creature from the Black Lagoon? Did you find it at least mildly titillating Virginia Bruce was (theoretically) running around without any clothes on in the 1940 film The Invisible Woman? Have you ever thought perhaps that H.P. Lovecraft might even cooler if he weren’t so damn sex-negative? Do you infer a line of artistic influence from Katsushika Hokusai to Toshio Maeda? Do you think it would be sexier to be Victor Frankenstein than Elvis?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then perhaps this site is for you.
This is the formal opening post at EroticMadScience.com, a site which I am intially opening as an experiment in the self-publication of some of my own fiction and my musings on a peculiar topic, to wit the topos of “mad science” or the “Mad Scientist”
as a source of kink.
If you want a detailed account of what this is and why I am doing it, I invite you to look at The Thaumatophile Manifesto, which I lay all this out in detail. And if you just want to jump in and see the kink in action, take a look at The Apsinthion Protocol, which is the first of seven long stories in my “Gnosis College” mad science series. It is written as a screenplay, because that’s the way things play out in my head.
More things will be coming here in the future: I’ll try to explain the various literary (?) antecedents of my fiction as well as provide people who find the erotic mad science thing appealing suggestions for future reading and viewing. In the future, I hope to offer a forum for people interested in what is going on here.
I feel great excitement at starting this site. As I was planning it, an aphorism of Nietzsche‘s from Beyond Good and Evil came to mind.
Die grossen Epochen unsres Lebens liegen dort, wo wir den Muthgewinnen, unser Böses als unser Bestes umzutaufen.
The great epochs in our lives come when we find the courage to rebaptize our our evil (this being Nietzsche, perhaps that should be implicitly read as our “evil”) as what is best in us. I guess today is just one of those days.
Comments on this an other posts will be welcome, subject of course to moderation (see the Manifesto for more detail on what might or might not be appropriate here).
So perhaps I shouldn’t say just welcome to all and sundry. Instead, welcome friends.
