After Nine; Halloween: Whos Scarier...Dracula or Freddie Kruger?

I. Am. Dracula is one of the most compelling and persistent scary characters in literature. And in film. He's been around a long time though and I wondered if a more modern kind of ghoul might be scarier in this day and age. I talked with English Professor Gerard Sweeney from the University of Akron who specializes in horror novels and literature of terror. And I got his opinion on the subject. So Professor Sweeney who is more terrible Dracula or Freddy Krueger. Well there's no doubt in my mind that it's Dracula Dracula as a book has managed to keep in mind remain in print for him now almost 100 years. And I really doubt whether even 10 years from now people will

know the name Freddy Krueger. Why is that. Because Freddy Krueger has no personality. We know nothing about him as a person. The Krueger movies Nightmare on Elm Street I guess 1 through 5. Now they deal with the character very much made up. And the interest in the movies has to do with it's not real real terror. It's an exploitation. It's violence for its own sake it has known. I don't want to say it has no redeeming social value. I wouldn't because that would sound puritanical but I really mean that it has no redeeming social values no theme no message. So what redeeming social value does the story of Dracula have. KING Dracula. Tells us something a little about Dracula the character but much more about the victims. There's a lot to be. There's a lot being revealed about

the characters who were victims of about the society that that encourages allows this predator into its midst. Dracula. Is this something means that about Victorian society about the thin veneer that covers the darkness underneath. Can you be a little more specific what sorts of things are we. Well if we read between the lines what are we learning about Victorian side essentially the Victorian society that Dracula is criticising is one of rigid moralities one of delusions about what women are. What happens to them when they get married. In the case of Lucy and the character victimized by Dracula She has three marital offers. And she's much sought after as a type of Victorian ideal of

purity innocence virtue correct manners poise grace elegance all these things which is to say a delusion in the minds of the males and they fail to recognize that she is a indeed a flesh and blood character. So here comes this extraordinarily powerful extraordinarily male character from Transylvania. And he enters her life and she likes it. She he shows her tricks Victorian society would wouldn't believe existed. And she enjoys it. And what Bram Stoker's seems to be suggesting is is this society and his delusions which in some measure allow for the Draculas of the world to prey on its members.

And that's why it's so different from Freddy Krueger. But essentially Freddy Krueger I don't think is is in any way substantially different from Jason 5:13 or Michael Meyers of the various Halloween movies. Why do you think these are so popular though. I mean people flock to see them. There are some of the most popular videos in the video where they are always out and yet I would guess I'm putting myself on the line your I would guess that far fewer people have actually taken out Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the library or or or Dracula and read it. Why why are they so popular. Well I'm glad you asked me that question because now I can get out my soapbox and talk as an English teacher. Why are they so popular because they're easy there. They don't require any significant amount of thinking. And lord knows they do not require reading the original Draculas over 400 pages long

you've got the book there in front of you. Yes it is in the modern library edition is 418 pages. And Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is considerably shorter but still the prose is complex. These books were written some ago. I think so but I think also about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein since we're talking about you know individuals who in horror type classic literature these were all written sometime ago. Yes well Mary she always Frings I was written roughly 18 18:18 so well of 150 years ago. And there's a there's a beautiful example of I think a book that has been made into a movie but where the movie versions are enormously different from the original text in the movie version the one that's most popular with Boris Karloff and other similar versions I

suppose the monster is a mistake made and the henchmen in terms of the right brain and the henchman gets a criminal brain and so that the monster is at least mentally if not spiritually deformed as well as physically in the original version by Mary Shali. You wouldn't call him the monster the creature is more appropriate the creature is extremely intelligent. He read he's read all of Paradise Lost identifies with Milton's Satan. He's an X you know he's read more than most other people I've read and he's very much a tragic character with whom we can identify. Your notion of Dracula as a critic of Victorian society and Bram Stoker having written that book there by being such a critic is a it's a really interesting one I hadn't thought of that before. Are people like Mary Shelley doing the same

thing to criticize their sets. Yes they are. Well Mary Shelley I think is actually going she's even She's the earliest of the three and she's perhaps even the most adventurous in terms of how far her criticism extends. She's really pre-Roe Victorian which is roughly the romantic era the early 80s hundreds and very much so she's criticizing certain religious conceptions that western society holds very dear. Basically what we have in her novel Frankenstein is a creature whose creator rejects Him whose creator says I don't want anything to do with you. You're damned. And the point Mary Mary Shelley is implicitly making is that relationship between the creator creature and the creator is very much like the relationship between God and mankind. God has courage.

She seems to be implying God created mankind but then according to certain Judeo-Christian beliefs he has said you're damned you're going to go to hell. I'm going to judge you. I'm going to be separate from you. And she's asking implicitly why should that be. What kind of god is it that does things like that. And that's very daring. Very daring for anyone to ask especially in that early. Yeah. How was this book accepted at that time. Did people which one Mary Shelley's book I don't I don't I'm not sure how well or how widely it was except that I don't think I think a lot of it but you'd think. No I don't think people got it as the gen. I don't think general readers understood as fully as but I think there was always and in any reading public that there are people who understand what an author is saying the same thing with Dracula. There's a great deal of

innuendo almost almost explicit sexual innuendo that a lot of people I think could easily pass over you know speed readers. But if you truly if you're open to what's what's being suggested it's very clear what's being suggested and that basically that this is the type of what's happening in the vampires preying on Lucy is a type of sexual awakening of a very cloistered female. And she likes it. And this is what this is why the males have to kill her and they do destroy her because she has become too. Well she has become a vampire. But another way of looking at it is she has become too uncontrollable as a female in this Victorian society to aware to fit in to to their society and their

ability to deal with her right in context. Do you have some favorite passages that you think really illustrate what the writer is doing especially well. Yes I do. Could you. Could you choose one for us here today and tell us what you think so write about it. All right. This is one of my favorite scenes from Dracula where the various males Dr. Van Helsing and Jonathan Hawker enter the hawker bed room and in it they see a horrifying sight namely Mrs. Hawker. Jonathan Hawker's wife Well it's not so much being attacked by Dracula but drinking his blood. And she she is drinking his blood. OK.

And the moonlight was so bright that through the thick yellow blind the room was light enough to see on the bed beside the window lay Jonathan Harker. His face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor. Kneeling on the edge of the bed facing outwards was the white clad figure of his wife by her side stood a tall thin man clad in black. His face was turned from us but the instant we saw him we all recognized the count. In every way even to the scar on his forehead with his left hand he held both Mrs. Hawker's hands keeping them away with her arms at full tension his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck forcing her face down on his bosom her white night dress was smeared with blood and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast which was shown by his torn open dress. The attitude of the two had a

terrible resemblance to a child seeing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink as he burst into the room the Count turned his face and the hellish look that I had her describe seemed to leap into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion the great nostrils of his long Aqualung nose opened wide and quivered at the edge and the white sharp teeth behind the full lips of the blood dripping mouth champed together like those of a wild beast with a wrench which threw his victim back upon the bed as though hurled from a height. He turned and sprang at us. That is for me is real gripping. That is amazing writing to some of the things that I picked up in it. The use of color said create brightness in the light. Yeah. So that you can create that for yourself. You know the language itself. It's

just beautifully flowing the way the words sound is as essential really as the scene that they're describing and it's quite graphic very very revealing. I mean what this is this is in terms of what I was suggesting before about reading material like this versus seeing Freddy Krueger. This takes a certain reading ability which I think perhaps of a lot of our culture has lost to fully appreciate its implications. This is in in and in many ways a description of a rape. It's and yet it doesn't have the graphic and imaginative qualities that we see in attacks like by Jason and you know Freddy Kruger and things like that. This is a rape. This man is forcing this woman into

his body holding her weak like a kitten. She's being forced to drink his blood. It has very much the qualities of a rape. And every person reading that or every person who just listen to you read that I'm sure created their own personal version of that story for themselves that seen for themselves. And that's something that's very difficult to do in a film. I know when you see a music video you can't ever hear that music and not see that that specific video ever again. And the song is no longer yours. You're right we have enough specificity. But this still flexibility in terms of imagine the scene putting it together imagining the bed room you know the body of the husband and flicks the rapist has replaced the husband and the wife's bed.

But we still have a great deal of flexibility in imagining that which is what pros can offer that film can't we have mentioned three scary individuals from classic literature Dracula and Frankenstein and Dr. Drew. Dr. Chase to you has said that you believe there are five extremely frightening characters are or you think you've identified the five most frightening characters of all time these three. Well certainly these are three of them. Who are the others. Well there's one that is less well known and that is a character that appears in a very short story of Henry James called The Beast in the jungle which despite its title really has nothing to do technically about a beast or about a jungle but essentially is a story about a man who lives his entire life in a delusion. You might say a delusion of grandeur or that something

is going to happen to him some in some way he is going to be important and he has a relationship with a woman who basically he manages to fit into his deluded lifestyle. And it's basically In other words it's a non relationship. His ego is too enormous to permit a real loving relationship with a woman to get him self to give up himself. And that's scary because I think horrify in many ways because at the end of his life he realizes that his life has been totally and absolutely empty and he is in in his own self-delusion he's rejected. The one thing. That could have made his life valuable and that is the love of this particular woman is the scariness then in this character come from the fact that there are a lot of people walking around the planet who may be very like this fellow. Yes I'm afraid that's true.

So if we count Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one person we still that want to go. Let me think. I guess I know that for me real horrifying character it would be Roderick Usher from reground pose for sure. Oh yeah. And for me the story is an example of real harm because it's so beautifully managed on post porn that we never know whether rodder gusher is crazy. And I mean real bonkers. That's one possibility or whether he's actually very sane and he realizes that he is living in an environment the House of Usher that is alive spiritual and malevolent and out to get him.

So what do you think he is. I intentionally try not to solve it because I think. That's what Poe wanted us to think that we don't. One of the horrifying things is that we'll never know we will never know about Usher and perhaps you know about ourselves even whether we're crazy or whether this person or this thing is out to get us. That always seems to be the case in in PEUX stories doesn't it. I mean there is a character about which there are always many questions you don't know if this person is really nuts if you can easily separate yourself from him by virtue of the fact that this guy is crazy. And I'm not. Or if something extraordinary is going on in the story or with the person that brings into doubt whether they really are crazy or not maybe they're very sane and maybe everything around them is crazy and therefore very scary.

That frequently happens although sometimes in Poe he gives you the clue right away the first person is crazy. But there is the typical Poe twist. That doesn't mean what he says isn't true. Yes. I mean you can be crazy and still describe reality accurately. And that's the added twist. Paul is by virtue of his language I think may be attractive to many people he writes With the right adjectives and adverbs he writes scarily intensely in the language itself while while beautiful and wonderful to read is also thrilling and scary at the same time. You know he he's quite different from Bram Stoker in one. Well in one particular way the brevity and I think that's one of the reasons why Paul was well known. All his stories are very very short story. He felt strongly in the intensity momentary intensity

or intense the last maybe an hour at most words a poem should be able to be read at a single sitting. And I think it's that feeling he creates like it's it's so much feeling packed into so few pages that that makes him very memorable. Everything happens at a very high pitch all the time there's virtually no relief to life in post stories. I mean you were you were taken to the top of the mountain and dangled there throughout the whole not the whole story right. So what are some of the literary devices that authors use to create those feelings of scariness for us when they're writing two things in particular. No point of view which is to say the way in which the material could be in film or in fiction the way the material is conveyed. And usually horror is generated from very frequently through the first person point of view namely through the experience

through the experience being conveyed by somebody in the process of experiencing so that the reader can put themselves in the place of that person. Right. So therefore I mean much of Dracula is in first person point of view not narrated by Dracula but by various characters letters journals etc. many post stories. Most stories are first person point of view and concomitantly we see for example to use a nightmare on elm street by the Frankensteins first person point of view as well. But Nightmare on Elm Street. We see these we see Freddy come at us through the eyes of the characters he's about to attack most frequently. And that adds to the intensity is there a certain immediacy to it. Yeah. Real immediacy. I mean it just apparent that actually what's interesting is on some occasions however we see things from the attackers point of view and that a

great master can sort of make a certain twist there and that's what we see in the famous shower scene in Psycho. Our eyes are Norman Bates his eyes as he steps down gently in the shower. But the other thing is is it just just know that trick is distancing. That is removing the plot from the contemporaneous the everyday the here and now it makes it a lot easier for the readers the viewers to suspend disbelief. So making it in archaic language or in a different location in exotic place different time. Right. The gothic horror stories that are set in the contemporary you know everyday here and now. They're rarities stories like for example the exorcist in posh Georgetown in Washington or Rosemary's Baby in New York City. They're relatively rare.

A lot of people who would read horror stories well actually a lot of people would choose not to read horror stories because they don't believe all that stuff. And yet often people who profess not to believe that stuff if they choose to read one of those things can get very scared indeed. How is it possible to be scared of something that you don't believe in the IF to the extent that that happens. It's to the credit of the director the writer and the script writer to make us scared. I think it's the writing ability that allows us to be swept up in the prose and and to shut off everything else. So what do you hope that your students get out of the course that you teach. Well I hope they enjoy the material I hope I hope that they're open to seeing the potential richness in this material which which is so frequently considered on the borderline between

art and some other thing called pop cult at the same time. They should realize the distinctions between the greatness of Poe and Stevenson and Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker and the exploitation films of Jason and his friends. And I suppose if I really really wanted to realize something they should ideally they should realize something in themselves. They should realize that Mr. Hyde is in all of us. Mr. Hyde and. His cousins are inside us and perhaps that would help us understand ourselves except ourselves. And accept other people. Professor Sweeney thank you so much. Oh you're quite welcome. My pleasure. Dr. Gerard Sweeney is professor of English at Akron University. Among the courses

he teaches are based in literature and the Gothic imagination. That's after nine for this morning. I'm Kathleen Serveti. Happy Halloween