Creature Feature

9. HEADING OUT INTO THE WILDERNESS

Out of School - Loitering Legally
OUT OF SCHOOL
Cars driving past. Four upper classman whose car is busted
a half mile down the road stand apart in front of building
noticeably away from those freshman-juniors who are waiting for
a ride from parents.
Call on cell phone.
The ‘beast’ arrives. A giant SUV. Peter, their friend who
has dropped out of school, who is a ventriloquist cum paranormal
investigator, is driving. They drive out, running up the curb
for a second, then blast out into the street.
Wind blazing them with windows blown out, music blaring.
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Vesper to Nathan:
Is he going camping with us? (referring to Peter)
Nathan:
I think so
Vesper:
Are you going camping with us, Peter?
Peter:
In a week or two I can. I have to do a house for this old
lady who thinks her husband is trying to send her a message.
Vesper:
Are you actually making a living with paranormal bullshit?
Peter:
Maybe. I don’t know all of my costs yet.
Jen:
You have to drive.
Peter:
Oh. Ok.
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Entering the woods is like the world revolution… the
overthrow by the workers
Middle aged woman driving along desolate road out near
woods they’re in… listening to that 80’s song “I need a hero” ,
she’s singing along, rocking out… “he’s gotta be strong and he’s
gotta be ____ and he’s gotta be fresh from the fight.”
Aliens blow up her car or… more appropriate scene, she’s in
a diner or something and they buzz the place

– . . .

——————————- – from ‘Focus on the Horror Film’ – pg 29 ————- :
… And a well-done “spectacular” of 1945, House of Dracula, includes all three figures, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Wolf-Man–but kept apart from each other throughout the film with a carefulness reminiscent of the isolation of major figures in traditional allegory. In fact, the seperation of the two major monster-types achieves the status almost of a structural principle during the ’30s and ’40s. Frankenstein may meet the Wolf-Man, as in the disappointing 1943 movie; but he never really confronts Dracula, in spite of what would appear to be the box-office blessing invoked by such a union.
The reason for the quarantine I have already partly indicated: it is a combination of commercial and imaginative wisdom, both probably conscious and each nearly indistinguishable form the other. Thinking of the two great fiends and their implications, one is reminded again of Lawrence (D.H. Lawrence) who, discussing Poe, defines the dual rhythm of “American art-activity”: “1. A disintegrating and sloughing of the old consciousness. 2 The forming of a new consciousness underneath.” But this rhythm, though dual is diastole and systole of a single cultural dynamic: one movement present by implication or anticipation in the other. And the two monsters, Dracula and Frankenstein, are the fabricated negatives of that rhythm. The vampire is the “old consciousness,” not sloughed off but resurrected to drain the blood of the new; and the artificial man is the “new man” of Edenic materialism, but with the brain of a killer. Each monster is present in the other, both by the mechanics of mythography and by their permanent association in the popular mind: but their explicit combination is a kind of imaginative overkill, an image of terror which pushes the horror film already innately and perilously ludicrous over the edge of absurdity. And, in fact, the only movie, to my knowledge, in which we see Dracula cooperating with the Frankenstein monster in planned malevolence is the 1948 comedy, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, where the plan is to invoke the horror in order to laugh it off.