New Book: Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster

Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster

Editors: Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel

Palgrave Macmillan, 2023

Available from SpringerLink in print, as an ebook, and as individual chapters. Full details at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7. 


Experiments with recent interdisciplinary methodologies to understand the mechanisms of adaptation more broadly


Conceptualizes adaptation beyond the traditional dyad of literature and screen media


Explores the relationship between text, context, and intertext to understand how meaning is made and remade


Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture (PSADVC)

About this book

This edited collection is the first book-length critical study of the Showtime-Sky Atlantic television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which also includes an analysis of Showtime’s 2020 spin-off City of Angels. Chapters examine the status of the series as a work of twenty-first-century cable television, contemporary Gothic-horror, and intermedial adaptation, spanning sources as diverse as eighteenth and nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, American dime novels, theatrical performance, Hollywood movies, and fan practices. Featuring iconic monsters such as Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature, the “bride” of Frankenstein, Dracula, the werewolf, Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll, Penny Dreadful is a mash-up of familiar texts and new Gothic figures such as spiritualist Vanessa Ives, played by the magnetic Eva Green. As a recent example of adapting multiple sources in different media, Penny Dreadful has as much to say about the Romantic and Victorian eras as it does about our present-day fascination with screen monsters.

Contents

Front Matter

Pages i-xviii



Introduction

Julie Grossman, Will Scheibel

Pages 1-11



Welcome to the Night: Issues of Reading and Media

The Medium Is the Model

Thomas Leitch

Pages 15-30

The Adaptive Marketing of Penny Dreadful: Listening to The Dreadfuls

Christine Becker

Pages 31-47

Penny Dreadful and Frankensteinian Collection: Museums, Anthologies, and Other Monstrous Media from Shelley to Showtime

Mike Goode

Pages 49-67



Anatomy of a Monster: Horror and the Gothic in Literature and on the Screen

In the House of the Night Creatures: Penny Dreadful’s Dracula

Joan Hawkins

Pages 71-86

Vampirism, Blood, and Memory in Penny Dreadful and Only Lovers Left Alive

Luciana Tamas, Eckart Voigts

Pages 87-104

“The Dead Place”: Cosmopolitan Gothic in Penny Dreadful’s London

Kendall R. Phillips

Pages 105-120

Adapting the Universal Classic Monsters in Penny Dreadful: An Uncanny Resurrection

Will Scheibel

Pages 121-137



The Monster Unbound: Theatrical Performance, Western Dime Novels, and TV Noir

Penny Dreadful and the Stage: Lessons in Horror and Heritage

Shannon Wells-Lassagne

Pages 141-155

Ethan Chandler, Penny Dreadful, and the Dime Novel; or, Dancing with American Werewolves in London

Ann M. Ryan

Pages 157-176

Dreadful Noir, Adaptation, and City of Angels: “Monsters, All, Are We Not?”

Julie Grossman, Phillip Novak

Pages 177-193



Meanings of Monstrosity: Identity, Difference, and Experience

Penny Dreadful’s Palimpsestuous Bride of Frankenstein

Lissette Lopez Szwydky

Pages 197-215

Predators Far and Near: The Sadean Gothic in Penny Dreadful

Lindsay Hallam

Pages 217-232

“All Those Sacred Midnight Things”: Queer Authorship, Veiled Desire, and Divine Transgression in Penny Dreadful

James Bogdanski

Pages 233-252

Borderland Identities in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels

Seda Öz

Pages 253-267



Back Matter

Pages 269-282

About the editors

Julie Grossman is a professor of English and Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY, USA. Her monographs include Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny (2015), Ida Lupino, Director (with Therese Grisham, 2017), Twin Peaks (with Will Scheibel, 2020), and The Femme Fatale (2020). She is co-editor (with R. Barton Palmer) of the essay collection Adaptation in Visual Culture (2017) and (with Marc C. Conner and R. Barton Palmer) Screening Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama (2022).

Will Scheibel is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University, USA, where he teaches film and screen studies. He is the author of Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front (2022) and, with Julie Grossman, co-author of Twin Peaks (2020).

Universal's Renfield

 Coming soon to theaters--a new take on Bram Stoker's Dracula from Universal Pictures. 

CFP Classic Horror (Spec Issue Horror Homeroom; 4/25/2022)

Classic Horror

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/04/01/classic-horror

deadline for submissions:
April 25, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Horror Homeroom

contact email:
dek7@lehigh.edu



CLASSIC HORROR - abstracts due April 25, 2022

2022 is the 90th anniversary of the numerous amazing classic horror films that were released in 1932, among them Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Dark House, The Mummy, and White Zombie. To mark this anniversary, we are soliciting abstracts for a special 'journal' issue of the website Horror Homeroom on classic horror. This special issue, which will come out in 2022, will certainly honor those films that have their anniversary this year, but we also want to broaden what classic horror looks like and are interested in essays that explore other national cinemas and lesser-known films.

So, what is classic horror? We’re suggesting that it’s any film released prior to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho--the film that saw the birth of ‘modern’ horror (although we're interested in abstracts that contest those designations!)

Emerging and advanced scholars, popular writers, and fans are invited to submit abstracts on any aspect of the subgenre. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Body horror and 1930s mad scientists
• Comedy-horror franchises
• Intersectional readings of Universal monsters
• Undead iconography and the Gothic
• Spencer Williams’ Son of Ingagi and early Black horror
• Horror film as historical document
• Otherness and paranoia
• Film aesthetics
• Influence of the ‘Code’ on US horror
• Pre-Hollywood horror
• Classic horror adaptations of literary works
• Contemporary cinematic adaptations of classic horror (e.g., Universal’s new monster films)
• Disability and classic horror
• Race, ethnicity, and nationalism in early horror

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words and a brief bio to Dawn Keetley and Elizabeth Erwin at horrorhomeroom@gmail.com and dek7@lehigh.edu by April 25, 2022. Articles will be limited to 2,500 words and should be written for a general audience. Completed essays will be due June 17, 2022. We welcome all questions and inquiries!




Last updated April 7, 2022

CFP The Horror Classics (Spec. Issue of Journal of Dracula Studies) (1/1/15)

Special Edition 2015 Journal of Dracula Studies (Jan 1, 2015)
full name / name of organization:
Journal of Dracula Studies
contact email:
journalofdraculastudies@kutztown.edu
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/59087

In 2015 we will be publishing a special edition of the Journal of Dracula Studies to mark the 20th anniversary of our Chapter. The theme of this edition will be The Horror Classics.

We invite manuscripts of scholarly, reader-friendly, articles of 3000 words or less for The Horror Classics. We are looking for articles which explore the classic horror monsters of literature, film, comics from the
Golden Age of horror (Tales From the Crypt etc), and TV: The Mummy, Ghosts, The Witch, Mad Scientists, Swamp Monsters, Zombies, The Haunted House, The Werewolf, Aliens, Edward Gory etc. (For this special edition, we are not publishing material on the Vampire). Material is not limited to any historical era.

We require that articles be free of jargon and over-dependence on literary criticism.

Send submissions (electronic only) to Curt Herr (journalofdraculastudies@kutztown.edu). Please put “Special Edition: Horror Classics” in the subject line.

Deadline: Jan. 1, 2015

By web submission at 10/24/2014 - 16:10

Playing Dress-Up with Hallmark for Halloween 2014

I've been working intermittently on my NEPCA paper on the re-castings of Frankenstein, and I'm trying to categorize some of the appropriations I see. One common type is when familiar characterize (like Garfield and crew, the Smurfs, the Peanuts gang, the Archie gang, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) take upon the appearance of one of the characters of the Frankenstein story (usually inspired by Universal's versions rather than Shelley's original) for humorous or whimsical  purposes. I'm calling this "playing dress-up" and thought I'd share some of the other monster-related examples I've come across this season.

Vampires continue to be popular, and Hallmark has a number of examples of fan-favorite characters in Bela Lugosi-inspired costumes.

The cheapest this season is a Winnie the Pooh card for $3.75 with a vampire Piglet wearing fangs and a cape.

There are also a series of items featuring a vampiric Mickey Mouse. The cutest is part of Hallmarks's itty bittys line sold (in stores only) for $6.95. The product page details that this "Count Mickey" just " 'vants' to be yours this Halloween," in a play on Lugosi's famous accent. He is presented as the most "real", but his deformed appearance lessens the impact of Mickey's transformation and the cuteness of its humor greatly reduces his scariness.

A larger version (at 7" W x 9.25" H x 7" D) of this undead incarnation of Mickey is labelled "Count Mickey Mouse". He sells for $19.95 and is now sold out online. In an attempt to further separate appearance from potential action, his description focuses on the artificiality of his costume, explaining, "Fresh from Transylvania, this elegant vampire is none other than our friend Mickey! But never fear—this plush pushover won't really bite."

Vampire Mickey reappears as part of the Mickey and Minnie Mouse Water Globe collectible, which includes Minnie dressed as a witch (more of this to follow). The water globe (retailing at $39.95) is also now sold out online; like the plush Count Mickey Mouse, it, too, highlights the fake-ness of Mickey and Minnie's monstrous appearances, rather than the potentially more sinister connotations of two creatures of the night gazing at two small, innocent chipmunks.

Notice that this Mickey has been de-fanged, a detail that de-emphasizes any possibility of horror (or even delight) here. The description is likewise brightened, noting "This decoration will add a fun and festive touch to your mantel or party table. Dressed for trick-or-treating, Mickey and Minnie peer into a jack-o'-lantern water globe at a fall scene where two furry friends are frolicking" (and not, we should note, being spied upon as a potential meal).

My final example here presents vampiric versions of Charles Schulz's Snoopy and Woodstock. Titled "Hangin' With Count Snoopy," the item is part of the ongoing Peanuts series of Keepsake Ornaments and sells for $24.95 (though it is now, also, sold out online). The product and its description offers a better blend of horror and play than the larger Mickeys. First, the description reads, "Snoopy's doghouse is all decked out for the season of screams. Press the button on the ornament to hear spooky Halloween music play. Trick or treat—if you dare!" The item presents Snoopy (dressed partly as a vampire and partly as a witch) with arms outstretched and a group of vampiric Woodstocks (bird wings replaced with bat wings) in attendance apparently guarding their vampiric overlord.

Playing the accompanying music clip creates a chilling effect. The sample begins with a excerpt from Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, a theme closely associated with Halloween ever since its use in the opening credits for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) (thanks Wikipedia!). Interspersed with the music track is the sound of Snoopy's voice, but it is anything but familiar. Instead, Snoopy seems to relish his new role as the undead and utters a series of menacing laughs better pronounced by megalomaniacal monsters (like Victor Frankenstein or Count Dracula) than lovable old Snoopy. Here is a triumph of Halloween over brand identity.