Jekyll

This week Morgan read the 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and Brent watched the 2007 tv series Jekyll.

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The book is the story of a doctor and his terrible secret.

The tv show is also about a doctor and his terrible secret except with shiny buttons, guns and Johnson from peep show.

I don’t feel like writing a blog post this week so enjoy these Johnson and Mitchell and Webb gifs

Flipping Patriarchy – Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto

VOTE FOR US by the 14 of February 2019 Australian Podcast Awards

This episode of The Frankenpod Morgan tells Brent a bit about the first gothic novel The Castle of Otranto and its creator, Horatio Walpole the 4th Earl of Oxford, known for our purposes as Horace Walpole.

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You can read The Castle of Otranto for free thanks to public domain and Project Gutenberg here

Horace Walpole was the son of the first British prime minister Robert Walpole and entered into politics himself as the elected member for Callington Cornwall. Horace Walpole never went to Callington. The constituency was what was known as a rotten borough which meant that an elected member of a very small area could be gain the same amount of influence as someone who was elected by a very populated area.

Horace spent 43 years building a gothic mansion called Strawberry Hill which is a quilt of gothic architectural elements all represented in one large building, as promised during the podcast here are some photos of Strawberry Hill:

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Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto anonymously in 1764, but the preface claims that it is a found text discovered by Catholic family in the north of England.

It is a story in which a tyrant and illegitimate ruler of the castle of Otranto named Manfred attempts through various nefarious and immoral means to maintain his lordship of Otranto.

When his son Conrad is killed by a massive helmet with a particular resemblance to the helmet on the statue of the founder of Otranto, Alfonso the Good, Manfred begins to panic and freak out. He tries to divorce his wife Hippolita and marry Isabella the young woman who his son was supposed to marry.

Thankfully it turns out that more that one person or entity is determined to stop Manfred’s evil machinations.

The Woman in Black vs. Spider the Wonderdog

‘I ran as I have never run before, heedless of my own safety, desperate to go to the aid of the brave, bright little creature who had given me such consolation and cheer in that desolate spot’

– The Woman in Black, Susan Hill

This episode is on Susan Hill’s ‘The Woman in Black’ and the 2012 Hammer Horror flick ‘The Woman in Black’

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Our promo this week is from the Fataliteas podcast

The Woman in Black is a story In which our hero, Spider the floofy dog, detects a problem… there is also some guy named Arthur Kipps who does a bunch of stuff. But the real story is about one floofy little dog who’s the bravest girl in the whole darn story.

The Woman in Black is a ghost story that centres around the haunting of a house by a creepy, skeletal woman in black. A young solicitor Arthur Kipps gets sent to a creepy place a la Jonathan harker in Dracula. Kipps is sent to settle the affairs of Alice Drablow, a reclusive elderly lady who lives in a creepy house called Eel Marsh which is only accessable at low tide. Once the tide is in you are stuck there with the creepy shadows, ominous noises and scary wildlife. At the nearest town, Crithin Gifford, everyone is sending Kipps some serious don’t-go-to-Eel-Marsh-vibes.

A spectre haunts Eel Marsh, a spectre that lures children to their deaths. There is a lot of child death in this episode. We try not to be too graphic, but if you’ve seen the movie you know that the graphic deaths are a huge part of the story. Not so much in the book. It is an atmospheric gothic horror that Susan Hill crafts drawing from classic horror stories. You can really feel the influence of the Brontës and Henry James in this book.

Apart from the graphic/atmospheric horror another key difference between the book and the movie is the biographical timeline of Mr Kipps. Whether he is a young enthusiastic solicitor looking to make a name for himself, or a greiving widower barely hanging on to his job as a solicitor for the sake of his young child, the Woman in Black has her sights set on Arthur Kipps and she wants revenge

In Cold Blood & Capote – Or why you should never trust a writer…

Welcome to season 2 of The Frankenpod in which we will be looking at Truman Capote and his “literary non-fiction” novel In Cold Blood (1966).

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The media that we focused on included;

1. The 1966 novel In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences by Truman Capote.
2.  The 2005 film Capote directed by Bennett Miller and starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the title role.
3. The 2011 collection of critical essays Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood by Ralph F. Voss.
4. The 1967 film In Cold Blood directed by Richard Brooks and starring Robert Blake as Perry Smith and Scott Wilson as Dick Hickcock.

In this episode, we touch on some aspects of the real events surrounding the murder of a ‘nice family’ from Kansas by two complex and dangerous men who have been recently paroled and believed that the father, Herb Clutter, kept a large amount of cash in a safe in the home. No such safe existed. We don’t go into great detail so if you are looking for a more comprehensive look into the murders of the Clutter’s I would suggest the In Sight Podcast episode on the case.

In Cold Blood was the last book ever written by Truman Capote and was first published in 1965 as a four-part series for the New Yorker and was published as a novel in 1966. Capote was an acclaimed writer of fiction and perhaps his most famous book after In Cold Blood was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He was controversial largely due to his flamboyant self promotion and the brutal confronting honesty of his prose. Truman Capote promoted the book as an entirely new genre of book, the “literary non-fiction” novel. But it didn’t come out of nowhere, these things seldom do, historical fiction and non-fiction accounts that embellish and twist the truth to suit the author’s needs have existed for centuries. He claimed that In Cold Blood was an accurate account based on years of correspondence and investigation into the horrific murders of the Clutter family and Capote certainly spent an enormous amount of time researching and interviewing those involved. The issue that many critics have with the book is Capote’s embellishment and manipulation of the truth, often including scenes and quotes in the novel that never happened. Another contentious issue was Capote’s obvious attachment to one of the convicted men, Perry Smith and his story was given primacy when many thought that the book should have focused more on the victims and the impact the crimes had on others.

The efficacy of the creation of In Cold Blood and the scandal that surrounds it is almost as interesting, if not more so than the book itself as evidenced by films like Capote and the critical work of Voss. After the film adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s Capote was determined to exercise more creative control over the film of In Cold Blood and the director Richard Brooks worked with him to create a beautifully shot if the somewhat narratively choppy film that they were both happy with.

 

 

• Brooks, Richard, 1912- & Blake, Robert, 1933- & Wilson, Scott, 1942- & Capote, Truman, 1924-. In cold blood & Columbia Pictures et al. 2003, Truman Capote’s In cold blood, Widescreen ed, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, Culver City, CA
• Capote, Truman 2000, In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences, Penguin, London.
• Miller, Bennett, (film director.) & Baron, Caroline, (film producer.) & Vince, William, (film producer.) & Ohoven, Michael, (film producer.) & Futterman, Dan, 1967-, (screenwriter.) et al. 2006, Capote, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Culver City, California
• Voss, Ralph F & ProQuest (Firm) 2011, Truman Capote and the legacy of In cold blood, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

Four Days to Go!

It’s 2pm Australian Eastern Daylight savings time on the 27th of October 2018 which means The Frankenpod season two starts in just four days on the 31st of October!

Halloween Spppooooookyyy.

Not really intentional it just seemed as good a time as any.

We have some amazing episodes coming with Melissa of The Brook Reading podcast on a particularly divisive and controversial book and I don my tinfoil hat with the ladies of Wives Tales to talk about a cinematic adaptation of one of the most popular conspiracies based novels of the 20th Century.

But for the first episode of season two Brent and I tackle a little true crime by examining a masterpiece of “literary non-fiction”, some of the controversies surrounding it and it’s cinematic adaptations.

We’ve recorded a short promo just to keep everyone in the loop and you can find the initial relaunch blog post here.

If you want a bit of a refresher on what we define as gothic you can find our introduction to gothic literature here and we will be updating this definition soon to include some of the things we have learnt along the way. There is also our everything is gothic unless it’s not and then it’s something else which might be useful if you are looking for more specific information about what we include as part of the gothic genre.

This season we will be featuring creepy stories submitted by listeners and some classic gothic short stories you may not have heard before. It doesn’t have to be frightening, it doesn’t have to be dramatic, just a little something that can be read in 5 minutes. If you like you can send it to us as the text for us to read or you can read it yourself and send us an audio file. If writing isn’t your thing we are also happy to accept music.

Make sure you let us know if you want us to promote your project, podcast, writing or anything. It is literally the least we could do.

If you want to come on the podcast and have a chat about your favourite gothic book, movie, television show, graphic novel, poem, character or author you can email us at thefrankenpod@gmail.com.

We can’t wait to be back!

http://thefrankenpod.libsyn.com/season-2-starts-on-the-31st-of-october

 

Promo Music: Swing Gitane by The Underscore Orkestra is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Image: A digitized image of the original painting American Gothic that Grant Wood, a master artist of the twentieth century, created in 1930 and sold to the Art Institute of Chicago in November of the same year.