#david j. skal

[cinemajunkie70]

Rest in peace David J. Skal! What a horrible loss! Dark Carnival is essential reading!

[contentabnormal]

The fearful fortieth issue of We Belong Dead magazine featuring cover art by Content Abnormal contributor Josh Ryals is now available! This issue is a Dracula Special celebrating the centennial of Hamilton Deane's Dracula play being performed for the first time on stage in Derby, England. This issue is also dedicated to the late great David J. Skal.

Links to where you may order We Belong Dead #40 HERE

[frankentyner]

[professorambrius]

Dracula and Classic Hollywood Horror Writer and Historian David J. Skal Has Died.

David J. Skal suddenly and tragically passed away January 1st 2024.

He was perhaps the greatest authority on Dracula covering everything from Bram Storker to Bela Lugosi and classic Hollywood Horror.

He will be sorley missed by all those who love the classics of Horrors.

[hollywoodgothique]

Obituary: David J. Skal, author of Hollywood Gothic

Author David J. Skal, whose works explored the cultural significance of the horror genre in literature and film, is dead. He was killed on New Year’s Day when a car jumped the median and struck the vehicle in which he was a passenger. The announcement of his death was made by his sister, Sandy Skal-Gerlock, on Facebook and confirmed by checking the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s website.…

[travsd]

R.I.P. David J. Skal

I’m very sorry to hear of the passing away of author David J. Skal (1952-2024). When I signed with FSG to write my first book, one of the first things my visionary editor Denise Oswald did was hand me a copy of Skal’s 1993 The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. I had already known about the author on account of his first huge success Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from…

[rozann]

[another-chaotic-bisexual-vampire]

just read that one of the first reviews of Bela Lugosi in the Broadway premiere of "Dracula" had this exact quote from The New Yorker's drama critic:

Ye who have fits, prepare to throw them now.

and I'm fully obsessed with this quote and so upset we haven't been using it to discuss Dracula Daily / Re: Dracula this whole time

[nitrateglow]

RIP David J. Skal

I just learned David J. Skal died on New Year's Day in a car accident.

Skal was an amazing film historian, focusing on classic horror. If a disc had one of his audio commentaries included, you knew you were in for a treat mixed with expertise and enthusiasm. His commentary for the 1931 Dracula is a must-listen, as is his book on Dracula's road to movie screens, Hollywood Gothic.

[froward-bat]

It was announced today that critic and historian David J. Skal has passed away at the age of 71. Skal produced the fantastic documentaries and audio commentaries for Universal's classic monster movie DVDs. Rest in peace. : r/horror

Oh man, this sucks (fucking drunk drivers). I love his writing on horror, I first encountered him as a kid going through my local library for any and all vampire content, and his books were really formative in getting me fascinated with the history of horror filmmaking for the rest of my life. Also formative to be getting that from a queer historian who would actually discuss the queer themes in the movies, and real-life queer people involved in making them. I should go dig up the copies I have at my parents' house, I remember them being well written and full of fascinating information.

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

Just when I heaved a sigh of relief that Wilde died and the author finally shut up about him, HE STARTED TALKNG ABOUT ALL THESE MEDIUMS "CONTACTING" HIS SPIRIT. In the biography of Stoker. The words cannot describe my rage.

Skal has a massive hateboner for Henry Irving. This, I guess, explains why he didn't eat as much of the book as Wilde did.

Oh, great, and now he's talking about the early history of Dracula adaptations. It's not that Skal already has the whole separate book on this subject or something.

The author believes that Stoker did have syphilis (I don't care either way) and that he might have been a co-author of Powers of Darkness (ahaha, no he wasn't, he wasn't that cool.)

Well, it was okay. I wish I learned anything about Stoker from this book.

Something in the Blood readthrough

David J. Skal actually talk about Bram fucking Stoker in his biography of Bram Stoker for a change challenge

No, seriously, he gets distracted and starts talking about some randos ALL. THE. TIME. And it just keeps getting more and more grating. Why is there pages and pages about some actress who was in a play of his buddy who also gets pages and pages written here about him, and then within this actress' bio there is also bio of another actress who knew her? Why do I need to know about Willie Wilde's marriages? I get why there is so much of Henry Irving and Walt Whitman and even Oscar Wilde here (though I heard he eats like half of the book) but William fucking Wilde???

It looks like Skal would rather write about Oscar Wilde than Bram Stoker. And from everything I read from him and about him, Stoker does seem like a very bland person whille Wilde is... not. But why write Stoker's bio then? And Skal's book IS interesting, and his analysis of Stoker IS interesting... but he's just not doing it half of the time.

[contentabnormal]

Our tribute to David J. Skal.

Art by Josh Ryals.

[chthonic-cassandra]

An anonymous individual asked @awildwickedslip for recommendations of literary criticism on the gothic, and she directed them to me, so I thought it was time I make a rec list on the topic.

I'm keep this to more general analyses, but of course have a lot of recommendations for more works on more specific texts (especially but not limited to Dracula).

I'm also including some things that are more properly about amatory or epistolary fiction, because I think an understanding of those genres will serve you well in contemplating the gothic.

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves

Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (eds), Shakespearean Gothic

Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle

David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror

Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman

Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola

Elizabeth Cook, Epistolary Bodies

Jacqueline Howard, Readng Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach

Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance

Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France

Peter Cryle, Geometry in the Budoir: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative

Jalal Toufic, Vampire: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature

Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth Century Literature and the Invention of the Uncanny

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

david j. skal's something in the blood: the untold story of bram stoker, the man who wrote dracula, on the book's reception:

One through-line in all contemporary reviews was praise to Stoker for his cleverness in juxtaposing medieval legend with up-to-date modernity. We have become so accustomed to thinking of Dracula as a "period" novel that it is easy to forget that in its time, the book was set in an immediately recognizable present day.

[forthegothicheroine]

For those asking, I no longer have my sociology report on trick or treating because it was (god help me) 10+ years ago and I probably used a local save file. However, here's what I recall learning from books and from interviewing all the parents I knew about the practice.

Trick or Treating itself does seem to have ancient roots, but it's not as simple as 'it started as x thing and became y thing.' People have always wanted to have a big holiday when the harvest comes in and it starts to get dark early. Children going around and asking for treats specifically seems to have gone in and out of fashion over different time periods, but there is a strong history of partying.

Candles in fruit and vegetables does seem to have history in this regard. I read a fairy tale about how Jack of the Lantern pulled a trick on the devil and so was not allowed into either heaven or hell but had to roam the earth carrying only a lantern to guide him, but I suspect that is not actually the origin of the practice.

Some variants on trick or treating took place on Christmas. This mostly died out in America by the mid 20th century.

Nobody in living memory had celebrated All Hallows Eve as a religious Christian thing (as opposed to Day of the Dead, which is a separate holiday, or neopagans celebrating Samhain.) Religious children, Christian or Jewish, were more likely to have been forbidden from trick or treating.

The Celts likely had some form of human sacrifice because a lot of ancient cultures did, but it's hard to know the details because the Romans had a vested interest in making them appear barbaric.

There have been a couple cases of people putting pins in candy, but the razor in an apple thing seems made up. In the most well known, confirmed and tragic case of candy tampering, it was the victim's own father who did it. Due to this panic, the practice of giving out home backed cookies was mostly dead.

As with Rocky Horror, Halloween used to be a time where you could dress in drag and not get hassled.

Most of the parents (Boomer and older) I talked to had gone trick or treating as children, except the ones who were immigrants from a place without that practice.

City and suburban parents said far fewer children were trick or treating at their houses now, as kids can go to stores downtown, but the more rural the neighborhood, the more likely kids went door to door.

You used to be able to demand a "trick" from a child in exchange for a treat and they would do something funny. Nobody knows this now except my husband, who was eager to perform magic tricks as a child at the drop of a hat. (He got a lot candy this way.)

I imagine that there's been a lot more Celtic history research since I went to college, so do not take this as an authoritative guide! I will still recommend a book I heavily referenced for this, Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween by horror scholar David J. Skal as both informative and a whole lot of fun.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The new American prosperity of the early 1950s was won atop the largest bone pile in human history. World War II had claimed the lives of over 40 million soldiers and civilians, and had introduced two radical new forms of mechanized death – the atomic bomb and the extermination camp – that seriously challenged the mind’s ability to absorb, much less cope with, the naked face of horror at mid-century.

David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror