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- Volume 16, Issue 1, 2023
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Making Monsters, Jun 2023
Making Monsters, Jun 2023
- Editorial
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Editorial: Making Monsters, Building Terror
Authors: Benjamin Pinsent and Richard J. HandThis is the editorial for the Special Issue Making Monsters. The Special Issues comes out of my own academic interest and a two-day symposium. This editorial outlines the need for research around the practice of making monsters, placing the production processes needed to make the creatures in horror media as central to the adaptation of monsters into various media forms. It also will introduce the contributors to the Special Issue and briefly lay out their specific approach to this broad and engaging topic, whether that be looking at the practical effects used to bring monsters to the stage and screen or new ways we conceptualize the monstrous in the digital forms.
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- Traditional Technologies
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Dr Jekyll and/or Mr Hyde: The two versions of David Edgar’s stage adaptation
By David CottisIn 1991, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged David Edgar’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1885 novella, directed by Peter Wood, to a generally negative critical and commercial response. Five years later, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre produced Edgar’s revised version of the play, using the shorter title Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to much more positive reviews, often from the same people. The striking thing about this radically different response is that, apart from a single element, the two scripts are very similar. They can therefore serve almost as a real-life scientific experiment, demonstrating the difference that a single change will make. This article will consider the various choices that an adaptor may make with this story and look at what the different responses to the two versions can tell us about the nature of this story, and possibly about horror and fantasy in general.
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Jaws, anthropocentrism and cinema as a monster-making machine
By Brett MillsJaws (Spielberg 1975) is a film in which a shark is depicted as a monster. Readings and analyses of the film routinely describe the shark as a monster, and pleasures associated with the film rest on audiences reading the animal as such. The book the film is adapted from constructs the shark in similar ways, but there are notable differences between the two. This article examines how the film constructs the shark as a monster, with particular reference to differences between the book and film. It focuses specifically on the story-telling and representational norms associated with each medium, indicating how cinema’s centring of the audio-visual is fundamental to its monster-making processes. Drawing on work from the ‘animal turn’ this article demonstrates cinema’s embedded anthropocentrism and points to the implications this has for non-humans outside of cinema.
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I’ll be grotesque before your eyes: The expanding monstrousness between Is This Scary? (1993) and Michael Jackson’s Ghosts (1996)
More LessThis article examines the role of the monster in the film Michael Jackson’s Ghosts (Stan Winston 1996) by comparing it to its original unreleased version Is This Scary? (Mick Garris 1993). Despite on the surface telling very similar stories about an angry mob storming the mansion of the reclusive and eccentric Maestro, its use of monsters and monstrousness changes drastically due to the contexts in which both films were made, namely before and after allegations of child molestation were made against Jackson. Comparing these two films offers a uniquely comprehensive insight into how Jackson perceived himself within society, as well as how and why cultural backlash against him manifested. The article includes a comparative analysis of both films’ characters, themes and shared sequences, supplanted by analysis of Jackson’s life and fluctuating critical reality within these two eras. Ultimately, the article will demonstrate an expansion of Jackson’s understanding of his own media freakishness: acknowledging the societal perceptions that made the allegations against him so believable and using it to advocate for his humanity.
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The Reproachful Head of the Green Knight: Exploring the eerie, liminality, deep time and duration in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’
By Michael EdenThe outcomes presented in this article represent a body of fine artworks that respond to the medieval poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (c.1380), culminating in the realization of the monstrous head of the Green Knight. I outline influences from an extended base of film, and television, including direct adaptations of the poem, and thematically relevant sources that include analogous narratives; as well as looking at fine art sculpture and painting that have informed my making strategies. I also discuss my theoretical framing of the poem which asserts the Green Knight as an eerie agent of temporality. The relationship between liminal space and monstrous intrusion on the subject is explored, looking to French philosopher Henri Bergson and English writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher to articulate the subjective implications of deep time manifested in monstrosity. The article charts the ways in which academic research has combined with studio practices to develop and enrich ideas, allowing for a dramatic error in production to become an attribute of a finished work.
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The remaking of tokusatsu monsters
By Angela LongoSince the arrival of Godzilla (1954), the science-fiction genre of tokusatsu started booming its monsters by adapting different DIY techniques. The post-war period defined a collaborative effort between artists who worked within limited creative conditions due to economic restraints. They experimented with unusual materials for making monsters and image techniques to create visual effects on the filmed screen. Sculptors, art students, freelance workers and animators started collaborating to discover ways to produce suitmation and strategies to make the monster seem alive. Specifically, in Toho Studios, the Special Effects Department, directed by Tsuburaya Eiji, helped create a generation of monster-making specialists that spread to other studios. Along with Iizuka Sadao, they produced special effects using the animation stand and animation-related techniques, such as optical composition, to create the monster zigzag gleaming rays that became the staple of tokusatsu monsters. The analogue era of monster-making only starts to change from the Heisei Gamera series (1995–2006), where analogue and digital intertwine and culminate in Shin Godzilla (2016). This article investigates the possibilities of monster creation and adaptation and how this challenge created a space for hybrid images in the contemporary Japanese media landscape.
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- Modern Approaches
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Weird monsters and monstrous media: The adaptation of Annihilation
More LessThis article scrutinizes Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation (2015) and its cinematic adaptation directed by Alex Garland (2018) with the aim of investigating the tensions between the weird and visualization. It argues that it is in the monstrous, weirding function of the medium in Annihilation that the weird persists. By engaging with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming, I argue that the computer-generated imagery of the Annihilation film invites us to think of digital images themselves as monstrous – an articulation of the molecular, cellular, trans-species exchanges and mutations of the film, which sustains a movement towards becoming-imperceptible while becoming-visible. I argue that by releasing the monstrous, weird-making and world-making qualities of the literary and cinematic medium, the two works open us up to flowing articulations of the world that are not centred around the human but directed towards an appreciation of our existence in an incommensurable, incomprehensible, but nonetheless real and material, more-than-human embeddedness.
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Wendigo, vampires and Lovecraft: Intertextual monstrosity and cultural otherness in video games
By André CowenCivilization has, since its inception, employed mythical or deified entities in place of the unknown. Folklore and mythology are the culmination of such beliefs, providing lessons or logic behind behavioural patterns within the society of the time, with the Epic of Gilgamesh (Anon. c.2100 BC) producing a narrative precedence that ‘[n]ature is the opposing pole of the human’. However, the roles of such tales, and hence their monsters, have adapted as humans came to understand more of the world around them. Tchaprazov suggests that Stoker’s Dracula (Stoker 1897) emphasizes ‘that the Slovaks stand both culturally and geographically opposite to the West’, producing social narratives relating to a cultural ‘Other’. Within this article I explore how monsters, based on regional folklore, within video game adaptations such as The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (CD Projekt Red 2008) and Metro 2033 Redux (4A Games 2014) are depicted as a nature-based ‘other’, especially as opposed to the player-character. Furthermore, I look at the cultural implications of contrasting modern depictions, such as the wendigo within Until Dawn (Supermassive Games 2015) and other transmorphic entities. Finally, I suggest that the intersection of culture and folklore within the ‘brickmaker’s village’ in The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is a hybridized adaptation which simultaneously adapts Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth (Lovecraft 1931) and the Slavic folklore of the vodyanoy, whilst also challenging what Švelch calls a ‘conceptualization of monstrosity’.
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Adapting visual references in concept art for films and video games in design uncanny monsters
More LessAfter demonstrating the efficacy of adapting visual references (3D renders and photos) to concept art for high-budget game development and film production, this contribution suggests a specific approach for the digital artist to produce the uncanny valley when designing monsters. This article illustrates the importance of embedding visual references into the artwork for time efficiency, correct use of perspective and establishment of believable textures. In particular, the search for realism shows to be advantageous in design uncanny monsters. Visual references can be manipulated in software such as Photoshop to prepare not only the blueprints for the 3D modelling/sculpting stage but also to design the special effects makeup for live-action monsters. This contribution fills a gap between our current understanding of the uncanny valley and the process of designing characters; it suggests an efficient approach to monster-making for entertainment and sheds a light on contemporary concept art practices. This is important for a dual reason: (a) it moves knowledge forward in the field of the uncanny valley’s applications to concept art since this has not been investigated in depth in other works; (b) it helps professional concept artists in shaping and controlling the uncanniness of antagonistic characters.
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The clash of digital and traditional monsters: Slender Man adaptations and the Balkan culture
More LessFree movement inside the internet universe and the ability to adapt to almost every culture they encounter enable monster creations to develop through this process of exploring cultures other than theirs. Perhaps this is one of the qualities that contemporary monster creations need to have in order to become and stay alive. In this article, I argue that the Slender Man myth seems to have adapted in terms of monstrosity in many cultures of the world, where its digital quality is its greatest strength and at the same time its greatest weakness in cultures that do not have the capacity or interest to create an equivalent to it. Instead, the lack of a digital aspect makes the folklore of these countries like the Balkan ones more significant, which sabotages the adaptation of digital monsters into a non-digital monster culture that prides itself on its traditional folk stories and legends, like the rich Balkan culture. These digital products in return end up lost within certain cultures, as they do not have the means or the capacity to develop and adapt because of the clash of the digital and the traditional.
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- Practitioners’ Perspectives
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The phoenix rises: Peeter Rebane on Firebird
By Tom UeIn this interview, writer – director Peeter Rebane and I discuss his feature Firebird (2021). Set during the Cold War, the film centres on the real-life Sergey Fetisov’s (the film’s co-writer Tom Prior), Roman’s (Oleg Zagorodnii) and Luisa’s (Diana Pozharskaya) love triangle, exploring the decisions they make and their attendant consequences. Rebane and I examine the challenges of filming some extraordinary material – from underwater shots of the young Sergey (Romek Uibopuu) and Dima (Gregory Kibus) to shots of dozens and dozens of people seated in a concert hall, and from flying sequences to theatre ones – on an independent film budget, and how Rebane has retained integrity to the project without making compromises. We attend to the story on which Firebird was based; Rebane’s and Prior’s fidelity to their source material; how they expanded it to show, more prominently, the social and political context in which it is set; and how they altered Luisa’s character to show her perspective. We discuss Rebane’s extensive research into and recreation of the film’s world, which includes meeting with the real-life Sergey, to whom it is dedicated; casting it; and studying documentaries and photos to create costumes for its many actors and extras. Finally, Rebane and I explore the process of distributing Firebird during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has included screening the film at numerous events worldwide. This interview provides insight into both the making and the distribution of this ambitious film adaptation.
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- Book Review
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Television Series as Literature, Winckler Reto and Huertas-Martín Víctor (eds) (2021)
More LessReview of: Television Series as Literature, Winckler Reto and Huertas-Martín Víctor (eds) (2021)
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 355 pp.,
ISBN 978-9-81154-719-5, p/bk, £39.99
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 17 (2024)
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Volume 16 (2023)
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Volume 15 (2022)
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Volume 14 (2021)
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Volume 13 (2020)
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Volume 12 (2019)
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Volume 11 (2018)
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Volume 10 (2017)
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Volume 9 (2016)
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Volume 8 (2015)
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Volume 7 (2013 - 2014)
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Volume 6 (2013)
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Volume 5 (2012)
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Volume 4 (2011)
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Volume 3 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 2 (2009)
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Volume 1 (2007 - 2009)
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Editorial
Authors: Richard Hand and Katja Krebs
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