Nosferatu (1922):-The 1922 German film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is basically an unauthorized knock-off of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The filmmakers couldn’t get permission from the late Stoker’s estate to adapt the book, so they made certain changes. Instead of Count Dracula, the main villain is Count Orlok.
Copyright drama aside, stories of undead beings feeding off the living have been around a lot longer than Stoker’s novel. The modern idea of vampires likely evolved from old European folk beliefs. Before people understood how diseases spread, vampirism may have been a way to explain deaths from the plague, tuberculosis and other unseen maladies that ravaged communities. Different regions had different ways of stopping vampires. In Romania, one remedy was to cut out the heart of a suspected vampire (i.e., a cadaver) and burn it to ashes.Some have speculated Stoker’s Dracula was based on Vlad the Impaler, aka Vlad III Dracula, a 15th-century ruler of Wallachia in Romania. In Stoker’s research notes for Dracula, he recorded that “dracula” means “devil” in the Wallachian language. However, scholars suspect he appropriated the name without knowing very much about Vlad. In any case, there was already a lot of vampire fiction by then: Lord Byron’s epic poem The Giaour (1813), the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1847) and the lesbian vampire novel Carmilla (1872), to name a few.
The Exorcist (1973):-In August 1949, The Washington Post ran at least two stories about a 14-year-old boy’s exorcism in Maryland. In one, the newspaper reported, “the boy broke into a violent tantrum of screaming, cursing and voicing of Latin phrases—a language he had never studied.” The story inspired author William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist, the basis for the 1973 film in which a young Linda Blair projectile-vomits pea soup.
In reality, the boy who inspired Blair’s character was probably troubled, not possessed. A Marylander named Mark Opsasnick who didn’t buy the story investigated it and published his findings in Strange Magazine in 1999. Opsasnick identified the boy in the story and interviewed people who’d known him (though he did not release the boy’s name), and concluded the boy likely had psychological problems and was mimicking the priest’s LatinIn an interview with The Washington Post in 1999, Opsasnick acknowledged that although he was fascinated by his discovery, few other people would probably care. And indeed, when the Post reached out to a man who lived next door to the house where the exorcism had supposedly taken place, he replied, “I don't really care about that.”
The Amityville Horror (1979):-On November 13, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family in their sleep. One year later, the Lutz family purchased the house in Amityville, New York where the horror took place.
Parents George and Kathy Lutz then claimed they experienced shocking paranormal phenomena in the house: green slime oozing from the walls, a creature with red eyes and multiple family members levitating in their beds. The claims appeared in Jay Anson’s 1977 book The Amityville Horror, which inspired the 1979 movie of the same title, which inspired many more movies.
Butch DeFeo’s lawyer later admitted that he, George and Kathy had “created this horror story over many bottles of wine.” Even so, the tale raised the profile of Ed and Lorriane Warren, a couple who got involved with the Amityville story and helped promote it.
“They set themselves up as psychics and clairvoyants who investigate ghosts and hauntings,” says Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. “They would hear about stories either in the news or just sort of through the grapevine, and they would sort of introduce themselves into the story.” But more on them later.
Comments
Post a Comment