Reading/Watching Log #95

It’s the spooky season and along with a glut of scary stories, I decided to apply an EIGHTIES WEREWOLVES THEME to this October. I don’t know what was in the water during that decade, but films in the eighties were rather obsessed with that subject. In 1981 alone, there were no less than three werewolf films.

I’m a big fan of themed viewing/reading, though it often bites me in the ass when I end up getting tired of whatever subject I’ve decided to focus on. And as it happens, werewolf movies can be strikingly similar in the major narrative beats they hit, and they’re often a metaphor for an individual losing their inhibitions.

There are some plot-points that reappear in nearly every film: the fateful bite or wolf attack, a gradual heightening of senses in the recipient of the bite, a few brutal killings, the horrific (and prolonged) transformation sequence, and an opportunity to either reject or embrace the curse.

But in almost every case, turning into a werewolf grants a character a level of freedom and confidence they’ve never experienced before, from the light-hearted Teen Wolf (Michael J. Fox suddenly gets popular) to the much darker Wolf (Jack Nicolson gains stamina, ruthlessness, and the inexplicable ability to be attractive to Michelle Pfieffer).

But of course, there’s always a price; a reason that werewolfry is referred to as “a curse.” Many of the transformations are painful and grotesque to behold – particularly in The Howling, The Company of Wolves and An American Werewolf in London, and actually being a wolf leads one to massacring innocent people before waking up naked in a strange place with no memory of what you were up to the night before. In such cases any transformation will be framed as a tragedy, in which the protagonist’s identity is at risk of being lost to the wolf persona.

Yet although the protagonist is usually desperate to stop the transformation in order to save lives (Brigette in Ginger Snaps: Unleashed, Karen in The Howling), they can just as often find a new lease on life with their new condition (Wolf, The Company of Wolves, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning). On that note, sometimes becoming a werewolf is an extended metaphor for puberty. Scott’s hair-growth and sex drive in Teen Wolf is a very blatant example of this, but The Company of Wolves is filled with symbols and motifs that signify Rosaleen’s sexual awakening through an overtly feminine lens.

But if the film’s protagonist is not the werewolf and instead the character trying to hunt the werewolf (as The Howling, Silver Bullet and Wolfen) then any wolf will be portrayed as terrifyingly animalistic and brutal; creatures which simply must be stopped by any means necessary.

And interestingly enough, the idea of a silver bullet being the only thing that can kill a werewolf is seldom used. In fact, Silver Bullet (obviously) is the only film that has this be the case. In everything else, normal bullets will suffice.

In any case, this pelthora of werewolf films were interesting to view in quick succession, though I simply don’t have the time to delve deeper into the implications and meaning of the werewolf as a symbol. Mostly it was just fun to revisit the eighties, as the multitude of shows/films that are made today in tribute to that decade don’t really compare to anything actually made in that decade.

I suspect that the surprising amount of werewolf stories made around this time was due to the advances in practical effects that made the transformations so intense and visceral. These days, you’d just run it all through a computer.

Legend of the Seeker: Torn

And with this episode, I am halfway through the season! (Though well over halfway through the year, which is an annoyance since I was hoping to get this project wrapped up before 2024).

If the last episode provided a minor character study on Richard, then this is Kahlan’s turn to step into the spotlight. This entire story is devoted to exploring the duality of her character, by using that favourite fantasy trope: splitting the individual into two halves. That is, their personality is split between two separate (and identical) bodies, which TV Tropes calls a Literal Split Personality.

You’ve seen it in early episodes of Charmed and Farscape (though there Prue and Crichton were divided into three parts) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (where it was Xander, making use of the convenient fact that actor Nicholas Brendon is a twin). I also recall a Star Trek episode where two separate people are merged into one, and then refuse to be turned back since he doesn’t want to die, a storyline that’s somewhat relevant to this episode of Legend of the Seeker.

And those examples are just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are thousands more out there.

It makes for a fairly interesting look at what makes Kahlan tick, though it’s rather on-the-nose compared to the last episode’s more veiled depiction of Richard’s fears and how they pertain to his self-image. This is essentially just knocking Kahlan’s fundamental personality out of kilter and demonstrating that the two sides of a person need to work in harmony – which is true, but true of anyone, not just Kahlan.

King's Quest: To Heir is Human

This game could well have been called King’s Quest: Something Completely Different, as its introduction throws out everything previously established in the series thus far in favour of a brand-new set up. So much so, that initial reactions to the game were negative simply because Graham and Daventry were nowhere to be seen. And if there’s one thing that fans hate, it’s change.

The opening introduces us to a seventeen-year-old boy called Gwydion, who lives as a slave in the clifftop mansion of a cruel wizard called Manannan in the land of Llewdor (yes, Roberta Williams had clearly been reading up on her Welsh mythology). He lives a lonely, miserable existence, longing for freedom and the answer to the question: “who am I?”

The game manual reveals that this Gwydion is only the latest in a long line of Gwydions, for even though Manannan is powerful enough to conjure spirits to do his housework, he prefers the cruelty that comes with having a mortal child at his beck and call. As such, he’s been kidnapping babies for years in order to raise them as his slaves – only to realize that with age comes agency. After the first Gwydion was found dabbling with spells in Manannan’s secret laboratory, the wizard vowed never to let another child live past the age of eighteen.

Woman of the Month: Wednesday Addams

Wednesday Addams from The Addams Family

It’s the spooky season, which requires an appropriately Halloween-y entry for Woman of the Month. And what better choice given the success of her recent Netflix show than Wednesday Addams?

That said, the character has been around a lot longer than Jenna Ortega’s take, which means this post has ended up just as much a retrospective as a spotlight on her latest interpretation. I dug a little deeper into the history of Wednesday, and the results are a fascinating look at how a character can evolve over time.

Created by cartoonist Charles Addams, she first appeared (without a name) in the August 26, 1944, issue of The New Yorker, in a comic that featured her being told to stop whining and “go tell your brother you’ll poison him right back.” In fact, none of the iconic characters had names at this point, they were simply designed to be the deliberate antithesis of the idealized American nuclear family.

It wasn’t until the comics were adapted for the 1960s television show that names were bestowed, with the daughter dubbed Wednesday, adapted from the familiar children’s nursery rhyme: “Wednesday’s child is full of woe.”

But whereas the comic iteration of the character, with her pale skin and oddly-shaped egghead, was obsessed with dark subjects such as torture, death and crazy science experiments, the Wednesday of the show (as played by Lisa Loring) was in many ways a normal little girl. She liked ballet and dolls, is well-mannered and sweet-natured, and comes across as surprisingly normal.

Okay, so her doll has no head because she’s just learned about Marie Antoinette, and she raises spiders as pets, but there’s no sign of the Deadpan Snarking that would eventually become the staple part of her characterization. In fact, her first day at school leaves her in tears after she’s read a story about a knight slaying a dragon. Poor dragon!

The 1991 film takes Wednesday back to her comic roots, but still doesn’t go too hard on the deadpanning. Yes, Christina Ricci’s take on the character is definitely our most popular rendition of the character, but she also regularly demonstrates fear, excitement and joy. It’s the second film, Addams Family Values, that really codified Wednesday as the cold, emotionless pre-teen we recognize today.

Slightly less known are the two Hanna-Barbera cartoons (one in the seventies and one in the nineties) as well as two animated movies in 2019 and 2021. These all very much depict Wednesday as she appeared in the original comics: chalk-white skin, an oval-shaped head, and dark hair in two braids. I can’t say I have much interest in watching any of them, but a quick glance over the Wikipedia and TV Tropes pages tells me Wednesday is borderline psychotic in these iterations, making – among other things – several serious attempts on her brother’s life.

Then there’s the Broadway musical and the straight-to-video releases and the webseries, the most famous of which features Wednesday confronting some cat-callers.

But to watch the three most famous adaptations of The Addams Family: the original television show, the two nineties films, and the Netflix adaptation, is to watch the character grow from child to tween to teenager. By the time we’ve reached Jenna Ortega, the emotionless deadpanning has become the very crux of her character.

Still, her introductory scene is wrecking bloody vengeance on her brother’s bullies by unleashing flesh-eating piranhas in the school swimming pool, and her subsequent investigation into the mystery of Nevermore Academy is as much to do with s sense of societal responsibility as sating her own curiosity (though she’d never admit it). There’s a heart beating somewhere deep beneath all those layers of black.

But what to actually make of Wednesday Addams? What’s the appeal given her Ensemble Darkhorse status within the franchise? For my money, it’s that subversive element, her complete refusal to conform.

In a world where teenage girls (and women in general) are meant to be bright and bubbly and cheerful, Wednesday has zero interest in following the crowd. She’s the girl we want to be when we’re tired of smiling, tired of conversation, tired of being endlessly polite. She’s our sadistic tendencies and morbid obsessions; the melancholic disposition that we’re meant to keep concealed at all costs.  

And she’s completely unapologetic about it. How freeing it must be to truly not care what other people think, to always have a devastatingly backhanded comment at the ready, to be completely unmoved and unfazed by any attempt at bullying. The character’s appeal lies in her ability to be both a projection and a fantasy – albeit a dark one.