Café de Nuit

Well, since Rafael does not show up to tell whether the previous guesses were right, here goes another to revive this topic. This is probably easy, but who can say...


'Carmilla' is widely regarded as a prominent influence in gothic literature and beyond. It is the birth of the female lesbian vampire genre, that is so popular in films and in the XXth century. But Carmilla itself had inspirations.
It can be argued that Carmilla was inspired in another lady of the night. Who, and in what work did she appear?

That was a tough one, and I may be reaching for straws here, but my guess would be Lady Geraldine from Coleridge's Christabel. She isn't explicitly a vampire, but she has some similarities to Carmilla von Karstein, so that's my bid.

Agamemnon wrote:That was a tough one, and I may be reaching for straws here, but my guess would be Lady Geraldine from Coleridge's Christabel. She isn't explicitly a vampire, but she has some similarities to Carmilla von Karstein, so that's my bid.

And that is exactly correct. In my view, she is not a vampire. I thought at once she would be one, but read and reread it several times and there is nothing in there that suggests it. So, I did not ask for it in the question either

The point though is that she is a lady who is seemingly in distress, is brought home by her victim and in some sense preys on her, like Carmilla. Most notably, there is a certain eroticness in her interest for the victim, a certain lesbianity which was also an inspiration for Carmilla.

Next question, please! =)

Sorry for the delay in giving a question.

Here's another one:

A certain Romantic German poem is more well-known for being misquoted in a famous Gothic work than for itself. The passage which is misquoted follows:

"Wir und die Toten reiten schnell;"

Question:

What is the title of this poem?

Which Gothic work misquotes it?

Agamemnon wrote:What is the title of this poem?

Which Gothic work misquotes it?

It's from Gottfried Burger's "Lenore" and is misquoted in Dracula.

The gentleman is correct, and gets to ask a new question.

Take it away.

The lady will think of one when she's done teaching for the morning.


FWIW, the misquote may be justified, as Stoker might've been attempting to show that the Transylvanians aren't terribly well-educated, and/or that Harker's lousy at German.

Rotipher of the FoS wrote:The lady will think of one when she's done teaching for the morning.

Oops...
The dangers of online text-only communication. I apologize, madame.

Rotipher of the FoS wrote:FWIW, the misquote may be justified, as Stoker might've been attempting to show that the Transylvanians aren't terribly well-educated, and/or that Harker's lousy at German.

The changed quote also makes a lot more sense grammatically in the context it is represented, as Stoker writes: "denn die Toten reiten schnell" (for the dead ride fast), which makes more sense in the situation than saying "we and the dead ride fast." So it cannot be dismissed that Bram Stoker changed the quote on purpose.

Anyway, present your question at leisure, Madame Rotipher.

Okay, how about...

Which literary mad scientist, when the tale of his great breakthrough was brought to the silver screen, had the mechanism by which he'd attained that breakthrough changed to emulate another mad scientist's signature invention?

Rotipher of the FoS wrote:Okay, how about...

Which literary mad scientist, when the tale of his great breakthrough was brought to the silver screen, had the mechanism by which he'd attained that breakthrough changed to emulate another mad scientist's signature invention?

Hmmm.... been thinking on this on and off, but try as I might, there seem to be too many mad scientists to track them all. Could you give just a tiny hint, Rotipher? Please?

I know Frankenstein in the book does not use lightning directly, but I wouldn't know who Colin Clive could be emulating, as 'Back to the Future' was still in 'the future', so to say :/
So something tells me this is not the answer...

Well, you're right that it's not Frankenstein. But one of the two mad scientists I'm thinking of did appear on the silver screen in the same year as Frankenstein.

I'm still banging my head on the wall. I couldn't, for the life of me, find a film that would match your description. I looked over films from 1931, 1957, even the 1910s and something in between all of this.

But I have to admit I'm lost.

If I were to guess, I'd say the scientist that appeared on screen in the year of Frankenstein is Dr Jekyll and the other would be Jack Griffin from The Invisible Man. I coudln't confirm this, but it seems Griffin uses a monocain potion in the film (a potion was what Jekyll used), but in the book it seems to require an apparatus of some sort.

So, that's my final take on this question :/

Got it! Yes, contrary to popular belief, Griffin of The Invisible Man had actually used an overlapping resonance field to turn his tissues transparent. The only thing he ingested first was a blood-decolorizing agent, and that only made him turn from albino-pale to paper-white.

In the 1933 movie, they replaced the apparatus with a simple one-dose potion, in emulation of Dr. Jekyll's formula. This change was presumably due to the poor state of special effects at the time, which would've made capturing a "resonance field" on screen impossible. It also meant that Claude Rains could imbibe the drug on screen while fully clad, whereas using the apparatus as described in the book would've meant showing him nude, which was unthinkable in the 1930s.

Ever since the film, nearly everyone believes that it was a potion, not a device, that turned the Invisible Man transparent. Even our own Z-Gaz's version, "Eddie", was a product of alchemy, not a mechanism.



Okay, Ail, your turn! Got a question?

Rotipher of the FoS wrote:Got it! Yes, contrary to popular belief, Griffin of The Invisible Man had actually used an overlapping resonance field to turn his tissues transparent. The only thing he ingested first was a blood-decolorizing agent, and that only made him turn from albino-pale to paper-white.

In the 1933 movie, they replaced the apparatus with a simple one-dose potion, in emulation of Dr. Jekyll's formula. This change was presumably due to the poor state of special effects at the time, which would've made capturing a "resonance field" on screen impossible. It also meant that Claude Rains could imbibe the drug on screen while fully clad, whereas using the apparatus as described in the book would've meant showing him nude, which was unthinkable in the 1930s.

Ever since the film, nearly everyone believes that it was a potion, not a device, that turned the Invisible Man transparent. Even our own Z-Gaz's version, "Eddie", was a product of alchemy, not a mechanism.



Okay, Ail, your turn! Got a question?

Certainly not at all at this hour of the night =)
But I'll try to think one up.


I was not confident of the answer at all, but I'm very happy it ended right =)

Wooooooooooooo!!!

How could this thread go on without me!?

Ail wrote:3. Google is your friend, they say. Let's see if it was my friend this time.
That would be The Bat, probably the 1926 film, although there is a play from 1920 on which it is based. It features a caped killer known as bat that kills people in an old mansion, one by one. He taunts them first with a kind of bat-signal. There's also a 1930 film based on the same story, The Bat Whispers.

Indeed! I am marvelled! I didn't think anyone would know that!

Ail wrote: c) The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve (in desperation, really)

Correct, again!!! The cursed part of the castle also features a secret trapdoor, and is the first Gothic place a hero enters willingly while knowing the danger.

And as to the Werewolf question, I just got me the 2-Disc DVD edition of 1941' The Wolfman. Very interesting background info.

The Silver Bullet thing, for example, seems indeed a completely new invention by the script writers... Based on a radio episode of "The Lone Ranger".