- Apr 30, 2017
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The village they're presumably invoking, the one that has always been on the USH tour and (in reconstructed form, I believe) still is, is Frank's vaguely continental village.
The one thing the village really can't be is British. Without endorsing what is clearly a xenophobic notion, in these stories (both as written and as filmed) Britain is the familiar and "civilized." The point of "the village" is that, like most of the monstrous threats, it is "alien," "exotic," "foreign" - in short, continental. This is clearest in Dracula, in which an (eastern) continental threat invades the sanctity of the Emerald Isles. It's also very present in Wolf Man. The primary Wolf Man has to be British, to highlight the full horror of the "civilized" man becoming a beast (again, I'm certainly not endorsing these views, but it can also be seen in non-Uni monster story Jeckyll and Hyde as well), Significantly, the curse comes from an "outsider," a Romani gentleman played by Bela Lugosi (significantly, the character is ALSO named Bela - there's a reason the accented Lugosi was such a prominent part of these films).
While understanding how problematic some of this subtext is, we can still acknowledge that these stories and films - and the tropes within them, like "the village" - rely upon a key distinction between Britain as the safe and familiar and (generally Eastern) Europe as the unfamiliar and unsettling.
I'll still buy lots of merchandise, of course.
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