- 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.OK, let's break this down.
Everyone knows that Dracula is from Transylvania, which is part of present day Romania.
Frankenstein literally means German Castle. The Franks were a Germanic tribe, Stein is Germanic for stone, but common in names of landscapes, places, and CASTLES.
Wolfman is from Wales, which is in central Great Britain.
Moor is a distinctly British word for "uncultivated land including hunting areas and low-lying wetlands", but the word is not used in Wales. The Welsh word for a moor is "Gweiadur". So I guess Darkmoor is better than "Darkgweiadur" (you know UC probably actually had this discussion, no proof, but logic says...).
So Darkmoor must be a generic "European" village on the edge of a moor where you could possibly encounter an angry dogman, a random German Castle/Manor, and a blood thirsty international Casanova. Oh, and a Windmill with a Tavern.
Sounds good to me.
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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