Monstrous Progeny

I saw Van Helsing Thursday night. Great, if startlingly mindless, fun. The whole look of the thing was very impressive, most of the acting was adequate (although Richard Roxburgh's Dracula was lacklustre -- a bit of a flaw when he was the main villain), and the use of the Universal horror movie icons was very inventive. The Brides of Dracula, with their floaty chiffon dresses morphing into bat's wings, and the electrically-sparking, occasionally-falling-apart Frankenstein monster, were particularly enjoyable.

On the other hand, the ending was messy, some of the computer-animated characters were unconvincing, and they killed off Victor Frankenstein in the first scene. What's more the script could really have done with a lot of polishing. Given that the movie was almost constant action, the last point is perhaps arguable, but I'd have liked to have seen some more intelligence applied, especially given the deliberate harking-back in some particulars to the original novels from which the monsters originally came. This was particularly noticeable in the case of Frankenstein's creature, who (although bolt-necked and shambling) at least talked reasonably like the character from Mary Shelley's novel, with a high degree of articulacy and as much Romantic sensibility as can feasibly be fitted into a two-hour film with lots of fighting in it.

Predictably, I was most interested in this whole postmodern-metatextuality angle. Multiple crossovers across the fiction of particular periods have been a growth area recently, with Alan Moore's excellent graphic novels based around The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen picking up where previous efforts -- Kim Newman's Anno Dracula novels, for instance -- have left off. (Both of those series also include Dracula in their paracanon, although he's not named in LoEG.)

Van Helsing riffs heavily on the classic Universal horror flicks, throwing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein, his Creature and Igor, Dracula and his Brides, and the Wolf Man into the same plot, just to see what happens. (Nor does the metatextuality stop there -- the early scene in the Vatican, for instance, riffs very obviously on the James Bond films, while Mr Hyde is directly related to the hunchback of Notre-Dame.) Compared with LoEG or Anno Dracula, that's not particularly impressive (just one scene in Newman's Dracula Cha Cha Cha, set in the 1950s, shows Tom Ripley chatting with Clark Kent, Tony Hancock, Gomez and Morticia Addams and characters from sundry horror films) but the logic of the interaction between the various stories and their motifs is well thought-through.

The way such stories seem to work seems to be to take two linear stories (or clusters of parallel stories, I suppose, in the case of the Dracula and Frankenstein mythoi) and use them as mathematical axes, creating a whole new fictional space (in Van Helsing's case, a four-dimensional one) which the new metafiction can explore. These new degrees of liberty are perhaps why the plots of such stories have a tendency to sprawl out of control, but they also allow some astonishing imaginative constructs to be assembled.

Surely a sequel has to be on the cards -- Van Helsing Meets the Mummy being the obvious one, although it wouldn't surprise me to see the Invisible Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon thrown into the mix too. Personally I'd prefer to see them bring back the Bride of Frankenstein, but that would be a little tricky now they've killed off the good Doctor.

And how long can it be, in these days of computer-generated footage, before Abbott and Costello Meet Van Helsing?