Cycling through the air, straight-backed and determined, Miss Gulch transforms into a witch on a broomstick at the start of The Wizard of Oz. It’s terrifying and fabulous. Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 classic, owned the part fully, becoming a [...]
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Vampire Hunting
Tomorrow night all manner of ghouls and creeps will walk our suburban streets. Maybe there will be vampires…if it’s the real thing, you know what to do, clutch your crucifix and drive a stake through his heart. But what it this is a more subtle vampire? The kind who smiles nicely and [...]
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Anthony Hopkins: Darkness Visible
Anthony Hopkins’ trademark is intense stillness broken by an electrifying stream of words, or a sudden violent movement, or a flash of those unsettling pale eyes. He was born in the dark of winter. His powerful, stony Capricorn Sun is buried in the 12th house – the [...]
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The Inception of Monsters: Frankenstein and Dracula
Bela Lugosi as … Lilith? 1816: they called it the summer there was no summer. In the Swiss Alps, the cold was bitter even in June. Huddled under the stormy cloak cast by the unseasonable weather, a band of young English travellers passed the time with talking, fantasising, [...]
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Fat Boy, Fukushima and Japan Facing Frankenstein
Godzilla emerged from the depths of the ocean back in 1954, and trashed Tokyo. He may have been a plastic monster in a less than B-movie, but he also symbolised something important. Let me explain. A rather attractive Polish version of Godzilla. Godzilla – as you may recall (I had to [...]
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Awakening Frankenstein
Boris Karloff in the 1931 film Frankenstein. In the summer I wrote a post about Dracula with some suggestions about which planets we could associate with the fanged one. I ended that piece by suggesting that Frankenstein might be associated with the planet Uranus. |’ve come back to [...]
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Talk on Monsters
I’m giving a talk on Scary Monsters. February 16 at the Oxford Astrology Group. For more information look at their site. Come along if you’re in the neighborhood.
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Vampire Squid – Pluto vs Neptune?
I was taking a shower this morning with my five year old and she started to play a game about a “vampire squid” which was attacking us around the curtain. (Yes, apparently there is such a thing.) That’s a pretty scary monster, right. Well, it also seemed rather a good image [...]
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