“Dead” can entrance
Tommy Woodard © 2014 There is a scene in the classic horror movie, “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935) in which the Monster (Boris Karloff) finds Dr. Frankenstein’s fellow mad scientist Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) dining in a burial vault, using a coffin lid as a tabletop. The sequence is a classic Gothic scene because settings such as cemeteries and themes like commingling with the dead are recurring themes inherited from Romanticism. In the movie, Pretorius is an old man, and as a mad scientist, he is a certified odd fellow; but the idea of a young man communing with the dead is an especially stark one. Edgar Allan Poe was just 18 when he composed “Spirits of the Dead” in 1827, but he was certainly not the first poet to explore the subject—not by a long shot! One thinks, for example, of Thomas Gray’s masterpiece, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) , written a century earlier, when Gray was 26 years old. If Poe was right that “ The death of a beautiful woman