Greetings, visitor, and welcome to our Monster AU sideblog!
How did this blog come about and what is there to expect here, you ask? We’ll try to explain.
Before we even considered starting this AU, we’d heard... discouraging accounts about The Umm (a.k.a. the 2017 Mummy film starring Tom Cruise as Definitely Not A Mummy and featuring Russell Crowe as Jekyll and Hyde) and later what Universal has in mind for its future Dark Universe. Despite not having seen the film at the time, the reviews of the movie and talks about what Universal wants to do with their classic monster franchises left us with doubts about the future of said cinematic universe (and watching it ourselves only further confirmed those opinions on the matter). However, it did make us wonder about what the original Universal Monster films were like, so we figured we might as well watch a few of them for ourselves to find out.
Entering through the unearthed tomb of the 1932 Mummy film, we soon found a trove filled with vampires, mad scientists, reanimated beings, invisible individuals, werewolves, phantoms of musical establishments, and so much more. We eventually decided to dive deeper, beyond the Universal Classic Horror/Universal Monsters catalog, to the source material behind some of the adaptations and even chilling cinematic and television films from other studios.
During all these watches, we began to form ideas that stemmed from multiple factors. Factors (and examples) like:
A lack of actual supernatural-ish monsters in a number of the films that were women-led. (Spoilers: there are no literal monster women in The Spider-Woman Strikes Back, She-Wolf of London, or Daughter of Dr. Jekyll. Worse: there is a monster in the latter, but it’s not the title character.)
The monster women that were in the films not being used to their full potential/getting very limited screentime (The Bride of Frankenstein’s Monster, Lucy and the Brides in Dracula) or being little-known (Kitty Carroll, Lisa Moya, Countess Marya Zaleska).
A desire to see representation in these characters (even though most of these films were produced during the Hays Code, which weren’t exactly kind to characters that deviated from the “norm.”) (You cannot convince us that Dr. Jack Griffin and Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe aren’t bi. You just can’t.)
The realization that the backstories and concepts for some of the monsters of days of old were... let’s say “in poor taste”. (Poor, poor Paula Dupree...)
An interest in wanting to possibly explore some of Universal’s lesser-known monsters (Dan McCormick, Lisa Moya, Hal Moffet).
A desire to see a lot of these characters live and have happier endings than the ones they were given. (We’d be here a while if we named them all. Like we said, early Hollywood wasn’t very kind to these kinds of characters.)
Curiosity about what it’d be like to see these characters who never met in any of these movies interact with each other (something like Erique Claudin and Larry Talbot, for one of many examples).
All of this led to us coming up with ideas about a universe that contained all of these characters (and then some) in a setting where not only do they exist but are all starting to become aware that they aren’t the only ones who do. This sideblog is basically for any posts that may be about what we have for this AU of ours, be they posts that have some tangential connection to something or someone in this AU or actual content we may have for it.
We welcome you, as they say, “to a new world of gods and monsters.”
