The Writer's Life 1/30 - Horrors & More

An article by Joseph Duprey at listverse.com on horror movie misconceptions by inspired the following: Fans of the old Universal films remember the gypsy woman's prophetic words in The Wolf Man (1941): "Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright," delivered so chillingly by Maria Ouspenskaya. They were the creation of Curt Siodmak, who has 78 credits as a writer at IMDb, most of them in the horror genre... Wolves howl whether there’s a moon out or not... There were three silent versions of Mary Shelley's monster: Frankenstein (1910),  Life Without Soul (1915), and Il Mostro di Frankenstein (Italian, 1920) Here's how it looked in the first:

Although she had only five minutes of screen-time as The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Elsa Lanchester's performance may be immortal. Oddly, she received no billing for it. The role is simply credited as “?” She, of course, played Mary Shelley in the opening sequence... One of Hollywood's unsung stalwarts is Ricou Browing, who played the Gill Man in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955), and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). He had only a few other appearances in front of the camera, in Sea Hunt, Flipper and as a stunt diver in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), but he did a whole lot more, directing 37 episodes of the original Flipper, and 28 of the '90's reboot starring Jessica Alba. He also directed 14 episodes of Gentle Ben, and the thrilling underwater sequence of Thunderball (1965) and its remake Never Say Never Again (1983)... According to entomologists, if an insect ever grew to the size of a bus, it would drop dead shortly afterward. They breathe through a method called diffusion, and oxygen does not travel fast enough during that process, which limits the size of bugs.

My thanks to Ludmila, who showed up just before I was going to close shop and bought three books in Russian and a bio of Leonardo da Vinci. During our conversation she used "Ars Longa Vita Brevis," which has come to mean "Art (skill, a craft) is long and life is short." I googled it and found its original intent was a bit different. There's an intelligent interpretation at writingexplained.org. The phrase comes from the Greek physician Hippocrates, considered the father of medicine, and comprises the first two lines of Aphorismi: "Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile." He believed that learning to be a doctor took a long time, but the time in which someone can be a doctor was short.

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