Word: succubus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...snake has all the lines here: "Name your poison," says Lady Sylvia to a toothsome aristocrat. Russell oils the dialogue with lots of slithery images: killer vacuum-cleaner hoses and serpentine watch hands, Snakes and Ladders gameboards and pickled earthworms in aspic. With all the dream demons and succubus seductions, the movie starts to look like a man's fearful scenario of woman's seductive power. Is Russell just kidding or deadly serious? The answer is, as always, both. His campfire tale may be more camp than fire, but it shows the cinema's last angry mannerist in good humor...
...have cried foul over Fatal Attraction: Alex is the '80s career woman as homicidal vamp. Says Marsha Kinder, a film professor at the University of Southern California: "In this film, it is not sexual repression that causes psychosis. It is sexual liberation. For men, Alex's sexuality is a succubus; it saps a man's strength. Fatal Attraction is also about how men fear women. Because in this movie women have the power, positively and negatively. When Alex hears Dan threaten her, she doesn't take it seriously. But when Beth tells Alex she is going to kill her, Alex...
Frankenstein was a modern horror story; Russell means Gothic to be the last horror show. Byron is Count Dracula, feeding on his guests' dreams and demons. Shelley is every weak hero, Polidori every mad doctor, Clairmont every wench whose lust turns her into a succubus. And Godwin, racked by visions of her stillborn child, becomes the cursed mothers of The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. From the labor of her nightmares, she gives birth to literature's most enduring monster...
...disbursements; the latter a female golem, an artificial being that Puttermesser fashioned from potting soil. With Xanthippe's aid, the civil ser vant becomes mayor and turns the city into a Utopia. Unfortunately, it is the nature of golems to turn against their creators. Xanthippe plays a succubus, sleeps with every man in the administration, and the city returns to chaos...