America’s greatest Shakespearian is undoubtedly Paul Cantor, whose course on Shakespeare is the best thing of its kind & much loved by tens of thousands of people. You can find it on youtube! Paul is also, however, a great lover of pop culture & a friend, so I had the chance to talk to him about Halloween themes & not once, but twice.
First, one of the directors we both admire, Tim Burton, an American lover of the weird, but not the sordid—here’s our conversation on the first decade or so of Burton movies, from Pee Wee through Edward Scissorhands & Batman to Mars Attacks! Burton is a Halloween director more than anyone in his generation & he has a strange combination of earnestness, Romantic conviction that the beautiful is more than a little tied up with the doomed, & a sense of humor, of the absurd, of the pretentious things that pervade ordinary life, as well as the lives of the unusual among us… Burton, you can say, was dedicated to finding uncanny things in suburbia, to look at Americana twice, or insistently—there’s more weird stuff than among us than we dare admit. Come to think of it, we should do a Sleepy Hollow podcast, too!
Our Halloween podcast is about Frankenstein—starting from Mary Shelley’s novel, going through 19th c. theatrical adaptations all the way to America, to the Hollywood horrors of the 30s & other adaptations since, we talked about the most memorable modern myth, scientific immortality & what’s so fearful about being human!