Bloomsbury Publishing, Shame on You!

            Gary S Cross, Freak Show Legacies: How the Cute, Camp and Creepy Shaped Modern Popular Culture. 2021

            This is a fun book, even for non-academics.  Gary Gross’s theme is that outré visions, as in freak shows and the like, over time become less shocking, and even embraced through a process of “cuteifying” and familiarity.

            Other factors in the mainstreaming of the weird or horrifying include mass-media awareness, advances in science which disallowed the cursed-by-God explanation, and the outsider-as-cool phenomenon.

            BUT WAIT, THERE’S LESS!

            There are so many typo-type mistakes in this book, you will be disgusted.  As is my wont, here is a list, by page number:

·         Viii – the TV show is not Fear of the Walking Dead

·         2 – King Kong was released in 1933, and did not influence 1931’s Dracula

·         2 – The word “and” is mistakenly italicized when referring to the films “King Kong and Frankenstein”

·         8 ­– films did not “get passed censors,” they got “past censors”

·         15 – “audiences pretended to be amazed and even digested” – s/b “disgusted”

21 – “they have remained surprising persistent” – s/b “surprisingly”

·         28 – The Feejee Mermaid (above) was not “a monkey’s head sewn onto the lower half of a fish” – it was a monkey’s head and upper torso

·         89 – “replace them bouncers” s/b “replace them with bouncers”

·         94 – “the Hungarian midget who road into the arena” – s/b “rode”

·         106 – a close-quote is missing in the parenthetical mention of a name: midget “Charles Nestel (‘Commodore Foote) begins oddly”

111 – “Tom Thump’s success” – it’s Tom Thumb

139 – we have a sudden attack of boldface

·         183 – the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein (above) IS NOT “a remake of the famous Frankenstein.”  It’s a SEQUEL!

184 – the film titles Son of Frankenstein and Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein s/b italicized

·         185 – there’re a few too many words in this passage:  “as a rite of passage of rite out of childhood.”

186 – the film is The Attack of the Giant Leeches – not “Leaches”

·         186 – the guy who ran the MPAA was named Jack Valenti, not “Valente” (misspelled three times in the same paragraph)

·         187 – the correct title of the 1963 film is X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes – the book only gives the title as The Man with the X-ray Eyes

·         188 – he means “bowels” when he says “a loosening of bowls or bladder control.”

·         190 – “a budget of roughly $125,000 dollars.”

·         193 – the 1979 film is not The Alien, it’s just Alien

·         198 – “audiences were draw to the basic predictability” – s/b “drawn”

·         199 – the film is The Rocky Horror Picture Show not “The Rock Horror Picture Show”

·         200 – “well-healed horror commenters” s/b “well-heeled”

·         200 – “test their metal” s/b “mettle”

·         212 – the ratings system is from Nielsen, not “Nielson”

·         216 – in mention of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, “the” s/b capitalized as part of the title – also, none of the film’s title is italicized

 

Somehow, such sloppy mistakes are more disquieting because this is a self-proclaimed “academic” book.

            I encourage you to read this book, but keep a rubber doorstop at hand to stick in your mouth while you grind your teeth.  Anybody who mentions Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Robert Crum comix, and who accurately describes the face of Hello Kitty as horrifying deserves to be cut a little slack!

 See you next year, fellow freaks!