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 Thumb139 – 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!
