LA museum explores spooky science behind horror flicks
LOSANGELES:What is the spookiest thing about Frankenstein, The Mummy and Dracula? The hideous monster? The ancient curse? The sharp fangs? Or the fact that these classic horror films were all rooted in real-life scientific experiments and discoveries?
That is the premise of a new exhibition at Los Angeles’ Natural History Museum, showcasing movie props from Hollywood’s golden age of horror alongside scientific artefacts that inspired them.
The Natural History of Horror - opening soon, as Halloween looms - displays the cloth wrappings used to mummify Boris Karloff in the 1932 classic movie alongside real ancient Egyptian corpse bindings from the museum’s archeology collection.
Visitors can pull a lever to recreate Luigi Galvani’s 18thcentury electrical experiment on twitching frog legs - which inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - while examining the metal shackles used to bind The Monster on-screen in 1931. “The early electrical work that was done to see if you can re-energise animals and bring them to life was the beginning of Frankenstein,” said museum director Lori Bettison-Varga.
“These films are essentially inspired by the natural and physical world, and the imagination that people had to create stories based on real things,” she added.
The exhibition explains how 19th-century diseases such as cholera inspired the Dracula from Bram Stoker’s vampire novel we know today.