2024-01-16 23:25:10
The death of the popularizer David J. Skal, known last week, has come as a shock to fans and scholars of fantasy cinema. The author, who had recently visited Spain following the reissue in Spanish of his classic essay Monster show, a cultural history of horror (Es Pop Ediciones), died in a traffic accident at the age of 71 on January 1. He leaves behind a fruitful legacy as an essayist and popularizer.
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Trained as a journalist, initiated as a film critic and also as a writer of fantasy literature, Skal made it clear through his first essays that he also had the impulse of a researcher. He approached cultural issues freaklike the monster movies that Universal Studios turned into a trademark during the 1930s, and studied them with an academic rigor powered by passion.
Throughout his life, Skal encountered again and again everything that had to do with his childhood favorite monster: Dracula. His first test, Hollywood gothicwas a highly documented and exciting journey through the creation process of Bram Stoker’s novel, the free adaptation without permission that was Nosferatu, its conversion into a controversial commercial theater phenomenon in England and the United States and its subsequent cinematic success. Skal acted as a detective of history. In his hands, everything was exciting, even the disputes over copyright.
Skal’s second essay is perhaps the one that generated the most impact among the public and his colleagues: Monster show It is a work that talks about the creatures of terrifying cinema, about the artists who created them, about the fears that these fictions exorcised or enhanced. It was one of the spearheads, perhaps especially accessible, of those cultural studies that talk about pop and film scares, but can also address social and political history, feminism or culture. queer. Over the decades, she persevered in her studies around horror films and vampire narratives. She wrote a biography about Stoker (Something in the blood), co-wrote a monograph on the director of Dracula (Tod Browning: The Carnival of Darkness) and dedicated a book to the day of the dead, its origins and its commercialized present: Halloween, death comes out to party.
The author’s dissemination task found other complementary means to the printed letter. And not only through talks, round tables and various events. When Universal Studios began editing classic films like Dracula, Frankenstein o The invisible man On DVD, Skal was in charge of scripting and directing different audiovisual pieces and audio commentaries intended to complement the viewing of the films. In 2023, the essayist participated in another similar endeavor: Tod Browning’s Sideshow shockers, a videographic edition of three films by the director of Dracula (1931) on the American label Criterion.
The Spanish home of a pop culture giant
Until a few years ago, Skal’s essayistic work had remained almost completely unpublished in Spain. Spanish Film Archive published Tod Browning: Carnival of Darkness in 1996. The historic publisher of fantastic and terrifying literature Valdemar had brought Spanish bookstores Monster show: a cultural history of horror in 2008. A label specialized in essays on mass culture, Es Pop Ediciones, has taken over with force by publishing Hollywood gothic, something in the blood y Halloween: death comes out to party. Recently, in addition, it has recovered Monster show.
The director of Es Pop is the translator Óscar Palmer. His first contact with Skal was in the late nineties of the last century, when Palmer was preparing a translation of Dracula. “She was very kind, as she always was with everyone if we judge by the condolences that have been seen these days,” explains the translator. In 2017, editor and writer met in person and “a slightly deeper friendship” was cemented. Skal and Palmer collaborated closely so that the Spanish version of Halloween and the recent reissue of Monster show (which also has a prologue written for the occasion) were very visually elaborate.
Palmer, who is affected by the essayist’s sudden disappearance, explains that Skal’s works exemplify what he looks for when choosing books for his publishing house: “That you finish the book with the feeling of knowing much more than when you started, but without being It was difficult to assimilate it. “David had tremendous erudition, but also a particular talent for transmitting that knowledge without making it cumbersome.”
The editor and translator considers that the author’s style of Hollywood gothic It is “a little unrepeatable, because his way of writing reflects his life experience, his sense of humor or the narrative pulse he had.” Skal’s death leaves his plans to give greater visibility to his role as a novelist, somewhat forgotten, in the air.
Write after Skal
Spanish authors such as Antonio José Navarro or Jesús Palacios share with Skal a certain perspective of a film critic and historian specialized in fantastic and terrifying cinema that also focuses on literature and other cultural expressions. After years very dedicated to criticism published in newspapers, Navarro has reoriented himself to writing essays. Some of them are voluminous analyzes of popular culture born from an enormous work of documentation (see The empire of fear) that can refer (due to ambition, rigor and also the pleasure in connecting cinema and society) to the works of the American writer.
As Navarro has explained on the social network X, his former dedication to the Sitges International Film Festival caused him to come into contact with Skal. That generated an epistolary communication that was repeated over the years. The author of Hollywood and the war on terror He uses that word that is repeated among those who evoke Skal: kind. “He was very companionable, very close, he did not maintain the distant posture that other scholars of the same size may have,” he says.
Navarro was beginning to establish himself as a critic back in 1990, when Skal published his first essay. In 1993, he hit American bookstores Monster show. “Reading it 30 years later, his ability to relate the cultural life of a society with its artistic expression in the form of fantastic and horror films is still striking. It was a very important book,” he says.
When asked if Skal has heirs in Spain, Navarro responds that it is not his place to say who they could be, but he affirms that “there are people who have tried to do something similar within our European intellectual and cultural parameters, who can introduce nuances or things that could escape him, and vice versa.” All in all, the critic considers that in Spain more French studies on cinema continue to prevail, more based on the theory of the authors who disseminated media such as Cinema Notebooks.
Studying culture in the new century
Navarro’s generation was becoming professional when the publication of Monster show in United States. Other colleagues later took up the pen, such as the duo of film critics and essayists formed by Elisa McCausland and Diego Salgado (Supernovas, a feminist history of audiovisual science fiction), and they coexisted with Skal’s work in a different way. What may have had some disruptive and surprising contribution in 1993 had been fully consolidated after the turn of the century as a valid and potentially fruitful, standardized methodology.
For this duo of authors, the presence of Skal and his model was, in some way, comforting. “We felt very in tune with what a giant like him was doing, and that made us feel well on track,” explains Salgado. The critic, co-author of black kiss Cinema, witchcraft and pop culture (Hermenaute) also highlights that “it’s nice to remember that Skal was quite a geek at the beginning. He has always been involved in scholarship, but in his first books one could see more of the enthusiasm of amateurism. Afterwards he has sharpened his pen more, as happens to all of us.”
Salgado regrets not having been able to meet the author of something in the blood at the last San Sebastián Fantastic and Horror Film Week. And he points out a possibility: that Skal may not be as widely read as “the social media bubble and posturing” suggest. “If you keep him in mind, it shows in what you write, and the mixture of rigor and enthusiasm with Skal’s foundation does not occur much. Neither here, nor in the United States,” he diagnoses.
Like Palmer, the co-author of Supernovas It also ends up highlighting the American’s prose. “Sometimes we forget that writing is a communicative act and also a creative act. An essay does not have to be a dry product where you limit yourself to writing one thing after another. Skal managed several records and was a very good writer. His books are meant to be read in one sitting, and they leave you wanting more,” he concludes.
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