DIVALLE CURIE writer of paranormal erotica
On Writing Autumn Moon
Anyone who's read my first rendition of Mina Harker's Diary will recognize the chapters of Autumn Moon. That first attempt was simply too ungainly. It needed to be split and rearranged. These are the chapters that I decided to put into the second collection.
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Now, I've been a nut for monster movies since I was a child. So, I decided that I need not limit my collection to literary works. I turned my research onto classic movies, as well—The Mummy, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Wolf Man and King Kong. For The Mummy, I had to stretch a bit to find my sexual adventures, but the others lent themselves beautifully. There are very definite, subtly erotic scenes in each of them. I only took these moments and embellished them, telling the stories that I felt sure the directors wanted to tell, but couldn't.
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This is why, unlike Mina Harker's Diary, the second collection includes both literary and cinematic sources. In some ways, I found the latter more difficult, since I had to interpret the spirit of the stories through a director's—rather than a writer's—vision. Directors, with their attention to background and lighting, costume and makeup, angle and position, tend to have a more holistic approach to storytelling than writers do.
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First in Autumn Moon comes The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells. This isn't at all a bad novel, but it's rife with Wells's hallmark cynicism and sardonic wit. I tried to capture some of this, as well as his distinctive leftist politics, in my chapters. Like Stevenson, Wells includes few female characters that enabled me to eroticize his story. The one woman of any depth is Janny Hall, who only appears at the beginning of the book and is profoundly un-erotic. So, I took Dr. Kemp's two-dimensional housemaid (who's called 'the housemaid' throughout the story) and fleshed her out into a genuine character. And I named her 'Janie' in deference to the aforementioned Mrs. Hall.
For all his sneer, Wells is capable of some wonderful turns of phrase. In Griffin's first conversation with Kemp, Wells uses the dialogue tag, 'said the Unseen'. And later, Griffin opines, "What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah?" I loved these so much that I titled my chapters from them. And more importantly, the Biblical Delilah reference inspired my development of Janie's character, and the plot arc of both chapters.
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Then I went to 1941, and the classic horror movie of that year, The Wolf Man. For all its flaws (and it has many), this film is remarkable on multiple levels—the transformation scenes, superb dialogue, very fine acting, and the curious absence of a full moon (virtually unheard-of in a werewolf movie!). Screenwriter Curt Siodmak had meant his story to depict a man's slow descent into insanity, and never meant his audience to know if Larry Talbot were a real werewolf or not. But Universal Studios overruled him, insisting on an actual monster for their monster movie. I tried to capture Siodmak's original intent as much as possible for my chapter. And I titled it for a term used in the oft-quoted werewolf poem: 'Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night can become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the Autumn moon is bright.' Obviously, I also used this for the new book's title.
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Then comes The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund in 1932. An interesting tale, I managed to get two chapters out of it. (For a time, I merged these into one, discarding the Mirror of Ardath Bey title and keeping Abduction of Ankhesenamon. I have since rethought this rethink, and separated them again.) By studying the making of the film, I learned that a whole sequence of Helen's past lives had been cut from the final release. I reinterpret these lost scenes and take advantage of a minor one—Ardath Bey's expulsion of his Nubian servant—to give them all sensuous import.
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Next is King Kong—what is regarded by film historians as the greatest monster movie ever made. Despite two remakes in 1976 and 2005, with their increasingly superior visual effects technologies, the original version in 1933 remains unsurpassed. This movie is the brainchild of Merian C. Cooper, who saw the symbolism of Kong as the decline and fall of masculinity in western civilization. My treatment tries to capture that same spirit.
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At first, I was a little uneasy about including King Kong in my collection. After all, it would be an adventure in bestiality, which I don't believe appeals to most women. But at the same time, there's an indisputably erotic moment between Ann and Kong that only the original film manages to capture properly. (I hadn't yet realized that Autumn Moon and Pas de Deux were essentially bestiality, too!) In discussing this matter with a lady friend, she convinced me that women don't really regard Kong as an ape, but only as an enormous man. Taking her word for it—and the precaution of never mentioning the intra-species aspects of the story—I went ahead with Ann Darrow's Nuptials. And I have to say that I'm happy with it.
From 1933, I then took a radical leap into 1954 and the cinematic hit of that year, Creature from the Black Lagoon. The scene I chose is unarguably one of the most erotic in cinema history, with Dr. Kay Lawrence swimming across the lagoon while the Creature swims in tandem underneath her. Film historians have long referred to this scene as the Pas de Deux, which was all the reason I needed to title my chapter thus. My principal concern for this story was to ensure that Kay never sees the Creature's face, because no woman could ever be horny or drunk enough to do him!
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Of all the stories I've ever read, few were as disappointing as Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. To be honest, I was expecting more from the book, and I don't know how it became a favorite. It does have some very poignant scenes which lend to artistic expression, and there's a mild level of creepiness to it. But it gets a bit farcical in places, too. Overall, I didn't find it a very impressive story.
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I chose to eroticize an early scene in Christine's dressing room (Christine's Voice), and a much later scene toward the end of the book (Don Juan Triumphant). Both involve bondage and discipline because...well, why not? And Christine's tortured love/dread relationship with Erik practically demands it. In my chapters, I try keeping to the spirit of Leroux's work by focusing on the maniacal passion of the Phantom—both for Christine and for music—and minimizing the absurdities of the story itself.
The most loyal cinematic treatment of The Phantom of the Opera is Lon Chaney's version from 1925—if you can disregard the chase scene at the end. The most artistic and beautiful rendition is Andrew Lloyd Webber's Broadway production, translated to the silver screen by Joel Schumacher in 2004. And there have been many others—the Claude Rains version of 1943, and the Herbert Lom version of 1962—that borrow the Phantom title, but make no effort to tell the actual story. But any rendition, in theater or cinema, is bound to be very different than the original novel. Leroux's book is simply too unlikely for any producer to faithfully recreate.
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So, there it is—the story of how Autumn Moon came to be.
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