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« on: November 18, 2009, 10:57:51 PM »
Ah, and so it begins--Love of LeviaLife!
From the point of metanarrative, this episode is very cool (or maybe it was the one before?) because we finally get a Jonathan-on-Grayson fanging sequence. Love how the actors played it, even though I'm sure Frid, at least, was squirming (given his oft-stated objection to the fanging scenes on principle--and the outrageousness of this particular setpiece in specific).
I would LOVE to know where and when DC claimed to have "hated Leviathans from the beginning just as much as the fans did." Even for him, that's EXTREME revisionism of established DS history. About on the level of Mao having Liu Shao-ch'i erased after his fall from various group photographs recording certain Party functions. But then, there never seemed any limits to DC's personal megalomania, particularly in the sphere of DS.
I love the design elements in our introduction to Haza, Oberon, and the Leviathan altar. (or the "cairn," as Julia always, rather oddly to my mind, called it.) Thinking of them now, I wonder whether Haza and Oberon were the actual ancestors of Uncle Fester Addams. I'd know that pasty skin, those sunken eyes, that crazed leer, and those long snake-like robes anywhere.
The aesthetic atmosphere here always makes me think of the drawings of Edward Gorey. Particularly in this scene with Barn in that gorgeous 1790s cape.
Angelique has a line in a later episode in which she describes the Leviathans as "creatures of the Underworld." That element is certainly present in how Haza and Oberon are depicted here. Their makeup may also hint at an episode in Lovecraft's tale, The Whisperer in Darkness. I think the main story that DC read to help fill in the elements of the Leviathan narrative must have been the Dunwich Horror.
vile serpentine hissing,
G.
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