Los Angeles (AFP)
What's more frightening about Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy and Dracula? The fact that these stars of horror movies have all been inspired by scientific phenomena, says the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, which inaugurated Thursday an exhibition on this theme on the occasion of Halloween.
"The natural horror story" allows visitors, for example, to use a lever to reproduce Luigi Galvani's electric experiment on frog legs, which inspired "Frankenstein" to novelist Mary Shelley. Nearby are exposed chains that hindered the monster camped on the screen by Boris Karloff in 1931.
"This work on electricity, intended to see if we could bring animals back to life by re-energizing them, was the starting point of + Frankenstein +", explains to AFP the director of the museum, Lori Bettison- Varga.
Also on display are the strips that wrapped the same Karloff in "The Mummy" of 1932, allowing comparison with authentic strips of an Egyptian mummy preserved in the collections of the Museum.
These Hollywood classics "are mostly inspired by nature and physics, and the imagination to create stories based on real things," said Ms. Bettison-Varga.
Dracula, scientific creature? Diseases spread in the 19th century, such as the deadly cholera epidemic that had marked his mother in Ireland, gave Bram Stoker the idea for the appearance of his vampire and the undead in his novel, reveals 'exposure.
The exhibition also features a silicone copy of the costume worn in 1954 by "The Strange Black Lake Creature". According to the organizers, the look of the creature was directly inspired by the discovery of a famous prehistoric fish, the coelacanth, which was thought extinct.
A fossil of the animal, which was once considered - wrongly - as the ancestor common to all terrestrial creatures, is there to testify.
When it was founded in 1913, the Museum was officially dedicated to history, science and art. As such, he received in the 1930s, from neighboring Universal Studios, a string of movie props, including a fork from the shooting of "The Fiancee Frankenstein".
© 2019 AFP