strange_complex

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Wow, thanks for the link to the Daisy Chainsaw video! It's great, and I love how they have taken advantage of the visual medium to echo Nosferatu's grainy, high-contrast black and white look, as well as very much capturing the Great Expectations vibe.

You're welcome! I hadn't known it existed until a few years ago and it just basically delights me. It really does have a silent feel.

Thanks also re the info on The Duchess of Malfi. I've never seen or read it, I'm afraid, but a skim of the Wikipedia page supports what you say.

I was lucky enough to see a local production in 2009 and I was interested in it partly because I'd glanced off it with Carter. (It didn't do enough with the Duke-as-werewolf, but it was still very much worth seeing.) A lot of Carter's stories are more than one thing at the same time. "Puss-in-Boots" uses the language of commedia dell' arte and opera buffa; the title figure of "The Erl-King" comes from Goethe, but the bird-transformations and the last line seem to come from the folk tradition of "The Juniper Tree." Even the more or less direct retellings have some kind of swerve in them, like the mother being the one to rescue the heroine at the end of "The Bloody Chamber" instead of her more traditional brothers. I agree with your description of riffs more than retellings. Sometimes they're remixes.

I never really wrote about it, but I saw Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) last year and really enjoyed it.