Mummys are cool, but equally cool is the living dead. Seeing all these posts about death and the dead made me think about one of the most terrifying themes in literature, people giving inanimate things life. Frankenstein is obviously a good example. Another one that less people are familiar with is the story of the Golem, a legend that takes place in the 1600s. Basically the story is that the Rabbi of Prague, using mysticism, creates a Golem to protect the Jewish community from anti-semitism, but the Golem eventually gets out of control and has to be destroyed. There was an German silent film made about the legend in 1920 called Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How he came into the World). Here’s a picture from the film.
I dunno, whenever read these stories I can help thinking about our technological age, computers, robots, and how this fictional fear of unnatural life doesn’t actually seem quite so ridiculous. MIT is apparently working on personal robots with a human-like range of expressions. Is that creepy to anyone else?
-Lauren
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