Psycho. #27

Should we cross oceans of time to rewatch childhood favourites?

Hi Caspar!

It being Halloween this week we chose to watch Coppola’s Dracula on iPlayer. A film which I watched many, many times between the ages of 10-12 and then never again until last night. I was shocked at how much I didn’t remember AT ALL, especially the parts with Sadie Frost. How could I not have remembered her? I loved her performance this time round. Had I memory holed her parts because I may have found her SEXUALITY (insert Jenna Maroney gif) intimidating when I was so young and I most likely preferred the more ‘yearning’ love between Winona and Dracs, which now many years later, I found a snooze. (Let’s just not speak of Keanu-who I often love) Is this a sign that I should rewatch every film I loved when I was young and see how and if my memories/feelings/perceptions have changed, perhaps it would tell on me in ways that a therapy session cannot! (I’ve never had therapy.) Or is that just too obvious, people change therefore our relation to art will change! What film from your childhood would you be most surprised by an opposite reaction to in your adulthood?

Hi questioner! What a lot is going on in this big, rambling, rather engaging question-paragraph! Weirdly, I experienced something similar upon watching Dracula for the first time around the age of 19-20, and then again more recently at the age of [cough, splutter]. I must have been a very conservative viewer indeed — I suppose I still am in some ways, although I try very hard to fight that instinct — because all that I had retained from Coppola’s Dracula was that it was ‘bad’. That is, that the performances were ridiculous, Dracula’s hair comical, the style ripe to the point of rottenness. What I looked for in films above all, I think, was plausibility and good taste: according to that worldview, misfiring accents and a hot, vamping style count as unforgivable sins.