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Old 06-07-2011, 09:08 PM   #173
TheMisfortuneTeller
Haunting Spirit
 
Join Date: Mar 2011
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The purloined cliché

Quote:
Originally Posted by Morthoron View Post
... the vampire has been invited into the room
Just an interesting (to me) aside about the vampire invitation business that you mention: It seems only too obvious that Professor Tolkien ripped off Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) for that scene in The Two Towers (1954) where Smeagol-Gollum crawls "head first" down a rock precipice -- "like a nasty crawling spider on a wall" -- following Frodo and Sam, just as Jonathan Harker had witnessed the Count emerging from a window over a "dreadful abyss" and then crawling "face down" the sides of the castle, "just as a lizard moves along a wall."

As much as we love to give Peter Jackson deserved grief for his use of purloined film clichés, it only seems fair to note where literary authors such as Professor Tolkien have succumbed to the same temptation.
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