upworthy

movies

Pop Culture

Bonnie Tyler reveals her 80's hit 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' is actually all about vampires

The song was originally called Vampires in Love.

Bonnie Tyler/Youtube, Nosferatu promo still

'Total Eclipse of the Heart' music video (left) Robert Eggers' Nosferatu (right)

Bonnie Tyler’s epic power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is a staple of rock n’ roll, but not many know that its actual origin stems from musical theatre. Vampire-centric musical theatre, no less. The year was 1982. Tyler had only recently acquired her distinctive rasp as a result of nodule removal surgery, and was looking to put the voice to good use by signing with record label Sony and aiming to transition from country rock to rock.

In a 2023 interview with The Guardian, Tyler shared how she had been inspired to work with composer and lyricist Jim Steinman after seeing Meat Loaf perform ‘Bat Out of Hell,’ which Steinman wrote and produced, on the BBC. Her reps looked at her like she was crazy (or “barmy,” as the Welsh singer put it in the interview) but nonetheless, the meeting was eventually arranged.

And Steinman, who was unsurprisingly won over by Tyler's raw and gritty voice after she sang a couple tunes for him, had just the song to bestow upon his new collaborator—a little ditty inspired by the lunar eclipse he had started writing for a prospective musical version of the 1922 vampire film Nosferatu, titled The Dream Engine, years prior, but never finished. It had originally been intended for Meatloaf, who had lost his voice (something he would famously lament for years to come) and was aptly titled Vampires In Love.


media1.giphy.com

"If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in [the] dark. And so I figured 'Who's ever going to know; it's Vienna!' And then it was just hard to take it out,” Steinman would reveal in an interview with Playbill.

I mean, not much argument here. “Once upon a time, there was light in my life/now there's only love in the dark.” C’mon. Plus, there are apparent vampiric themes in the song’s dazzling melodramatic music video. “We shot the video in a frightening gothic former asylum in Surrey. The guard dogs wouldn’t set foot in the rooms downstairs where they used to give people electric shock treatment,” Tyler shared.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Thanks in no small part to Tyler’s unforgettable vocal performance necessary of a song like that, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” went on to be a No. 1 hit and sit at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks in 1983, in addition to earning a Grammy nomination for best pop vocal performance, solidifying its rightful place as an iconic 80s power ballad.

Plus, Total Eclipse of the Heart did eventually end up in a vampire musical in the late ‘90s and 2000s, when Steinman debuted Dance of the Vampires, a stage adaptation of the 1967 Roman Polanski film The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Musical theatre tends to be fairly alienating. Not everybody can get behind the overly pronounced articulation and "nasal" tone placement that is often associated with the genre. But in actuality, it encompasses a wide range of vocal styles. Plus, it’s all about emotional builds and epic storytelling, which lends itself nicely to virtually any genre, but particularly rock. I mean, just look at Queen’s discography. So it seems very appropriate that “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which incorporates a variety of both elements—theatricality, grit, shamelessness, romance, an oh-so satisfying key change—would go on to be so timeless. In many ways, the best art is an amalgamation of many different sources of inspirations, formed to create something new. This is a great example of that.

From Your Site Articles
movies
Culture

Pamela Anderson surprises fans with her high-brow film taste

"I don’t think people kind of expect me to be such a…cinephile"

www.flickr.com
Pamela Anderson 1994 | The post Pamela Anderson 1994 appeare… | Flickr

It’s a good time to be Pamela Anderson. The former Baywatch star recently earned a Golden Globe nomination—the first of a 35-year career—for her starring role in the Gia Coppola drama The Last Showgirl. And now she’s boosted her hipster street cred by visiting the Criterion Closet, showcasing some of her favorite films—and surprising a number of fans with her "cinephile" taste.

A little background for the uninitiated: The Criterion Collection is a home-video distribution company whose tasteful box sets and restorations have become synonymous with the high-brow. With interview web series Criterion Closet Picks, they invite famous actors and filmmakers into, yes, an actual closet filled floor to ceiling with their own releases. The guests pick titles off the shelves, diving into their influences.

Anderson was thrilled to be there—so much that she decided to throw out her curated list and simply "go crazy."

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

"I’m here in the Criterion Closet, which is a dream come true," she told the camera, before picking out films that would impress any college cinema professor. These include a handful of French staples: the 1969 psychological thriller La Piscine, directed by Jacques Deray; the 1960 drama La Vérité, helmed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring Brigitte Bardot; and Jean Luc-Godard’s 1960 crime-drama Breathless.

The latter even inspired a fashion choice. "[The] reason I cut my hair into a pixie cut was Jean Seberg," she said, name-checking one of the film’s stars. "Thought it would grow out in a few months. It took me a good couple years to get my hair back after I decided to do that." Also of note on her list: David Lynch’s surreal 1986 neo-noir mystery Blue Velvet and David Lean’s 1955 romantic comedy Summertime, which she noted she’d "love to remake."

The interview gave Anderson the chance to outline the depth of her movie knowledge. "I’m so thrilled to be here and so happy to be invited here because I don’t think people kind of expect me to be such a…cinephile," she said. "Can I say that? I don’t know if I’m that, but I’m definitely a movie lover." (She is definitely allowed to say that.)

Anderson joins a prestigious Criterion interview club that includes Kevin Smith, Francis Ford Coppola, Janelle Monáe, Bill Hader, Barry Jenkins, Ari Aster, Charlie Day, Willem Dafoe, and even musicians like St. Vincent and Ben Gibbard. You could spend a whole day exploring the Closet wing of their site—and if you do, make sure you check out Anderson’s full list.

The fan response to Anderson’s interview was fascinating. "Pamela Anderson…in large glasses…talking about Hepburn and Schneider….i need a fainting couch," one user wrote. "Pamela Anderson turning out to be a massive cinephile who drops the Koker Trilogy in her @Criterion Closet video just made my entire year," added another. Perhaps the most direct: "Pamela Anderson knows more about cinema than you ever will."

In a December interview with Variety, Anderson talked about how starring in The Last Showgirl helped refine her chops—and fulfill a personal "dream."

"I was always very curious about the craft of acting, but I didn’t have to apply myself when I was running around in a bathing suit on Baywatch," she said. "I was curious about it—I would be sitting on the floor of Samuel French, reading Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill plays. I didn’t know how to get from there to there, but I just had this dream. I always kept it a secret that I could be more than I was doing."

pamela anderson
Pop Culture

Finally, someone explains why we all need subtitles when watching TV

No, you're probably not losing your hearing.

Vox/YouTube

Finally, someone explains why we all need subtitles.

It seems everyone needs subtitles nowadays in order to "hear" the television. This is something that has become more common over the past decade and it's caused people to question if their hearing is going bad or if perhaps actors have gotten lazy with enunciation.

So if you've been wondering if it's just you who needs subtitles in order to watch the latest marathon-worthy show, worry no more. Vox video producer Edward Vega interviewed dialogue editor Austin Olivia Kendrick to get to the bottom of why we can't seem to make out what the actors are saying anymore. It turns out it's technology's fault, and to get to how we got here, Vega and Kendrick took us back in time.

They first explained that way back when movies were first moving from silent film to spoken dialogue, actors had to enunciate and project loudly while speaking directly into a large microphone. If they spoke and moved like actors do today, it would sound almost as if someone were giving a drive-by soliloquy while circling the block. You'd only hear every other sentence or two.

But with today's technology, microphones are so small they can be strapped just about anywhere on an actor. This allows the actor to move about the set freely and speak at a normal volume without worrying that their words won't be picked up.

So then why can't we hear them? Turns out it's super complicated…and also not.

"A lot of people will ask, 'Why don't you just turn the dialogue up?' Like, 'Just turn it up.' And...if only it were that simple," Kendrick said before explaining, "If you have your dialogue that's going to be at the same volume as an explosion that immediately follows it, the explosion is not going to feel as big. You need that contrast in volume in order to give your ear a sense of scale."

Sure, you may be thinking, well that kinda explains it, but why do the music and other cinematic noises sound like they're beating on your eardrum while the dialogue sounds like the actors are whispering every line? That doesn't seem very balanced. There's more to it, and again, it falls back onto technology.

In the video, they explain how our televisions are too thin to hold large speakers facing in the correct direction, and until this video, it didn't dawn on me that the speakers to my television are indeed in the back. No wonder we can't hear. The actors are quite literally talking to our walls.

And there's more. Check out the full explanation in the video:

While it may be a confusing trend, there's a reason for it as Kendrick explains. And, some experts like the World Literacy Foundation note that watching television and movies with subtitles is especially beneficial for children. Studies have shown that simply putting on subtitles improves literacy for kids, and many actors support the practice. This is good news for those worried about the literacy crisis in America.

If subtitles help us "hear" and improve literacy, then I'm all for them.

This article originally appeared last year.

From Your Site Articles
subtitles
Pop Culture

'Wicked' author reveals how one line in 'The Wizard of Oz' inspired Elphaba and Glinda's story

Gregory Maguire says he "fell down to the ground" laughing when the idea hit him.

Public domain

Gregory Maguire was inspired by a line in the original 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz."

Have you ever watched a movie or read a book or listened to a piece of music and wondered, "How did they come up with that idea?" The creative process is so enigmatic even artists themselves don't always know where their ideas come from, so It's a treat when we get to hear the genesis of a brilliant idea straight from the horse's mouth. If you've watched "Wicked" and wondered where the idea for the friendship between Elphaba (the Wicked Witch) and Glinda (the Good Witch) came from, the author of the book has shared the precise moment it came to him.

The hit movie "Wicked" is based on the 20-year-old hit stage musical, which is based on the novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" written by Gregory Maguire. While the musical is a simplified version of the 1995 book, the basic storyline—the origins of the two witches from "The Wizard of Oz"—lies at the heart of both. In an interview with BBC, Maguire explained how Elphaba and Glinda's friendship popped into his head.

Maguire was visiting Beatrix Potter's farm in Cumbria, England, and thinking about "The Wizard of Oz," which he had loved as a child and thought could be an interesting basis for a story about evil.

"I thought 'alright, what do we know about 'The Wizard of Oz' from our memories,'" he said. "We have the house falling on the witch. What do we know about that witch? All we know about that witch is that she has feet. So I began to think about Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West…

"There is one scene in the 1939 film where Billie Burke comes down looking all pink and fluffy, and Margaret Hamilton is all crawed and crabbed and she says something like, 'I might have known you'd be behind this, Glinda!' This was my memory, and I thought, now why is she using Glinda's first name? They have known each other. Maybe they've known each other for a long time. Maybe they went to college together. And I fell down onto the ground in the Lake District laughing at the thought that they had gone to college together."

In "Wicked," Glinda and the Wicked Witch, Elphaba, meet as students at Shiz University, a school of wizardry. They get placed as roommates, loathe each other at first, but eventually become best friends. The story grows a lot more complicated from there (and the novel goes darker than the stage play), but it's the character development of the two witches and their relationship with one another that force us to examine our ideas about good and evil.


- YouTubeyoutu.be

Maguire also shared with the Denver Center for Performing Arts what had inspired him to use the "Wizard of Oz" characters in the first place.

"I was living in London in the early 1990’s during the start of the Gulf War. I was interested to see how my own blood temperature chilled at reading a headline in the usually cautious British newspaper, the Times of London: 'Sadaam Hussein: The New Hitler?' I caught myself ready to have a fully formed political opinion about the Gulf War and the necessity of action against Sadaam Hussein on the basis of how that headline made me feel. The use of the word Hitler – what a word! What it evokes! When a few months later several young schoolboys kidnapped and killed a toddler, the British press paid much attention to the nature of the crime. I became interested in the nature of evil, and whether one really could be born bad. I considered briefly writing a novel about Hitler but discarded the notion due to my general discomfort with the reality of those times. But when I realized that nobody had ever written about the second most evil character in our collective American subconscious, the Wicked Witch of the West, I thought I had experienced a small moment of inspiration. Everybody in America knows who the Wicked Witch of the West is, but nobody really knows anything about her. There is more to her than meets the eye."

Authors and artists—and their ideas—help hold a mirror up to humanity for us to see and reflect on who we are, and "Wicked" is one of those stories that makes us take a hard look at what we're seeing in that mirror. Thanks, Gregory Maguire, for launching us on a collective journey that not only entertains but has the potential to change how we see one another.

From Your Site Articles
wicked
Trending Stories