ABSTRACT

Drawing on Monster Studies, this paper develops its own syncretic theoretical approach to focus on recent transformations of Beowulf’s archetypal plot of the Hero Overcoming the Monster in film discourse, as part of the broad popularity that Beowulf still enjoys in different art forms. Significantly preceded by McTiernan’s The 13th Warrior (1999), an attempt to adapt Michael Crichton’s literary ambition to make Beowulf’s story appealing to modern audiences, the new century opens with a revisionist approach to it in Hartley’s No Such Thing (2001), whose heroine empathises with the monster. While crude adaptations such as Lyon’s Grendel and McCain’s Outlander (2008) still abound, Gunnarson’s Beowulf & Grendel (2005) and Zemeckis’s Beowulf (2007) enhance the story by focalising it from Grendel’s mother’s perspective without renouncing its grotesque and sublime elements. Similar elements are likewise present in monster movies which are not ostensibly Beowulf adaptations, such as Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), Bayona’s A Monster Calls (2016), and del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), yet whose monster discourse is sustained by ingredients ultimately deriving from the Anglo-Saxon poem: the monster as a tester of moral fibre, the cultural syncretism which gives sociohistorical meaning to the alien entity, and its human kinship.

摘要

借鉴怪物研究，本文开发了自己的融合理论方法，重点关注贝奥武夫电影话语中英雄战胜怪物的原型情节的近期变化，作为贝奥武夫在不同艺术形式中仍然享有广泛知名度的一部分。早在麦克蒂尔南的《第十三勇士》（1999 年）之前，试图改编迈克尔·克莱顿的文学野心，使贝奥武夫的故事吸引现代观众，新世纪以修正主义的方式在哈特利的《没有这样的事》（2001 年）中拉开序幕，其女主人公感同身受与怪物。而粗略的改编，如里昂的格伦德尔和麦凯恩的欧蓝德(2008) 仍然比比皆是，Gunnarson 的Beowulf & Grendel (2005) 和 Zemeckis 的Beowulf (2007) 通过从 Grendel 母亲的角度聚焦故事而不放弃其怪诞和崇高的元素来增强故事。类似的元素同样存在于表面上不是贝奥武夫改编的怪物电影中，例如雷德利斯科特的普罗米修斯（2012）、巴约纳的怪物召唤（2016）和德尔托罗的水形物（2017），但其怪物话语是由最终源自盎格鲁-撒克逊诗歌的成分：作为道德纤维测试者的怪物，赋予外星实体社会历史意义的文化融合，以及它的人类血缘关系。