Hopeless said:
rust said:
Loz said:
See, also, Theatre of Blood, which is very much Dr Phibes without Dr Phibes, but with the peerless Vincent Price.
Definitely recommended.
Yes, indeed.
Wasn't there a movie entitled something Raven which had the wife had apparently died and in fact she left her husband for a rival mage something only revealed near the end after the villain is defeated by the former husband who proves a better sorceror?
What do you think inspired my earlier post with the plot twist about the wife being alive, just desperate to get away from her boring husband? Same kind of plot; in mine, I just took away the superfluous third party and gave the wife the power of sorcery.
Also, the thing about necromancers is that I feel in the modern fantasy genre they're rather insulated as a profession, because all the necromantic stuff seems to be focusing on ghoulish grave-diggers reanimating cadavers and turning them into zombies.
Necromancy was originally just one of the Mancies - a means of divining answers, in this case by asking questions of the dead. Like oneiromancers and cartomancers, their job is the same as that of any of the usual oracles for hire - clients come up to them asking for guidance or the gods' blessings before a venture, the Mancy Boy draws his cards or channels a ghost or ancestor spirit or says "I'll sleep on it" and washes down a pint of acetylcholine and adrenochrome with his cheese and lobster pasty before retiring, and gives the client an answer, after getting the client's money.
The bit with the cadavers and reanimation comes more under the remit of medical magic - whether divine or sorcerous - and that comes under the profession of Thanatologist, specialising in death and funerary customs.
Divine Thanatologists would handle the corpses for burial and provide propitiation rites to ensure the deceased's journey to the afterlife. Their job is with the communities served by the living.
Sorcerous Thanatologists - Thanatomists? - are more liable to be obsessed with Death itself - its causes and, some day, its prevention. Their roots are in the study of medical anatomy by dissection and examination of cadavers, and their role is more that of the local Coroner or state Medical Examiner, with authority to conduct postmortem examinations and perform autopsies and necropsies on animals. (Also, traditionally, they have a duty to examine finds of artifacts, coins and gemstones to determine whether treasure trove law applies).
Which makes the villain of the above piece exceptionally scary, if he is painted as some sort of a failed medic, deranged by his wife's death, with some sorcery skills but - more frighteningly - a detailed knowledge of human anatomy and physiology to rival Hannibal Lecter. Someone who could size you up, measure your weight by your tread, and dose you
just enough to knock you out with a timed dose of anaesthetic to match your mass and metabolism, making sure you wake up at just the right time to see him looming over you, scalpel in hand ...
