r/rhps • u/PablomentFanquedelic • 5h ago
The Rider Haggard Picture Show—parallels to the Victorian novel She: A History Of Adventure?
For context, H. Rider Haggard was a British author of colonial adventure fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most famously King Solomon's Mines and She (which eventually ended up getting a crossover).
Anyway, She reflects sexual and gendered anxieties of its era and hasn't aged perfectly. But the basic plot is that two travelers (at least one of whom appears to be a virgin) are on a trip to revisit their past when they get captured by a mysterious, insular group of degenerate foreigners who take them to meet a strange leader with extensive biological expertise, control over life and death, and uncanny powers of seduction. Despite the indiscriminate use of seduction as a means of control, this leader is in love with one specific man, who was previously a dead puppet but has recently come to life. The leader becomes violently protective of this lover, even going so far as to kill potential rivals and to force the man into eternal sexual slavery. Fortunately, the leader dies during a strange ritual gone awry, and the travelers escape. Oh, and somewhere along the line, an attempt at cannibalism occurs.
Seriously, I have wondered for over a decade whether Richard O'Brien was deliberately referencing She or whether the parallels were unintentional. Does anyone else here have thoughts on this?
