If you cared to wager a guess as to the year the vibrator (yes, the sex toy), was invented, you may pick a date in the free-love 1960s. Perhaps you’d think the swinging ’70s, when women’s liberation really took off. Maybe even the 1980s, when battery-powered toys (of all sorts), really came into their own.
Try 100 years earlier. The vibrator was invented in 1880 — that’s crazy, right? Get ready for something crazier: Jonathan Pryce and the lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal are currently filming a movie (aptly titled Hysteria) about the toy/tool/medical device’s creation.
From The Geek Files:
Jonathan, who plays the doctor father of Maggie’s character said: “It’s set in 1880 and it’s based on fact. There are humorous elements, for sure, but ultimately it’s a film about female emancipation and liberation.”
Maggie told The Guardian earlier this year:
“I play a firecracker whose father is a doctor who is in the business of curing hysterical women … He cures them basically by getting them off and that actually happened. I end up having a sort of unexpected love affair with this guy who works for him, and who by mistake invents the vibrator.”
This movie has it all: geek cred in the form of Pryce (the star of Brazil, Tomorrow Never Dies and Pirates of the Caribbean), feminism, vibrators, and best of all, Maggie Gyllenhaal.
For a lower (way lower) budget geek fix, check out Bits in Pieces, a clever short film spoof that uses completely non-digital “special effects” to mimic disaster flick tropes.
From Underwire:
The low-fi video spoofs big Hollywood disaster movies like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow with “action scenes” depicting an earthquake (off-screen crew members shaking a table), traffic catastrophes (miniature cars and trains pulled by visible wires) and flaming comets (balls of yarn set on fire).”
The post also contains a “making of tutorial” video, so if you feel like getting your DIY on, have a look.
