Over the the Philly Inquirer, Tirdad Derakhshani takes the opportunity to castigate the book and movie for one particular point: what’s up with making the albino the villain? “Does Silas really need to be an albino?” asks San Francisco dermatologist Vail Reese, who says the monk’s other attributes are more than enough to account for his “repugnant wickedness.”
Reese says the imbalance is striking. “Since 1960, there have been 67 movies that have featured the Evil Albino,” while barely a handful have tried to give albino characters a positive spin. Most of those movies – like Cold Mountain, The Time Machine, The Princess Bride, Disturbing Behavior, Hacks, Dark City – and The Matrix: Reloaded – aren’t exactly obscure.
So what’s the answer? Well one guy, Dennis Hurley, has offered up an antidote in The Albino Code, a 12-minute parody that tells Brown’s story from Silas’ point of view. In the film, Hurley’s character, Wilas, is asked to kill two people and retrieve a “sacred keystone.” But he’s not complaining overmuch because the actor (who has albinism) has a small part in the upcoming movie RUNNING WITH SCISSORS as “a regular guy who happens to have albinism.”