(Updated in September 2021)
12. Dracula (1931- dir. Tod Browning)
Before Tod Browning’s Dracula was released on Valentine’s Day, 1931, no one knew what a “horror movie” was. The term hadn’t entered the lexicon yet. Afterward, it was just a matter of time. If a single film can be designated ground zero for horror’s stranglehold on cinema, it is Dracula. This wasn’t the first supernatural monster movie—it wasn’t even the first Dracula picture— but it was the first that was so massively successful it sent studios scrambling to emulate it. On a historical level, no one argues the importance of Dracula. Bela Lugosi’s performance is as iconic as any in Hollywood history. Any time a kid dons a black cape and plastic fangs on Halloween or some joker puts on a dire Hungarian accent to intone “I vant to suck your blahd!” they’re paying tribute to Lugosi, not the vampire in Bram Stoker’s novel, who was gaunt, repellent, and hairy.
Dracula likely would have suffered had it exceeded its 75-minute run time, as evidenced by the 104-minute Spanish-language version produced simultaneously, which wears out its welcome despite George Melford’s superior camerawork. As it stands, Browning’s Dracula is tight and creepy, flaunts two iconic performances, and cemented horror’s place in cinema. It is a classic.
Mixed reviews be damned; Dracula was a massive blockbuster for Universal. Not knowing how long the public’s zeal for supernatural thrillers would last, the studio didn’t waste a second in following it up. Before 1931 was over, studio chief Carl Laemmle, Jr., had acquired another stage play adapted from a classic Gothic horror novel.
Rewritten for the screen byDracula-stage-play scribe John L. Balderston, Frankenstein made the writer’s adaptation of Stoker seem positively faithful. Gone is the chatty, philosophical creature in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 novel. Gone is the arctic wraparound story. Gone is the monster’s vaguely alchemic creation. Gone is his demand for a mate (but not for long). In are a slew of elements soon to become monster movie staples: a hulking, unspeaking beast; his animation by lightning; the “hunchback” assistant; the angry villagers with their torches and rakes. Director James Whale, who was none too thrilled about his monstery project or the horrific path on which it set his career, brings an artist’s eye to the film’s subtly distorted design.
Some aspects of Frankenstein are lazy: its abrupt conclusion, Frankenstein Senior’s tiresome comic relief (how did such a buffoon sire such a scary mad genius?), the noticeable wrinkles in the sky backdrop during the climactic monster hunt, the way Frankenstein survives his bone-shattering fall from the windmill. Many are unforgettable: Fritz’s brain manhandling, the dizzying creation sequence, the Monster’s first appearance in a series of unnerving jump cuts, his tragic encounter with Little Maria, the brilliant parallel shots of the Monster and his creator glaring at each other through the windmill’s spinning gears.
Most important is the film’s central performance. Boris Karloff created an almost entirely sympathetic creature. Despite his lumbering gait and iconic necro-make- up (designed in collaboration by Whale and Universal’s resident mad scientist, Jack Pierce), there is an undeniable sadness in those half-mast eyes, making for a particularly poetic “villain” at the center of a world full of fear-addled, bloodthirsty villagers and mad doctors. Colin Clive, as the title doc, also proves a more interesting monster-foil than Edward Van Sloan did in Dracula (Van Sloan is relegated to a minor role in Whale’s film). Most will acknowledge that there was oneFrankensteinfilm that topped the first one, but the original, along with Dracula, formed the lab table upon which all future monster movies would be built.
Universal’s monster movie success in 1931 was not lost on other studios. Paramount was determined to outdo Dracula and Frankenstein by treating gruesome subject matter with a greater degree of respect and stronger production values while still delivering the horror goods. The results are, in my opinion, the greatest pure horror movie ever made.
Paramount stuck close to Universal’s formula. Creepy 19th century literature— Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde— provided the source material. Wally Westmore followed the lead of Universal’s Jack Pierce by designing a memorable monster, and trumped him by developing one that subtly devolves over the course of the film. However, the inconsistent plotting and attention to detail of Universal’s films is nowhere in sight. Director Rouben Mamoulian is more sure-handed than Browning or Whale and even more inventive. He uses every trick available to animate Stevenson’s story: jarring first- person camera perspectives, bizarre montages, clever special effects utilizing lights and filters to render Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde seamlessly. But Mamoulian’s secret weapons are Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins.
As delightful as Lugosi, Karloff, Clive, and Frye’s performances are in the Universal horrors, campy, overly theatrical acting generally marks those films. March’s performance in the title roles of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is staggering. He covers an unbelievable range of moods without ever losing sight of the distinct natures of his character(s). He plays Jekyll as a smart, witty, frustrated, and desperately randy fellow, who while deeply conflicted about his own nature, really only wants to do good. When he is in Hyde mode, there isn’t a damn good thing about him, though his initial wicked playfulness has a certain charisma. As the movie unfurls, the comic energy fades from Hyde’s evil games until he becomes utterly terrifying. As great as Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster are as horror icons, I doubt any modern audience would consider either of them scary. That isn’t the case with March’s Hyde. His performance is all the more disturbing for the conflicting feelings it rouses in the viewer: one moment he’s making us giggle by kicking a bearskin rug; the next he’s strangling us into silence by terrorizing poor Ivy. Miriam Hopkins’s performance in that role is just as powerful as March’s. Most comparable roles for women in horror movies required little more than a lot of screaming and fainting. Hopkins makes Ivy a living, breathing woman: humorous, wickedly sexy (this pre-code film is notorious for one overtly erotic scene later heavily edited for certain re-releases), heartbreaking, realistic at a level rarely present in movies from the thirties.
After the smash, genre-making adaptation of Dracula, and a version of Frankenstein about to hit theaters, Carl Laemmle, Jr., apparently assumed that the future of Universal horror would remain linked with literary classics. And when it comes to classic horror literature, the name Poe rises above all others. So a version of one of the master’s stories seemed a natural fit for Universal’s barely begun horror cycle. So desperate was the need for more horror product that a mere month was scheduled to shoot the damn thing. Director Robert Florey ended up on the project as a sort of consolation prize when he was moved off of Frankenstein, and three months to the day after the release of that monster, Murders in the Rue Morgue appeared.
If anything, it was more lurid than the two movies that preceded it. Bela Lugosi is back (like his director, he failed to stick with the Frankenstein project and ended up here), and this time he’s a particularly mad scientist who somehow seeks to prove the theory of evolution by injecting women with gorilla blood. It sounds silly, but plays out sadistically and Karl Freund's background in German Expressionism oozes through his disturbed cinematography. The intentional humor is strong too, particularly in a gag in which three men give their interpretations of monkey language. Granted, Rue Morgue is not as quietly spooky as Dracula, as grand and emotionally powerful as Frankenstein, or as iconic as either, but it is still a very worthy third chapter in Universal horror’s sound-era.
16. Freaks (1932 – dir. Tod Browning)
MGM had a growing reputation as the most prestigious studio in Hollywood, so it is ironic that its first talky horror picture is still regarded as one of cinema’s greatest disgraces. Contemporary charges against Freaks focus on Tod Browning’s exploitation of the film’s sundry circus performers. The original backlash was less politically astute. Audiences found such little Harry Earles marrying full-sized Olga Baclanova—not to mention the film’s
spectacles as conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, “half boy” Johnny Eck, “human skeleton” Peter Robinson, “living torso” Prince Randian, “pinheads” Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow, and the concept of themes of castration and, errr, chicken-lady surgery—revolting.
Browning’s film is dicey no matter how you shake it. Although there is no question that its villains are two “normal” characters—Baclanova’s gold-digging Cleopatra and her co-conspiring strongman boyfriend Hercules—and the “freaks” are the underdog heroes, Browning does invite us to gawp at them like sideshow spectators. That being said, it is hard not to be amazed by Randian’s ability to roll and light a cigarette without the use of hands, and though the cast was clearly chosen for their bodies rather than their acting skills, Eck and the Hilton sisters give fine performances (Earles is no natural, though).
A former sideshow performer himself, Browning is also more personally invested in this material than Dracula, which really shines through in the emotional gravity of Cleopatra’s horrific treatment of Earles's Hans and her cruel explosion during their wedding banquet. And though Browning’s initial depiction of his sideshow performers (friends of his from his own carnival days) as childlike sweethearts is patronizing, he empowers them ultimately by allowing them to take revenge on their tormentors. Still the sight of them crawling through the rain and mud like animals on their way to the kill stirs further ambivalent feelings: it is dehumanizing to our heroes, yet rivetingly shot and staged. Perhaps the true villains of Freaks are we the viewers.
17. White Zombie (1932- dir. Victor Halperin)
Maybe it was because Dracula was a bit of an albatross, but Bela Lugosi always contended that his greatest role was Murder Legendre in White Zombie. Lugosi’s delightfully named zombie master hasn’t had Dracula’s impact, but the actor does vivify him with even greater Mephistophelian menace than he brought to the count. White Zombie is the first major zombie film of any note, though contemporary genre fans might find it lacking. This film features the voodoo variety of walking dead familiar to E.C. Comics readers rather than the sci-fi brain-eaters George Romero invented decades later. The film seems to be making some hazy commentary on the evils of slavery, though the fact that no one is galvanized to defeat Legendre until he mesmerizes a white woman (hence, “white zombie”) is typical of its unapologetically racist era.
Though the film has been criticized for its acting and plot, director Victor Halperin crafts a pungent atmosphere. The dank odor of German Expressionism is all over this film, with its weird shadows, skeletal graveyards, and floating, disembodied eyes. Definitely slow moving, White Zombie is either hypnotic or boring depending on ones sensibilities. I opt for the former. The soundtrack, which includes pieces by Mussorgsky, Borch, and Wagner, as well as an original chant by Guy Bevier Williams, is superb.
The team that would soon bring you King Kong conducts a sort of jungle thriller dress rehearsal by adapting Richard Connell’s classic short story about a psycho big game hunter who believes the biggest game walks on two legs and does crossword puzzles. The Most Dangerous Game is a superb macabre adventure with a bloody shark attack, a jungle citadel as creepy as Dracula’s castle, and a truly grotesque trophy room full of preserved people parts. The exterior sets were so cool that director Ernest B. Schoedsack and producer Merian C. Cooper reused them for King Kong. Much of the cast would also find themselves back to work for the big ape. Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong play a plausibility-stretching pair of siblings and Noble Johnson appears as the long-lost brother of Karloff in The Old Dark House. Leslie Banks is the oily, Mephistophelean hunter. There’s even an unexpected underlying message about the barbarity of hunting. No giant ape necessary.
19. The Old Dark House (1932- dir. James Whale)
Whether he liked it or not (not), James Whale would forever be branded a monster wrangler after the gargantuan success of Frankenstein. Whale longed to bring more personal stuff like the World War I epic The Road Back to the screen. Universal insisted he give them another spook show starring Karloff. Whale biographer James Curtis notes that the director “went about the business of shooting [The Old Dark House] as quietly as possible,” implying he wasn’t too thrilled about the assignment.
That may have been the case, but the film is clearly a more personal project than Frankenstein. A bit of a snob when it came to his countrymen (he daily broke filming to host Brits-only afternoon teas), Whale loads the cast with a stellar crop of English actors: Charles Laughton as a blustery knight, Ernest Thesiger as the neurotic head of the household, Eva Moore as his Bible-thumping sister, and of course, Karloff as the Lurch-like butler Morgan (though Chas Addams always insisted his character was not based on Karloff’s).
More significantly, Whale’s droll wit is given greater range in The Old Dark House, and it may be the first horror/comedy to play to a more sophisticated audience than sillier stuff such as The Cat and the Canary and The Bat Whispers. American Lilian Bond is hilarious as Laughton’s hot footed, flapper gal pal Gladys. The Old Dark House is not merely good for a laugh; in one absolutely chilling sequence, Moore’s haggard face is reflected in various surfaces, growing more and more distorted as she rants at negligee-clad Gloria Stuart. The reveal of Moore and Thesiger’s insane 102-year old brother, played by actor Elspeth Dudgeon, is just as unsettling.
20. The Mummy (1932- dir. Karl Freund)
With the genre-galvanizing Dracula and Frankenstein beneath his belt, Carl Laemmle, Jr., set his sights beyond 18th century Gothic lit and schemed to cash in on the current wave of Egyptian fever sparked by the opening of King Tut’s tomb. The result may have been original in name, but The Mummy does owe a heavy debt to Dracula. Both films star an undying, coffin lounging creature who mixes with aristocracy in order to infiltrate their ranks and make off with the lady of his fancy (both films even use the same passage from Swan Lake for theme music!). Whereas Dracula seemed to mostly crave Mina as a snack, Imhotep’s (Boris Karloff) intentions are intensely romantic. He knowingly commits a fatal sacrilege in order to resurrect his dead love, Princess Ankh-es-en-amon (Zita Johann), and is mummified and buried alive for his crime. Revived by an ancient curse (aren’t all curses ancient?), he crosses eons to find his reincarnated lady friend... so he can kill her and have her join him in eternity. Romance Universal horror style.
Karloff’s performance in The Mummy is more slow burn than blazing passion, which suits the desiccated ghoul he portrays. Yet there are still moments of real fire, as when he shows the princess images of their past in the reflection of an enchanted pool. The mummification flashback is among the most disquieting scenes in classic horror. Karloff and Johann make a most memorable duo. The Egyptian tomb set design easily beats any other set in a classic Universal horror production, as does the opening sequence, in which Bramwell Fletcher reads a bit from the Scroll of Thoth and goes mad as the Mummy goes “for a little walk.”
21. Island of Lost Souls (1932- dir. Erle C. Kenton)
Although Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was an Academy Award-winning success for Paramount, the studio was not particularly interested in becoming another horror grind house like Universal. A full year passed before the studio released another such picture, and like Jekyll and Hyde—and Freaks, which it resembles in a number of ways—the studio’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau was beset with controversy. In the U.K., where animal cruelty was a big cinematic no-no, Island of Lost Souls was banned for its themes of vivisection, even though we never actually see any such thing in the film. Wells disdained the picture, feeling it degenerated his allegorical novel into a crass monster movie.
Actually, Wells’s anti-imperialism message makes the transition from novel to film fairly well, and director Erle C. Kenton doesn’t spend much time ogling his man-beasts. The focus of the piece is Moreau, played with unctuous self- satisfaction by Charles Laughton. Without Frankenstein’s inner-discord or Jekyll’s chemical-induced madness, Moreau is the most unequivocally evil mad scientist of his era. While the monsters in Universal’s films were generally conflicted, few were more inherently sympathetic than the creatures in Lost Souls, brought into pitiful existence by Moreau to be tortured and controlled. Their climactic monster riot is as satisfying as the similar scene in Freaks, and it zaps the film out of its muggy lethargy: Kenton’s camera grows more active, the monsters lunge at the viewer in horrific close-ups, and Moreau is dispatched gruesomely in his own House of Pain.
22. The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933- dir. Michael Curtiz)
23. King Kong (1933- dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)
No monster movie before it and few since have been as ambitious as King Kong. It is an ocean voyage/jungle adventure/dinosaur rampaging/New York- trashing/giant gorilla movie with some of the greatest visual effects of the pre- computer age, courtesy of stop-motion wizard Willis O’Brien. Merian C. Cooper poured all of his experiences as an air force pilot and Jackass-style wildlife photographer, who’d risk being eaten by a tiger to get the magic shot, into Kong. Cooper and co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack’s scope is panoramic. The film is part Island of Lost Souls-style jungle romp and part Wax Museum-style urban jaunt.
Unlike the makers of those movies, the Kong crew exploits its environments completely. Following an atmosphere-rich ocean voyage seasoned with Max Steiner’s spooky score, we travel deep into the jungle (unfortunately, the offensive depiction of the island’s natives will make the Skull Island sequence hard to stomach for anyone with a conscience), a menagerie of dinosaurs, and the biggest, baddest ape in cinemadom. Then we move to Manhattan, where Kong goes on a midtown murder spree in search of the little blonde lady of his dreams that leads him to a fateful showdown atop the Empire State Building. Kong is not quite as sympathetic as some might recall him to be, but he is certainly more so than the white hunters who drag him from his natural environment to be ogled by the upper crust.
Despite the film’s racism and sexism, modern viewers may view its white men as the villains, and the fact that a woman, Ruth Rose, finished off the script with a great deal of character development makes me want to believe that it was not totally unintentional even though it probably was. Carl Denham famously declares “it wasn't the airplanes...it was beauty killed the beast,” but we know that isn’t true, and Denham bears sole responsibility for the monster’s sad death.
24. The Ghoul (1933- dir. T. Hayes Hunter)
Just two years after scoring smashes with Dracula and Frankenstein, Universal Pictures was already experiencing hard times. The studio all but ceased functioning throughout the first months of 1933, laying off employees and putting contracts on hold (though the studio would get itself together in time to release the summer-season hit Invisible Man). Despite the overseas situation, Gaumont Studios was making Britain’s first significant bid to capitalize on America’s horror fad. The result is a false start; it would take England 25 years to fully establish a unique horror vision and set the genre’s standard for the subsequent decade. Nevertheless, The Ghoul is a good movie, though one that might have been terrific with better orchestrated acting and crisper editing.
Director T. Hayes Hunter follows the Universal format pretty faithfully, using several of the studio’s stars on loan, fashioning a fairly memorable creature in the speechless Frankenstein Monster tradition, appropriating the Egyptian iconography of the previous year’s Mummy, and indulging wholeheartedly in the kind of German-Expressionist shadow play that distinguished all of Universal’s horror efforts to date. Professor Morlant (Boris Karloff) is a dying Egyptologist who insists on being entombed with a rare jewel, the “Eternal Light”. He vows to his servant Laing (Karloff’s recent Old Dark House co-star Ernest Thesiger) that he will return from the dead if anyone swipes the jewel from his dead paw. Someone does, otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.
The premise is pretty decent, refurbishing bits of Universal’s past hits, as well as paying homage to classic ghost stories such as “The Golden Arm”. The talky, lumpy script by Frank King, who also wrote the novel and co-wrote the play on which this film was based, is no great shakes. The long stretch between Karloff’s entombment and his inevitable return is bloated with a lot of gabbing from grating characters. A product of the silent era, Hunter apparently had trouble adapting his style to sound film. The actors all bellow their lines as if they’re playing to the balcony.
The director’s way with a camera, however, is beyond reproach; his work is more inventive, fluid, and purposefully gloomy than that of Browning in Dracula or Whale inFrankenstein. His use of dancing shadows and bold framing is remarkable. His experiments with darkness are audacious, even if they’re not always completely successful: some images are so black it’s impossible to figure out what’s happening on screen.
There are also some nice, signature touches scattered throughout that puff life into even the saggiest passages, such as Harold Huth preparing himself an absinthe cocktail, the way the bursting of roasting chestnuts creates a bit of tension in an otherwise innocuous scene, and an effectively gruesome self- mutilation late in the picture. Karloff is underused, but Thesiger does an admirable job of picking up the slack with his typical impudence and wholly unconvincing Scottish brogue. It’s always fun to see him working with Karloff regardless of the quantity or quality of their screen time together. The Ghoul also deserves props for being one of the few films with the guts to explore the S&M possibilities of coffee making.
25. The Invisible Man (1933- dir. James Whale)
Frankenstein established James Whale as an expert horror craftsman. The Old Dark Houseprovided an initial glimpse of his wicked sense of humor.The Invisible Man was his perfect fusion of these two poles. That any adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novella would require groundbreaking special effects is a given, and Whale’s film delivers on this count completely. The invisibility effects are spectacular, and not just in a “that’s-pretty-impressive-for-1933” way. Whether depicting the mad Dr. Griffin unraveling his bandages to reveal a cackling blank space, his seemingly rider-less bicycle careening down a village street, or his empty pants jigging after a screaming woman, John P. Fulton’s resourceful effects haven’t dated a bit.
What Wells’s story does not suggest are the endless opportunities for off-the-wall humor, which sprang from Whale and uncredited co-screenwriter Preston Sturges’s imaginations. The film nearly qualifies as pure comedy, with its barrage of visual jokes (the dancing pants), over-the-top performances (James Whale’s favorite comic relief actor, Una O’Connor, as the wailing, flailing inn hostess), and bizarre one-liners (“How’s that for a hairbrush, George Henry?”). Yet Griffin’s shocking murder spree keeps the film at arm’s length from farce. Though he only gets 10 seconds of face time in the film, Claude Rains makes Griffin a fully dimensional character with nothing more than his expressive voice.
Ever since their twin masterworks at the decade’s outset, Karloff and Lugosi were the Monuments of Monster Movies. So it was simple box office logic that they’d eventually co-star in a picture. Ultimately, the duo would perform in six movies together, but the first was their best and the one in which they were best matched. The Black Cat adapts Edgar Allan Poe in title only, though the film’s themes of sadism, devil worship, and flaying would have been right up the writer’s alley.
For one of the very few times in his career, Lugosi plays the good guy... albeit a good guy with a penchant for torture. Sporting the severest widow’s peak in cinema history, Karloff is diabolical as Hjalmar Poelzig, with his yen for human sacrifice and macabre chess games. Poelzig is an architect, Satanist, and war criminal responsible for the deaths of 10,000 soldiers during World War I. As was his style, Karloff underplays the role, relying on his piercing gaze and lulling voice to convey Poelzig’s smoldering evil. His relishing delivery of “He has an intense and all-consuming horror of cats” is among the most memorable line readings in the Universal horror canon, as is Lugosi’s observation, “Supernatural, perhaps; boloney, perhaps not.” Ulmer’s art deco set design is an alien alternative to horror’s more common Gothic settings, while his Man Ray-esque imagery supplies Gothic flavor of a more futuristic sort. The grave robbing of Frankenstein and throat chomping of Dracula are hopscotch games compared to the smorgasbord of perverse horrors director Edgar Ulmer and screenwriter Peter Ruric cooked up for The Black Cat. The year the film was released, unyielding conservative Joseph Breen became administrator of the Hays Code, and his strict enforcement would make it a lot harder to get away with such material in the years to come.
27. Bride of Frankenstein (1935- dir. James Whale)
With three horror films on his résumé, James Whale was not keen on making another one. He certainly had no interest in returning to the subject that first typecast him. The director reportedly said, “I squeezed the idea dry with the original picture, and I never want to work on it again.” The execs at Universal kept pushing the sequel issue, and Whale ultimately gave in. Figuring he would never top Frankenstein, the director supposedly said his only goal was to make the sequel “a hoot.”
He was absolutely correct in deeming Bride of Frankenstein a hoot but dead wrong in thinking it would not top the original. The film is an explosion of imagination, ingenuity, pathos, subversive humor, wonderful characterizations, wonderful performances, glorious sets, and spectacular special effects (those bizarre miniatures!). The cast all seem as though they’re having the most fun they’ve ever had, especially Ernest Thesiger, who plays the campy, devilish Dr. Pretorius (“Do you like gin? It is my only weakness”). With only a handful of words in his vocabulary (“Friend!” “Fire bad!”), Karloff turns in a touching performance as the monster who just wants to be loved. Although she only occupies a total of eight minutes of screen time in both roles, Elsa Lanchester makes a seismic impact as both the creature’s reluctant bride and Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, who appears in an ingenious prologue. We also get some positively hysterical performances from Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, and the inimitable Una O’Connor. Whale’s humor was never sharper, more daring (“follow the lead of Nature–or of God, if you like your Bible stories”), or more poignant. The maliciousness of The Invisible Man gives way to a humanity that manages to remain sincere even as it mingles with laughs, especially during the Monster’s encounter with a blind hermit inspired by a similar scene in Mary Shelley’s novel, as was the monster’s central demand for a mate. Bride of Frankenstein is too eager to please to have the terrifying power of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but for sheer fun, it is peerless.
After going far afield from Poe with The Black Cat, Universal sort of winds its way back to the writer with The Raven. Granted, this is no faithful adaptation of the beastly bard’s most-read poem. Yet Edgar Allan is very present in David Boehm’s script. Bela Lugosi’s sadistic Dr. Vollin is so obsessed with Poe that the surgeon actually installs an actual pit and an actual pendulum in his basement. No doubt, Chekhov’s pendulum is going to be put to use by the end of this film, but first Dr. Bela has to become fixated on a pretty patient (Irene Ware) and give an escaped killer (Boris Karloff) a bad facelift to evade the law.
Lugosi gets to recite the title poem, and Ware performs a rather enchanting interpretive dance based on it, but the film’s poeticism ends there. The Raven is more in league with the absurd Night of Terror than Ulmer’s elegant Black Cat. Boehm’s plot is a mess, Karloff’s make-up is laughably bad, and Lugosi shouts nonsense like “Poe you are avenged!” Why Poe needed to be avenged or how Vollin’s sadistic high jinks accomplishes that is never explained. If you need me to explain why a film like this might be essential viewing, you’ve wandered onto the wrong site.
American audiences got their first glimpse of Peter Lorre in Karl Freund’s final directorial effort. Mad Love revisits Maurice Renard’s novel The Hands of Orlac, already adapted as an expressionistic silent by Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) in 1924. Lorre is Dr. Gogol, the maddest of mad scientists, driven by his desire for Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) to graft the hands of a knife-throwing killer onto her mutilated husband, Stephen (Colin Clive), and frame him for murder.
This film’s wildness is only comparable with the horror-comedies of Whale. And though Mad Love is rich in morbid humor, it is no comedy, nor is Peter Lorre an urbane villain à la Lugosi’s Dracula or Karloff’s Imhotep. Witnessing his sweaty, neurotic, googly-eyed Dr. Gogol matched with the ever-manic Clive—and heightened by Freund’s zooming camera and vertiginous montages—is anxiety inducing. On top of that appropriately “mad” atmosphere is the most perverse parade of forbidden fruits since The Black Cat: torture, corpse mutilation, a condemned killer who seems to take pleasure in the guillotine, a journalist who hounds that killer for his autograph, sexual obsession and sadism, and implications of waxwork-fucking. This kind of freewheeling depravity was not long for Hollywood. Mad Love feels like a genre gone too far and an era nearing its end. It was.
30. Dracula’s Daughter (1936- dir. Lambert Hillyer)
Amidst Universal’s initial horror frenzy, producer David O. Selznick bought the rights to Bram Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest”, often believed to be the excised opening chapter of his most famous novel. The story arguably introduced Jonathan Harker (never mentioned by name) and followed his weird encounter with a female vampire while heading to Dracula’s castle. Aside from the presence of a lady vampire, the treatment John Balderston composed had nothing to do with Stoker’s story. It did offer a banquet of S&M sex, explicit homosexuality, and bizarre fantasy that would have made Mad Love seem ho hum. Not surprisingly, Balderston’s concept for Dracula’s Daughter was nixed by production-code führer Joe Breen, who branded the treatment “dangerous.” Balderston lost the job and James Whale, who’d been slated to direct, went off to direct his pet musical, Showboat.
Garrett Fort’s screenplay was considerably less controversial, though a homosexual subtext is still present when Gloria Holden’s Countess Marya Zaleska seduces a street girl. Of course, the script handles that theme with the reactionary stupidity of a far less enlightened time. Critics have often likened Zaleska’s desire to have a psychiatrist deprogram her from vampirism to conversion therapy.
No doubt, Hillyer’s movie is weak tea compared to what Whale would have served, and its dated take on homosexuality can make it tough viewing today, yet Dracula’s Daughter still has its charms. Edward Van Sloan is back as Van Helsing, who quite logically, is accused of murder when the authorities find him hovering over the Count’s corpse. Sadly, Bela Lugosi is absent. The body is just a wax figure, though it does set up Zaleska’s moody al fresco funeral for her dad. Such enthralling sequences help to mask the weak script, as does the haunted grace Holden brings to the title role. She’s much more of a tragic figure than Dracula because she so thoroughly does not want to be a vampire. She’s certainly Universal’s most reluctant monster until Larry Talbot, and all the more sympathetic because Otto Kruger’s misogynistic Dr. Jeffrey Garth is such a loathsome protagonist. Holden singlehandedly makes Dracula’s Daughter Universal’s most melancholic monster movie.
The film also presents the first time in which a female monster really carried a picture, and characters from Princess Asa Vadja in The Mask of Satan to Lady Sylvia Marsh in another Stoker adaptation, The Lair of the White Worm, owe her a debt. During its own time, the severely tamed Dracula’s Daughter was more symbolic of the wind going out of Universal’s cobweb-caked sails. Like so many of its beasts, the studio’s horror strain would largely fall dormant for the next few years, to be revived bigger, meaner, and dumber than ever when the time was right.
As we reach the end of the horror feature’s second and most important decade, it is worthwhile to consider what makes a movie a horror movie. Many people might question the presence of many of the movies in this very series. Is The Hunchback of Notre Dame a legitimate horror movie? It has been considered one since its release despite the myriad problems with labeling
Quasimodo a monster. Is The Most Dangerous Gamea true horror movie or more of an adventurous thriller? How about Charles Laughton’s noir-fantasy The Night of the Hunter or Darren Aronofsky’s allegorical mother! or any film by the genre-averse David Lynch?
Perhaps answering this question comes down to ticking boxes. Is there a monster, human or otherwise? Is there a threat? Does the film intend to scare us? If these are the qualities that define horror, then The Wizard of Oz definitely falls within that genre.
Statistics may not actually exist to support this statement, but I still say with complete confidence that no children’s movie traumatized more kids than The Wizard of Oz. Certainly others have had their brain-scarring impacts. The surreal riverboat sequence from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in which Gene Wilder recites a poem of befuddled despair in an increasingly demented wail and a chicken gets its head lopped off in graphic detail surely did a number on many youngsters. The diabolical Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang loomed large in his share of nightmares. Even Disney, a studio often chided for over- sanitizing the grimmest fairy tales, dealt out some pretty potent scares in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, but the terrors of The Wizard of Oz beat the rest, possibly because it is watched more often than these other movies. Or maybe it’s because The Wizard of Oz is the first movie a lot of children see, or at least, the first movie with horror elements they see.
A lot of parents screen the movie for their kids because of its delightful songs and cute characters, and though we may walk away from the screen whistling “Over the Rainbow” or giggling over the Cowardly Lion’s pratfalls, when the bedclothes are on and the lights are off, the faces of the Wicked Witch of the West and her armies of hideous flying monkeys and green-skinned Winkie guards are what dance in our heads. No one but the highly meltable villain dies in The Wizard of Oz, but there is nonstop danger as the Witch tosses a fireball at the Scarecrow, unleashes her monkey minions in a scene of terrifying chaos, and hunts Dorothy with more resolve than any boogieman hiding under your bed. She is also as responsible for the image of witches as pointy hatted, cackling, green-faced monsters that has dominated scary stories and Halloween decorations for 80 years as Lugosi’s Dracula is responsible for caped, thick-accented vampires and Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster is for flat-headed, bolt-necked created creatures. Without opening ourselves to the possibility that The Wizard of Oz is a horror movie, the genre becomes a lot more limited and a lot less interesting.
With the exception of a few stray aberrations (The Invisible Ray, The Devil Doll), the years following Dracula’s Daughter were tragically short on horrors, at least in the cinema. The U.S. economy was in rough shape, and cinema attendance dropped drastically. The Catholic League of Decency, an officious crew of anti-art twits, continued their reign of terror (which began just days before the release of that sadistic classic, The Black Cat). Across the pond, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) established a dreaded scarlet “H” to brand family- unfriendly horror films.
Perhaps most significantly of all, Carl Laemmle, Jr., lost control of Universal Pictures when Standard Capital bought him out after he took out a hefty loan with the company. The bankers did not share Laemmle’s love of the macabre and little interest in prolonging Universal’s role as cinema’s central house of horrors. A tremendously successful 1938 revival of Dracula and Frankenstein as a double- bill (initially a triple bill with the all-around less successful Son of Kong) proved that Universal could still wring lucre from its stock monsters, but the lack of a leader who respected them and the bank’s general miniaturizing of budgets meant that the monster movies Universal would churn out going forward would rarely have the opulence of a Mummy or Bride of Frankenstein.
The first of these went back to the well of Universal’s most successful monster. Son of Frankenstein is not the explosion of genius Whale’s two films were. For the first time, the Monster is reduced to window-dressing, and Karloff’s insistence that he return to the muteness of the original film doesn’t help. Little Donnie Dunagan, who would later do much better work voicing Bambi, is awful as Frankenstein’s son. At 1 hour and 40 minutes, the film is about a half hour longer than almost any of the Universal monster movies that preceded it, and it drags badly. YetSon of Frankensteinis also a beautifully designed film. Its expressionistic sets are even freakier than those in either Whale film, more reminiscent of Edgar Ulmer’s abstract art in The Black Cat. Basil Rathbone does a fine job as Frankenstein Junior and is a worthy new member of Universal’s stock monster squad. The film’s greatest triumph is that of Bela Lugosi, who turns in his finest work as Ygor, a manipulative, smug, broken-necked menace. We also get to see Karloff slip on the hobnail boots one last time. Rightly sensing the Monster was on his way to self-parody, the actor refused to ever play him again.
A big hit, Son of Frankenstein did revive Universal horror, and the studio still had some iconic monsters yet to terrorize moviegoers. However its golden decade was drawing to a close, and its most groundbreaking artworks were in the past. B-grade horror would dominate the next decade, though a cerebral Ukrainian émigré over at RKO would prove that there was still much room for growth in the genre.
Creep on to the '40s…
Flee back to the ‘20s...
