-George Lucas, Starlog
2002
It’s always tempting to place pop fiction in a particular
bag, and with its aliens, space ships, and interplanetary jaunts, Star Wars is usually dropped into the
science fiction satchel. That’s fine for lazy critics, but the series has
always been too much of a dabbler for its sci-fi status to ring totally true.
Yes, George Lucas was clearly influenced by such items as Metropolis, Flash Gordon,
and Dune. He was also profoundly
affected by westerns (The Searchers),
Samurai pictures (The Hidden Fortress),
historical epics (Lawrence of Arabia),
and fantasy (The Wizard of Oz). As
the above quote indicates, classic horror also creeped into that yarn set a
long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
The Star Wars saga
made its most explicit reference to horror movies in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, when the Emperor plays
Dr. Frankenstein by strapping the freshly mangled Anakin Skywalker to a lab
table and transforming his protégé into a mechanized monster who lumbers forth
like Boris Karloff. The movies “of the 1930s and 1940s” of which Lucas spoke
are, of course, Universal’s Frankenstein
franchise. Return of the Jedi even
attempts to give the series’ nastiest villain a level of Karloff-style pathos
by presenting Darth Vader as a conflicted creature. Inverting Karloff’s mute
performance, the expressionless Vader conveys this new facet of his once
wholly evil character via James Earl Jones’s voice.
David Prowse, the actor who embodies the dark lord, was
limited by his bulky costume fitted out with a long, black Dracula cape. However,
he did have a strong link to classic horror. Well, at least he had a link to a
classic horror production company considering that 1970’s The Horror of Frankenstein and 1974’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell are not two of Hammer
Studio’s best products. In the latter film, the hulking Prowse co-starred with
Peter Cushing, the actor who has played Dr. Frankenstein more than any other
and whose gaunt, angular face is as iconically linked to Hammer as the studio’s
logo. That face was always too unique to waste buried beneath mounds of creature
make-up. As he did when playing the doctor, Cushing was still able to
convey absolute monstrousness without the aid of so much as fake teeth when he played Grand Moff Tarkin, the
unrepentant destroyer of worlds who keeps Vader under his thumb. In contrast to
his portrayals of Dr. Frankenstein, there is not a wisp of humanity or conflict
in Cushing’s work as Tarkin, making this his most evil role-- far more
rotten than any he ever played in a pure horror picture.
Perhaps in an effort to link the prequel trilogy to the
classic Star Wars trilogy’s links to Hammer, that studio’s other iconic face, Christopher Lee, was cast as the
black-caped Count Dooku in Attack of the
Clones and Revenge of the Sith.
The character’s unfortunate baby-talk name is slightly ameliorated by his
title, which reminds us of Lee’s most famous role, Count Dracula. The title also
takes advantage of how Stoker’s vampire has forever transformed the very word
“count” into a calling card of evil and monstrousness.
Star Wars dips deeper
into the horror handbag and comes up with a menagerie of monsters distinct from
the more typical egg-headed, big-eyed aliens common to outer-space fiction.
H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau,
a classic of both science fiction and monsterrific horror, seems to have run a
number of Star Wars’ creatures
through its house of pain. The series is lousy with Wellsian man-beasts with
names like Hammerhead, Walrus Man, Yak Face, Amana Man, and Squid Head. For the
most part these overly on-the-nose names were coined by the folks at Kenner who
had to come up with titles for their line of toys, and they have since been
given less descriptive ones in the plethora of Star Wars novels and character guides. But a Walrus Man by any
other name still looks like something that should be sunning itself on pack ice, just as Ugnauts and Gamorean Guards don’t look any less like hogs that
recently hopped off mad Dr. Moreau’s vivisection table. Lucas’s dog Indiana directly
inspired the beloved Chewbacca, a ringer for Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man.
An actual wolf man of sorts also makes an appearance in the cantina scene of Star Wars, though this weird crossover was the result of too little time and not enough budget to create the exotic array of space creatures Lucas really wanted. In other words, the Wolf Man mask was simply handy. When Lucas fiddled with his film to make the controversial “special edition” of 1997, the one cantina patron he digitally replaced was the Wolf Man, perhaps because he felt that this creature was a step too far in paying homage to overly familiar horror icons. It may be worth noting that these animal aliens are almost never articulate like the creatures in the firmly sci-fi Planet of the Apes (the one exception is the fish-headed Admiral Ackbar, whose race being called “Mon Calamari” is probably the best joke in the entire Star Wars series), making their ties to the groaning, grunting, growling monsters of classic horror stronger.
An actual wolf man of sorts also makes an appearance in the cantina scene of Star Wars, though this weird crossover was the result of too little time and not enough budget to create the exotic array of space creatures Lucas really wanted. In other words, the Wolf Man mask was simply handy. When Lucas fiddled with his film to make the controversial “special edition” of 1997, the one cantina patron he digitally replaced was the Wolf Man, perhaps because he felt that this creature was a step too far in paying homage to overly familiar horror icons. It may be worth noting that these animal aliens are almost never articulate like the creatures in the firmly sci-fi Planet of the Apes (the one exception is the fish-headed Admiral Ackbar, whose race being called “Mon Calamari” is probably the best joke in the entire Star Wars series), making their ties to the groaning, grunting, growling monsters of classic horror stronger.
The Star Wars
series is speckled with other horror references, from the bounty hunters
Zuckuss and 4-Lom, who apparently borrowed The Fly’s face, to the Jedis’ Dracula-like ability to bend weak minds to the Emperor’s Grim-Reaper cloak to
the Blob-like Jabba the Hutt to the AT-AT attack, which plays like an
onslaught pulled from some monster movie from 1950s U.S. or Japan (another horrory scene from an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back had Darth Vader feeding a flock of pet gargoyles at his Hellish compound). The series
even features one legitimately creepy scene in which Luke Skywalker slips into
a gloomy cave to confront a Darth Vader phantom, whose decapitated head
explodes to reveal the nightmarish face of Luke, himself . It’s all part of Star Wars’ genre-smorgasbord, which may
serve science fiction as the main course, but offers too many delectable side
dishes to pass up.
