From the twenties through the fifties, Universal Studios
completely defined horror cinema, bringing iconic literary characters and the
exclusive creations of all their Dr. Frankensteins on staff to life. Modern
audiences may have trouble relating to these “slow,” black & white films
created some eighty or seventy years ago, but they will surely be as familiar
with the glowering visages of Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Wolf
Man as they are with the mugs of Santa Claus or Jesus. For us fans who do not
dismiss the best and most enduring of Universal's monster movies—Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein, The
Wolf Man, and Creature from the Black
Lagoon— these are films that defy criticism. Yet each film does have at
least one noteworthy flaw. At the risk of ruining your enjoyment of the Gill
Man's underwater frolics or the Phantom's floor show, let's take off our fan
caps for a second and put on our critical thinking ones instead, because we're
about to whine about 8 Flaws in
Universal's Great 8 Monster Movies.
The Phantom of the Opera
Our first flaw is the most fundamental one on this list. You’ve
got a movie called The Phantom of the Opera.
You do not have sound. See the problem? Carl Laemmle could have selected any
piece of public domain horror literature under the sun. Why choose one in which
sound plays such an integral role before the advent of sound cinema? So there
are scenes of singing without song, elaborate orchestral performances with only
whatever melody the pit organist could pump out. We need to hear Christine’s
lovely voice, and this flaw was not one unrecognized in its time. In fact, as
soon as sound started invading film in the late twenties, Universal schemed to
reissue its flagship horror with the sound the film always demanded. In lieu of
original director Rupert Julian (or Lon Chaney, depending on which making-of
account you want to believe), new directors Ernst Laemmle and Frank McCormick
began shooting replacement footage for half the movie, which enjoyed a
successful opening in 1930. Unfortunately, only the soundtrack remains, and a
proper reissue of the sound Phantom of
the Opera is not currently available. It’s a testament to the original
film’s elaborate design and Chaney’s still-terrifying performance as Erik
the Phantom that a seemingly major flaw does not really seem that bad when
watching a silent film about opera. No sound remake has ever bettered it.
Dracula
Every critic seems to have a big, fat opinion about the
flaws in Dracula. It’s slow. It’s
static. It’s too talky. Bela’s a ham. Blah, blah, blah. You’ll hear no such
complaints from me. I love Dracula
and honestly believe it suffers from none of the above, but there is one
less-exhausted complaint about the film that I can lodge: there just isn’t
enough Lucy Westenra (or Weston, as Garrett Fort renamed her). In Bram Stoker’s
novel, Lucy was one of the tale’s most interesting characters and involved in
some of its most striking scenes. She was the fun and vivacious counterpoint to
the more grounded and dull Mina. She was Dracula’s first victim, and her
vampiric return as the “bloofer lady”—a creepy night-drifter who feeds on
children—is as scary as her true death in her crypt is gruesome and heartbreaking.
In Universal’s film, she barely appears. We get enough of Frances Dade as a
flapper-style Lucy that we want to spend more time with her, but she’s all gone
with a quick munch from the count. Her bloofer scenes are reduced to a few
seconds of eerie nighttime wandering. Granted, pulling off scenes of her murdering
kids or having her head chopped off probably would have been too much for a
1931 horror movie, but even merely suggestive scenes would have been welcome compared
to the teensy bit of Lucy that ended up in the final film.
Frankenstein
In Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein does not survive his
own story, and this too was how Francis Faragoh ended his screenplay for
Universal, James Whale shot the last scene of his film, and preview audiences
saw Frankenstein. The Monster lobs
his creator over the side of the mill to his death. The mill burns. The end. The
audience was so flabbergasted by this ruthless, nihilistic finale that they
fell silent at the end of the preview. Critics were less quiet, declaring the
picture a disaster. Junior Laemmle had a new ending shot that found some
Frankenstein imposter lying in bed after surviving a fall that would have
killed the Monster himself. Meanwhile, Frank’s dad Baron Frankenstein—the
goofiest character in the film—ensures his servant staff that everything will
be peachy keen and leads them in a toast. It is abrupt and as forceful an
ending as a dry fart. Granted, had Frankenstein actually perished in the stark,
stunning, original ending, we would not have gotten the greatest sequel in
cinema history. Of course, Universal never had much problem resurrecting
characters that had died very unambiguous deaths in earlier movies, so maybe
that isn’t true.
The Mummy
The Mummy is one of the tightest early Universal horrors. With
Boris Karloff’s icy performance and the studio’s most elaborate horror set
design since Phantom, Karl Freund’s
film leaves a strong and lasting impression. So does an issue that probably
didn’t ruffle a shroud in 1932 but is painful to watch with twenty-first
century eyes: the Nubian. As Im-Ho-Tep’s speechless muscle, Noble Johnson had
to play a character defined by his “exotic” race. The truly weird part is that
Johnson was black, but he apparently was not black enough for Universal,
because he was corked-up from pate to torso as the Nubian (not the only time
he’d suffer such an indignity—he’d be made up similarly with an additional afro
wig in King Kong). It may seem a cop
out to call this a flaw when such casual, mindless racism was so common in
1930s cinema, but it is a drag that such a thing has to mar the fun of such a
relatively flaw-free cinema classic as The
Mummy.
The Invisible Man
Speaking of flaw-free, The
Invisible Man is so flaw-free that I almost considered leaving it off this
list. Everything about this movie—from the delirious performances to the still-amazing
special effects to the still-hilarious humor—is superb. Even the fact that we
barely get a glimpse of the star is not a problem since Claude Rains’s voice is
so marvelously effective (and since he plays the title character in a movie
called The Invisible Man, after all).
So where’s the flaw? The best I could come up with is the fact that Dr. Griffin
spends so much time buck naked outside in a snowy, English winter. We never
hear his teeth so much as chatter! Did the monocane not only make him invisible
but also impervious to cold? Maybe we could chalk it up to the drug’s side effect
of insanity and simply call The Invisible
Man flawless.
Bride of Frankenstein
Bride of Frankenstein,
however, is not flawless even if it gets my vote for the most purely enjoyable
monster movie ever made. Another hilarious, imaginative, wonderfully acted,
special effects extravaganza from James Whale, Bride of Frankenstein also has a dopey ending in which a
conveniently placed lever kills all of our villains while our heroes are
conveniently allowed to go free. This ending earned my favorite monster movie a
place on a piece I wrote called Ten Terrible Scenes in Otherwise Terrific Terror Movies back in 2010. With five
years of reflection, I’ve realized that there is something much worse at work
in my beloved Bride. The entire film
seems intent on humanizing the Monster, eliciting our sympathy with how
terribly he is rejected by his creator, how sweetly he takes to a blind hermit,
how cruelly ignorant villagers treat him, and how desperately he wants love.
However, some sloppy editing nearly destroys our sympathy for the character
when it seems as though he has gone on a murder spree that claims the lives of
an innocent couple (the Neumans), and more disconcertingly, a little girl named
Frieda. According to ace horror historian Gregory Mank, these murders were not
intended to be the Monster’s work, but that of Frankenstein’s assistant Karl,
who originally featured in his own murder-spree subplot that also had him bump
off his own uncle. With the deletion of this subplot, which was allegedly
filmed, the random murders can only seem to be the Monster’s work, and one of
cinema’s most sympathetic bad guys is rendered totally unsympathetic. Knowing
about the deleted subplot allows me to correct the film in my head, but anyone
who isn’t aware of it will have a very different, and very unfortunate,
impression of the sweet brute... who may actually avenge the deaths of all those
poor victims by deliberately killing Karl toward the end of Bride.
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| Dwight Frye as Karl menancing his uncle in a still of a deleted scene. |
The Wolf Man
One thing we can count on from Universal’s classic horrors
is that they really define the iconic monsters. Gaston Leroux’s Phantom looks
like a living skull in a tux. Bram Stoker’s Dracula similarly prefers eveningwear—with
special emphasis on the requisite cape— to offset his pasty palor and slick
hairdo. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Monster is a flat-headed lug with
electrodes in his neck who likes to wear sport coats. His mate, who Shelley never
adequately describes (probably because the author never even bothers to animate
the lass), wears her hair up and undyed. The Mummy is more about the bandages
than the leathered skin of real mummies. But what is a werewolf? OK, so we all
know how Lon Chaney, Jr., looks in The
Wolf Man; he’s basically a furry man with fangs, claws, and a dog nose. But
let’s not forget the werewolf that werewolfs Lon. Bela Lugosi’s Bela the Werewolf
is not a fur-man at all. He’s an actual animal (though, to be precise, he’s a
German Shepherd named Moose, not a wolf). So what are we supposed to think
werewolves are: hairy people or dogs? Obviously, the Chaney version is so
iconic that a lot of people do not even realize that there are two kinds of
werewolves in The Wolf Man.
Nevertheless, for people who have actually seen The Wolf Man, the fact that there is no consistency in its depiction
of wolf men can only be viewed as a flaw, though without it, we wouldn’t have
the necessary ambiguity of whether or not Talbot is crazy and we wouldn’t have
one of horror’s most iconic monsters. So, perhaps this flaw is more necessary
than any of the others on this list.
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| Lon Chaney,Jr., and Moose |
Creature from the Black Lagoon
We now jump ahead more than a decade to when the gothic
horrors of yore have been shoved aside by an age of scientific horrors bred by
the A and H bombs. The Gill Man is not one such horror, though his origin as a
missing link between fish and people is more science-based than the vampires, reanimated
corpses, cursed mummies, and werewolves of the outmoded gothics. And a genuine
scientific innovation—the underwater movie camera—helped make Creature from the Black Lagoon
especially unique among Universal’s A-list horrors. Unfortunately, as is so
often the case when a new toy comes on the scene, it tends to get abused. Yes,
the underwater photography in Creature
is enchanting—to a point. But too often the film is like watching one of those
video aquariums: too many shots of drifting kelp, bubbles, and people swimming.
Creature probably could have shaved
five or ten minutes of the underwater footage that makes it drag more than
tidier movies like Dracula, Mummy, or Bride of Frankenstein do. But then all of those movies have their own
unique flaws too—and let’s face it—the vast majority of movies do. Such flaws
make cinema more interesting, and they make being a cinema fan a more engaging
activity. And thankfully, all the flaws on this list do very, very little to
detract from the enjoyment and thrills that come with watching eight of the
very, very finest monster movies ever made.
