The Movie: The Invisible Ray (1936)
What Is It?: In
one of the last gasps of the first wave of Universal horror, the studio’s two
biggest legends—Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff—are scientists who form an uneasy
alliance after Karloff captures a ray from the Andromeda nebula that leads him
to a pre-historic meteor in Africa. The partnership gets a bit complicated when
that meteor turns Karloff into a psycho King Midas in Reverse. The Invisible Ray is almost like a
two-decades-early bridge between the Gothic horrors of the thirties and the
atom-age paranoia of the fifties with lightning storm-soaked castles sharing
the screen with radiation-derived monsterism.
Why Today?: Today
is Meteor Watch Day.
