When I was a Monster Kid, there was nothing I liked to check
out from the school library better than books about classic horror movies. They
gave you the basic rundown of what made flicks like Dracula and The Wolf Man
so boss and delivered plenty of B&W photos to back it up. Today, works such
as Gary D. Rhodes’s Tod Browning’s
Dracula and David J. Skal’s The
Monster Show take a more scholarly and/or critical look at the classics. The Monster Movies of Universal Studios
falls somewhere between the kids and film criticism library shelves.
Author James L. Neibaur zips though the 29 movies he covers
too swiftly for the book to qualify as scholarship, and his writing is simple
enough for any Monster Kid to grasp (Neibaur is an Encyclopedia Britannica contributor, and his affectless writing would not be out of place in an encyclopedia), but he does make room in each
roughly 5-to-10 page chapter to get into a bit of plot synopsis, a bit of
criticism, and a bit of background history. For those of us who’ve consumed
what’s already out there, chapters on well-examined films such as Dracula and The Wolf Man are redundant, but ones on items such as The Invisible Woman and The Mummy’s Tomb are fresher—if
not exactly revelatory— and more likely to stimulate Neibaur’s critical side.
That latter observation is not a sly criticism of Neibaur, since the Monster
Kid in me appreciates his unabashed love of Dracula,
a delightful film too often run down in contemporary criticism, and since
analysis is not the author’s primary goal.
Neibaur limits his discussions to films that deal with the big six monsters of Universal (or Universale, as he repeatedly spells it for some reason) —Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, The Wolf Man,
The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature—which means that both Chaney and
Rains’s Phantoms and Abbott &
Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde get left out of the chat, as do
non-Monster horrors such as The Black Cat
and The Old Dark House. So The Monster Movies of Universal Studios
isn’t exactly the definitive book on the topic, but I bet some modern-day
Monster Kids might still enjoy checking it out of their own school libraries.