Review: 'Classic Monsters, Modern Art'

When I took my wife to see The Bride of Frankenstein at NY's Museum of Modern Art on one of our first dates, the one thing she commented on after seeing it for the first time was how "iconic" every frame of it is. It may not be as lauded as Citizen Kane, but Kane doesn't have an image half as indelible as Karloff's monster lumbering through a crypt or Lanchester's Bride shrieking in horror when she first meets him. As far as I'm concerned, the horror of the unseen (see The Haunting or The Blair Witch Project) will always be scariest, but the monsters, crypts, and graveyards of less frightening films will never fail to scratch the itchy shoulders of those like me who look forward to Halloween more than Christmas.

Review: 'Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films'

Like horror, science fiction is a genre that can be tricky to define. Frankenstein is certainly a horror movie, but with the pseudo-scientific creation of flat-top Boris, it can also be classified as science-fiction. Bride of Frankenstein, in which Dr. Pretorius creates creatures in a way more in line with "black magic," doesn't bother so much with the pseudo science. Whatever. They both qualify as science fiction in Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films even though Douglas Brode goes to some lengths to define the science-fiction film as any that makes some attempt to explain its weirdness scientifically. 

Review: 'Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror'

Serious horror fans may argue that humor undercuts terror, but the two emotions come from similar places. A laugh and a shriek are both spontaneous reactions often brought on by a surprise and/or a stimulus often (but not always) specifically designed to elicit such a reaction. Horror and humor can enhance each other when dealt out piggyback style. Think of how the hideous Deadites generate wails of horror when they fly up from the fruit cellar in Evil Dead II but then immediately cause wails of laughter when they start behaving more like Moe and Curly. Think of how a humorously foul-mouthed conversation amongst starship crew members suddenly turns terrifying when the titular Alien bursts through one of their chests. 

Review: 'Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! More Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema'

Armed with a great deal of old-school research, some over-heated writing, and an embarrassing "Watch out! The Progressive Mob is coming to burn your DVD collection!!!" foreword, Greg Mank returns for a semi-sequel to his chaotic 2014 book The Very Witching Time of Night: Dark Alleys of Classic Horror called Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! More Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema. This time Mank tightens up his approach for (mostly) uniformly formatted chapters to examine how classics such as Murders in the Rue Morgue, Island of Lost Souls, Mad Love, House of Frankenstein, and Bride of Frankenstein, mediocrities such as Werewolf of London and the 1941 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and crap-fests like Captive Wild Woman fared against Joseph Breen's censorship board. 

Mank consults period documents to carefully note instances of censorious notes, how the filmmakers followed or worked around the meddlesome directives, and how regional exhibitors made their own cuts. In the case of Werewolf of London (which he insists on typing as WereWolf of London), the author argues that it could have been a better film without such changes as bumping a prostitute character down to the role of alms beggar. In the case of Captive Wild Woman, he offers no such possible avenues for improvement or redemption, and despite the author's dopey opening, he actually comprehends why folks were so horrified by the film's likening of black women to apes. That's pretty surprising since Mank thinks you're a dummy if you take offense at The Mask of Fu Manchu, an equally ugly pile of rubbish with a "happy" ending that involves Asian genocide by ray gun. Not a whole lot of philosophical consistency there, Manky.

Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! switches to soft focus in its concluding chapters that deal with (A) the depressing end of Basil Rathbone's career and (B) how horror performed at the box office in the thirties and forties. These chapters don't quite fit with the rest of the book but are as useful to the monster movie historian as the rest of it, which I'll admit is pretty useful.

Review: 'Fright Favorites: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond'

It was hard enough boiling a century of horror cinema down to 200 spook shows. Imagine having to whittle it down to 31.

I understand the significance of the number—just enough to watch a single picture on each night of October—but its skimpiness skirts inconsequence. Normally, I wouldn’t even bother with a book like Fright Favorites: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond. I made an exception because its author is the David Bordwell of horror: David J. Skal, the writer of such essential tomes as The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, and Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween.

Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #1

Halloween season simply isn’t Halloween season without a regular dose of golden age Universal horror (1923-1963). Every day this October, I’ll be giving you a steady IV drip of it by counting down Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors!

#1. Bride of Frankenstein (1935- dir. James Whale)

There could be no other number-one in this series. It is widely regarded as the crown jewel of Universal horror and one of the few sequels to best its original predecessor. It is an explosion of imagination, special effects, pathos, humor, camp, and sheer madness. Every scene offers something delightful to behold: the glittering, self-referential prologue in the home of Mary Shelley and spouse; the mock-scary re-introduction of Karloff’s monster; the unveiling of wonderfully withering and withered Dr. Pretorius; Elizabeth Frankenstein’s weird freak-out in her bedroom; Minnie; Pretorius’s astounding homunculi; the Monster’s strangely moving visit with a blind hermit; the birth of the magnificent Bride and the Monster’s ill-fated attempt to court her. Bride of Frankenstein is not as scary as Frankenstein or as pungent as Dracula or as consistently funny as Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein or as sophisticated as Psycho and The Birds, yet it is a movie that feels like it has it all and then some. It is a monster masterpiece and such dizzying fun that it will keep you sugar-buzzed for a week after Frankenstein’s castle explodes. It is Psychobabble’s favorite Universal horror, favorite horror, favorite movie, and the best prescription for having a happy Halloween. Hope you have one yourself.

Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Monsters!

Welcome, foolish mortals, to Psychobabble’s House of 100 Monsters. Creak up the steps and over the threshold. Within this vile abode you will encounter not 98, not 99, but one hundred of the most terrifying, horrifying, unpleasantifying creatures who have ever haunted the page, the screen, and the breakfast table. They are my personal favorite freaks, ranked from terriblest to really terriblest. No Halloween is complete without a visit to a spook house, and my house of horrors is as spooky as it gets. So I formally invite you to freak out to Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Monsters. Step right this way…

100. Tar Man

First, allow me to guide you down into the basement where a certain deceased individual has recently been resurrected by a certain military-grade toxic gas. Don’t ask me who he was in life, but in death this standout star of Return of the Living Dead is like an E.C. Comics zombie in the oozing flesh and he wants one thing only... brains!

99. Black Frost

Sidestep the Tar Man and take a break by our deep freeze. Oops. Bad idea, because inside is a terrifying thingy that blasts incapacitating frosty air from its jockstrap. This is how Black Frost brought down The Mighty Boosh, and it traumatized many viewers of their surreal British comedy by baring its unsettlingly white teeth before breaking into a hideous dance of death. He’s one icy bastard.

98. Clayface

Wait a minute… that chap wasn’t Black Frost at all! His face has morphed back into its natural state—that of one Matt Hagen, better known as Batman’s hulking, shape-shifting nemesis Clayface, one of the nastiest and most genuinely monstrous monsters to ever menace Gotham City!

97. Wampa

Back in the deep freeze is another terrible creature, a towering snow beast with white, shaggy fur and clawed paws the size of trashcan lids. Is it the Yeti? Nah. They wouldn’t know what the hell a Yeti is up on the distant planet of Hoth. That’s where the Wampa whomps Luke Skywalker’s face off in the shocking attack that kicks The Empire Strikes Back into gear.

96. Pumpkinhead

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 335

The Date: August 30

The Movie: Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)

What Is It?: What could have just been an update of Bride of Frankenstein is a totally individual film. Robert Morris is the young assistant of Pete Cushing’s Dr. Frankenstein. Morris is beheaded for a crime he didn’t commit. The good doctor resurrects him by transferring his soul into the body of his girlfriend, Susan Denberg, who’d drowned herself after witnessing the execution. A badly scarred brunette in life, Denberg somehow springs back to life as a blonde with perfect skin and a yen for revenge against the trio of snotty rich kids who committed the crime for which Morris was killed. 

Why Today?: On this day in 1797, Mary Godwin is born.

Review: 'Bride of Re-Animator' Blu-ray

Re-Animator was a splattery, campy take on Frankenstein for the eighties. The next logical step was to follow in the original monster’s hobnail boot prints and bring some female energy to Herbert West’s attempts to reanimate dead tissue. And so, Brian Yuzna, who’d produced Re-Animator and was now directing too, gave us Bride of Re-Animator in 1990. The predecessor’s zany humor and absurd gore attracted an adoring cult that could only be appeased by an escalation of such elements, and Bride delivered that while also paying very explicit homage to Bride of Frankenstein. West (king of low-key looniness Jeffrey Combs) is Dr. Pretorius to Dan Cain’s (Bruce Abbott) Henry Frankenstein, constantly luring Cain away from normalcy and into the batshit-nuts realm of corpse reanimation. Cain can’t resist resuming the experiments when West reveals that he possesses the heart of Cain’s girlfriend from the first movie and intends to put it in a new body of his own making. Kathleen Kinmont is the head and pilot of that body, and the actress clearly studied Elsa Lanchester’s performance. She gets an A+ for recapturing the more famous bride’s jerky movements and innate pathos.

The rudimentary plot Bride of Re-Animator —directly reanimated from an original idea for Bride of Frankenstein that would have found Elizabeth Frankenstein murdered and her heart placed in Elsa Lanchester’s body—is mostly an excuse for Yuzna and his special effects team to indulge in all sorts of monstery mayhem. There’s a sort of spider creature assembled from an eyeball and fingers, a group of cackling zombies, dog and bat parts mixed-and-matched with human bits, and some seriously nasty gore that necessitated two cuts of the movie. Both are included on Arrow Video’s new Bride of Re-Animator blu-ray. The unrated version lingers on several gore scenes a little longer than the R-rated one does, but the trajectory and running times of both films are identical. Bride of Re-Animator may be a slab of cheap-o exploitation, but it’s a great-looking one, and Arrow presents it with rich color and organic fidelity, though there are a few elements from the uncensored cut that look washed out (they only constitute seconds of the movie, so don’t fret too much about that). I’ve read that there were some audio problems with Capelight’s previous blu-ray edition of Bride, but there are no such issues with Arrow’s.

Supplements include three audio commentaries that find Yuzna and the special effects team providing insight into their film’s inspirations and production and Combs and Abbott just having a ball rewatching the thing, as well as an hour of new and archival video content. “Brian Yuzna Remembers” gives the filmmaker the opportunity to discuss his movie on camera for ten minutes, while “Splatter Masters” allots fifteen minutes for the special effects team to do the same. The archival stuff includes a vintage making-of featurette, a deleted scene captured from behind the scenes that brings back Cain’s girlfriend but settles for a Barbara Crampton lookalike, and the cast and crew discussing another deleted scenes to still-photo accompaniment. All of this is very nice treatment for an often-underappreciated episode in one of the very, very few horror franchises that’s actually worth a damn.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 28

The Date: October 28

The Movie: Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

What Is It?: The rare sequel that’s better than the original; the rare movie that’s better than almost every other movie; the most fun you’ll ever have watching monsters, murderers, and homunculi. Bride is also the very,very rare Universalmonster movie in which the people are as much fun to watch as the monsters. Everything that comes out of Ernest Thesiger's mouth is spun gold.

Why Today?: On this day in 1902, Bride Elsa Lanchester was born.

8 Flaws in Universal's Great 8 Monster Movies

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

Review: 'Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the 1930s'

Horror movie guides pop up like grass on a grave, yet they never tend to get it right. Too often they are glib, and they never encompass everything world cinema has contributed to the genre since its inception. There have been good ones. Jonathan Rigby’s American Gothic and the collaborative, two-volume American Silent Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films, 1913-1929, come to mind, but as their titles suggest, their scopes are still limited. A series is necessary to serve a genre with as much breadth and longevity as horror, which Christopher Workman and Troy Howarth realize.

Based on the first volume of their series, a chunky collection of reviews devoted exclusively to the thirties, these guys aren’t cutting any corners (the second volume will actually backtrack to the silent era and pick up with the forties in volume three). Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the 1930s swells with shorts and features from all recesses of the world, which is significant considering that studies of the genre’s key decade are often limited to its most prolific location of production, Hollywood, and often even more limited to a specific studio, Universal.

Each entry features a few technical specs, cast list, synopsis, history, critique, and even some details about the major players’ personal lives and careers beyond the given films. Pieces on lost films may only be a few paragraphs, but major movies may receive an entire page or more. Workman’s entry on King Kong is truly superb, going deep enough to assess the biological accuracy of its dinosaurs! (On the flip side, his more critical assessment of the comparatively fantastical creatures in Son of Kong goes a little too far considering that it is, after all, a movie about a giant gorilla.)

The writers’ tone keeps the discussions enjoyable rather than dry, though I believe they are too hard on certain aspects of the classics, like the oft-denounced “staginess” of Dracula and the performances of Valerie Hobson and Una O’Connor in Bride of Frankenstein, which I believe are integral to the movie’s delicious deliriousness. Of course, no opinionated reader is ever going to completely agree with all the opinions of a movie guide writer, so I’m impressed by how often I agreed with Workman and Howarth. I would have preferred the book to be arranged strictly chronologically instead of alphabetical by year, since how one film develops on the innovations of others is particularly significant in horror. That’s a nitpick since guides of this sort are meant to be dipped into rather than read from cover-to-cover, even though this is one of the few that welcomes that kind of reading. Some might also complain that a lot of the murder mysteries and Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan movies in here only loosely qualify as horror, but I think their presence is further evidence of the writers’ determination to be all-inclusive. You certainly can’t complain that any significant film is missing, which would be the far greater crime. Tome of Terror also scores points for the terrific photos that appear on nearly every one of its pages, but its greatest achievement is fattening up my list of movies to see, which is the ultimate job of any movie guide worth reading. I can’t wait to build that list even bigger when they publish volume two.

Review: 'Capturing Archetypes: Twenty Years of Sideshow Collectibles Art'

Sideshow Collectibles are strangely multifaceted for models of characters from comics and genre movies. Sure, they’re basically scaled down representations of Darth Vader and Batman and the Alien and Bride of Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, progeny of the Aurora models adored by the monster kids of the fifties and sixties. But they are also exemplars of how seriously the geeks of today take their obsessions. The jocks can have their cheap plastic football trophies. Sideshow Collectibles are lovingly, intricately sculpted from assorted materials—resin, polystone, real cloth and leather, fiberglass. They may depict the icons of alleged low culture, but they are genuine art pieces, and they’re affixed with big art piece price tags, which also yokes them with the dubious distinction of being status symbols too (as of this writing, the most inexpensive item on Sideshow’s official site is a $69.99 vinyl doll of a character that looks like a licorice jelly bean called Dolly Colorway; the most expensive are lifesize busts of similar looking guys called War Machine and Iron Patriot, both running $8999.99). This means that they are only available to the wealthiest nerds, guys like Guillermo Del Toro, who pens the introduction to the new coffee table tribute Capturing Archetypes: Twenty Years of Sideshow Collectibles Art. This book is a far more economical way to collect these pieces than actually collecting them.

Del Toro offhandedly but insightfully mentions the “fetishistic” impulses of the collector, and Capturing Archetypes is nothing if not fetishistic. Instead of depicting the sculptures in flat full view, the book presents them in alluring shadows, lighting, and smoke, often zooming in on a particular feature or contour. There is an unabashed gaze on body parts, most obviously in the leering sculptures and photographs of curvaceous female characters, such as Catwoman, Molotov Cocktease, Lady Death, Vampira, Elvira, and Jessica Rabbit—who actually receives her own centerfold!—but also the absurd, veiny musculature of male characters like Dare Devil, the Hulk, and even Darth Maul. Capturing Geek Porn might have been a more accurate title for this book, but only the most blinkered critic would deny the true artistry of the pieces it depicts. And besides, Psychobabble Reader, whose body would you rather ogle: David’s or Boba Fett’s?

That’s what I thought.

Review: Philip J. Riley's 'The Return of Frankenstein'

Bride of Frankenstein went through several iterations on its way to becoming the greatest monster movie ever made. Philip MacDonald, who’d later adapt Rebecca for Hitchcock and The Body Snatcher for Robert Wise, imagined Frankenstein’s invention of a death ray as an integral plot element of the sequel to James Whale’s 1931 smash. L.G. Blochman, who enjoyed greater success as a mystery novelist than a screenwriter, had a more fanciful vision in which the mad doctor and his bride Elizabeth leave their troubles behind to work as puppeteers in a traveling carnival. John L. Balderston, who’d adapted the original Frankenstein, got closest to the film we know and adore, though his screenplay was a much darker affair, more faithful to Mary Shelley with a meatier role for the Bride than Elsa Lanchester got to play in the finished film. There’s no Dr. Pretorius in his draft dated June 1934, no Minnie, no humor or homunculi. The Monster, however, does get to talk a lot more and a lot more articulately. He also gets to milk a cow and eat a muskrat. Plus, Fritz is back, because Balderston apparently forgot that the Monster wrung his neck in the first film. So much for continuity.

Philip J. Riley compiled MacDonald and Blochman’s treatments and Balderston’s complete screenplay in his recent book The Return of Frankenstein (this was the preferred title for a while since the producer’s realized the Bride wasn’t actually Frankenstein’s intended…though Balderston does have the Monster refer to himself as Frankenstein a couple of times! So much for knowing who your main character is…). Like all entries in Riley’s “Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters” series (or the “Filmonster Series-Lost Scripts,” as it’s now called), The Return of Frankenstein is a juicy tidbit of film history cluing us in on what might have been. Sometimes the scrapped scripts are better than what ended up on screen, as was the case with Dracula’s Daughter, the most essential entry in Riley’s series. In the case of Bride of Frankenstein, we ended up with the very best monster picture imaginable, elevated incalculably by James Whale and William Hurlbut’s witty and imaginative revisions. The treatments and screenplay in this book aren’t nearly as much fun to read as Whale’s movie is to watch, but they are still fascinating, essential documents for any classic monster education. If nothing else, they really make you appreciate the depth of James Whale’s genius.

Ten Reasons 'Bride of Frankenstein' is the Most!

There’s a lot of brilliance packed into Bride of Frankenstein’s slight 75 minutes. Here are 10 reasons why James Whale’s final monster movie remains cinema’s greatest.

1. What of My Mary?

As we open on Bride of Frankenstein, we witness one of its most inspired scenes. We are not in a laboratory of blasphemous horrors but an opulent living room where literary giants Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley discuss the latter’s most famous creation. Informing her husband that Frankenstein “wasn't the end at all,” she proceeds to tell the tale of the Monster’s quest for a mate. There is literary accuracy in this scene, since Shelley’s original novel did, indeed, include a major subplot in which the Monster compels Frankenstein to build him a bride. There is also great cinematic ingenuity in this prologue. It is a way to directly transition into the second chapter of Frankenstein, to acknowledge its literary origins, and to tie the new monster to her true creator, as Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary and The Bride. As barrier-breaking ideas often do, the prologue had its obstacles. Editor Ted Kent wanted Whale to cut the sequence, feeling it detracted from the horror. The décolletage-baring gown Lanchester wore as Shelley set off alarms with the censors. Fortunately, Whale ignored Kent and a few minor cuts placated the censors enough for the prologue to remain, providing Bride of Frankenstein with its cleverest postmodern touch.

2. Woman… Friend… Wife

She only has four minutes of screen time in the film named after her, but Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein is without question the most memorable female monster in cinema history and certainly the first significant one. With her lightning-streaked fright wig and childlike awkwardness, The Bride has inspired countless imitators and been captured on an innumerable amount of merchandise. Her unsettling combination of morbid weirdness and early-Hollywood glamour (designed by Universal’s resident makeup whiz Jack P. Pierce) laid the groundwork for all of the sexy grotesques that followed her, from Vampira to Princess Asa Vajda of Black Sunday to Morticia Addams to Elvira to Lady Sylvia Marsh of Lair of the White Worm. Her hairstyle has been appropriated in one form or another by personalities ranging from Lily Munster to singer Dave Vanian of The Damned. Her teasingly brief presence in Bride of Frankenstein sparked numerous attempts to fill in the gaps (Elizabeth Hand’s imaginative feminist novel The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride; Franc Roddam’s film The Bride), yet she packs a lot of living into her four minutes on film. She learns to walk by leaning on the shoulders of her creators, takes in all around her with a wide-eyed mixture of wonder and disgust, tentatively considers a romance with an ugly but sensitive brute, and ultimately says “no thanks” to it all. That concise arch from childlike hesitancy to aggressive self-reliance makes The Bride a fully realized personality despite her lack of screen time. Couple that complexity with an iconic appearance and you’ve got the most unforgettable female monster of them all.

3. A Perfect Human

Review: 'The Horror Show Guide: The Ultimate Frightfest of Movies'

All right, Mike Mayo, you got me. Based on your rave review in The Horror Show Guide (and I’ll admit, the presence of Naomi Watts), I watched 45 minutes of Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering. That must be the horror guide version of a Rick Roll. I should have known better. Mayo’s taste can be a bit questionable. While he gives the thumbs up to garbage such as The Lawnmower Man, Hollow Man, and the aforementioned Corn movie, he’s pretty dismissive of many of the best movies in his book, among them Bride of Frankenstein, Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Haunting, and Eraserhead. His problem with most of these movies? They’re “dated.” Woo-ee! Does Mike Mayo love that word! There’s barely a review of a film made before 1960 in The Horror Show Guide that escapes it. Gee, a movie from the ’30s is dated? What insight! Well, I can say the same about 1992’s Lawnmower Man, but there is a big difference between its dated early-CGI effects and the “dated” effects in, say, James Whale’s The Invisible Man: Claude Rains’ disappearance remains incredibly charming and impressive, while the sub-ColecoVision frogs and sex robots in Lawnmower Man look like shit. Mayo’s not having any of that, though. The effects in The Invisible Man are “dated.” The humor in Bride of Frankenstein is “dated.” The acting in The Haunting “has aged poorly” (nice variation!).

Still, I can’t completely write off The Horror Show Guide. Mayo has seen a lot of horror movies (though not all of these are horror movies. Whatever their tenuous connections to the genre, Dolores Claiborne, Fellini Satyricon, Ed Wood, and others don’t belong in this book. I was kind of tickled that he included Passion of the Christ, though). Like any good horror guide, his book should be read with a pen and paper in hand to jot down intriguing and unfamiliar titles for future viewing. Just be sure to take his assessments with a big grain of salt, or you may get suckered into seeing something like Children of the Corn IV, or worse, steered away from something like The Haunting.

Psychobabble's 200 Essential Horror Movies: The Complete List

Click the blue links to see detailed reviews of all 150 films decade by decade.

The 1920s

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
2. Genuine (1920)

3. The Golem (1920)

4. The Phantom Carriage (1921)

5. Nosferatu (1922)

6. Häxan (1922)

7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

8. The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

9. Faust (1926)

10. The Cat and the Canary (1927)

11. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

The 1930s

12. Dracula (1931)

13. Frankenstein (1931)

14. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Mary Shelley

215 years ago today, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was born. 19 years later she’d give birth to horror’s most notorious —or should I say beloved?— monster. We all know that much, but here are twenty other things you may not have known about Mary Shelley.

Review: 'Bride of Frankenstein': The Vintage Novelization Reprinted!

Several years ago I attended a showing of Bride of Frankenstein at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The crowd was mostly made up of people who probably first saw the film when it was released in 1935. Without the burden of a modern sensitivity to irony, the older folks in the theater seemed to take the film at face value. As they shuddered and gasped at the Monster’s antics, I understood Bride of Frankenstein as a genuinely horrifying horror movie—as opposed to a knowingly camp monster movie, which is how I always enjoyed it— for the first time. However, I did not feel the film’s horror until reading BearManor Media’s new reprint of Michael Egremont’s vintage novelization. Without being filtered through director James Whale’s ironic eye and acted by camp pioneers like Ernest Thesiger, Una O’Connor, and Dwight Frye, Bride of Frankenstein proves to be a genuinely horrifying tale; more so because Egremont took it so seriously. Yes, there are still all the consciously humorous lines that helped make the film one of our first truly funny horror-comedies (both gin and a good cigar are still Dr. Pretorius’s only weakness). However, the scenes of horror are described so ghoulishly that the comedic aspects shrink well into the background. Egremont pores over the corpse Pretorius procures to serve as the Monster’s bride in grotesque detail, with her eyelids “sunk into the pits beneath,” her eyes “long collapsed and desiccated,” her cheek revealing “the shining jawbone, and the little, even teeth,” and her neck “pitted and corroded by time and time’s grim assistant, the conqueror worm.” Shudder.

To put a fine point on how much the tone of the novelization diverges from that of the film, Frye’s googly-eyed assistant Karl is renamed Franz and given a gruesome back story and a far different and more well-developed resolution. O’Connor’s shrieking housemaid Minnie “might have gone down to History as one of the great investigators of the world”! And that’s how Egremont handles the comic relief! As for our ostensible villain, The Monster (who is so remolded that his iconic flat pate is now described as “domed”) becomes a bit less sympathetic when we actually witness his attack on some peasant girls, a sequence the film largely glosses over. The novelization also restores his wrestling match with a statue of Christ, a scene the censors deemed so blasphemous that the crucifix was replaced with a statue of a generic bishop in the film. Despite that radical move, Egremont still felt it necessary to rewrite history by misrepresenting Percy Shelley’s “The Necessity of Atheism” (misnamed “A Defence of Atheism”) as a “practical joke.” I guess a novelization can only handle so much iconoclasm.

BearManor Media continues to do horror film history a great service with its “Nightmare Series” of novelizations, shedding additional light on familiar cinema classics by dredging up the strange and the rare. One quibble though: I understand that a small press does not have the editorial staff of a large one, but there still really isn’t any excuse for the number of typos that appear in so many of their volumes, including this one. They’re sloppy and distracting. Of course, if you let that stop you from reading this or any of the press’s other fascinating books, you might need a brain transplant. Hold on while I get Franz and Pretorius on the phone…

Monsterology: Brides

In this new feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

“Here come the brides”…

As they have in so much of our male dominated cultural, women have always taken a backseat in the horrifying side of horror literature and film. While there is no shortage of women playing the victim or the damsel in need of rescuing, far, far fewer have been the agents of terror. The most common—and ancient— she-monster is the witch. But another lady killer has also been a fixture of horror, and she’s been in the game a lot longer than 1935 when Boris Karloff’s Monster first demanded a mate.

Logically, it was a woman who first saw fit to touch upon the monstrous bride. In her genre-defining Gothic horror novel Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dwelled on a disturbing plot thread in which the creature does, indeed, demand a mate. He presents his creator with a grotesque ultimatum: build me a bride and I’ll stop killing and otherwise making your life less than pleasant. The plotline had any number of unsavory implications. The Monster had more in mind than handholding (“…one as deformed as myself would not deny herself to me”), essentially inventing a new strain of necrophilia in which both parties are deceased. There is Frankenstein’s equally demented destruction of the bride that bears traces of sexual violence (“trembling with passion, [I] tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged”). The doctor destroys the bride before she has a chance to animate and reject her nefarious fiancé, as she would in the film this plotline would inspire 117 years later. Rather than a havoc-raising monster in her own right, she is just another of the numerous female pawns destroyed during Frankenstein and his creation’s macabre chess match. Victor’s destruction of the Monster’s potential mate is payback for the Monster’s murder of Victor’s brother William, as well as the ostensible destruction of the boy’s nanny Justine Moritz, who is executed after being accused of the murder. His own mate obliterated, the Monster kills Victor’s fiancé Elizabeth on the day they are to be married.

Mary Shelley at Work
In Frankenstein, Shelley angrily, unflinchingly comments on the roles women so often played in reality and maps out the roles they would often play in horror fiction for centuries to come. As such, Frankenstein can be read as an anti-patriarchal diatribe, a criticism of a society in which women are built, controlled, and ruined according to the whims of men. Mary knew well of such things firsthand. Percy Bysshe Shelley left his bride’s name off the book when he submitted Frankenstein for publication, knowing that her gender might hinder its acceptance. Upon its first printing, she received no credit for her extraordinarily imaginative and influential work. Not surprisingly, Percy was generally believed to be its true creator, and even after his wife finally received her due credit upon the book’s 1822 second printing, her authorship was often questioned and continues to be to present times (see John Lauritsen’s The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, published in 2007).

The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneering feminist commentary A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, must have felt the sting of such sexist skepticism keenly. Even those who accepted that Frankenstein was written by a woman often used that fact against the novel. As related in Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s essential Frankenstein: A Cultural History, a writer for British Critic grunted, “If our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should, and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”

Contrary to that critic’s command, Frankenstein was not forgotten. Its brand of Gothic horror persisted similarly. So did the bride, and toward the end of the decade, Bram Stoker supplied not one but three monstrous brides in Dracula. And this time, they would not be destroyed before getting the opportunity to terrify. However, Stoker was no feminist. Quite the opposite, and his trio of brides are both fiendish abominations of female sexuality, hungrily draining the essence from poor Jonathan Harker, and embodiments of female subservience, cowering before their master like Mormon sister wives at the feet of their priesthood-holding husband. Shelley wanted us to sympathize with her women. Stoker wants us to be repelled by his. If Dracula’s brides are not the most flattering representations of women, they at least get the chance to do some damage, keeping Harker prisoner and Van Helsing and Mina at bay. They also eat a baby.