Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #27

Halloween season simply isn’t Halloween season without a regular dose of classic 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!

#27. Dracula’s Daughter (1936- dir. Lambert Hillyer)

Dracula’s Daughter marks the first time a female monster was allowed to dominate a Universal horror (poor Elsa Lanchester only got a few minutes of screen time the previous year). Of course, this was 1936, so don’t dive in expecting a progressive spin on its themes as the film equates vampirism with bisexuality and the deeply conflicted monster behaves more like prey than predator, implying that a female monster is inherently a weak one. Blah. Nevertheless, Gloria Holden remains wonderfully spooky and haunted in the title role, especially during her late-night funeral for her dad in the woods. It’s a shame that James Whale did not get to make the outrageous movie called Dracula’s Daughter he’d been plotting. Ultimately, Hillyer’s flick is thin gruel compared to the hearty stew than Whale and screenwriter R.C. Sherriff had been cooking up.

Review: 'It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Movie Posters from the Kirk Hammett Collection'

In an age when lazily staged poses and perfunctorily photo-shopped images are regularly used to promote major motion pictures, it is halting to revisit the art once used to sell movies regarded as junk for the matinee crowd. Even films as chintzy as The Angry Red Planet and The Crawling Eye were hawked with striking graphics and paintings. Artworks for more prestigious pictures, such as Lionel Reiss’s bold art deco piece advertising The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and an uncredited work for The Invisible Man so haunting and striking and innately nightmarish that text was barely deemed necessary, are—no exaggeration— museum quality.

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has long recognized the artfulness, power, and fun of classic horror and sci-fi movie posters, amassing an impressive collection being exhibited in a show called It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Movie Posters from the Kirk Hammett Collection at the Peabody Essex Museum in (appropriately enough) Salem, Massachusetts, and in a tie-in book of the same name.

The book combines oddities such as the aforementioned Caligari poster, Roland Coudon’s funeral procession tableaux for Frankenstein, and a Karoly Grosz Mummy poster that spotlights the film’s human cast members with a lot of more common promos for pictures such as Dracula’s Daughter, Barbarella, Mystery of the Wax Museum, and Island of Lost Souls. Hammett favors pre-sixties posters, though there is a scattering of later day ones for movies such as Alien, Rosemary’s Baby, Blacula, and of course, It’s Alive. It’s an impressive collection.

It’s Alive! also features a few interesting essays on the history and craft of horror promo posters, the fear reaction as explained through neuroscience and psychology, and Hammett’s own relationship with horror films and their adverts. Hammett is only quoted in that latter essay, so he generally allows his artworks to assume the starring role in this book. However, a shot of him grinning like a kid surrounded by his collection of other creepy toys, records, magazines, comics, models, and props really makes me wish this book had expanded its scope more beyond often familiar poster artwork to encompass the complete Kirk Hammett Horror Collection.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 200

The Date: April 17

The Movie: Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

What Is It?: As cinema’s first memorable female monster, Gloria Holden battles through a homophobic script to command Lambert Hillyer’s effectively gloomy visuals with her imposing presence.

Why Today?: Today is Bat Appreciation Day

Review: 'The Z Files: Treasures from Zacherley's Archives'

When I was a kid, my dad would creep down into the basement and unearth his copy of Spook Along with Zacherley every October 1^st, which then served as our household Halloween carols for the rest of the spooky season. I was born too late to actually have seen Zach’s act on the classic monster movie showcase “Shock Theatre” or the Rock & Roll dance party “Disc-O-Teen,” but the record was all I needed to get him. The photo of him in frock coat and cadaverous make up on the cover. The silly songs about the Transylvania P.T.A., a Ring-a-Ding Orangutaun, and the return of Frank and Drac he crooned in a very un-Rock & Roll bass-baritone. As a devotee of “The Munsters,” “The Groovie Goolies,” and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the corny songs resonated with me even though I never got the chance to see the Cool Ghoul step on screen in the middle of Dracula’s Daughter to explain that the burns he got while dragging the Count from a funeral pyre prevented him from attending a cocktail party in his honor. Since TV archiving wasn’t super meticulous in the early sixties, I’m still unable to see much footage of Zacherley in action. Fortunately, there’s The Z Files: Treasures from the Zacherley Archives to provide a bit of a simulation.

Published last year, Richard Scrivani and Tom Weaver’s book collects a King-Kong’s ransom of choice artifacts from Zach’s personal collection. There’s a complete script of his Dracula’s Daughter show (which admittedly doesn’t read as well as it probably played on screen). There are scripts for three of his WOR-TV shows (ditto). These are neat, but I really loved the weird miscellany leading up to these major pieces: a stereotypically hyperbolic juvenile delinquency article about some kids who broke into a mausoleum to steal a skull for their Zacherley Club House, the angry letters from “Shock Theatre” viewers who didn’t appreciate his intrusions on their favorite movies, a letter from the New Jersey Television Broadcasting Company warning Zach’s cameramen to stop zooming in on the dancers for “bust” and “fanny” shots, an article about a Zacherley impersonator who’d been arrested for public drunkenness, and so on and so on. There’s also a good selection of B&W Zach pics, several of them displaying sweet-faced John Zacherle without his ghoulish get up. Apparently, there is also an accompanying DVD in the works, which hopefully will include whatever surviving footage there is. Until that emerges from the crypt, The Z Files fills the gap well.

Review: 'Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural' (1975)

Certain well-done B-horror movies deliver an infectious grotesqueness that couldn’t be captured in a big budget picture. Films such as The Blair Witch Project, Carnival of Souls, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Paranormal Activity bear an ingratiating queasiness that compliments their cardboard cheapness powerfully. Not as well-remembered as any of those films, and not necessarily as good, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1975) is still an effectively unsettling creepshow. Writer/director Richard Blackburn (who’d make a bigger cult splash in 1982 when he co-wrote Eating Raoul with Paul Bartel) recycles plot elements from Dracula and The Night of the Hunter and re-imagines them as a loopy psycho-sexual coming-of-age tale indebted to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Lila (Cheryl Smith) is the daughter of a gangster in Prohibition America. Her dad calls her to join him in Astaroth, a monster-menaced fairyland likely inspired by Vasaria in the old Universal monster pictures. There she is attacked by some Moreau-esque monsters, imprisoned in a dungeon, terrorized by a creepy hag (Maxine Ballantyne), and subjected to some heavy come-ons from the title character (Lesley Gilb), who looks like Gloria Holden in Dracula’s Daughter.

No one is going to accuse Lemora of being well written, well acted, or well shot. It looks like a vintage porno with the sex scenes excised. Yet it spins a definite spell. The plot drifts along with the mercurial logic and foreboding air of a nightmare. The climactic slow-mo monster battle royal is goofy, but it is preceded by scenes that are haunting or frightening in spite of themselves, particularly Lila’s encounters with the singing hag and a gaggle of giggling vampire kids. Had I come across this movie on TV when I was a kid I’m sure it would have cost me as many nights of sleep as a similar looking ad for The Haunted Mansion in Long Branch, New Jersey, did. Catching the film on TV in the ‘70s was unlikely, though, considering its distribution was severely hindered by the officious prigs at the Catholic League of Decency, who denounced its suggestions of pedophilia and homosexuality. Fortunately, Lemora has been back in circulation since the late ‘90s (and as of this writing, it’s available to watch instantly on Netflix), and though it isn’t quite a lost classic, horror geeks should find it well worth watching for its numerous monster-movie in-jokes and unrelenting air of unease.

Psychobabble Babbles with… Philip J. Riley!

Regular visitors to Psychobabble know of my fondness for the work of Philip J. Riley. Riley is the Indiana Jones of classic Monster Movies, executing daring vault raids and emerging with such invaluable artifacts as the long-lost script and treatments for James Whale’s unproduced version of Dracula’s Daughter, the Mummy-precursor Cagliostro, the version of Dracula in which Lon Chaney was to star, and the scrapped Monster Rally Wolfman vs. Dracula. Riley’s finds are fascinating both for their obscurity and for their often bizarre nature (a quick perusal of Dracula’s Daughter will reveal why Universal gave it a pass!) and can be read as part of his “Alternate Histories for Classic Film Monsters” series published by BearManor Media. He recently allowed Psychobabble to pop open his skull and pick his brain for the first fascinating installment of our new interview series: Psychobabble Babbles with…
Philip J. Riley


Psychobabble: You have a truly impressive catalogue of published archival scripts. How did you get started in your work as an ace researcher and what led to you publishing your finds?

Philip J. Riley: It all started with (Famous Monsters of Filmland-founder) Forrest J. Ackerman. I donated all my rare scripts and items, such as the hat and teeth from London After Midnight (Lon Chaney's lost 1927 MGM film), to his collection. While I was working with him during the day and playing music at night (I did a lot of session work with Elton John, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, etc. and occasionally played bass for the original US stage production of The Rocky Horror Show) I found out from Forry about some lost silent films, so I contacted a friend in MGM's legal department and got permission to use all the MGM material that was still on the lot— this was in the ‘70s when MGM was sold and before the auction.

MGM still had all their original nitrate 8x10 negatives at the time, so we had prints made from all the lost Chaney films — plus other lost films such as Garbo's Divine Woman for a 50 cent a piece! When I finished the reconstruction of the films I was encouraged to continue writing by many famous visitors to Forry's house, like Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Fritz Lang. So I did, but it took 10 years until a publisher picked it up. In the ‘70s there was not much interest in "old films" and videotapes were just getting started, so no one really had a chance to see them except on TV, which rarely aired a silent film. And that's what started my publishing projects.

PB: If we can just back up for a second, I have to know how exactly you came into possession of Chaney’s teeth and hat.

PJR: The hat I found right at the costume building in 1974, I think, at MGM before the big sale went on. I traded the janitor, who was wearing it, for my beloved Stetson hat. The teeth I arranged for a permanent loan from the Museum of Natural History through their curator. Now that Forry is gone, I believe they went back to the museum— I hope they did!



PB: I love the image of the janitor sweeping up the MGM costume building while wearing such a priceless piece of Monster Movie history. So, what sparked your own fascination with the genre, and do you have a favorite Monster Movie?

PJR: I've always loved the old horror classics. I remember when I was 11 I took a paper route for the summer so that I could earn enough to buy a cheap 8mm projector and a full 8mm print of the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera, which remains my favorite film. I couldn't tell you what started it all— a shrink would probable tell you that I identified with the monsters as they were hated because they were different— or maybe it was a hidden desire to save the heroine from the monsters.

PB: As for the “Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters” books, did you go seeking these scripts and treatments with the series in mind, or did you just happen across some of them as part of your regular research, thus inspiring it?

PJR: I've been carting these scripts around for years. During my research for the Universal Filmscript Series by MagicImage Filmbooks, I had the chance to meet all the great actors, producers, musicians, and crewmembers that were still alive at the time. I was one of the few authors to be permitted access to the Universal Vaults. I’d been trying to get into Universal for 10 years, but they wouldn't even admit that they had a vault! Then one day I was having lunch at Universal with Patsy Ruth Miller (star of the 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Leonard Maltin, when Patsy's brother grabbed my arm and said he wanted me to meet someone. Well, that someone happened to be (Universal Studios owner) Lew Wasserman, himself, who said in a loud voice so all the lawyers could hear, "I like your work, kid. Give this kid anything he wants for his books". That started me on the Classic Monster/comedy/Science fiction series for Universal.


I found many, many rare items in the vaults — some of them being the old Universal Exhibitor's Books, which announced what titles the theater owners could book in advance in the following year. That is where I originally found that Lugosi was to star in the sequel to Dracula and Karloff was to star in The Wolf Man and Cagliostro and Lon Chaney was to star in Dracula. But at the time, I didn't want to get sidetracked, and many of the announced but never produced films had very little production files. The scripts just came to me from many sources. The draft of Dracula's Daughter was given to me by the writer, himself, R. C. Sherriff, and several came from (former Universal Studios head) Carl Laemmle Jr., whom I befriended in his last years before he became too ill. Some were only available on Microfilm, so they had to be transcribed for the PDF format that modern publishing houses use. Then I saw some of the advance ads again in Ron Borst's wonderful book Graven Images, and that is what inspired me to produce the answers to practically the last mysteries about the Classic Monster films. The series was picked up by a great publishing house called BearManor Media run by Ben Ohmart. They deserve a lot of credit for getting these scripts out of my trunks and into the books. They recognized the historic importance in them.

PB: What kind of work goes into putting one of these books together? I imagine the research is intense.

PJR: Yes it is. Today it is harder to locate material since I donated all my collection to the Universal Archives, MoMA, and Forry Ackerman and the Academy libraries. But I've been very lucky to have kept transcripts of the interviews I did back in the ‘70s at a time when I was younger and could go diligently through thousands of articles and photographs just to find the right ones. So these books are as fun to produce as they are fun for the fans. Plus the Internet has been a great source of new material.

PB: Which find most blew your mind? I personally couldn’t believe you dug up the original Dracula’s Daughter treatment and script, nor did I imagine they would be so outrageous.

PJR: That is my favorite. I was told by Sherriff that James Whale did not want to do another horror film. Laemmle Junior insisted, though, but in 1934 when the draft was being written along side The Return of Frankenstein, Whale hatched a plot with his friends and they came out with the draft you see in the book, with it's mutilations, sexual overtones, and over-the-top scenes to drive the budget up. Whale secretly and anonymously submitted the script to the Censor who naturally went into shock! The project was stalled and Whale got to do his other projects like Show Boat. It's a script that could be made today and be enjoyed by the slice and dice generation. But without Lugosi — who knows?


PB: Are there any great, lost films that continue to elude you? What would be the ultimate discovery?

PJR: London After Midnight of course, Garbo's Divine Woman, Chaney's The Big City, A Blind Bargain, Thunder, Murnau's The 4 Devils, and Laurel and Hardy/Lawrence Tibbett's The Rogue Song, as well as the 2-color Technicolor Mysterious Island.

PB: So, what’s next in the “Alternate Histories for Classic Film Monsters” series?

PJR: The next book, coming out for Halloween through BearManor Media will be Bela Lugosi in Frankenstein, followed up with Willis O'Brien's unmade MGM film War Eagles for which the production background is being written by David Conover. Then in the “lost film” series I have started a 2nd revised edition of my London After Midnight reconstruction — then Chaney in The Man Who Laughs, Karloff in The Invisible Man, and hopefully the first draft handwritten script by Noel Langley for Shirley Temple in The Wizard of Oz. Someday I'll get to writing my novels (laughs).

Thanks again to Philip J. Riley for his time and insights.

November 3, 2009: Psychobabble recommends ‘Dracula’s Daughter- An Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters'

When I posted a piece about the lost versions of Dracula’s Daughter just two weeks ago, I had no idea that a book was poised to be published that would be the final word on this fascinating nook of film history. At the risk of sounding melodramatic (or, at the very least, really geeky), I literally gasped when I learned about Philip J. Riley’s Dracula's Daughter - An Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters. Riley’s book gathers precious documents detailing what might have been regarding the first sequel to Tod Browning’s 1931 classic Dracula, such as John L. Balderston’s 10-page treatment, which was rejected by the suits at Universal Studio for being too shockingly perverse, and R.C. Sheriff’s entire script for the version that would have been filmed by Frankenstein director James Whale. The book also contains fascinating recollections from Carl Laemmle, Jr., the head producer at Universal when the company was turning out it’s greatest monster films; the full text of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest”, the story that inspired Dracula’s Daughter; proposed poster art for the aborted versions of the film; and spare but priceless historical and biographical tidbits by Riley.


Without question, Dracula’s Daughter- An Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters contains the most important artifacts of classic horror film history to be made public this century. Finally, we get to read in specific detail just what so offended Laemmle and Co. about Balderston’s treatment and realize that his film could have been the greatest of all of Universal’s Dracula pictures, not to mention one of the most faithful to Stoker’s original text—Balderston includes many of the author’s details that did not make it into Browning’s film, including a character based on Quincey Morris. Sheriff’s script is equally jaw-dropping: Whale was far more interested in filming the musical Showboat than another monster picture, so he had Sheriff make his screenplay for Dracula’s Daughter so outrageous that Laemmle would never green light it. This included a flashback showing Dracula being transformed into a vampire by a Yoda-like creature and a pair of overtly gay heroes. Whale got his wish and Showboat was released in 1936.

I’ll not give away much more about this book, which is a trove of revelations and an utter thrill to read. Most exciting of all is the fact that it’s just the beginning. Riley’s “Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters” series will include future installments about scrapped versions of The Wolfman and The Invisible Man that would have starred Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney’s Dracula, Wolfman vs. Dracula, and more. Unfathomably essential.

October 14, 2009: The Lost World: John L. Balderston’s ‘Dracula’s Daughter’

Developing a movie project is such a convoluted process that it’s amazing any films ever get made at all. There are the budgetary problems, and the casting difficulties, and the conflicts between directors and producers that have caused more than a few projects to be aborted before reaching term. In this on-going series I’ve dubbed “The Lost World”, I’ll be looking at some of these sweet abortions.

John L. Balderston’s Dracula’s Daughter

It all starts with Tod Browning’s Dracula, the film that kicked off the golden age of horror, inspired endless pretenders, and became Universal Pictures’ most massive money machine of 1931. Desperate for income during the Great Depression, Universal was hot to capitalize on Dracula’s success, and rapidly followed it with such iconic chillers as Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Old Dark House. Amidst Universal’s initial horror frenzy, producer David O. Selznick bought the rights to the excised opening chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from Stoker’s widow Florence in 1933. The chapter introduced Jonathan Harker and detailed his weird encounter with a female vampire he happens across while heading to Dracula’s castle. Stoker’s publisher clipped the sequence from Dracula for fear the novel was growing unwieldy, but it was published as a short story titled “Dracula’s Guest” two years after his death. Selznick, however, decided that Dracula’s Daughter was a snappier title for his film.

John L. Balderston

Selznick recruited John L. Balderston, who’d written the stage play on which the Dracula film was based (as well as the screenplays for Frankenstein and The Mummy) to compose a treatment. This was right before Hollywood really began enforcing the priggish Hays Code that drastically reduced the level of sex and violence permissible in American films, so Balderston packed his treatment with all manner of forbidden delights. With the title vampire left staked and dead (as opposed to “undead”) at the climax of Dracula, Balderston had to explore some of the second-tier characters for a premise. As related in David J. Skal’s indispensable book The Monster Show, Balderston decided to focus on Dracula’s trio of wan brides glimpsed so briefly and tantalizingly in Browning’s film. His treatment revives a most unsavory sequence from Stoker’s novel in which Dracula presents his brides with an infant as a sack lunch. The film was to have the Prince of Darkness’s daughter offering up the bagged baby, as she was left to rule over crumbling Castle Dracula while daddy was out of town. The brides gripe that they’d prefer some young men to feed on, and the daughter expresses her displeasure at their complaints by cracking an S&M whip at her stepmothers and warning that she is their “mistress” while Drac’s away.


Balderston also intended to explicitly portray the daughter’s attacks as sensual seductions committed by a night creature that is “amorous of her victims.” She was to torture these fellows using the sundry “industrial-strengths whips, straps, and chains” she kept in her arsenal.

Unlike Browning’s Dracula, which started with a bang then gradually relaxed into a drawing-room mystery, Balderston intended his Dracula’s Daughter to build steadily toward a heart-jolting climax more in line with Stoker’s book. The film was to begin with Dr. Van Helsing setting off to Transylvania to do away with Dracula’s brides. Unbeknownst to the vampire hunter, the Daughter follows him to London. While there she snares a handsome aristocrat named Lord Edward Wadhurst in her thrall. Van Helsing and the aristocrat’s fiancée, Helen Swaything, chase the Daughter back to Transylvania, where they put her in her permanent grave. Incidentally, this treatment (as well as all subsequent versions of Dracula’s Daughter) has nothing in common with “Dracula’s Guest” aside from the presence of a female vampire.

Balderston’s Dracula’s Daughter was probably never going to get the green light simply based on its content: the sex, the gruesome violence, the torture, the baby eating. But it was legal matters that sunk the picture officially. According to Selznick’s agreement with Florence Stoker, no character or incident from any of her husband’s work aside from “Dracula’s Guest” was permitted to be included in the film. That means no Van Helsing, no Brides, and no baby in a bag. Selznick parted ways with Balderston and employed R.C. Sherriff, who’d contributed dialogue to The Old Dark House and written The Invisible Man, to rewrite the treatment. But when Universal Pictures sent the treatment to production-code führer Joe Breen, it was again rejected for its sex and violence, which Breen branded “dangerous,” and for Sherriff’s inclusion of Dracula in some flashback sequences.


So Dracula’s Daughter just kept getting limper and limper. The exorcising of kinky sex and violence neutered the film as a truly shocking entity. The loss of the Dracula character devalued its appeal as a sequel to the original film, which hinged so much on the iconic presence of Bela Lugosi (although Van Helsing somehow remained). Hope was in the air when James Whale, horror’s single most original and extraordinary filmmaker, came on board to direct, but his plans to craft a lavish, big-budget picture were nixed by Universal, who were reluctant to dole out the dollars. They settled for a fairly humdrum screenplay by Garrett Fort, who’d worked on the script of the Dracula play, and hired Lambert Hillyer to direct. As released in 1936, Dracula’s Daughter is certainly not without its charms. Gloria Holden brings a spooky grace and possessed intensity to Countess Marya Zaleska, the title vampire. The scene in which she puts her father to rest during an al fresco funeral ritual is among the most atmospheric and unsettling in a Universal horror film. The overt S&M torture of Balderston’s treatment may be gone, but Countess’s seduction of a street girl is still pretty racy by 1930’s standards. Still it would be glorious for a contemporary filmmaker to resurrect the film blueprinted in Balderston’s nasty treatment. Until then, John L. Balderston’s Dracula’s Daughter will continue to be just another pile of bones languishing in the Lost World.