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.

And Now for No Other Reason Than Universal Horror is Awesome, Here Are 20 Horrific Sketches...

I whipped up some sketches of classic Universal horror characters. Here they are...

Psychobabble’s 10 Tips for the Perfect Retro-Halloween

In a confusing, modern world in which everyone wanders around aimlessly in their virtual reality helmets while playing Pokemon pogs on their telephones and listening to auto-tuned teenagers sing about their vaginas, Psychobabble offers Halloween as an oasis of retro sensibilities. Not politically retro. That would be gross. I just mean Halloweenally retro. Take off the helmet. Put down the phone. Turn off that singer who is still a teenager and consider listening to one who was a teenager fifty years ago (may I suggest The Crystals’ and their “Frankenstein Twist”?). It’s time to buckle down and allow the waves of nostalgia in.

There are few things more old-fashioned than the notion that the vale between the natural world and the spirit world will lift up and a host of ghosts will sneak under it and start partying on our turf every October 31^st.. That’s some silly shit. So it would be highly inappropriate to celebrate such an old-fashioned holiday in a new-fashioned way. Here are Psychobabble’s ten tips for recreating the perfect retro Halloween experience.

1. Hang Beistly decorations.

Halloween is not an icy pool. You don’t just leap into it on October 31^st and leap right back out again. It is a warm bath. You sink into it slowly and lounge, preferably for an entire month. Part of that involves decorating your home. Many people spend all of their energy hanging ghouls and skeletons all over the outside of their homes, which is all fine and good for showing your neighbors how festive you are, but you should never neglect the inside either, since you probably spend more time indoors than out on the lawn. Whether you’re decorating inside or out, you cannot have a truly retro Halloween without some Beistle decorations. You know them. They’re those grinning cats and jack-o-lanterns, wrinkly witches, and dancing skeletons rendered in shades of orange, black, yellow, and green on die-cut cardboard. These designs have been in use since the Beistle Company began in 1900 and were particularly ubiquitous in the seventies and early eighties. Few visuals will instantly conjure those old-timey Halloween feelings than Beistle decorations, though you are also welcome to hang up some of those toxic melted plastic popcorn decorations depicting ghosts, witches, and cats. They’re retro too. Expensive animatronic serial killers and giant inflatable Adam Sandler vampires from Hotel Transylvania are not.

2. Send mail using actual paper and actual mail boxes.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 24

Series: Night Gallery

Episode: “Green Fingers/The Funeral/The Tune in Dan’s Cafe”, in which Cameron Mitchell is a sleazy industrialist who wants to build a factory on the property of gardening-enthusiast Elsa Lanchester. Mitchell would have probably backed off if he’d known just how effective the sweet, old lady’s green fingers are. “Green Fingers” soars with a macabre script by Rod Serling (based on R.C. Cook’s short story), creepy direction by John “Saturday Night Fever” Badham, the star of the greatest monster movie ever made, and an awesome tribute in Siouxsie and the Banshee’s “Green Fingers” (song not included in this episode). Our next painting is a morsel of fun silliness from Richard Matheson in which a vampire plans the funeral he never got a chance to have. The mourners look like the cast of The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t. Yay! The portrait at the end of our museum of miscreants depicts Susan Oliver and Pernell Roberts as a couple incessantly blabbing about their flailing marriage in a bar while the same crappy country song plays over and over on the juke box. Apparently, it was the song that was playing when another doomed couple was swept up in violence at the joint years ago. Despite some groovy psychedelic solarization effects and an elegantly filmed shoot out, this last tale is a whole lot of nothing. The other two are essential Halloween season viewing.

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.

We Need Another Barbara Steele!

Perhaps no other genre generated more iconic actors than horror, and it wasted no time dumping them in cinemas. Even before the advent of sound, there was Lon Chaney and Conrad Viedt. As soon as we could hear our monsters groan and growl, we had Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Dwight Frye, Claude Rains, and Peter Lorre. Then came Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, etc.

The key word here, of course, is actors. Actresses were not absent from horror movies. Those monsters needed someone screaming and helpless to carry off, after all, so we had Mae Clark, Helen Chandler, Fay Wray, Valerie Hobson, Evelyn Ankers, and Hazel Court to perform such tasks. Their thankless roles as distressed damsels are summed up in the term “scream queen” coined decades after the first queen was heard to scream on screen. But what about the women who made us scream? They were few in the early days of horror cinema, and though the Bride of Frankenstein would become an iconic figure only rivaled by the big three guys—Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Frankenstein Monster—the character only had four minutes of screen time and Elsa Lanchester would not follow up on her horror stardom as Bela, Lon, and Boris did. Universal followed its first great sound scare-fest with Dracula’s Daughter, though the film is not one of the best-remembered horrors of its day, and the vampiric Gloria Holden would not capitalize on it any more than Lanchester did on Bride.

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

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.

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.

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 2: The 1930s

In this feature, Psychobabble creeps through 100 years of horror cinema to assemble a highly personal list of the genre’s 200 most monstrous works, decade by decade.

(Updated in September 2021)

12. Dracula (1931- dir. Tod Browning)

Review: The Criterion edition of 'The Night of the Hunter'

In 1955, actor Charles Laughton directed his first and final film and Robert Mitchum embodied one of the cinema’s most relentless, frightening, and oddly humorous bogeymen. Mitchum is Harry Powell, a psychotic Big Bad Wolf in preacher’s clothing on the hunt for a pair of children who know the location of a cache of cash (and how relevant is that theme of a predatory priest today, kids?).

April 22, 2010: The Bride’s Many Veils: 75 Years of Bride of Frankenstein

When this site was in its infancy, one of my first posts was a list of my 100 favorite horror movies. I’ve since deleted the post because tastes change. But one thing hasn’t: James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein is still #1 as far as I’m concerned. At the time, a reader took issue with this, writing that while the film has its charms, it does not even try to be frightening, and, therefore, doesn’t qualify as a horror movie. A few months later I attended a showing of Bride of Frankenstein at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. I was on a date with my then girlfriend, now Bride, Elise. She’d taken me to see her favorite movie, West Side Story, at MOMA recently, and though I’m not a fan of musicals, I went along to score new-boyfriend points. To my surprise and delight, West Side Story was a brilliant piece of work: colorful and energetic, but deepened by a strong atmosphere of dread (actually, this shouldn’t have been that surprising since director Robert Wise also made the brilliantly energetic and powerfully dreadful The Haunting). What made the film all the more enjoyable was the responsive audience. The attendees who were moved to sing along were pretty annoying, but the ones who laughed at the odd moments of humor and swooned at the stretches of romance and shimmied in their seats to the music made the film a more engaging experience.



Going tit for tat, I asked Elise to come to that Bride of Frankenstein screening with me, even though she’s pretty indifferent about horror movies, classic or otherwise. Seeing the theater was full of folks who were probably old enough to have seen the movie during its original release, I felt a little twinge of disappointment. I figured this wouldn’t be the invigorating experience that West Side Story showing had been. Well, call me an ageist bastard, because I guess that’s what I was, but I certainly learned my lesson that evening. As soon as the Universal logo flashed on the screen, the crowd sprang to life. But what really took me by surprise was the way they audibly shuddered when Karloff first appeared in his monster make-up.


As much as I loved the movie for its humor and its bizarre imaginativeness and its wonderful characters and its Gothic style, I couldn’t really argue with that commenter who insisted that Bride of Frankenstein wasn’t scary. Yet now I was sitting in a theater full of spectators who would disagree. There truly was a time when Karloff’s square-head haunted dreams, there was a time when the abomination of reviving stitched-up corpses was a concept too ghastly to ponder, and in a way, this screening was like traveling back to 1935 and experiencing that firsthand.


That Bride of Frankenstein could be viewed as a genuinely horrifying horror film, as opposed to a merely ironic one made by master-ironist James Whale, added an extra level to a film that already possessed so many levels that to accept another made it seem almost greedy. Bride already stood as a brilliant comedy, what with Una O’Connor’s snappy housekeeper Minnie providing a bit of slapstick and the diabolic Dr. Pretorius offering wry double-entendres and dry witticisms (“Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils, and no nonsense about angels and being good.”). As James Whale was one of Hollywood’s earliest luminaries to intrepidly step out of the closet, the film is also often viewed as a milestone of gay cinema, with Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and Pretorius (openly gay Ernest Thesiger) serving as a male couple who father the monster together. This theory is particularly emphasized in Bill Condon’s bio-pic Gods and Monsters when Ian McKellan’s Whale tells Matt McKenzie’s Clive that his character is a little in love with Pretorius. Most film historians suggest the gay subtext of Bride is revisionist theorizing and wasn’t Whale’s intention. David Lewis, Whale’s longtime boyfriend, insisted the director never created a film in accordance with any social, sexual, or political agenda. Still, while Whale may not have consciously allowed his homosexuality to influence his work, he may have done so subconsciously, and Bride is difficult to view outside of that context today.

Along with being a (definite) comedy and a (possible) pioneering gay text, Bride of Frankenstein is also an affecting melodrama (the Monster’s absurd yet undeniably moving encounter with a blind hermit; his brief and tragic courtship of Elsa Lanchester’s Bride), a trove of indelible cinema iconography (the Monster, the shock-quaffed Bride, Frankenstein’s oft-referenced shriek of “She’s alive…alive!”), a fairy tale (Pretorius’s miniature people; the fantastical forest the Monster wanders), a goofy history (the uproarious prologue in which Lanchester plays author Mary Shelley), a costume spectacle, and a knowing parody of monster-movies. And now, on top of all this, we’re to also accept Bride of Frankenstein as an actual horror movie? Most younger viewers will have a tough time swallowing that, even though the film was deemed “a grotesque, gruesome tale” by the New York Post in 1935 and was heavily edited for its horrific content overseas (particularly in Asia and Sweden). For my six pence, the only horror picture of the ‘30s that still holds up as genuinely scary is Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and perhaps “disturbing” or “upsetting” might be more accurate descriptors than “scary.” As such, Jekyll can’t really be called “fun,” even though Fredric March’s early scenes as Hyde are quite funny. Bride of Frankenstein, however, does not possess a frame that isn’t delirious fun, which is the real reason viewers have been returning to it for precisely 75 years. No other classic Universal monster flick can match it for sheer enjoyment, and few films of any other ilk can, either. I suppose that was the most overwhelming revelation of that MOMA screening: everyone in the joint—whether they were in their ‘20s or their ‘90s—was having one hell of a great time.



Bride of Frankenstein was released 75 years ago today.

February 13, 2009: The Psychobabble Double-Feature: ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ and ‘Eraserhead’

One of the earmarks of a truly great movie is that it can be watched over and over again while offering something new with each viewing. Last night I was watching my favorite movie, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), which I’ve seen so many times that I’ve basically stopped thinking that it might continue doling out nuggets of newness. So naïve. What struck me with this latest viewing are the numerous similarities it shares with another of my favorites, James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. Hear me out. Yes, the films were made forty years apart and for completely different kinds of audiences (Whale’s film was aimed at mainstream, blockbuster-attending crowds; Lynch’s at tiny Midnight Movie audiences), and whether or not Lynch ever even saw Bride is highly questionable. According to Greg Olsen’s biography David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, Lynch spent a good portion of his youth attending screenings of B-horror flicks like The Fly, yet he professes to not be a fan of the genre. Still the influence of period horror films is unmistakable in much of his work, from The Alphabet (1968) to Blue Velvet (1986) to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) to Inland Empire (2006). Lynch also says that he is not a film buff and hasn’t seen most of the essential classics. In any event, whether or not Eraserhead was directly influenced by Bride of Frankenstein (even I think that’s a stretch), the thematic resemblances are uncanny.

Both films:

October 12, 2009: The 20 Most Astounding She-Monsters!

As in most other areas of characterization, women have tended to be relegated to second-string status in the realm of monsterdom. Frankenstein’s Monster? Dracula? The Phantom of the Opera? King Kong? All dudes. Even the Invisible Man was a guy. While the vast majority of A-list monsters are male, there are plenty of fictional females that either qualify as inhuman creatures or simply partake in particularly monstrous activities. There are ghosts and vampires, aliens and devil dolls, and witches, witches, witches. So, here are twenty of the scariest, creepiest, and incomparably most astounding females ever to induce a nightmare.

20. Mater Suspiriorum (a.k.a.: Helena Markos)
Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers Trilogy” took twenty years to complete, but there’s no question that its first episode was the series’ finest... and the greatest film in Argento’s gorgeously grisly oeuvre. Suspiria introduces mother number one: Helena Markos, the Mother of Sighs. As the film begins, Markos merely seems to be a long-dead presence at the Tanz Akademie, a dance academy in Germany’s Black Forest where American Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) is studying ballet. All we get is the occasional image of the witch’s shudder-inducing disembodied peepers as various folks are murdered in horrific ways at the academy. Those scenes are notorious for both their brutality and the painterly way Argento executes them. But the most deeply chilling moment in the film comes at the climax when we discover that Mama Markos isn’t as dead as Banyon thinks. But she sure looks like she is. According to Jessica Harper, Argento employed a 90-year old former hooker he found in Rome to play Mater Suspiriorum, but this monster’s memorability stems more from Pierantonio Mecacci’s make-up wizardry than acting.

19. Countess Marya Zaleska
Had Dracula’s Daughter (1936) come off the way screenwriter John L. Balderston intended, Countess Marya Zaleska might have been a lot closer to the top of this list. Alas, the Powers-That-Be at Universal Pictures rejected his outrageous script, which contained scenes of a lusty vampiress committing acts of S&M torture. Frankenstein director James Whale was originally slotted to make the picture, and he was apparently determined to craft a film that would have made Bride of Frankenstein look like an episode of “The Donna Reed Show”, but he backed out when Universal informed him that they expected something quite a bit less elaborate (and costly) than what he had in mind. So, Dracula's Daughter is not as spectacular as it surely would have been with Balderston's racy original script or Whale at the helm, but Gloria Holden still manages to save the day with her icy, ethereal, intense portrayal of Drac’s spawn. And her seduction of a street girl is about as daring as Hollywood got in the wake of the Hays Code.

18. Countess Muriel Arrowsmith

No one does weird sensuality like Barbara Steele, who pretty much took the Goth look invented by Vampira and drained it of its bombshell campiness. Steele brings all of her gaunt allure to her dual roles as sisters Muriel and Jenny Arrowsmith in the surreal Italian ghost story Nightmare Castle. Muriel floats through the first quarter of the film like a looming storm cloud until her sadistic mad-scientist husband Stephen tortures her to death for her marital indiscretions. But Muriel has the last laugh when she takes possession of the sister who replaces her and returns from the grave as a grotesque ghoul triumphantly shrieking “It’s my moment now!” in one of the most wonderfully overwrought scenes in ‘60s horror. Countess Muriel Arrowsmith is not as well remembered as Steele’s similar turns as Princess Asa Vajda and Katja Vajda in Black Sunday (more on that further down the list), but she is nearly as terrifyingly mesmerizing.

17. The Alien Queen
Call me a monster movie blasphemer, but I’m not a fan of James Cameron’s Aliens. Whereas Ridley Scott’s original Alien was a dark, moody horror film, Cameron’s sequel is kind of a loud, dumb shoot-‘em-up (Cameron sure loves loud and dumb). Regardless of my opinion about the film as a whole, I’d feel remiss to not give credit to the magnificent Alien Queen with whom Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley has an unforgettable showdown at the climax of the film. While Ripley searches for a missing girl with the unfortunate name Newt, she discovers just who is responsible for birthing all of those nasty aliens… and she’s massive and very, very miffed.

16. Regan MacNeil
The reason why a horror character as iconic as sweet, little Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is not higher up on this list is because, technically, she isn’t the monster in The Exorcist (1973). She merely plays host to Old Scratch. Still it’s Regan we see doing all manner of horrendous things, from peeing on a perfectly good carpet to giving herself a villainous gynecological probe with a crucifix to shoving her mom’s face in her bloody crotch. I’d add “projectile puking on a priest” to her list of atrocities, but who among us wouldn’t do the same if given the chance? She looks scary, she’s got the mouth of a longshoreman, and she’s 12-years old. If that isn’t the definition of a monster, nothing is.

15. Virginia Merrye
Spider Baby is that rare cult horror movie that works both as outrageous camp and as a quality movie, and the late Jill Banner perfectly embodies that dichotomy as the equally uproarious and sinister Virginia Merrye. A decade before he made celebrated blaxploitation flicks like Coffy and Foxy Brown, Jack Hill made this perverse, droll, disturbing, stylish, and vengefully original little movie about a completely insane Southern family in 1964. Finally released four years later, Spider Baby might best be described as Tennessee Williams meets Charles Addams. The cast is cult-horror fan manna with Sid “Captain Spalding” Haig as twitchy, dangerous simpleton Ralph Merrye and Lon Chaney Jr. as Bruno the Chauffer, the family’s father figure. But Jill Banner as Virgina Merrye, a loony woman-child with a penchant for creepy-crawly pets and slicing folks up, steals the show completely. The late Banner only had a few credits (mostly TV guest spots), which is unfortunate because she displays real star power as the title creep in Spider Baby.

14. Irena Dubrovna
Irena Dubrovna: average woman wracked with emotional problems or flesh-feasting were-cat? As is often the case with a Val Lewton film, Cat People leaves such supernatural questions ambiguous. What isn’t ambiguous is the power the beautiful Simon Simone wields over the film. As Irena— a Serbian refugee recently wed to American engineer Oliver Reed (Kent Smith)— she is at first cute and care free, but when she realizes her superstition-born terror of sex is causing a marital rift, she turns morose… then murderous. Cat People is unusual for its time as it portrays religious-superstitions and a woman’s denial of her sexuality as destructive (compare how Irena fairs in the film to Jane Randolph’s sexually confident Alice Moore). Irena ultimately falls victim to her hang-ups, but viewers who fall under her feline charms, as Oliver Reed did, will be happy to see her back in ghostly form in Curse of the Cat People, which arguably trumps its predecessor.

13. Elizabeth Selwyn
It takes a really powerful presence to upstage Christopher Lee, and that’s just what Patricia Jessel as Elizabeth Selwyn does in City of the Dead (a.k.a.: Horror Hotel). The film begins in 1692 as the innocent Selwyn is burned at the stake for allegedly playing footsy with Satan. Disgusted by her religiously crazed neighbors, she vows allegiance to the Devil as she burns and her terror turns to elated vengeance. Cut to that same town in 1960 where a woman, who looks suspiciously like Selwyn, is running a creepy hotel in the foggiest little nook in New England. Whether she’s spitting on the assholes that sentence her to death or orchestrating human sacrifices almost 300 years later, Selwyn is tough and self-possessed in a stately manner that makes her cinema’s strongest female equivalent to co-star Lee’s Dracula.

12. Rhoda Penmark
There has never been a child as terrifying as tap shoe-wielding maniac Rhoda Penmark. Unlike Regan McNeil, she’s no vessel for Satan. Nature vs. nurture arguments notwithstanding, Rhoda’s evil is all hers. Nothing that cheerfully polite and seemingly eager-to-please could be anything but a psychopath in waiting, and Rhoda gives in to her urges after classmate Claude Daigle usurps the penmanship award she so covets. The big screen incarnation of The Bad Seed swathes the story in stagy camp, earning it a passionate following of ironic cultists. But William March’s original novel is far more disturbing. Patty McCormack’s performance as Rhoda in the 1956 film is certainly cult-worthy, but it is her literally predecessor that may inspire nightmares.

11. Granny Hart
The title character of “The Twilight Zone’s” “Jess-Belle” is a brooding, beautiful, lovelorn witch played by Anne Francis, but the episode’s real star is Jeanette’s Nolan’s horny, happy-go-luck Granny Hart. After Jess falls in love with Roscoe from “The Dukes of Hazzard”, she calls on local broom-rider Granny Hart to “witch” her in exchange for her soul. Granny is renowned in the Ozarks for her love potions, but her neatest trick is the ability to transform herself from a hag to a quite attractive senior citizen in the blink of an eye. Whether she’s hunched over a cauldron or pawing James Best, Granny Hart is invariably in a chipper mood and absolutely delighted by her sorceress status. When Jess-Belle expresses remorse after making her Mephistophelean deal, Granny cheerfully responds, “Well, you’re lookin’ at it all wrong. Be a witch. Take a witch’s pleasure. Take the man you bargained for—give him witch’s love!” That’s the spirit!

10. Princess Asa Vajda
Although it’s slow-paced, Mario Bava’s Black Sunday is a masterpiece of Gothic atmosphere and exquisitely creepy sets. But the film’s most memorable element is the haunting presence of one Princess Asa Vajda, who we first see as she’s about to be burned at the stake for witchery or Satan worshipping or some such crime against Christian decency. The peeved Princess vows revenge on the crazed mob right before they hammer a spiked mask onto her face (the spikes are on the inside, incidentally). Many years later she is resurrected as a sort of vampire-witch, her face still polka-dotted with the puncture wounds she suffered so many years before and sets off on a macabre quest for eternal life. Most will remember the Princess for her unforgettably gruesome visage, but it’s Barbara Steele’s wild performance that makes her a truly great She-Monster. With eyes and nostrils flaring, Steele delights in executing the Princess’s escapades and every one of her scenes is a showstopper. The results: Italy gains its first great horror film and its most unforgettable monster.

9. Baby Jane Hudson
Long before Danny Bonaduce and Dana Plato became the models for the child-star-gone-wrong there was Baby Jane Hudson. Of course, there really isn’t that much difference between the apple-cheeked, attitudinal singer she was as a tyke and the psychotic pentagenarian she would become. Honestly, I think I’d rather be bound and gagged to a bed like Joan Crawford than have to listen to little Baby Jane sing “I’m Sending a Letter to Daddy”. But that’s just me. Bette Davis’s portrayal of the title character of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the stuff of legend: she’s creepy, she’s hilarious, and she’s also pretty heartbreaking — try not to feel for her when she convinces herself that Victor “King Tut” Buono will resurrect her long-dead career. Just don’t let her serve you lunch.

8. Medusa
The most ancient monster on this list may also be the scariest. Just think of how terrifying a creature has to be to have the power to kill you just by looking at you. In Greek mythology, Medusa was one of three gorgon sisters (Stheno and Euryale were the others), which had snakes for hair and the power to turn humans into stone with their gazes. Terence Fisher’s 1964 film The Gorgon played really fast and loose with mythology, having Magaera (actually a Fury, not a Gorgon) strolling around London and committing murders beneath the full moon like the Wolf Man. Medusa as realized by stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen in 1981’s Clash of the Titans is a lot closer to the original myth, and with her snake-like body and scaly face, she truly lives up to her horrifying reputation.

7. Carrie White
Like so many of the classic creatures (Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolf Man, the Gill Man), Carrie White is not really the monster in her story. It’s the “normal” folks who really epitomize monstrosity in their hatred, prejudice, and small-minded superstitions. The destructiveness the title telekinetic teen unleashes at the climax of Carrie—novel and film—is an act of righteous retaliation. How many who’ve been victimized by the “cool kids” fantasized about perpetrating similar revenge? Too many, according to the media, but Carrie may provide a vicarious outlet for some of these kids. For the victimizers, there’s a valuable lesson to be learned: don’t fuck with the weird kid.

6. The Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
The great thing about the Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is that she’s two monsters in one. For the first half of the film she’s a sadistic but beautiful creep of the wicked-stepmother variety who orders the death of fairer stepdaughter Snow White. In a gruesome move that would never past muster in a contemporary Disney film, she asks her huntsman crony to bring Snow’s heart back to her in a jeweled box as proof that the deed is done (a detail from the original Brothers Grimm tale). In the second half of the film, the Queen transforms into a witchlike crone and delivers the non-proverbial poison apple to the subject of her seething jealousy. The chilling presence of the Evil Queen has stretched far beyond the original Snow White, and films ranging from Annie Hall to John Waters’s Desperate Living to Enchanted have paid tribute to her unforgettable evil.

5. Minnie Castevet
The women and girls on this list do some nasty things, but really… orchestrating the rape of a newlywed by Satan? That’s going a wee bit too far. Yet all is forgiven because Ruth Gordon, as the witch Minnie Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby, is utterly adorable. Yes, she’s a pretty obnoxious neighbor, constantly showing up at the Woodhouse’s apartment uninvited, slipping a Mickey Finn into Rosemary’s “chocolate mouse”, and stealing her demon baby (plus the whole rape thing), but she’s so upbeat, so full of vigor, so funny and charming that it’s impossible to begrudge her. Few monsters are as thoroughly evil and thoroughly likable as Minnie Castevet.

4. Talky Tina
The original gabby demon doll, Talky Tina is the anti-hero at the center of the “Twilight Zone’s” scariest 30 minutes. In “Living Doll”, a little girl named Christie is having difficulty acclimating to her mother’s new dickhead boyfriend, played with sweaty menace by Telly Savalas. Kojak has a cow when he sees his wastrel wife has purchased an expensive talking doll for Christie, but outrage turns to terror when Talky Tina starts giggling, “I’m Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you.” Voiced by June “Rocky the Flying Squirrel” Foray, Talky Tina is a terrifying combination of relentlessness, indestructibility, Charles Bronson-cool, and plastic.

3. Lady Sylvia Marsh
Male or female, few monsters relish their evilocity with the zeal of Lady Sylvia Marsh in Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm. The Lady is a vampire/snake-priestess thingy who worships a giant night crawler and just has to dance whenever she hears a wind instrument. Russell’s empathy is clearly with the vivacious, anti-religion, anti-priggishness, and very funny Marsh and not with the dull prudes who would thwart her plot to feed virginal Catherine Oxenberg to her wormy master. She can barely contain her glee when blasting venom on a crucifix (a stunt that equally delighted atheist-actress Amanda Donohoe and atheist-viewer me) or baring fangs at her numerous victims. Based on a Bram Stoker novel that isn’t Dracula, Lair has many detractors, but those losers are missing out on a bottomless pit of fun… and most of that fun can be traced directly to the antics of Lady Sylvia Marsh.

2. The Wicked Witch of the West
I’d wager that if a poll were taken assessing the fictional character that traumatized the most children, the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz would come out on top. She’s just such an embodiment of the things that most terrify impressionable kids: her ruthlessness, her apparent ability to materialize anywhere at anytime, her cadre of hideous flying monkeys that follow her every command, her twisted tower in which she imprisons young Dorothy, her boner for Dorothy’s beloved pet, her leering green face and grasping fingers, and the way she delights in her own evil. As mean and scary as Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch is, you have to admit that she has a legitimate beef with Dorothy. What would you do if some Kansas yokel dropped a house on your sister and ripped off her shoes? You’d probably go as ballistic as the WWW. Of course, The Wizard of Oz directs all of our empathy squarely toward Dorothy, so it’s tough to see the Witch as anything other than the ultimate bogey woman.

1. The Bride of Frankenstein
She only has four minutes of screen time in the film named after her, but Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein is without question the most memorable monster on this list, and may only fall behind Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster and Lugosi’s Dracula in overall terms. 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 laid the groundwork for all of the sexy grotesques that followed her, from Vampira to Morticia Addams to Princess Asa Vajda to Elvira to Lady Sylvia Marsh. Her hairstyle has been appropriated in one form or another by personalities ranging from Lily Munster to Dave Vanian of the Damned. Her elliptical presence in The Bride of Frankenstein sparked numerous attempts to fill in the gaps (Elizabeth Hand’s imaginative feminist novel The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride; the films The Bride and an upcoming remake that promises to focus more on the title character than the original did), 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 arc 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 astounding She-Monster of them all!

May 4, 2009: Psychobabble Presents… Frankenstein A-Z

By the late ‘40s the original Universal Monsters were growing a little tired. While the “monster rally” pictures House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) were loads of fun, the creatures (Wolf Man, Dracula, and the Frankenstein Monster) were basically depicted as parodic ghosts of their former sinister selves. So the Powers That Be at Universal Pictures had the stroke of genius to pair their most monstrous properties with their most hilarious comedy duo in a film that put an official end to the golden age of Universal Horror while sparking off a successful string of Abbott and Costello Meet… (insert monster) films. None of those subsequent movies was as frenetically hilarious and dementedly delightful as the first. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) finds Bud and Lou going snout to snout with Universal’s most terrifying trio, and the one-liners (Larry Talbot: “Every night when the moon is full, I turn into a wolf.” Costello: “You and twenty million other guys.”) come fast and fabulous. Notably, this picture marks the second and last time Bela Lugosi would ever play Dracula in a feature film.

Of the nine novels Christopher Bram has composed, none has garnered more attention than the one originally published as The Father of Frankenstein. That’s largely because the book was adapted into a major motion picture as Gods and Monster (a considerably better title) in 1998, winning director and writer Bill Condon an Academy Award for Best Screenplay Adaptation and scoring star Ian McKellan slobbering reviews and an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Frankenstein director James Whale. The book and film focus on