366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 45

The Date: November 14

The Movie: I Married a Witch (1942)

What Is It?: Veronica Lake is great fun as a witch who makes Fredric March miserable after his ancestor condemned her to burn at the stake three centuries earlier. Lake’s real-life torture of March while making the film makes it all the more fun to watch.

Why Today?: On this day in 1922, Veronica Lake was born.

Review: 'I Married a Witch' (1942)

Dodgy ideas are scattered like landmines throughout the introductory passage of René Clair’s 1942 comedy I Married a Witch. The film ignites in 1770 Salem where broom-rider Jennifer (Veronica Lake) and her pop (Cecil Kellaway) are about to be burned after getting ratted out by Puritan Jonathan Wooley (Fredric March in a bad wig). As the witch heads to the stake, she vows vengeance on Wooley and all his descendents, cursing them with eternal unhappiness. That means they’ll all get married to ruthlessly henpecking wives. We then see March in various Wooley guises throughout the centuries getting his balls handed to him by generations of harpies. Hardy-har.

A Strange Case for ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’

Early in his amusing study Danse Macabre, Stephen King lays out the three essential monster archetypes: “the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name.” Each of these creatures serves as the central villain of three “twentieth-century gothics which have become known as ‘the modern horror story’.” King’s categorizing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a vampire novel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a “thing without a name” novel need no explanation. His werewolf tale is slightly dodgier. But the gnomish ghoul in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has always sat outside the pack despite his broad influence and importance. Mr. Hyde is not a werewolf in any official sense, but it isn’t too tough to suss where King is coming from. Hyde is a monster brought on by transformation, a not-so-subtle representation of uncontrollable, destructive id. He parallels alcoholics and drug addicts neater than the Wolf Man does, but the similarities are still significant. So is King’s categorization of Hyde as a werewolf. There was never a major werewolf novel in the vein of Dracula or Frankenstein, yet that beast naturally completes the holy trinity of major monsters. The werewolf took its fated position alongside Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster in 1941 when Universal Studios released The Wolf Man, its final great, serious monster movie during its great golden age of monster movies, and one of its few without literary precedent.