Review: 'The Monster' (1925) DVD

In 1959, Crane Wilbur directed an excellent adaptation of Mary Roberts Rinehart's old dark house stage play The Circular Staircase. 34 years earlier, Roland West did the same for Wilbur's own old dark house play The Monster. 

Review" 'The Bat' Special Edition Blu-ray

The Film Detective issued a blu-ray of The Bat in 2015, and though Crane Wilbur's comedic 1959 old dark house flick, based on a play by Mary Roberts Rinehart, remained a complete delight, the disc was not without issues. While I did note in my review that it was a vast improvement over the myriad DVD editions of this public domain picture, I also noted the myriad "specs and thin scratches" that invade the image regularly and the disc's crackly audio. It was also a pretty bare bones package.

Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #13

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!

#13. The Phantom of the Opera (1925- dir. Rupert Julan)

Lon Chaney’s definitive character is still really scary. What did those audiences in the earliest days of cinema think when they witnessed Chaney’s Phantom staring them down, marching forward with dreadful relentlessness, his finger pointing accusingly right at them? Probably something like, “Oh, rhatz. I do believe I’ve soiled my golf knickers.” There’s something a bit off about a silent movie about opera, but the big bonus is that we don’t have to listen to any opera. Plus, the Phantom’s sewer lair is super cool.

Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #24

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!

#24. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923- dir. Wallace Worsley)

I’ve always had trouble viewing The Hunchback of Notre Dame as a horror movie, because the implication is that Quasimodo—a disabled man whom almost everyone treats like complete shit—is a monster. The true monsters of the picture are the so-called “normal” people who whip and mock him. Fuck those assholes. There is great satisfaction in witnessing Quasimodo’s revenge, as there is in witnessing the tenderness between he and Esmeralda, Lon Chaney’s sensitive performance as the title character, director Wallace Worsley’s lush and epic images, and Joe Bonomo’s incredible acrobatics as Chaney’s stunt-performing stand in.

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...

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 359

The Date: September 23

The Movie: Phantom of the Opera (1925)

What Is It?: The first true American horror film that looks like a full-blown, Hollywood production, trumpeting a cast of thousands and exquisite costumes and sets, particularly the Phantom’s underground labyrinth. As familiar as stills of Lon Chaney's face as Erik the Phantom are, the uninitiated may be surprised by how truly scary that puss is when moving on the screen. Here the Universal era and the golden age of horror begins.

 Why Today?: On this day in 1909, the serialized publication of Gaston Leroux’s novel begins in Le Gaulois.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 157

The Date: March 5

The Movie: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

What Is It?: Often cited as the launching point for Universal’s horror cycle, Wallace Worsley’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel is less concerned with horror and monsters than it is with how the lower classes are capable of far greater humanity and cunning than the upper classes expect. Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo is hardly a monster; he’s a revolutionary.

Why Today?: Today is World Book Day.

Review: Flicker Alley's 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' blu-ray

Regardless of the political implications of deeming Quasimodo—a disfigured human (though hardly a disabled one—the guy has more gymnastic skills than Mary Lou Retton)—a monster, there’s no question that Wallace Worsley’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame launched the Universal Monster age. And while the title characters’ monstrousness may be in question, the film’s horror element is not. None of its genre peers are as horrifically violent; none display such acts of cruelty—from the torture Quasimodo and his unattainable love Esmeralda suffer to his crazed molten lead retaliation against their would-be captors. Yet this is also a film of stark compassion and mercy, best conveyed by the divine Lon Chaney’s expression when Esmeralda gives him a drink after his whipping.

Mastered from a multi-tint 16mm print struck from the original negative, Flicker Alley’s new blu-ray edition of The Hunchback of Notre Dame gives us what will likely be the clearest details of Chaney’s nuanced performance we’ll see. Not that it will fool you into thinking it was filmed last week. Scratches and artifacts are pervasive. I don’t doubt that this 16mm print is beyond complete restoration, but I wonder if more could have been done about some of those blemishes. Nevertheless, compared to the utterly unwatchable reprints proliferating public domain collections, this improvement is striking. I’m not sure how marked the improvement is over Image Entertainment’s “Ultimate Edition” DVD from 2007 (which runs 117 minutes versus this blu-ray’s 110—additional speed correction could account for the time difference), but I do know that most of that edition’s extras reappear on Flicker Alley’s, including Robert Israel’s elegant realization of Donald Hunsberger’s compiled score, Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake’s audio commentary, stills galleries (sans the DVD’s 3-D content), and a short film of Chaney on set in his street clothes. The major new edition is the surviving thirteen minutes of Joseph De Grasse’s charming 1915 fairy tale Alas and Alack, in which Chaney briefly appears as a hunchback.

Five Still Scary Scenes from Universal Horror Movies

For audiences not yet accustomed to the weird, the macabre, and the grotesque, Universal’s horror cycle sparked its share of terror and even outrage in its time (the delightful Bride of Frankenstein was a particular lightning rod for the more censorious movie markets). Contemporary audiences may find it nearly impossible to view these movies in their original horrific spirit. Whether desensitized by the luridly graphic horrors of The Exorcist or Friday the 13^th or unmoved by anything but the most subtle, imagination-stoking terrors of The Haunting or The Blair Witch Project, modern moviegoers associate Dracula or the Frankenstein Monster too readily with cartoons, Halloween decorations, and breakfast cereals to find Lugosi or Karloff remotely scary.

This is not necessarily tragic since these films offer so much beyond chills that they remain highly entertaining, artistic, and even poignant (these days, the Frankenstein Monster’s accidental murder of a little girl is more sad than scary). But has their potential for terror been totally drained? Those who believe themselves to be completely inoculated to Karloff’s ability to frighten may be surprised by at least one sequence in Frankenstein or another in The Mummy. Those who grew up listening to Count von Count’s Lugosi impersonation on “Sesame Street” may be prepared to do nothing but giggle during Dracula, but maybe there are scares to be found in the movie that have nothing to do with Lugosi’s performance. For your consideration, I offer five scenes from Universal horror movies that may still have the power to make the tiny hairs on your neck stand at attention.

1. The Phantom Unmasked

We begin with what must still stand as the most truly terrifying scene in any Universal horror picture, and one that may not have lost a drop of its potency over the past eighty-eight years. Erik the Phantom sits at his organ, churning out hypnotic music. Christine stands behind him, fascinated, terrified by the artist beneath the opera mask. We see the internal debate on her face: should she remove the mask? Shouldn’t she? We-the-audience know that whatever Erik is concealing can’t be good. The suspense is brutal. Finally, she makes her move. That face! That gape-eyed, noseless, skull-like face! The look of surprise, almost triumph on Erik’s face makes it all the more shocking. But that’s not all there is to this iconic scene. The Phantom leaps off his stool, turns to Christine, points his finger accusingly, stalks toward the camera, breaks the fourth wall—he is stalking toward us! No matter how many times you’ve seen Lon Chaney in his Phantom make-up, seeing this scene is like seeing it for the first time every time. That unbearable build up to the unmasking. That terrible, terrible face. Chaney’s crazed reaction and his punishing pursuit of both Christine and the audience. All this adds up to complete and timeless terror.

2. Renfield Revealed

As sinister as Dracula’s nocturnal activities may be, he is still essentially a very well dressed, good looking gentlemen who happens to spend a lot of time in a coffin or flapping around as a rubber prop bat. But he is not the only menace in Tod Browning’s Dracula. What of the count’s lackey, the wannabe vampire Renfield? Dwight Frye mainly plays Renfield comically, but there are other sides to the old fly-eater too. He displays a conscience when trying to protect Miss Mina from his boss. He is more often terrified than he is terrifying. But he is terrifying, particularly when discovered in the hull of the Vesta. Once again, the scene is a suspense/reveal structure. The men who discover the ghost ship hear muffled laughter coming from below. “What’s that?” one asks. “Why, it’s coming from the hatchway!” another responds. “Don’t look in there!” we shout. But they do, and staring up at them and us is Renfield, his eyes and grin almost glowing from the darkness, his caught-in-the-throat cackle unlike anything we’ve ever heard. Chilling.

3. Enter the Monster

Of all the Universal Monsters, the most endearing is the childlike Frankenstein Monster. Yet he receives the most frightening entrance of them all. Henry Frankenstein discusses his bizarre experiments with mentor Dr. Waldman when suddenly we hear the shuffling of heavy feet. The men turn their heads toward the door. “Here he comes,” Frankenstein says. Suspense. He dims the light. Atmosphere. The door opens. A figure backs into the room for apparently no other reason than to prolong the excruciating wait. He begins to turn around. What a relief! It’s just that old square head we’ve seen so many times. It’s Herman Munster. It’s Frankie from “The Groovie Goolies.” No big deal. But then—then—director James Whale pushes in for a series of disquieting jump cuts, throwing us right into the Monster’s face, his cheeks looking more sunken, his eyes rolling up more grotesquely in his skull than we’ve ever seen in any sitcom or cartoon. It’s the same technique Hitchcock used when he forced us to look at Dan Fawcett’s eyeless corpse in The Birds, and it’s nearly as disturbing in Frankenstein.

4. The Mummy’s Stare

The face of another well-familiar monster turns unexpectedly chilling in The Mummy, and it’s not even the monster in full-on monster mode! Karloff only appears in his famed wrappings in the brief opening scene of the movie. He spends the rest of it looking like a really wrinkly yet still fully human fellow named Ardath Bey. Perhaps it is that very thing that lulls us into believing that there will be no terrors in The Mummy and what so shocks us when there is one. Again surprise plays a key role in the shot’s effectiveness. Ardath Bey and Dr. Muller discuss the cursed scroll of Toth in medium shot in a fairly well lit room. Suddenly the perspective changes to a tight close-up of Ardath Bey’s face. The lighting has also inexplicably changed so that all is shrouded in shadow except for his eyes, which glow unnaturally, staring right into our own peepers. The effect is a simple one—director Karl Freund simply lowered the room lights and shined a couple of small spotlights directly into Karloff’s eyes. The results are as unsettling as they are unexpected.

5. Femm’s Fanaticism

Surprise has been an important element in many of these scary scenes, but it may be most effective in The Old Dark House because James Whale’s film is keener to tickle your funny bone than make your skin crawl. This deliriously fun horror/comedy suddenly shifts to the terrifying when Rebecca Femm, the religious fanatic who lives in the title house, starts ranting about her sister’s agonizing demise and the similarly “sinful” women who’ve occupied her bedroom. As the rant intensifies, Whale shows us Rebecca reflected in various objects, her face distorting more and more with each stomach-churning jump cut. If anyone ever tells you that those good old Universal horror movies are nothing but good old fun, a look at this —or any of the other five scenes on this list —just might scare that person straight.

Monsterology: The Lugosi Vampire

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

“I bid you… velcome…”

Suave and imposing and dapperly attired in evening wear, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula was a far more explicit link between sex and death than any movie monster before him. His portrayal is often pinpointed as ground zero for our modern conception of the vampire, the one that sexily sexes up teenage girls in books written just for teenage girls (they weren’t made for you grown ups, so stop reading them!). As described by Stoker, Dracula was certainly sexual (if being breast-fed blood by a man is your idea of sexy), but physically, he was pretty grotty. Stoker’s Dracula was a gaunt, dome-headed creep with a unibrow, “rank” breath, and hairy palms (sexy!). While Lugosi may not make girls who swoon over Robert Pattinson pee their pants, he was in his day, quite the heartthrob. Tall, dark, European, and bearing an undeniable charisma, he even caught The It Girl in his thrall, enjoying a brief affair with Clara Bow after she saw him own the stage in Horace Liveright’s production of Dracula.

Lugosi was keen to keep his refined features unobstructed by fangs or furry applications when he brought his vampire to the screen for Universal. Film historians love to speculate about how Dracula might have looked had Lon Chaney lived long enough to portray him. They often imagine a count more along the lines of the terrifying pseudo-vamp Chaney played in London After Midnight, with his buggy eyes and razor teeth. Maybe he would have looked something like Max Schreck’s even scarier bald, rat-like count in Nosferatu. Or maybe Chaney would have gone to the source text and based his creature on Stoker’s hairy-palmed menace. Driven by vanity— and perhaps unconsciously recognizing a powerful image when he created one— Lugosi would have none of this. Lugosi’s Dracula just looked like Lugosi, not even sporting the exaggerated widow’s peak he’d wear in Mark of the Vampire, the 1935 remake of London After Midnight.

Following Nosferatu and London After Midnight, Lugosi’s Dracula must have seemed like a radical rewrite of the vampire. However, there had been dashing, even beautiful, vampires even before Stoker’s novel was published in 1897. The genre’s first significant fiction was Dr. John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819). Dr. John began his story at that same fateful Swiss getaway that saw Mary Shelley conceive Frankenstein. Despite a ghastly pallor, the “form and outline” of Lord Ruthven’s face are “beautiful” and “many of the female hunters… attempted to win his attentions, and gain, at least, some marks of what they might term affection…”  The cutesy-pie named Varney in James Malcom Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1847)—with his “dreadful eyes,” “horrible” face, and “hideous” teeth— was more akin to the creature Stoker would create, but the title character of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871) was “pretty, even beautiful,” and up for some lesbian action intended to titillate readers also invited to condemn her “unnatural” desires; that way everyone could get their rocks off while still feeling morally superior.

Lugosi was not the first good-looking, sexually attractive vampire, but he refined the vampire concept so powerfully and pervasively that he nearly negated the very option that these creatures could be anything less than Playgirl-ready. The ugly vampires of cinema future usually paid explicit homage to Max Schreck (Reggie Nalder’s Kurt Barlow in Salem’s Lot, Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht). More commonly, we could expect super hunks like Christopher Lee, Louis Jordan, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman to don the cape. Perhaps Anne Rice put the final nail in the ugly count’s coffin, opening the crypt door for Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt to take vampire attractiveness to absurd extremes in Interview with the Vampire, and paving the Borgo Pass for Robert Pattinson’s dreamy-weamy Eddie “Munster” Cullen in Twilight.

So should Lugosi be praised or condemned for so assuredly re-vamping the vampire for generations to come? Well, it is what it is, and maybe sexing up the vamp is not even his greatest crime, for he is responsible—unintentionally, of course—for thick, Hungarian accents intoning “I vant to suck your blaahd!” or simply “Blah!” or other such nonsense that appears nowhere in Tod Browning’s film. Without Lugosi, there would be no Groovie Goolie Drac, no Count von Count (“Von bat! Tooo bats! Ha, ha, ha!”), no Count Chocula (“Vith chocolate flavored sweeties!”), and no Count Blah (“Blah!”).

Yet Dracula, has not suffered by such parodies. Only Sherlock Holmes rivals him as the character most often depicted on screen. The count remains un-alive and well in the 21^st century, goofing around in the current cartoon Hotel Transylvania and ready to re-sex y’all as embodied by sexy sexer Jonathan Rhys Meyers in a T.V. series slated to air on NBC next year. While the timelessness of Stoker’s novel must take some credit, Lugosi’s equally timeless portrayal of Dracula is just as responsible for the character’s unbelievable longevity. That’s quite a supernatural achievement.

Bela Lugosi was born 130 years ago today.

Review: ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame: A Reconstruction’

In 1985, Philip J. Riley began doing his part in the film preservation movement with London After Midnight: A Reconstruction, a literary attempt to piece together Lon Chaney’s long lost vampire(ish) film from 1927. Three years later, he turned his sites on another Chaney classic. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is hardly a lost film, however the version with which we are familiar today is quite different from the one released in 1923. That original 35mm print was some 10 or 15 minutes longer than the 16mm copy currently available and included scenes of Quasimodo bringing Esmeralda a winged gift and Jehan’s dalliance with black magic, as well as numerous extra sequences involving Clopin. Although that footage is apparently gone, Riley did his best to recreate the original print by supplementing the heavily notated shooting script with production stills. That’s what makes The Hunchback of Notre Dame: A Reconstruction historically important. What makes it fun are the numerous additional baubles, most notably the film’s original program reprinted in its entirety and a charming remembrance from Esmeralda–portrayer Patsy Ruth Miller. BearManor Media’s republication of Riley’s 1988 volume is supplemented with a new introductory note by the author that includes a lengthy excerpt from The Strongman, the autobiography of stuntman Joe Bonomo, who performed Quasimodo’s incredible acrobatic feats.

Review: 'Poster Art from Classic Monster Films'

During a recent trip to Paris, my wife and I were passing a cinema presenting a revival of In the Heat of the Night. She commented that the poster looked strangely modern. It was, indeed, a non-vintage photo composite, the kind you’ll see promoting any contemporary film, slapped outside any contemporary theater. Quite a shame, considering that the original poster advertising Norman Jewison’s film was terrific: graphic, kinetic, painted. It was art, something contemporary movie posters most certainly are not.

Prior to the ‘80s, painted movie posters were the norm, and the loss of them meant the loss of a legitimate subcategory of pop art. In his new book, Poster Art from Classic Monster Films, Philip J. Riley eulogizes this sadly defunct art form by presenting striking, full-color posters from the major films of Universal’s golden horror age, beginning with 1923’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and creeping through the decades to 1954’s This Island Earth, when that era shuddered its last.

These posters are magnificent. Many will be familiar to Monster fans, though there are some interesting variations included throughout. The real treat in Poster Art from Classic Monster Films is Riley’s inclusion of numerous hand-tinted lobby cards, so we get to see the Frankenstein Monster’s beige (not green!) face, Ygor’s purple cloak, and Im Ho Tep’s green (not beige!) bandages for the first time. Certain films, such as Dracula (both English and Spanish language versions) and The Murders in the Rue Morgue, were promoted with what looks like exclusively painted lobby cards, although it’s possible the artist just put on the tinting with an unusually heavy hand. Even more fascinating, Erik’s face has been blurred out from the Phantom of the Opera lobby cards, probably because Universal didn’t want to spoil Lon Chaney’s big, horrifying surprise.

There’s no commentary, and barely any captions, so it would have been nice if Riley had supplied a bit more text, perhaps providing some information on the artists. Still, this is art that speaks for itself, and we can be grateful to him for collecting it all in such a swell volume. It’s nice to see that even when Universal was cutting corners on the screen, as it did with some of its later Horrors, it still invested in memorable, artful promo paintings. If only modern film companies maintained such attention to detail.

Review: 'The Phantom of the Opera: Angel of Music Edition'

We’re all cinephiles here, right? So it’s OK to assume we all agree that it’s criminal to tamper with a classic film unnecessarily, whether you’re a doofus zillionaire who decides It’s a Wonderful Life is somehow inferior in black & white or a curmudgeonly geek who insists on constantly “upgrading” his own films with off-putting digital effects and freshly dubbed cries of “Nooooooo!” Yet— and bear with me here— the first truly great American horror feature may be an exception to this rule. That’s because Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925) has a long and rich history of being monkeyed with. The film has appeared with various soundtracks, in tinted and untinted versions, and two distinct edits with alternate title cards and shots and running times that differ by fifteen minutes. The 1929 edit also committed a revision of Lucas-proportions by featuring newly shot scenes with original actors Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry speaking their dialogue for the first time (Chaney was unavailable for the reshoots). Additional dubbing was added to this new, “improved” semi-talky version of the silent classic.

So, I must admit I wasn’t totally against the concept of Terror Inc. Films’ new “Angel of Music” edition of The Phantom of the Opera. The independent company not only remastered the film to the best of its ability (it looks much better than any other budget version I’ve seen), but it gave The Phantom a whole new dialogue track, a new music track, re-edited it using bits from both the 1925 and '29 versions, and converted it to 3D. If you’re going to monkey with a classic, might as well go ape.

Though purists are justified in regarding this reupholstering as an unconscionable violation, the producers clearly love the movie. I admire the amount of work that must have gone into composing a new script and synching the voice actors up with the lip movements of the original actors so well. But if you’re going to go to such trouble, why not spring for voice actors with stronger chops than this cast? And since that cast only consists of six actors, they often alter their voices in ridiculous ways to differentiate the characters. The guy who provides the Phantom’s voice sounds like a teenager doing a bad Frankenberry impersonation. The inspector is made to sound like the French Taunter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Others have absurd cockney accents. A work of high art transforms into high camp; What’s Up, Tiger Lily? without the jokes.

Perhaps it would have been a good idea to grunge up the dialogue track a little. Even without the poor performances, the voices would still be distracting because they sound too digital-clear set against the relatively scratchy images. Seeing these images in blurry 3D doesn’t help. The effect is arbitrary, lapsing for long stretches then highlighting random foreground objects like a statue or a chair. More questionably, 3D is employed to make a letter’s signature and a newspaper’s headline leap off the screen. These things aren’t 3D in real life. Why are they 3D in this movie?

No matter, because you’re likely to switch off the eye-aching 3D before long and switch to the 2D version conscientiously included on the first of this set’s two discs. Then you’re likely to hit the mute button since that version includes the bad dialogue track too.

The extras are definitely preferable to this set’s main feature. There’s a nifty motion comic utilizing still photos to recreate the film’s lost ending, which gives the Phantom a more sympathetic exit (and bonus points for allowing speech bubbles, rather than crappy voiceover, to convey the story). There’s a crude but fun vintage RKO cartoon called “Tom and Jerry in the Magic Mummy” (no, it’s not the Tom and Jerry you think it is), a handy comparison of the 1925 and 1929 edits, and a short piece that allows us to drool over select Phantom toys, models, comic books, novels, laser discs, masks, and advertisements. The most substantial extra is an 18-minute primer on the film’s history. Alas, it is also marred by a bad voice over, the narrator affecting a gravelly grunt reminiscent of Christian Bale in The Dark Knight. Apparently, good voice talent is hard to find.

Get The Phantom of the Opera: Angel of Music Editon at Middle Earth Collectibles here.

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 1: The 1920s

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)

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920- dir. Robert Wiene)

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Lon Chaney, Jr.

Born 105 years ago today, Lon Chaney, Jr., was the last of Universal Studios’ great monster stars, succeeding his frequent co-stars Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and completing horror’s holy trinity when he first played Larry Talbot the Wolf Man in 1941. Along with the film for which he was most famous, Chaney acted in nearly 200 other film and television roles. That alone is the stuff of an eventful life. Here are twenty trivia tidbits that may give you an even greater appreciation for and understanding of one of monsterdom’s great icons. So sit back, sniff a sprig of wolfsbane, and dig 20 Things You May Not Have Known About Lon Chaney, Jr.!

1. On February 10, 1906, Creighton “Lon” Chaney was born to mother, Frances Cleveland Creighton Chaney, and father, Lon “Man of 1,000 Faces” Chaney, while his performing parents were on tour in Oklahoma City. Born prematurely, Junior was not breathing upon his entry into the world and the doctor declared him stillborn. His father rushed him out into the frigid environment, kicked through the surface of an iced-over lake, and plunged his infant son into the water. According to this tale—tall or not—the cold shock started the boy breathing.

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.

June 24, 2010: Psychobabble recommends Philip J. Riley’s ‘Lon Chaney as Dracula’

Before Bela Lugosi forged his iconic performance as Count Dracula, another horror legend was slotted to play the role. Having risen to superstardom by playing grotesques in silent pictures such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Phantom of the Opera, and London After Midnight, Lon Chaney Sr. was to play the vampire in what would have been his second talking picture. The film was well past the planning stages—with Tod Browning hired to direct and Dudley Murphy and Louis Bromfield penning the script—when Chaney’s death by throat hemorrhage in 1930 halted it. Losing little time, Universal replaced Chaney with Bela Lugosi and hired Garrett Fort to write a new script in time for the film to be released less than six months after Chaney’s death.


Long thought to be lost, Murphy and Bromfield’s unproduced Dracula script is the latest discovery of cinematic archaeologist Philip J. Riley, whose Alternate History for Classic Monster Movies series continues to marvel. This latest volume is a more eclectic affair than the ones about James Whale’s Dracula’s Daughter and Wolfman vs. Dracula. Beginning with Riley’s brief introduction to the subject, the book moves on to Bromfield’s extensive, 50-page treatment, complete with long stretches of dialogue. Chaney was adamant that his film-adaptations remained faithful to the novels on which they were based, and the treatment reveals a picture considerably closer to Bram Stoker than Fort’s script based on the Dracula stage play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. The Count is also described in more animalistic terms, with his hairy body, wolfish ears, and long fangs, than Lugosi’s vampire, probably to take better advantage of Chaney’s makeup prowess. After the treatment comes the opening passage of Murphy and Bromfield’s script, which draws out Jonathan Harker’s arrival at Castle Dracula for 20-pages, suggesting a more epic film than the one with Lugosi. The script ends abruptly during Harker’s initial meeting with Dracula because of Chaney’s death, but Riley’s book still has several more treasures in its crypt: a complete cast, crew, and title list for the 1931 Dracula, F.W. Murnau’s complete shooting script for Nosferatu, which includes numerous notes by the director (Bromfield was given a copy of the script to help him along with constructing his vampire tale), and most valuably, Lon Chaney’s 12-page autobiography originally published in the September 1925 issue of Movie Magazine. While any classic horror enthusiast should be sufficiently lured by Bromfield’s fascinating treatment, Chaney’s autobiography is a clincher, offering a rare opportunity to read the man’s story in his own words, not to mention a wealth of terrific pictures.

April 14, 2010: Psychobabble recommends Philip J. Riley’s ‘The Wolfman vs. Dracula’

Several months ago I reviewed the first book in film historian Philip J. Riley’s “Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters” series. His book on the version of Dracula’s Daughter that was to be directed by James Whale was an invaluable archive of treatments, scripts, and notes about a film that may have been a milestone fusion of horror, comedy, sex, and fantasy along the lines of Whale’s masterpiece, Bride of Frankenstein. The second volume in Riley’s series, The Wolfman vs. Dracula, is not as bursting with original documents, but the film's utter obscurity makes it nearly as essential. That Whale was originally slated to direct Dracula’s Daughter is pretty well known among classic horror cultists. David Skal’s indispensable The Monster Show, published in 1993, contained an abundance of key details about the script. However, even Riley had never heard of The Wolfman vs. Dracula until recently. I sure hadn’t. Screenwriter Bernard L. Schubert (Mark of the Vampire; The Mummy’s Curse) unearthed his script for this long forgotten project sometime in the eighties. His scant recollections about the film preface his complete script in Riley’s book.

In short, the film was to serve as a direct sequel to both Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Son of Dracula. Lon Chaney Jr. was to re-don his fuzzy make-up as lycanthrope Larry Talbot. More significantly, the film was also intended to return Bela Lugosi to his rightful place as Dracula (a most welcome return considering Chaney’s hopeless portrayal of the count in Son… although an early concept had Chaney playing both Talbot and Dracula in Schubert’s film!). The film was also to be the second Universal Monster movie shot in color (Phantom of the Opera with Claude Rains was the first). There are several references to this in the script.

The film was dropped because Universal didn’t think they needed to waste the expense of color film stock on a monster movie that already had a built-in audience. Schubert went off to write The Mummy’s Curs, and filed his script away in his garage for forty years. The closest we got to Dracula meeting the Wolfman in their own picture was Columbia Pictures’ The Return of the Vampire with Lugosi as a vampire who hangs out with a werewolf henchman. That film was released in 1944— the same year Universal’s The Wolfman vs. Dracula was scheduled to hit.

This one remaining artifact of The Wolfman vs. Dracula (dated May 29, 1944) is a first draft, which means it probably would have gone through numerous changes had it eventually been shot. As it stands, the script tells the rather perverse tale of Talbot marrying a peasant girl in order to impel her hangman father to plug him with a silver bullet, ending his reign of wolfy terror once and for all (well, at least until the inevitable sequel). Unfortunately, Dad has already promised his daughter’s hand to Dracula, who takes issue with Talbot’s cock-blocking. Written in the charmingly clunky, exposition-heavy manner of later day Universal Monster flicks like House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, but with a greater emphasis on drawing-room debate than bestial carousing, The Wolfman vs. Dracula would have been quite a strange entry in the monster canon, especially considering the intention to film it in color. Yet I could still hear Chaney’s dejected voice speaking Talbot’s dialogue and Lugosi’s chewy baritone speaking Dracula’s in my head as I read this book. Monster fans won’t want to be without it.