Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #16

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!

#16. Son of Frankenstein (1939- dir. Roland V. Lee)

Universal’s second Frankenstein sequel, and its final Frankenfilm with Karloff as the Monster, is too long by 30 minutes and that little kid is a menace, but boy oh boy, is Bela Lugosi ever a blast to watch as Ygor! Tired of the franchise and an increasingly limited role to play, Karloff seems to cede the film to Lugosi, who is only too happy to steal the show as the diabolical survivor of a botched hanging. Ygor uses the Monster as a pliable tool of revenge in a sheepskin vest. Lionel Atwill is also terrific as the police inspector with a chip on his shoulder and splinters in his arm.

Review: 'Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration'

With the release of Ed Wood in 1994, “Karloff! That Limey cocksucker!” quite nearly replaced “I never drink…wine” and “The children of the night…what music they make” as the go-to phrase when doing a bad Bela Lugosi impression. Tim Burton’s movie hipped the larger film-going public to some of the real-life seething that went on during the filming of such Lugosi/Boris Karloff collaborations as The Black Cat and The Body Snatcher. However, Burton’s superb yet cartoonish film provided little of the complexity behind this classic Hollywood “rivalry.” For that, one would have to take a trip to the local Waldenbooks and pick up a copy of Gregory Mank’s Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Story of a Haunting Collaboration.

Originally published in 1990, the over 350-page book attempted a more nuanced view of a relationship that couldn’t simply be boiled down to a venerated horror star and a jealous, drug-addled also-ran. Swelling with an additional 250-or-so pages in 2009, the now Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration went into even greater depth with additional information and interviews. By Mank’s analysis, Lugosi and Karloff may have enjoyed a rather friendly working relationship while making Son of Frankenstein, and the alleged hatred Lugosi felt for Karloff may have really been directed at a Hollywood system that constantly ground the vampire under its merciless stake.

Karloff is not completely without blame in this mostly one-sided clash of titans. While he never had an explicitly nasty thing to say about Lugosi, his patronizing insistence on referring to his co-star as “poor Bela” in private and public could not have endeared himself to the actor who could be quite proud despite demeaning himself in Poverty Row and Ed Wood pictures.

Mank’s valiant attempt to uncover how Lugosi and Karloff really felt about each other was doomed to go without a definitive answer, but that barely matters when the rest of the story is so fascinating and well told. Mank goes deep into the movies they made together with nearly scene-by-scene analyses without neglecting the most important pictures they made without the other. So we get very satisfying histories of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and other key films, as well as quite a bit of information about other key players in those films such as James Whale and Colin Clive.

Last updated nearly a decade ago, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration is now enjoying a new printing though not another updating. That’s generally fine since there probably haven’t been many new revelations about the Karloff/Lugosi rivalry in recent years since so many of their other collaborators have died. Mank’s incessant leching over Lugosi and Karloff’s female co-stars is more than a little dated and brings nothing but discomfort to the storytelling, but if you can get past that, you will find that Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration remains one of the great studies of classic horror films.

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Bela Lugosi

So, it’s Bela’s birthday and you think you’re pretty hep because you know he played Dracula and he screamed “Pulled ze string!” in some Ed Wood movie. Well, you’re just scratching the surface, Daddy-O/Mommy-O. It’s time you used them pointy fangs to scratch these 20 Things You May Not Have Known About Bela Lugosi!

1. Bela Lugosi got himself discharged from the Hungarian army by pretending to be insane as a result of concussion.

2. Eleven years before his American film debut in Dracula, Lugosi appeared in Nosferatu-director F.W. Murnau’s Der Januskopf—a.k.a.: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Conrad Veidt played the title characters (retitled Dr. Warren and Mr. O’Connor) while our favorite vampire was relegated to playing his butler. Sadly, the film is lost.
(Thanks to Matt Marshall for this one!)

3. In the mid-‘20s vamp fell for vampire when celebrity flapper Clara Bow struck up an affair with Lugosi. The romance caused Lugosi’s marriage to Beatrice Weeks to end after a mere three days.

4. At the age of 13, future horror movie mogul William Castle stole $1.10 from his sister to purchase a balcony ticket for the Dracula stage play starring Bela Lugosi.

5. Horace Liveright, producer of the stage version of Dracula, was initially skeptical that Lugosi had the necessary presence to play the count. When he took the actor aside to express his concerns, Lugosi’s demeanor turned so sinister that Liveright was convinced he had the right man for the job.

6. In his stage incarnation as Dracula, Lugosi was the first actor to play a vampire as physically attractive rather than monstrous. For better or worse, the sexy vampire remains the prevailing cliché.

7. Fifteen year old Carroll Borland was so aroused by Lugosi’s stage performance as Dracula that she wrote her own sequel to the story, a novel she called Countess Dracula, and personally read it to her favorite actor. The gesture inspired Lugosi to advocate her for the role of his “daughter” Luna Mora, in Mark of the Vampire.

8. Because Lugosi never learned to drive he got around Hollywood on rollerskates.

9. Bizarrely, actor Ian Keith was the first choice to play Dracula in the only two movies in which Lugosi played the role: Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

10. Although the “Spanish” version of Dracula, filmed simultaneously with Tod Browning’s film, featured Carlos Villarias in the title role, a short outtake of Lugosi as the vampire arriving at the concert hall was cut into the film.

11. Lugosi claimed that he turned down the role of the Frankenstein Monster because he didn’t like the script and producer Carl Laemmle Jr. would only release him from the film if he found a replacement. Lugosi then scoured the talent agencies until he found Karloff to assume the role. Of course, this was a huge lie.

12. According to Ed Wood, Lugosi considered White Zombie to be his greatest film.

13. Shirley Ulmer, wife of Black Cat director Edgar, said—much to her own disgust— that Lugosi once nostalgically claimed he was a hangman in the Hungarian army. He also admitted how guilty he felt about his macabre—and most likely fictional— assignment.

14. Christopher Lee was, of course, the star of Hammer Studio’s seemingly endless string of Dracula movies. However, the most famous Dracula did, indeed, appear in a Hammer production when Bela Lugosi starred in the Mystery of the Marie Celeste in 1936.

15. Bela Lugosi was originally hired to play a police inspector in Son of Frankenstein, but instead co-created the character of Ygor—arguably his greatest performance— while on set.

16. After Ygor has his brain is transferred into the monster’s body at the end of Ghost of Frankenstein, he realizes that he is blind. The monster’s blindness was supposed to be a plot point in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, hense Lugosi’s lumbering, arms-outstretched approach to playing him. Oddly, the plot point was cut from the film, yet Lugosi’s blind fumbling became on of the most recognizable Frankenstein clichés.

17. Val Lewton reluctantly created the character of Joseph in The Body Snatcher when RKO executives decided that having Lugosi co-star alongside Boris Karloff would give the film a commercial boost.

18. After attending the premiere of House of Wax (which he did in full Dracula regalia), Bela Lugosi was so impressed by the 3D effects that he masterminded a letter-writing campaign to get Dracula remade in color and 3D. Sadly, Universal pictures paid the idea little mind.

19. Ed Wood claimed attending restaurants brought out serious behavior problems in Lugosi. He tended to snatch fox stoles off wealthy women and toss them into the street!

20. According to legend, Bela Lugosi died on August 16, 1956, while reading the script for a possible Ed Wood project titled, appropriately enough, The Final Curtain.

The following sources were invaluable in the compiling of this list:

Ed Wood: Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey

Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen by David J. Skal

The Monster Show by David J. Skal (This is the greatest book about horror films ever written. If you haven’t read it, you’re really missing out!)

November 25, 2009: Karloff vs. Lugosi: A brief look at the careers andrivalries of horrors’ biggest stars

And now, another contribution to Frankensteinia’s Boris Karloff Blogathon…

Karloff and Lugosi. They are the two most iconic actors who played the two most iconic monsters for the most iconic studio of the golden age of horror movies. Today their names and likenesses are just as recognizable as the creatures they helped create. A quick “Google News” search of the name “Bela Lugosi” not only brings up stories from recent Halloween retrospectives, but his name is referenced in articles about former Bauhaus singer Peter Murphy, a Pop Matters piece on ‘80s Goth Rock, and an adopted puppy from Canada named after the Dracula star. A similar search for “Boris Karloff” links to articles about on and off-off-off Broadway shows, parenting, and cosmetic limb lengthening. Lugosi’s heavy Hungarian accent has been appropriated by every hack jokester who ever belched, “I vant to suck your blaad!” His voice and visage inspired a Muppet. Bobby “Boris” Pickett nicked both Karloff’s unmistakably dulcet inflection and his name for the 1962 novelty hit “The Monster Mash”. John Entwistle just settled for the name when he wrote his first song for The Who, “Boris the Spider”. Both actors inspired breakfast cereal mascots.

Tim Burton’s 1994 film Ed Wood suggested that the equally-shared popularity of Karloff and Lugosi is a relatively recent phenomenon, that Lugosi sabotaged his own career by turning down the role of the Frankensetin Monster because it lacked the romantic allure of Dracula, damning him to forever star in Z-grade cheapies like Spooks Run Wild, The Ape Man, and the Wood pictures until his death in 1956. Meanwhile Karloff’s career flourished with prestigious turns in The Mummy, Scarface, and Bride of Frankenstein. This isn’t exactly true. Yes, Karloff was treated with far greater respect by Hollywood. The Powers That Be at Universal christened him “Karloff the Uncanny” and gave him top billing in any film he so much as poked his proboscis into. But with more than 150 films to his credit, he surely starred in his share of stinkers, including the horribly racist The Mask of Fu Manchu, The Island Monster, and Frankenstein 1970.

Critics bear some responsibility for the imbalance between Karloff and Lugosi’s popularity. While no one will argue the memorablility of Lugosi’s performance as Dracula, many have revised their take on his skills, chiding his exaggerated facial expressions, his mannered movements, and his unnatural diction caused by the simple fact that English was not his first language. I contend that these elements bring an otherworldly quality to his performance perfectly appropriate for a supernatural creature, and the sheer iconography of it could never be surpassed or eradicated by another Dracula portrayer. Furthermore, the fresh portion of Lugosi’s resume is certainly not limited to Dracula. He was also excellent in The Black Cat and The Raven (both of which co-starred Karloff), White Zombie, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and Son of Frankenstein, in which he did his finest work and played his second-most hallowed movie monster, Ygor. The back-from-the-grave creep with the broken neck allowed Lugosi unprecedented space to flex his acting muscles. He brings a heady blend of unctuousness, seething evil, and desperation to the character, unequivocally upstaging Karloff, who is merely going through the motions in his final portrayal of the Monster.



Now, I’m certainly not arguing that Lugosi was a more impressive actor than Karloff. Actually, the two were so different in presence and approach that one could not replace the other. Lugosi was icy, exotic, ethereal— qualities that made him the ideal Dracula. Karloff was earthier, more sympathetic, at once childlike and grandfatherly—all key facets of the Frankenstein Monster (well, maybe not “grandfatherly”). Lugosi’s standoffishness made him a more convincing pure-evil villain than Karloff. Karloff’s unshakable warmth made him the better conflicted villain (check out his heartbreaking work in The Devil Commands), although he could still go the full-nasty route when necessary, as he did with great deftness in The Black Cat and The Body Snatcher.

Burton’s Ed Wood presents a crazed, bitter Lugosi who basically hated Karloff for sustaining a respected career while Lugosi was left behind to make trash-o-la pictures for the “worst filmmaker of all time” and wither away in morphine addiction. Descendents of both actors contend that no such rivalry existed. Karloff and Lugosi made eight pictures together, several of them featuring some of the actors’ best work. They play off each other beautifully in their best collaboration, The Black Cat, which was one of the few films in which Lugosi played the ostensible good guy (The Invisible Ray, another Karloff/Lugosi collaboration, was another). The literal and figurative chess games in the film nicely encapsulate their work in this film, in which the two enemies—who masquerade as comrades—try to get the better of the other, leading to a gruesome climax. The truth and vitality in their performances may be a reflection of the real rivalry that may have existed between the actors behind these characters. Regardless of how they actually felt about each other, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi each influenced the other’s career profoundly. Certainly Karloff’s would never have reached such heights had Lugosi not opted out of Frankenstein. Popular culture and the horror film certainly would have been very, very different beasts without them.