366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 125

The Date: February 2

The Movie: Targets (1968)

What Is It?: Peter Bogdanovic’s first film is also Boris Karloff’s final film worth mentioning, and it is an elegiac send off for the great actor. Karloff and Bogdanovic both play barely disguised versions of themselves as the actor prepares to present one of his old-fashioned movies at a drive-in where a modern day monster ends up after shooting random people.

Why Today?: On this day in 1969, Boris Karloff dies.

Review: 'Boris Karloff: More Than a Monster'

Boris Karloff would have hated Boris Karloff: More Than a Monster. The man who became a legend by portraying the Frankenstein Monster and the Mummy beneath pounds of movie makeup loathed nothing more than having his private life revealed. The two instances in Stephen Jacobs’s 500-page-plus biography in which Karloff allows his politesse to drop is when being ambushed on TV’s “This Is Your Life” and prodded by a tactless interviewer. Karloff’s intense privacy is all the more interesting and endearing considering the lack of skeletons in his closet. Nearly everyone of the countless colleagues and friends Jacobs quotes have nothing but effusive praise for the screen’s greatest villain. “A true gentleman” and “sweet” are repeated with such regularity that readers of the more common muck-raking biography might wonder why Jacobs even bothered chronicling Karloff’s life. His legions of fans will recognize that life was so rich and fascinating because it was so far removed from the creatures he played. Tremendously generous with his time, loyal, caring, and dignified, Karloff lived up to all the wonderful things people said about him. That innate kindness really shone through creeps like the Frankenstein Monster and the Mummy, making them deeply sympathetic and infinitely more complex than their heroic human costars.

November 23, 2009: The 10 Essential Performances of Boris Karloff

Boris Karloff was born on this day in 1887, and to commemorate the man’s 122nd birthday, Frankensteinia has organized a “Boris Karloff Blog-a-Thon” comprising nearly 100 bloggers. We will be penning the praises of Horror’s most looming legend all week.

Karloff the Uncanny deserves all this and more, but considering he was a guy who made more than 150 films— many of them unworthy of his talent— where does the Karloff novice start? Fear not, because I’ve assembled a selection of Karloff’s ten most worthy performances.

On second thought, maybe you should fear.

1. The Monster in Frankenstein (1931)

The long-standing cliché has been that the Frankenstein Monster is a robotic walking-prop that does nothing but grunt and stomp around with its hands stretched outward like a somnambulist. This has nothing to do with Boris Karloff’s career-defining work as the title creature in James Whale’s Frankenstein. In the 1931 classic, Karloff gives a sensitive, complex performance. The monster is both a murderous brute and an abandoned child, and it is the monster’s desire for direction and understanding that most informs Karloff’s work. As terrifying as that first jump-cut close-up on his horrific face is (and that shot remains terrifying despite the fact that that face has since been pasted on everything from T-shirts to paper plates), the sight of the Monster groping at sunbeams yearningly is heart-rendering. The tenderness that Karloff brings to the scene in which the Monster sits by a pastoral riverbank to toss daisies into the water with a little girl makes his accidental murder of her all the more disturbing and infinitely sadder. Karloff famously refused to play the Monster again after his third go-round, surmising that it was on its way to becoming the walking-prop most people remember. Of course, he was right. Like all the greats, he went out on top, and no one has ever or will ever usurp his status as cinema’s greatest interpreter of the Frankenstein Monster.

2. Imhotep in The Mummy (1932)