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.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 54

The Date: November 23

The Movie: The Body Snatcher (1945)

What Is It?: Boris Karloff gives his most gleefully macabre performance as a grave robber in Robert’s Wise’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale. It's a slow burn, but worth watching for Karloff and a very spooky denouement. Lugosi's underused though.

Why Today?: On this day in 1887, Boris Karloff’s is born.

Review: 'Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade'

The 1920s and 1930s were watershed years for horror cinema as they were for all cinema. The twenties saw silent horror rise around the world with abandoned artistry. The thirties saw the genre’s tropes come into focus at Hollywood’s Universal Studios. That decade’s horror explosion turned to an implosion with the arrival of World War II’s very real horrors and the MPAA’s censorship crackdowns. This left forties horror seemingly out of focus with its plethora of relatively benign sequels, “Poverty Row” cheapies, and hard-to-categorize realistic pictures residing in the twilight zone between horror and noir. The apparent lack of full-blooded, truly artistic horror cinema during the forties often leaves the genre getting a bad critical rep—or even ignored—in discussions of horror and forties cinema.

Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade collects seventeen new essays that reevaluate a period too often maligned or shrugged off. What the writers uncover might cause horror fans to rethink both the standing of our favorite genre during the forties and what constitutes a horror picture. Writer Kristopher Woolfer acknowledges the blurriness of this period by noting how, in the forties, horror as pulpy as House of Dracula had become more reality based— with its vampire and werewolf seeking scientific cures for their monstrousness— and how drama as reality-based as the pseudo bio-pic Citizen Kane borrowed Gothic horror tropes liberally. Peter Marra further forces us to rethink how horror hid in the forties by designating Bluebeard, The Lodger, Hangover Square, The Leopard Man, and The Spiral Staircase as proto-slasher pictures—right down to their sexually motivated killings— released decades before the usually identified year-zero pictures, Psycho and Peeping Tom. Meanwhile, filmmaker Anne Golden acknowledges that a movie such as The Spiral Staircase does not have to adhere to a single genre, and can exist just as reasonably in the shadows of horror as it can in those of the avant-garde. Even more fascinatingly, Ian Olney locates a previously hidden stream of proto-feminist horror pictures during the era (while cheating a bit by bleeding into the fifties). Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare argues that The Body Snatcher contradicts Val Lewton’s reputation for overly restrained “horror of the unseen” pictures with one that he sees as falling in line with the Grand-Guignol tradition (the writer avoids discussing the graphic gore for which the theater is best known since Lewton’s production obviously has none of that). Mark Janovich tries to boost the reputation of forties horror by calling attention to the work of two of Hollywood’s biggest icons—Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson—in the genre.

This book lacks a serious reevaluation of Universal’s horrors of the forties, which included enough unfairly over looked pictures—The Mummy’s Hand, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, House of Frankenstein—to warrant their own explorations. Too often, Universal’s movies cast in minor comparative roles throughout these pieces. But perhaps Universal’s horrors have been handled as a whole enough times that this gap is excusable. Meanwhile, some of the best horrors of this period—Dead of Night and The Uninvited, to name a couple—are never even mentioned. That is more than a little curious, but even without such key pictures, these essays still manage to reveal how varied, evolving, influential, and present horror remained in this so-called “lost decade.” As should be expected of a book of this sort, a couple writers (Woolfer, Cory Legassic) bury their arguments beneath a slag heap of academic jargon , but the vast majority of these essays are as lucid and pleasurable to read as they are thought provoking… and Kier-La Janisse’s study of the appeal of the horror comedies of the East End Kids for real kids is downright fun.

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 3: The 1940s

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)

33. The Mummy’s Hand (1940- dir. Christy Cabanne)
 

The commercial and creative success of Son of Frankenstein in 1939 revived Universal Horror—and horror as a whole— after a four-year slump. The studio followed with further sequels, beginning with The Invisible Man Returns in the first days of 1940, but hit a more confident stride the following September with silent-film vet Christy Cabanne’s The Mummy’s Hand.

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.