Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #10

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!

#10. The Mummy (1932- dir. Karl Freund)

It’s a tried and true Hollywood formula: you score big once; you attempt to carbon copy that success. It doesn’t always work, but it did when Universal practically remade Dracula as The Mummy. Once again you have a long-in-the-tooth monster crossing an ocean to ensnare a specific women in its thrall while contending with Edward Van Sloan and David “Mr. Personality” Manners. The Mummy isn’t very original, but it does make certain stylistic improvements over Dracula with its sumptuous sets, elaborate monster make up, less static staging, and heightened air of romance. Karloff makes the most of a monster without much pep, and between his naturally mesmerizing gaze and some well-positioned pin lights, he’s also the center of some of the creepiest shots in a golden age Universal monster movie. Zita Johann and the flashback-pool sequence are similarly mesmerizing.

Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #17

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!

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

The neat thing about The Mummy’s Hand is that it may be Universal’s only monster movie in which the screenwriter wrote some actual people to go along with the monster. In fact, the heroes are much more fun than the monster, who has officially lapsed into the mindless shuffling and strangling with which the Mummy is now most associated. No matter when Dick Foran and Wallace Ford as archaeologists and Peggy Moran, and Cecil Kellaway as magicians are such a gas. It’s a pleasure watching characters who so genuinely like each other. I loathe the next Mummy sequel, The Mummy’s Tomb, because of the cruel way it reimagines this delightful cast.

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...

Review: 'Mummies: Classic Monsters of Pre-Code Horror Comics'

Mummies are the least interesting of the classic movie monsters because there’s never much personality under all those bandages. They don’t get to say creepy things like Dracula or project pathos like the Frankenstein Monster. That’s why Boris Karloff spent the majority of the best mummy movie out of swaddling. Subsequent mummy movies The Mummy’s Hand, The Curse of of the Mummy’s Tomb, and Bubba Ho-Tep are only interesting because of their human characters. The monster is never much more than a leg-dragging drag.

Because they are so one-note with their shuffling and gaits outstretched arms, mummies are more at home on the pages of horror comics where depth is not nearly as important as a good drawing of a slimy thing from the grave (or sarcophagus, as they case may be). Mummies: Classic Monsters of Pre-Code Horror Comics, Craig Yoe’s latest anthology of forgotten horror comic tales, pays tribute to the Egyptian wings of also-ran titles such as Web of Mystery, Web of Evil, Baffling Mysteries, A Hand of Fate Mystery, and a couple of comics with neither Web nor Mystery in its title. 

The nice thing about the off-the-wall nature of the lesser horror comics is that common tropes often went out the window, so in addition to the standard grunting ghouls, there’s also room for loquacious mummies, a tribe of mummies, phony mummies, a mummy necklace, quite a few amorous mummies, and in the absolutely bonkers (and atrociously illustrated) “Vault of the Winged Spectres”, a sort of mummy bird. My favorites of the bunch are Bob Powell and Howard Nostrand’s “Servants of the Tomb”, which is kind of like a cross between one of those gruesome E.C. fairy tales and a Masters of the Universe mini-comic, and Charles Nicholas’s more sensible “The Demon Coat”, which simply squirms with monsters mummified and otherwise. There’s also a neat 15-page history of mummies from ancient Egypt days through the horror comics era. Neatest factoid: John Balderston, writer of Karloff’s The Mummy, was supposedly present at the discovery of King Tut’s mummy!

Review: 'It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Movie Posters from the Kirk Hammett Collection'

In an age when lazily staged poses and perfunctorily photo-shopped images are regularly used to promote major motion pictures, it is halting to revisit the art once used to sell movies regarded as junk for the matinee crowd. Even films as chintzy as The Angry Red Planet and The Crawling Eye were hawked with striking graphics and paintings. Artworks for more prestigious pictures, such as Lionel Reiss’s bold art deco piece advertising The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and an uncredited work for The Invisible Man so haunting and striking and innately nightmarish that text was barely deemed necessary, are—no exaggeration— museum quality.

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has long recognized the artfulness, power, and fun of classic horror and sci-fi movie posters, amassing an impressive collection being exhibited in a show called It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Movie Posters from the Kirk Hammett Collection at the Peabody Essex Museum in (appropriately enough) Salem, Massachusetts, and in a tie-in book of the same name.

The book combines oddities such as the aforementioned Caligari poster, Roland Coudon’s funeral procession tableaux for Frankenstein, and a Karoly Grosz Mummy poster that spotlights the film’s human cast members with a lot of more common promos for pictures such as Dracula’s Daughter, Barbarella, Mystery of the Wax Museum, and Island of Lost Souls. Hammett favors pre-sixties posters, though there is a scattering of later day ones for movies such as Alien, Rosemary’s Baby, Blacula, and of course, It’s Alive. It’s an impressive collection.

It’s Alive! also features a few interesting essays on the history and craft of horror promo posters, the fear reaction as explained through neuroscience and psychology, and Hammett’s own relationship with horror films and their adverts. Hammett is only quoted in that latter essay, so he generally allows his artworks to assume the starring role in this book. However, a shot of him grinning like a kid surrounded by his collection of other creepy toys, records, magazines, comics, models, and props really makes me wish this book had expanded its scope more beyond often familiar poster artwork to encompass the complete Kirk Hammett Horror Collection.

Review: 'The Monster Movies of Universal Studios'

When I was a Monster Kid, there was nothing I liked to check out from the school library better than books about classic horror movies. They gave you the basic rundown of what made flicks like Dracula and The Wolf Man so boss and delivered plenty of B&W photos to back it up. Today, works such as Gary D. Rhodes’s Tod Browning’s Dracula and David J. Skal’s The Monster Show take a more scholarly and/or critical look at the classics. The Monster Movies of Universal Studios falls somewhere between the kids and film criticism library shelves.

Author James L. Neibaur zips though the 29 movies he covers too swiftly for the book to qualify as scholarship, and his writing is simple enough for any Monster Kid to grasp (Neibaur is an Encyclopedia Britannica contributor, and his affectless writing would not be out of place in an encyclopedia), but he does make room in each roughly 5-to-10 page chapter to get into a bit of plot synopsis, a bit of criticism, and a bit of background history. For those of us who’ve consumed what’s already out there, chapters on well-examined films such as Dracula and The Wolf Man are redundant, but ones on items such as The Invisible Woman and The Mummy’s Tomb are fresher—if not exactly revelatory— and more likely to stimulate Neibaur’s critical side. That latter observation is not a sly criticism of Neibaur, since the Monster Kid in me appreciates his unabashed love of Dracula, a delightful film too often run down in contemporary criticism, and since analysis is not the author’s primary goal.

Neibaur limits his discussions to films that deal with the big six monsters of Universal (or Universale, as he repeatedly spells it for some reason) —Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature—which means that both Chaney and Rains’s Phantoms and Abbott & Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde get left out of the chat, as do non-Monster horrors such as The Black Cat and The Old Dark House. So The Monster Movies of Universal Studios isn’t exactly the definitive book on the topic, but I bet some modern-day Monster Kids might still enjoy checking it out of their own school libraries.

Review: Mill Creek's Hammer Horror Double Feature Blu-rays

For a long period of the blu-ray age, being a Region A Hammer Horror fan was very frustrating. The most vivid hunks of monstrous comfort food were sparse in the U.S. despite being abundant in a number of other regions. That began to change last year with Warner Brothers’ release of The Mummy, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Taste the Blood of Dracula, and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. Since then, other companies have started serving famished fans such titles as Twilight Time’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Universal’s Hammer Horror 8-Film Collection, and Mill Creek’s double features of The Revenge of Frankenstein/The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll/Gorgon (blu-ray upgrades of DVD sets originally released in 2008).

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 297

The Date: July 23

The Movie: The Mummy (1959)

What Is It?: This is not one of Jimmy Sangster’s cleverest scripts, but Christopher Lee gets to upstage costar Peter Cushing for the first time. Spending much of the movie wrapped in dirty bandages, his face caked in Egyptian mud, Lee is still more sympathetic as lovelorn Kharis than he was in his earlier monster roles. He also gets some quality face time and dialogue during a lavish, 13-minute sequence reimagining the mummification scene from the original Mummy, though without reaching similar heights of claustrophobia-inducing terror and all of the brown-face makeup the white actors play while impersonating Egyptians is pretty off-putting. The greatest triumph of The Mummy is that of director Terence Fisher, cinematographer Jack Asher, and their brilliant art department. The team’s use of colored lights, painted backdrops, spectacular costumes and props, and sets cluttered with detail make the whole picture look like a canvass thick with rich oils.

Why Today?: On this day in 1952, the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 begins.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 35

The Date: November 4

The Movie: The Mummy (1933)

What Is It?: Universal’s first major monster movie not based on classic lit was inspired by the recent wave of Egypt-mania sparked by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Boris Karloff plays an unlikely romantic lead and goes for a little walk.

Why Today?: On this day in 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter discovers the entrance to King Tut’s tomb.

8 Flaws in Universal's Great 8 Monster Movies

From the twenties through the fifties, Universal Studios completely defined horror cinema, bringing iconic literary characters and the exclusive creations of all their Dr. Frankensteins on staff to life. Modern audiences may have trouble relating to these “slow,” black & white films created some eighty or seventy years ago, but they will surely be as familiar with the glowering visages of Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Wolf Man as they are with the mugs of Santa Claus or Jesus. For us fans who do not dismiss the best and most enduring of Universal's monster movies—Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon— these are films that defy criticism. Yet each film does have at least one noteworthy flaw. At the risk of ruining your enjoyment of the Gill Man's underwater frolics or the Phantom's floor show, let's take off our fan caps for a second and put on our critical thinking ones instead, because we're about to whine about 8 Flaws in Universal's Great 8 Monster Movies. 

The Phantom of the Opera

Our first flaw is the most fundamental one on this list. You’ve got a movie called The Phantom of the Opera. You do not have sound. See the problem? Carl Laemmle could have selected any piece of public domain horror literature under the sun. Why choose one in which sound plays such an integral role before the advent of sound cinema? So there are scenes of singing without song, elaborate orchestral performances with only whatever melody the pit organist could pump out. We need to hear Christine’s lovely voice, and this flaw was not one unrecognized in its time. In fact, as soon as sound started invading film in the late twenties, Universal schemed to reissue its flagship horror with the sound the film always demanded. In lieu of original director Rupert Julian (or Lon Chaney, depending on which making-of account you want to believe), new directors Ernst Laemmle and Frank McCormick began shooting replacement footage for half the movie, which enjoyed a successful opening in 1930. Unfortunately, only the soundtrack remains, and a proper reissue of the sound Phantom of the Opera is not currently available. It’s a testament to the original film’s elaborate design and Chaney’s still-terrifying performance as Erik the Phantom that a seemingly major flaw does not really seem that bad when watching a silent film about opera. No sound remake has ever bettered it.

Dracula

Farewell, Christopher Lee

Very sad news to report today: Christopher Lee, the British actor best known for his embodiment of Hammer horror, died last Sunday of heart failure. Of course, Lee's 93 years were richly spent. He starred in some of the most successful film series of all time--not just Hammer's Gothic horrors that found him playing Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Mummy-- but also Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, James Bond's The Man with the Golden Gun, and the Star Wars prequels. On imdb, Lee has an extraordinary 278 credits, and he remained active right into this year, most recently doing voice-over work in Raul Garcia's yet-to-be-released animated anthology of Poe adaptations, Extraordinary Tales. That is a fitting end to a career steeped in classic chills, and one so dependent on the actor's marvelously distinctive bass intonation. Despite the rich wealth of Christopher Lee movies already in existence (my personal favorites include Dracula, The Wicker Man, The Curse of Frankenstein, and The City of the Dead), I will miss seeing him in another one.

Ten Terrifying Monster Toys That Time Forgot!

The holidays are a time when the little ones rub the sleep from their eyes before the crack of dawn to scamper down the stairs to see what goodies Santa left under the tree. Is it a train for Johnny? Or maybe a dolly for Suzy? Or maybe it’s a galactic monstrosity so intent on ripping Johnny’s throat out that it has an extra mouth inside of its mouth. Or perhaps it’s a gelatinous millipede Suzy can create in her very own mad laboratory. Along with the usual Star Wars and Batman merchandise, terrifying toys that appealed to my love of monsters terrorized my own childhood. Here are ten of the most terrifying.

1. Mego Mad Monsters (1973)

We begin our discussion of monster toys as all discussions of monsters must begin: with Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy. In 1973, Mego, the company that totally dominated the pre-Star Wars toy market, built on the success of its superhero figures with ones celebrating Universal’s classic monsters. And these were not just any monsters; they were “mad”, possibly because they looked kind of crappy, at least compared to the similar dolls Remco would produce seven years later. While Remco’s line would be nicely molded to capture the visages of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaneys Sr. and Jr., Mego’s line was a bit generic. Dracula wore an outfit that looked more befitting Mayor McCheese than the Prince of Darkness, and the Frankenstein Monster looked a bit like he had gas. The Wolfman was pretty cool though, with its wolfier head than that of the Chaney-style werewolf. The only other creature in the line was a fairly convincing Mummy. Mego’s creeps got a really cool accessory with the Mad Monster Castle Playset, sort of a big version of Remco’s little carrying case (more on that to come). This one had a working drawbridge and gruesome interior artwork depicting decapitated heads in mayonnaise jars. A fresh generation of serial killers followed.

2. The Game of Jaws (1975)

...And for No Other Reason Than They're Awesome, Here Are Some Boxes of Monster Candy Cigarettes...

Online Petition to Get WB to Release Hammer Horror Blu-rays in the U.S.

In the U.S., the rights to Hammer Horror titles are as all over the place as the pre-op limbs of Frankenstein's Monster. Millennium Entertainment (Dracula: Prince of Darkness; Frankenstein Created Woman), Shout! Factory (The Vampire Lovers), and Synapse Films (Hands of the Ripper; Countess Dracula) have already gotten started on putting out some of these movies on blu-ray stateside. However, the two companies that own the most essential Hammers--Universal (Brides of Dracula; Curse of the Werewolf) and Warner Brothers (Horror of Dracula; The Curse of Frankenstein)-- continue to sit on their catalogs of classics. To call the latter company to task, Diabolique Magazine has started up one of those online petitions asking for the release of the following movies on Blu-ray:

The Curse of Frankenstein
Horror of Dracula
The Mummy
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
Dracula, AD 1972
Taste the Blood of Dracula
Dracula Must Be Destroyed

 I'm not convinced that these kinds of petitions ever actually accomplish anything. I'm pretty sure Warner Brothers will release these films in hi-def when it damn well feels like it (or not). I signed the petition nevertheless. For what it's worth, you can too here.

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 Assistant

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

The mark of a truly imposing villain is the ability to bend the wills of others to do his or her bidding. Like some malevolent dictator or string-pulling cult leader, the arch-villain hovers in the shadows while some hunched minion carries out the grunt work. By nature, the assistant is never the most important stock horror character. He or she is often eliminated early in the story, sacrificed as symbol of a monster so evil that it is willing to decimate its own team. The assistant provides black-comic relief when any such bumbling might cast the main monster in a less than threatening light. Essential? Perhaps not. Quirky? When the assistant is at his, her, or its best, absolutely, resulting in some of the most memorable second-stringers in horror cinema.

Unlike so many horror movie archetypes, the assistant does not have a strong predecessor on the page. In Mary Shelley’s novel, Dr. Frankenstein worked solo. In both literary and film incarnations, Dr. Jekyll never hung a “For Hire” sign outside his lab. Our closest literary forerunner of the assistant is R.M. Renfield. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the zoophagous maniac is much more limited than he would be on screen. In a novel sprawling with characters, Renfield is a relatively minor one, only mentioned on twelve dates of its epistolary pages. As an inmate in Dr. Seward’s asylum, Renfield’s main plot function is to invite Count Dracula into the building so he can get his fangs on Mina (as film adaptations sometimes forget, Dracula can’t just go anywhere he pleases). Thematically, he mostly serves as a comic reflection of the dead-somber Count, eating the small lives of bugs and spiders while his master sups on more substantial fare. His naked escapes into the night parody Dracula’s less absurd nocturnal, erotically tinged escapades. Mina’s visit in Renfield’s cell inverts Dracula’s intrusions into her bedroom. Dracula enters Mina’s room to impose his evil on her, to possess her. When Mina enters Renfield’s, she has the opposite effect, seemingly making him saner, more coherent, a better person more concerned with her safety than worshipping his master. By imploring her to free herself from Dracula’s thrall, Renfield earns himself a fatal thrashing from the vampire.

Renfield underwent significant alterations in the first feature adaptation of Dracula. In F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, he has been renamed Knock in keeping with other such attempts to wriggle around Florence Stoker’s copyright claims. Instead of beginning the story as an asylum inmate, he is Thomas Hutter’s (our Jonathan Harker stand-in) boss, who deploys him to Count Orlok’s (Dracula’s) castle.

Garrett Fort put his own spin on this revised Renfield in his screenplay for Universal’s 1931 film, changing the character forever. Harker’s visit to Castle Dracula is handed over to Renfield completely, leaving our protagonist with a drastically reduced role and our secondary antagonist with a vastly expanded one. Played by David Manners, Harker is a bland, background figure in Tod Browning’s film. Dwight Frye’s Renfield commands the screen every time he appears. He exudes personality even before Dracula impels him toward madness (Stoker’s Renfield was already mad and institutionalized when the Count took him into his employ). Frye plays the sane Renfield with a magnetic blend of terror (how his eyes widen when he sees that rubber bat flapping over the carriage!) and amiability (his joyful declaration that the “very old wine” is “delicious!” is delightfully sincere when set against the Count’s weirdness). Considering how vacant most of the cast is, Renfield is the character we’d most like to know in Dracula. That also means he is the most tragic figure. Dracula’s treatment of Renfield is painful to watch, from his mesmerized madness to his murder.

Review: 'Graphic Horror: Movie Monsters and Memories'

John Edgar Browning’s new book Graphic Horror: Movie Monsters and Memories (Schiffer Publishing) is a coffee table collection of movie posters and recollections from fans familiar (David Skal; Philip Riley) and otherwise. My favorite part of the book is easily the foreword by one of my heroes. Skal is our finest horror commentator, the thinking man’s Forry Ackerman, and he gets more personal here than I’ve yet to read in his own books (The Monster Show, Hollywood Gothic, etc.), discussing his boyhood introduction to monster memorabilia collecting with wit and candor (I was also thrilled to learn he’s at work on a new book about Bram Stoker!).

Perhaps the other memories and insights strewn throughout the book didn’t affect me similarly because I don’t really know who most of Browning’s guest commentators are. Or maybe they’re just too insubstantial and blurby. In at least one case, the commentator didn’t really know what she was talking about: Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart notes how in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein the Monster was called “The Creature” instead of “The Frankensteinian Monster” for possible copyright reasons. Huh? In what movie was he ever called The Frankensteinian Monster?

Of course, as is the case with any coffee table book, the purpose is more the graphics than the text. Browning selected a really intriguing hoard of images, passing by the more familiar U.S. posters to illustrate how London After Midnight was marketed in Argentina, The Mummy was hawked in Sweden, Psycho was sold in Israel, and so on. There are some fabulous graphics in Graphic Horror; I particularly dug the groovy space-au-go-go poster for The Astounding She Monster and the underground comix style Astro-Zombies promo. I just wish the designer had taken better advantage of the book’s size to present larger reproductions of this artwork. A bizarre illustration promoting Dead of Night with a giant vampire bat looming over decadent images from the film simply begs to be studied closer.

Review: ‘Horror and the Horror Film’

When I was much younger and working toward my film degree, I took a course on the horror film. There’s nothing quite like padding into class at 9AM to watch The Exorcist with a bunch of groggy, probably hung-over 21-year olds. I’d take my seat at the back of the class, and my professor would hover behind me near the projector, shuddering at every flitting shadow and drip of blood spurted throughout the semester. It was a fun experience, not least of all because of its weirdness, but it also solidified my love of the genre and bolstered me with enough theoretical psychobabble to create this site you’re reading right now. One thing the class lacked was a good text. Our professor’s chosen book was Gregory A. Waller’s American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. It’s a pretty good collection of essays, but as the title indicates, it’s limited. And that limitation doesn’t just apply to region: the films discussed were mostly released between 1968 and 1980. The few photocopied essays we students received to supplement Waller’s book still didn’t add up to an encompassing study of a genre with much greater breadth than many non-fans realize.

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.

A Belated Farewell to Jimmy Sangster

If director Terence Fisher was the eye of Hammer, and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were the horror studio's faces, then Jimmy Sangster was its voice. The Welsh screenwriter composed the mass of Hammer's greatest films, taking fresh liberties with war horses such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy, and conjuring first-rate original material such as Brides of Dracula, Scream of Fear, and The Nanny. His directorial efforts (The Horror of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire, Fear in the Night) were fewer and less successful, arriving after Hammer had passed from its golden age to a new era of sensationalistic sex and gore. Sangster remained active in film until 2000 when he co-wrote the German thriller Mörderische Ferien. At the same time, he was turning his writing to more personal matters, publishing his autobiography Do You Want It Good or Tuesday? in 1997 and Screenwriting Techniques for Success in 2003. Sangster died on August 19 at the age of 83.

Jimmy Sangster is also of the most well-represented writers in this site's on-going series "Psychobabble's 120 Essential Horror Movies." Here's what I had to say about some of his finest work:

36. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957- dir. Terence Fisher)

The Quatermass Xperiment was successful, but it wasn’t the film that made Hammer synonymous with horror. Almost two years of non-horror fare passed before that landmark film arrived. Like Quatermass, Hammer’s reimagining of Frankenstein put more bloody flesh on the screen than audiences were used to at the time, but it did so without masquerading as science fiction and in shocking full color. The Curse of Frankenstein is capital-H Horror. It also fully established the conventions fans would soon associate with Hammer: excessive blood, sleazy sex, and source material with roots in Universal horror. Terence Fisher’s remake arrived just a few months shy of the 25th anniversary of Whale’s original, but the new film could hardly be called a respectful homage. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster makes his film great by jettisoning much of what made Whale’s great. Frankenstein was a poetic, deeply humane portrait of a monstrous innocent driven to horrendous acts after being abandoned by his equally sympathetic creator. The Curse of Frankenstein is a portrait of cruelty. Focus shifts away from the Monster and onto the doctor, who is more villainous than any horror character since Mamoulian’s Hyde, and like Hyde, he is not without his charms because he is played with electrifying gusto. Peter Cushing is great in the title role, magnetic even as he murders a kindly house guest, launches into megalomaniacal rants, or torments the maid with whom he’s having an affair. Christopher Lee makes a lesser impact as the Monster because Fisher gives him a minimum of screen time and doesn’t bother imbuing him with any of the complexities Whale and Karloff gave theirs. Humanity and complexity are not on the agenda here. Its utter cynicism, undiluted by an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style disclaimer, can be felt in many horror films to follow. Typical of a Hammer Horror, critics loathed The Curse of Frankenstein but audiences loved it, and its international success confirmed the studio as the new generation’s Universal and Cushing and Lee as its Karloff and Lugosi.

38. Dracula (1958- dir. Terence Fisher)

The suits at Hammer must have taken all of three seconds to decide upon the follow up to 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein. Just as Universal knew Dracula was the natural follow up to their Frankenstein, Hammer recognized the reverse would work equally well. One can recognize Dracula as a Terence Fisher/Hammer production even before the opening credits are complete: we zoom into a crypt and focus on a casket dripped with vivid red-paint blood. As was the case with Curse, subtlety was not much concern in Dracula. Unlike that film, we are presented with a hero of the highest moral character. Deliciously, Van Helsing is played by the actor who brought such immoral menace to the earlier film. Peter Cushing proves he is just as affecting as the good guy as he was as the bad, bringing much zest and charm and heroic confidence to Van Helsing. Once again, Christopher Lee is somewhat underused as the monster, although his commanding presence and rich baritone are put to much better use as Count Dracula then they were as Frankenstein’s wobbly creature. His greatest scenes are reserved for the beginning of the film. About halfway though, he is reduced to the speechless, leering thing he’d reprise in countless Dracula sequels. Fisher’s film also differs from Stoker and Browning by jumbling character relationships, having Jonathan Harker turn into a vampire and get staked early in the picture, and—most egregious of all—losing Renfield. Yet, Dracula (or Horror of Dracula, as it was titled in the U.S. so not to be mistaken for Tod Browning’s film) is the jewel in Hammer’s crown because of the sumptuous visuals Fisher lays out like a decadent, aristocratic banquet: the costumes, the colors, the castles, the wind-blown leaves, the creepy woods— what an invitingly Gothic landscape! Significantly, Hammer’s two big monster movies contributed to a burgeoning monster revival sweeping kid culture in the late ‘50s. The films coincided with the launch of the syndicated “Shock Theater” package that gave a new generation of TV viewers its first taste of Universal’s classic horror. Forrest J. Ackerman capitalized on the craze and fueled it further with his Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Like The Mummy, the iconic monsters had laid dormant for a long spell, but a few conjuring words from Forry, horror hosts such as Zacherley and Vampira, and Hammer’s chief screenwriter Jimmy Sangster were enough to bring them back from the dead. Their young legion of followers, known affectionately as “Monster Kids,” guaranteed these creeps would never be out of the pop cultural floodlights again.

41. The Mummy (1959- dir. Terence Fisher)

Hammer stuck close to formula with its final horror of the ‘50s by remaking Universal’s successor to Dracula and Frankenstein. Cushing, Lee, Sangster, and Fisher all return for The Mummy, which actually has more in common with the mediocre sequel The Mummy’s Tomb than the 1932 Karloff vehicle. This is not one of Sangster’s cleverest scripts, but Lee gets to upstage costar Cushing for the first time. Spending much of the movie wrapped in dirty bandages, his face caked in Egyptian mud, Lee is still more sympathetic as lovelorn Kharis than he was in his earlier monster roles. He also gets some quality face time and dialogue during a lavish, 13-minute sequence reimagining the mummification scene from the original Mummy, though without reaching similar heights of claustrophobia-inducing terror. The greatest triumph of The Mummy is that of Fisher, cinematographer Jack Asher, and their brilliant art department. The team’s use of colored lights, painted backdrops, spectacular costumes and props, and sets cluttered with detail make the whole picture look like a canvass thick with rich oils. The Mummy was Hammer’s first horror film to receive some positive critical notices, but its appeal was certainly most obvious to young monster enthusiasts. The horror genre, however, was about to grow up during a decade of near constant upheaval and violence.

44. The Brides of Dracula (1960- dir. Terence Fisher)

There was no way its sequel would fully recapture the power of Hammer’s Dracula, because Christopher Lee refused to revisit the count for fear of being typecast (his stance would crumble soon enough). Still there’s a lot of what made Dracula great in The Brides of Dracula. Not suffering any of his costar’s reservations, Peter Cushing happily returns as Van Helsing, and he gets more opportunities to display undeath-defying heroism than in the previous film. His showdown with a dashing non-Dracula vampire is likely Terence Fisher’s most thrilling sequence, climaxing with Cushing getting chomped and taking some rather extreme measures to ward off his own vampirism. Marita Hunt is nearly as arresting in the role of the eccentric Baroness Meinster, while Fisher’s trademark mastery of color and artificial environments provides further distraction from Lee’s absence. The screenwriting team, led by Hammer Stalwart Jimmy Sangster, also came up with an intriguing mystery (why is the Baroness Meinster keeping a young man prisoner in her sprawling castle?) that arguably makes the film more engaging than Hammer’s previous horrors to those already well familiar with how Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy pan out. But as is the case with most Hammer pictures, the main allure of The Brides of Dracula is that it provides yet another opportunity to gawk at marvelous sets and costumes rendered in glorious Technicolor and indelible images of vampire brides rising from the grave.