Review: 'Werewolf Stories: Shape-Shifters, Lycanthropes, and Man-Beasts'

Werewolves are many things. They are scary and mystical. They are metaphors and metaphysical. They are the subjects of monsters movies, fairy tales, and folk lore. They are people who transform into four legged animals and furry two-legged weirdies that look suspiciously like Oliver Reed. They are fictions, and for a kooky few, non-fictions.

Review: 'Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror' Updated Edition

This year marks 90 years since Universal Studios became synonymous with horror by plopping both Dracula and Frankenstein into theaters. To commemorate that momentous event (and the 80th anniversary of The Wolf Man), Michael Mallory has updated his 2009 book Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror. Apparently, no changes have been made to the book's main text, which features synopses and a bit of background information on Universal's monster movies, including less celebrated pictures such as Night Monster and Monster on the Campus, and profiles of significant players from Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaneys Sr. and Jr. to director James Whale, makeup magician Jack P. Pierce, and perpetually shrieking character comedienne Una O'Connor. Short bios on Gloria Stuart and Elena Verdugo imply that these actresses, who died after the book's first publication, are still with us. 

The main changes are in a new introduction from Jason Blum of new horror manufacturer Blumhouse Productions and a 15-page coda mostly focused on Blumhouse/Universal's 2020 update of The Invisible Man. Oddly, there's nothing about Universal's other revivals of classic monsters both successful (1999's The Mummy and its sequels) and considerably less so (2004's Van Helsing, 2010's The Wolf Man, 2014's Dracula Untold). 

Still, it's worthwhile to have Universal Studios Monsters back in print. Serious fans may not learn much from Mallory's text, but the copious B&W and color portraits, stills, posters, and behind-the-scenes snaps of the most recognizable faces since Santa Claus are spectacular. With the additional material, there's also some neat fan art to complete a visually arresting package.

Review: 'Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film'

The premise of Craig Ian Mann's new book Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film is that compared to studies of, say, vampire or zombie pictures, there has been relatively little analysis of werewolf films and the ones that do exist tend to oversimplify them as "beast within" metaphors.  He then pores over more than a century of werewolf pictures from 1913's inaugural lycanthropy flick The Werewolf through 2015's Howl to explain how filmmakers have used werewolves to do everything from expressing anti-Native American (The Werewolf) and anti-Japanese (Werewolf of London) bigotry to using them as symbols for Germany's transformation into a fascist state (The Wolf Man), how partisanship is tearing America apart (Werewolves on Wheels), the dangers of sex (Curse of the Werewolf), the conflict between rationalism and superstition (An American Werewolf in London), the evils of Regan/Bush-era conservatism (Silver Bullet; My Mother Is a Werewolf), etc. 

Oddly, Mann uses a great deal of quotes from other writers who support his interpretations, implying that previous discussions of werewolf films have not been quite as reductive as he suggests. After all, merely saying that any werewolf film is about "the beast within" would be like saying that every mad scientist film is about "science gone mad." It is such a limited and obvious conclusion that it doesn't deserve to be acknowledged.

While I think Mann overreaches with his central premise, he still wrote a thought-provoking analysis of the werewolf picture, exposing the creature's versatility in films of great and little quality and from all social, political, and cultural points of view. He even discusses some non-werewolf transformation films, such as Cat People, The Wasp Woman, and yes, The Beast Within.

Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #9

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!

#9. The Wolf Man (1941- dir. George Waggner)

Having exhausted literary sources during the first phase of its Golden Age of monsters, Universal managed an original creation to really bring its next phase into focus. More rooted in the practical/tragic human issues of turning into a snarling beast beneath the moon than Werewolf of London had been, The Wolf Man finally got the werewolf picture right. The originality of its story is not the only thing that sets The Wolf Man apart from Universal’s earlier horrors: it also eschews a Gothic, period setting in favor of a contemporary, fairy tale milieu. Yet the new monster was such an instant smash that he was deemed an acceptable playmate for Frank and Drac. Lon Chaney, Jr., gets to do what he does best as he grimaces and wrings his hands as Larry Talbot. Jack Pierce gets to do what he does best as he covers Chaney’s face in yak fur, fashioning his final memorable monster. The Wolf Man also stands out from most of the earlier Frankenstein and Dracula pictures because of its consistently interesting cast. Dracula was a touch of a drag whenever Bela or Dwight Frye wasn’t on screen, but you never feel as though The Wolf Man is wasting your time as long as Claude Rains, Evelyn Ankers, the unforgettable Maria Ouspenskaya, and yes, Bela, are on screen.

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...

Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Monsters!

Welcome, foolish mortals, to Psychobabble’s House of 100 Monsters. Creak up the steps and over the threshold. Within this vile abode you will encounter not 98, not 99, but one hundred of the most terrifying, horrifying, unpleasantifying creatures who have ever haunted the page, the screen, and the breakfast table. They are my personal favorite freaks, ranked from terriblest to really terriblest. No Halloween is complete without a visit to a spook house, and my house of horrors is as spooky as it gets. So I formally invite you to freak out to Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Monsters. Step right this way…

100. Tar Man

First, allow me to guide you down into the basement where a certain deceased individual has recently been resurrected by a certain military-grade toxic gas. Don’t ask me who he was in life, but in death this standout star of Return of the Living Dead is like an E.C. Comics zombie in the oozing flesh and he wants one thing only... brains!

99. Black Frost

Sidestep the Tar Man and take a break by our deep freeze. Oops. Bad idea, because inside is a terrifying thingy that blasts incapacitating frosty air from its jockstrap. This is how Black Frost brought down The Mighty Boosh, and it traumatized many viewers of their surreal British comedy by baring its unsettlingly white teeth before breaking into a hideous dance of death. He’s one icy bastard.

98. Clayface

Wait a minute… that chap wasn’t Black Frost at all! His face has morphed back into its natural state—that of one Matt Hagen, better known as Batman’s hulking, shape-shifting nemesis Clayface, one of the nastiest and most genuinely monstrous monsters to ever menace Gotham City!

97. Wampa

Back in the deep freeze is another terrible creature, a towering snow beast with white, shaggy fur and clawed paws the size of trashcan lids. Is it the Yeti? Nah. They wouldn’t know what the hell a Yeti is up on the distant planet of Hoth. That’s where the Wampa whomps Luke Skywalker’s face off in the shocking attack that kicks The Empire Strikes Back into gear.

96. Pumpkinhead

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.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 358

The Date: September 22

The Movie: The Wolf Man (1941)

What Is It?: Writer Curt Siodmak, director George Waggner, and makeup wizard Jack Pierce reinvent the werewolf. Much of what we now associate with lycanthropes—their aversion to silver, their association with the pentagram, their kinship with gypsies—leaped from Siodmak’s imagination. He also composed an ace nursery rhyme repeated infinitely throughout The Wolf Man and its sequels (“Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night / may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright”). The film’s other great innovation is the introduction of Lon Chaney, Jr., as the next successor in his father’s monster-movie-star legacy.

Why Today?: Today is the first day of autumn.

Review: 'Cat People' Blu-ray

A year after Universal Studios completed its trio of major movie monsters with The Wolf Man, RKO tried to get a taste of that film’s success with a project called Cat People. It was passed off to Russian-American producer Val Lewton, a former pulp novelist without an inclination for the kinds of furry fantasies Universal peddled. For their laughably named project, Lewton, co-screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen (Lewton did extensive rewrites on the script), and director Jacques Tourneur fashioned a more subtle, cerebral film than RKO had in mind, exploring the psychology of a woman who may only believe she is a were-cat, her delusion a symptom of the film’s true monster: sexual repression.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 266

The Date: June 22

The Movie: House of Frankenstein (1944)

What Is It?: “FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER! WOLF MAN! DRACULA! HUNCHBACK! MAD DOCTOR!... All the Screen's Titans of Terror - Together in the Greatest of All SCREEN SENSATIONS!” House of Frankenstein is the kind of matinee pap one would expect from a movie with such a tagline, but as far as matinee pap goes, it’s gold. Logic, craft, and all pretensions toward thoughtfulness are pitched out the crypt door, leaving nothing more than a gullet-choking feast for monster aficionados. If one could detect the last gasps of a once formidable genre in House of Frankenstein, at least the Universal monster movie was going to go out just as it came in: overflowing with fun.

Why Today?: On this day in 1816, Mary Shelley allegedly had the dream that inspired the book without which there’d be no Frankenstein and no house for him.

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

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 2

The Date: October 2

The Movie: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

What Is It?: Dracula wants to stick Lou Costello’s brain into the Frankenstein Monster’s head. Lou and Bud Abbott would rather he did not do that, and they employ The Wolf Man to thwart the Count. Who wins? You do, sucker!

Why Today?: On this day in 1895, Bud Abbott was born.

Review: 'Monster Mash: The Creepy Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972'

Writers such as David Skal have dealt with the zany monster revival of the fifties and sixties before, but as far as I know, Monster Mash: The Creepy Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972 is the first book devoted to that topic alone. Mark Voger makes up for lost time by cramming as many monsters, Munsters, Addamses, Dark Shadows, issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland and Creepy, Borises Karloff and Pickett, horrific toys, models, and hot rods into a slim 190 pages as he can stuff. Unlike scholarly Skal, Voger captures the gee-whiz enthusiasm of a true Monster Kid with goofy prose and a scattered structure that screams, “Oh wait…here’s another boss thing that happened during the monster craze!”

The focus of Monster Mash is its copious interviews and photos. During his career as a journalist and pro-horror geek, Voger has interviewed such genre major players as writer/editor Forrest J. Ackerman, publisher James Warren, singer Bobby “Boris” Pickett, artists Basil Gogos and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, and actors John Astin, Lisa Loring, Al Lewis, Butch Patrick, Pat Priest, and Kathryn Leigh Scott. Those fun (it’s heartwarming to discover how much the “Addams Family” cast adored each other), sometimes frothy interviews constitute a good portion of this book’s text. However, they cannot compete with all the ghoulishly, gleefully, garish full-color photos of monster memorabilia. Don Post masks and Famous Monsters covers and comics panels and Aurora models and “Munsters” lunchboxes and Wolf Man dolls and Gill Man Soakies. Looking at Monster Mash is like having a giant nostalgia bug lay lovely eggs in your eye sockets. 

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)

I Was a Late-Generation Monster Kid

My room would be fuzzed with that vague purple that comes right before the sunrise. I’d be exhausted, because it was 6 AM and little kids need their rest, and because I’d been toiling away in school all week long, probably learning to print or gluing elbow macaroni to paper plates or whatever else it is you do in school when you’re five or six. I don’t remember how old I was exactly, because I can’t find any information about when “Groovie Goolies” aired at 6:30 AM (or was it 6:00 AM?) on Saturday Mornings in the late-seventies/early eighties, but man, do I remember that sickly feeling of trying to fight myself awake every Saturday morning so I could creep downstairs to the still-dark den to take in those cornball Burbank-by-way-of-Transylvania jokes and groove along to those bubble gum pop songs as sugary as the Frankenberry cereal I’d scarf after the closing credits.

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

Review: 'Pumpkin Cinema'

There are already enough horror movie guides haunting bookstores to choke King Kong. Nathaniel Tolle justifies the existence of yet another one by employing a welcome premise: movies that conjure just the right atmosphere for Halloween viewing. He lays out his criteria in the introductory chapter of Pumpkin Cinema: nothing too slow, too long, too depressing, too cruel, or too off-season for Halloween fun. Such seasonally perfect selections as Something Wicked This Way Comes, House of Frankenstein, The Adventures of Ichabod, and of course, Halloween are shoe-ins.

Sometimes Tolle has trouble sticking to his own premise, as when he chooses the swelteringly Amazonian Creature from the Black Lagoon instead of more appropriately autumnal alternatives like The Wolf Man or Dracula (which he disqualifies for being too slow…blasphemy!). While those are some glaring omissions matched only by the near-total absence of Hammer horrors, I appreciated Tolle’s otherwise appreciation of classic monster movies from all eras and how he further distinguishes his book from similar guides by getting into cartoons, short films, and Halloween episodes of non-supernatural TV series. I also liked the fact that he selected movies he likes, so you don’t have to hunt around to locate his recommendations. You still might want to approach a lot of those recommendations with caution since Tolle can be undiscerning when it comes to direct-to-video cheapies and holiday movies starring Ernest or The Olsen Twins. That unfettered enthusiasm extends to writing that is accessible yet can get dodgy without enough editorial intervention. Someone certainly should have steered him away from writing “working quite well are the many ample bosoms that constantly struggle to stay confined in their tiny bikini tops” in his entry for the notorious rape-monster movie Humanoids from the Deep. Yeesh.

Greg Nicotero's 'The United Monster Talent Agency'

Greg Nicotero had a twenty-five year career as one of Hollywood's leading makeup whiz's in his back pocket by the time he finally directed his own film in 2010. That's when the dude who brought creeps to life in Evil Dead II and Bride of Re-Animator, and worked additional magic on David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. and a plethora of Quentin Tarantino movies, created the utterly delightful "The United Monster Talent Agency". The eight-minute short jets back to a Hollywood when classic monsters were in such high demand that they required their very own talent agency to keep them in rotation.

As detailed in Donna Davies's groovy documentary Nightmare Factory (now streaming on Netflix), Nicotero and his crew did it all the old-fashioned way: lap-dissolving the Wolf Man's (comedian Dana Gould...one of several familiar faces you'll find in the film) transformation, stop-motion animating King Kong, and building all of the miraculously authentic costumes from scratch. They literally don't make 'em like this anymore, folks. Check out "The United Monster Talent Agency" here and see how many monsters you can spot!

Being Smart on Halloween: A Monster Movie Guide

If you’re too old for trick-or-treating or too clever to actually throw your Halloween party on Halloween (so rarely it falls on a weekend night, and who wants to get blitzed on Tuesday and have to drag themselves to work Wednesday morning?) you might spend October 31^st doing what I do: cramming as many horror movies into 24 hours as you can. But what to choose? What to choose? One wrong selection and— Ka-POW!—the entire atmosphere of this most atmospheric of holidays shoots right down the crapper, leaving you holding your head in anguish and weeping, “Why, oh why did I ever put Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood into the DVD player?” That would be pretty stupid. So here’s some Halloween-movie-selecting advice that will make you smart.

Obviously, a film set on or around Halloween is the perfect choice, though these are shockingly rare. Halloween and its sundry sequels and remakes are at the front of the pack. Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, with its children’s Halloween party gone awry, is a wonderful seasonal mood piece, as is the “Sleepy Hollow” episode of Disney’s marvelous Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. More recent examples are Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses, a rummage through dusty Halloween decorations stored in an attic reeking with dankness, and Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat, a picture I didn’t care for but one that has some truly rabid proponents who adore its nostalgic ambience. Something Wicked This Way Comes begins just a week before Halloween in a golden October in which “1,000 pumpkins lie waiting to be cut,” and movies don’t come richer in autumnal atmosphere than Jack Clayton’s. The neo-cult classic May finds the title character collecting some bloody booty during a psychotic trick-or-treat excursion. As the kids of The Blair Witch Project prepare for their own excursion into the woods, we see Halloween decorations in shop windows, so that one passes muster too.

There are exceptions to this seemingly obvious rule. Movies with Halloween scenes aren’t always ideal holiday fare. Classics they may be, but I wouldn’t want to spend the night of spooks watching, To Kill a Mockingbird, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, or Meet Me in St. Louis, though a chorus of “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley” has been known to terrify.

Certain movies are pretty safe to categorize as honorary Halloweeners. We know that a man may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright, but for all we know The Wolf Man takes place in late September, November, or shudder to think, early December. Nevertheless, it’s a good choice, so try not to get too hung up on when exactly Larry Talbot’s life goes to pot.

Films that immediately break the seasonal spell are those that glaringly take place in the wrong season or environment: desert horrors such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Near Dark, seaside ones such as The Birds, or snowy ones such as The Thing. And perish the thought of watching one that takes place on a completely different holiday! That means no Gremlins (Christmas), Jaws (4^th of July), or April Fool’s Day (April Fool’s Day). If you lived in the New York area during the late seventies/early eighties, you may also find that King Kong has too many Thanksgiving associations to enjoy it on October 31^st. With its island and metropolitan settings, it’s not very Halloweeny anyway.

You get an F for effort, King Kong.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is a bit of a grey area. On the one hand, no environment recalls Halloween less than the Amazon (except maybe space, which means no Alien!). On the other hand, as the studio’s ad campaign once insisted, “Universal IS Halloween.” Considering the place its iconic monsters hold in Halloween costumes, decorations, and holiday movie marathons, exceptions can be made for Black Lagoon and the snowy Invisible Man. Go ahead and enjoy them with a clear conscience on October 31^st. That being said, more ideal selections would be Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, or The Wolf Man. But you already knew about that last one.

Halloween is a distinctly western holiday, so at the risk of coming off xenophobic (I swear I’m not! Some of my best friends are xenos!), Asian horror films may not exactly hit that sweet spot. Still, North American Halloween influences have become pretty internationally pervasive over the years, so if you still feel compelled to spend your holiday with Godzilla or that cute little girl from Ringu, that is your prerogative. I also encourage you to indulge in movies centered on such seasonal tropes as haunted houses (recommended: Robert Wise’s The Haunting), black cats (recommended: Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat), witches (recommended: John Llewellyn Moxey’s The City of the Dead), pumpkins (recommended: Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead), and candy corn (recommended: TK).

Oh yeah. That's the stuff.

Just remember that as kooky and crazy as Halloween is, there are rules to enjoying it. Stay safe. Always wear reflective clothing. Check your candy for razor blades and light artillery. And no matter what you do, follow every guideline I’ve delineated above. Doing so just may save your life.

Twisted and Evil: The Influence of Classic Horror on ‘Star Wars’

“The scene where Anakin actually becomes Vader… it’s in the vocabulary of a time—of the 1930s and 1940s.”

-George Lucas, Starlog 2002

It’s always tempting to place pop fiction in a particular bag, and with its aliens, space ships, and interplanetary jaunts, Star Wars is usually dropped into the science fiction satchel. That’s fine for lazy critics, but the series has always been too much of a dabbler for its sci-fi status to ring totally true. Yes, George Lucas was clearly influenced by such items as Metropolis, Flash Gordon, and Dune. He was also profoundly affected by westerns (The Searchers), Samurai pictures (The Hidden Fortress), historical epics (Lawrence of Arabia), and fantasy (The Wizard of Oz). As the above quote indicates, classic horror also creeped into that yarn set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

The Star Wars saga made its most explicit reference to horror movies in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, when the Emperor plays Dr. Frankenstein by strapping the freshly mangled Anakin Skywalker to a lab table and transforming his protégé into a mechanized monster who lumbers forth like Boris Karloff. The movies “of the 1930s and 1940s” of which Lucas spoke are, of course, Universal’s Frankenstein franchise. Return of the Jedi even attempts to give the series’ nastiest villain a level of Karloff-style pathos by presenting Darth Vader as a conflicted creature. Inverting Karloff’s mute performance, the expressionless Vader conveys this new facet of his once wholly evil character via James Earl Jones’s voice.

David Prowse, the actor who embodies the dark lord, was limited by his bulky costume fitted out with a long, black Dracula cape. However, he did have a strong link to classic horror. Well, at least he had a link to a classic horror production company considering that 1970’s The Horror of Frankenstein and 1974’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell are not two of Hammer Studio’s best products. In the latter film, the hulking Prowse co-starred with Peter Cushing, the actor who has played Dr. Frankenstein more than any other and whose gaunt, angular face is as iconically linked to Hammer as the studio’s logo. That face was always too unique to waste buried beneath mounds of creature make-up. As he did when playing the doctor, Cushing was still able to convey absolute monstrousness without the aid of so much as fake teeth when he played Grand Moff Tarkin, the unrepentant destroyer of worlds who keeps Vader under his thumb. In contrast to his portrayals of Dr. Frankenstein, there is not a wisp of humanity or conflict in Cushing’s work as Tarkin, making this his most evil role-- far more rotten than any he ever played in a pure horror picture.

Perhaps in an effort to link the prequel trilogy to the classic Star Wars trilogy’s links to Hammer, that studio’s other iconic face, Christopher Lee, was cast as the black-caped Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. The character’s unfortunate baby-talk name is slightly ameliorated by his title, which reminds us of Lee’s most famous role, Count Dracula. The title also takes advantage of how Stoker’s vampire has forever transformed the very word “count” into a calling card of evil and monstrousness.

Star Wars dips deeper into the horror handbag and comes up with a menagerie of monsters distinct from the more typical egg-headed, big-eyed aliens common to outer-space fiction. H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, a classic of both science fiction and monsterrific horror, seems to have run a number of Star Wars’ creatures through its house of pain. The series is lousy with Wellsian man-beasts with names like Hammerhead, Walrus Man, Yak Face, Amana Man, and Squid Head. For the most part these overly on-the-nose names were coined by the folks at Kenner who had to come up with titles for their line of toys, and they have since been given less descriptive ones in the plethora of Star Wars novels and character guides. But a Walrus Man by any other name still looks like something that should be sunning itself on pack ice, just as Ugnauts and Gamorean Guards don’t look any less like hogs that recently hopped off mad Dr. Moreau’s vivisection table. Lucas’s dog Indiana directly inspired the beloved Chewbacca, a ringer for Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man. 

An actual wolf man of sorts also makes an appearance in the cantina scene of Star Wars, though this weird crossover was the result of too little time and not enough budget to create the exotic array of space creatures Lucas really wanted. In other words, the Wolf Man mask was simply handy. When Lucas fiddled with his film to make the controversial “special edition” of 1997, the one cantina patron he digitally replaced was the Wolf Man, perhaps because he felt that this creature was a step too far in paying homage to overly familiar horror icons. It may be worth noting that these animal aliens are almost never articulate like the creatures in the firmly sci-fi Planet of the Apes (the one exception is the fish-headed Admiral Ackbar, whose race being called “Mon Calamari” is probably the best joke in the entire Star Wars series), making their ties to the groaning, grunting, growling monsters of classic horror stronger.

The Star Wars series is speckled with other horror references, from the bounty hunters Zuckuss and 4-Lom, who apparently borrowed The Fly’s face, to the Jedis’ Dracula-like ability to bend weak minds to the Emperor’s Grim-Reaper cloak to the Blob-like Jabba the Hutt to the AT-AT attack, which plays like an onslaught pulled from some monster movie from 1950s U.S. or Japan (another horrory scene from an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back had Darth Vader feeding a flock of pet gargoyles at his Hellish compound). The series even features one legitimately creepy scene in which Luke Skywalker slips into a gloomy cave to confront a Darth Vader phantom, whose decapitated head explodes to reveal the nightmarish face of Luke, himself . It’s all part of Star Wars’ genre-smorgasbord, which may serve science fiction as the main course, but offers too many delectable side dishes to pass up.