Review: 'Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning' (revised edition)

Tod Browning is not usually considered among the great directors. Although he made over sixty films, only a half dozen or so are regarded by film historians, and the public at large are mostly familiar with two. But they're both doozies. However, although Dracula is among the most iconic films ever made, it's also often dismissed as lazily directed. The other big Browning film, Freaks, is widely considered potent, but it's use of actual circus performers, many of whom are differently abled (a term that really applies here... anyone who'd call Prince Radian disabled couldn't have been paying attention to the film), has been attracting controversy for over ninety years. 

Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #5

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!

#5. Dracula (1931- dir. Tod Browning)

Scoff if you will. Many have. They call it static, stagy, and hammy. They call it boring and inept. They can stake themselves as far as I’m concerned. Dracula is flawed in some ways, but the film’s overall effect is profound. This movie is so Gothic, so alluringly archaic, so deeply creepy you can practically smell the dank crypt air. Dracula builds atmosphere like few other films, and a horror movie is nothing without atmosphere. It also has Bela Lugosi, the man who embodies the count so completely that it is always unsatisfying seeing another actor portray him no matter how technically better the actor’s performance is. As iconic as Bela is, Dwight Frye arguably steals the film as Renfield. He’s crazed, but he is also funny, frightening, fearful, and strangely sympathetic. The entire opening sequence in Dracula’s castle is masterful: Dracula’s awe-inspiring appearance on his massive stairway, Renfield and Dracula’s sickly humorous dinner, the dreadful appearance of the vampire’s famished brides. Critics complain that the film loses all steam after it leaves Transylvania, but I prefer to think that the steam that opening sequence builds powers the rest of the picture. Frankenstein is technically a better movie, but no serious horror puts me in the Universal spirit like Dracula.

Review: 'The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies: 365 Films to Scare You to Death'

In 2006, monster authorities James Marriott and Kim Newman published the first edition of The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies: 333 Films to Scare You to Death. With our current decade slouching toward its conclusion, Marriott and Newman have updated their guide to a neat 365 films, so it can serve as a demon-a-day calendar for horror freaks with plenty of spare time.

The additions are all limited to the eight years that have passed since The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies was last updated, and like the rest of the book, the addendums consist of the essential (instant cult smashes A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Babadook, It Follows, Get Out), the awful (V/H/S), and “How’d this get in here?” non-genre pictures (A Field in England). The new material also commits some glaring oversights. How did great stuff such as Black Swan, The Skin I Live In, Kill List, and The Cabin in the Woods not make the cut? Surely there must be a better explanation than “We needed to make room for The Human Centipede 2.”

For those who’ve never read any edition of Marriott and Newman’s tome, it consists of half-page reviews written with an analytical eye and a blob of cheeky wit. Finding 365 great movies in any one genre is pretty tough, and the write ups are not always favorable, so don’t get too bent out of shape about the inclusion of crap such as Last House on the Left, Friday the 13^th, Sleepy Hollow, and Saw. Seven guest critics join the main writers, yet the guests are the only contributors whose reviews receive bylines. It would have been helpful if we’d known which of the others were written by Newman or Marriott since there are sometimes conflicting opinions about certain films (for example, the introduction to the chapter on 1930s films is way more complimentary toward Tod Browning’s Dracula than the specific review of the film is).

It also would have been nice if the expanded format extended before 2010 so that absolute essentials such as Gojira, The Stepford Wives, Gremlins, 28 Days Later, and Shadow of the Vampire could finally take their rightful places in this book. The older entries haven’t even been updated for this new edition, so an insert about made-for-TV horror peters out in 2007, missing the rich vein of today’s scary small-screen choices and the piece on Suspiria indicates that the final chapter of Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy has yet to be released when Mother of Tears came out all the way back in 2007. There’s also no introductory chapter for all the new entries for 2010s films.

While no one ever pleases all fans with movie guides such as these, Marriott and Newman get it righter than most. If you already own 333 Films to Scare You to Death, 365 Films to Scare You to Death may be worth a double dip, and if you don’t, you’ll probably want to add it to your Halloween wish list… and be sure to check back here on Psychobabble this coming Halloween season, because I’ll be putting my copy to good use.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 286

The Date: July 12

The Movie: Mark of the Vampire (1935)

What Is It?: Tod Browning’s sound remake of his own London After Midnight still sports a disappointing denouement, but the spookiness that precedes it is aces. Great, creepy graveyard sequences, and it’s always a pleasure to see Bela Lugosi donning the cape, even if he isn’t doing so as Dracula. That surreal scene where Carroll Borland descends from the ceiling on giant bat wings is worth the price of admission alone.

Why Today?: On this day in 1880, Tod Browning is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 152

The Date: February 29

The Movie: Freaks (1932)

What Is It?: The unusually bodied carnival performers are the heroes and the conventionally pretty people are the monsters in Tod Browning’s controversial tale of gruesome revenge. Gooble gobble!

Why Today?: February 29 is a freak.

Review: 'Tod Browning’s Dracula'

I can’t for the life of me find the source, but I believe I read at some point that there’s a scene in Dracula in which the camera remains completely static for six excruciating minutes. It’s the scene in which Mina talks with Van Helsing and Harker on an outdoor lounge about 48 minutes into the film. Every time I re-watch Dracula, which I do at least once a year, I watch the DVD counter during this scene, and every time it falls well short of six minutes. Where do these rumors get started?

This was probably an exaggeration of a more well-traveled accusation that has director Tod Browning allowing his camera to remain still for three minutes in this scene, which is something that has been repeated by no less a Dracula scholar than David Skal. This is untrue too. A dolly-in occurs only seconds into the scene, and a dolly-out ends it. Based on the way dollies frame the scene, it actually seems pretty well planned out and not the lazy blunder a lot of film historians want you to believe it is.

The same can be said of the entire film. While only a fool would argue that the very first sound horror film featuring one of the all-time iconic performances in any genre is not historically important, a lot of critics still argue that Dracula is a slow, talky, music and camera movement-devoid, overacted, underacted, dated bit of piffle that front-loads its only worthwhile scenes in the first two reels. Such criticisms always irk me, because Dracula is my favorite film from Universal’s golden age of monster movies that wasn’t directed by James Whale. I don’t find it slow. I think its “talky” script is swollen with quotable lines. I think Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye give two of the great horror performances, and I love how the relative lack of music contributes to its atmosphere of quiet, eerie dread.

The bad rep Dracula has developed throughout the years also really irks film historian Gary D. Rhodes. He backs up his belief the film has been unfairly and ignorantly maligned with a mountain of evidence in his new book Tod Browning’s Dracula. Rhodes knows you can’t get too scientific about opinions; if someone doesn’t like a movie, they don’t like it. But he proves that a lot of the reasons critics give for disliking Dracula are simply wrong. Rhodes compares the film to twenty other specimens released around the same time and concludes that its use of camera movement, music, and dialogue are not unusual for its day. This holds true when held against George Melford’s Spanish-language version of Dracula, which historians regularly rate as superior for its more active camera. This is an easy conclusion to repeat, but far more tedious to check. Well, Rhodes did the tedious work, counting the number of camera movements in both films, and guess what… Tod Browning’s Dracula has the more active camerawork and in a far tighter timeframe.

And speaking of Browning, Rhodes is making another point with the title of his book. The author refutes the rumors that Browning barely directed the film, that cinematographer Karl Freund did all the directorial work. He also challenges the often-repeated notion that the film is a faithful adaptation of the Balderston-Dean play and the gossip that Universal never wanted Lugosi for its star.

The misinformation surrounding this film is staggering, and it has sadly played a major role in lessening its standing as a great film. I really hope that will start to change with the publishing of Tod Browning’s Dracula. This is a superior piece of cinematic detective work and a great example of what one can accomplish when one simply does his or her homework. I’m not sure if it will make any of Dracula’s multitudinous haters reevaluate the movie for the better, but I sure hope they’ll at least stop using lies to rake it over the coals. Rhodes’s book is apparently the first installment of Tomahawk Press’ new series about classic horror films. I can’t wait for the next one, and I hope it is written with the same care, attention, and sense of purpose as Rhodes put into his book.

Monsterology: The Lugosi Vampire

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

“I bid you… velcome…”

Suave and imposing and dapperly attired in evening wear, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula was a far more explicit link between sex and death than any movie monster before him. His portrayal is often pinpointed as ground zero for our modern conception of the vampire, the one that sexily sexes up teenage girls in books written just for teenage girls (they weren’t made for you grown ups, so stop reading them!). As described by Stoker, Dracula was certainly sexual (if being breast-fed blood by a man is your idea of sexy), but physically, he was pretty grotty. Stoker’s Dracula was a gaunt, dome-headed creep with a unibrow, “rank” breath, and hairy palms (sexy!). While Lugosi may not make girls who swoon over Robert Pattinson pee their pants, he was in his day, quite the heartthrob. Tall, dark, European, and bearing an undeniable charisma, he even caught The It Girl in his thrall, enjoying a brief affair with Clara Bow after she saw him own the stage in Horace Liveright’s production of Dracula.

Lugosi was keen to keep his refined features unobstructed by fangs or furry applications when he brought his vampire to the screen for Universal. Film historians love to speculate about how Dracula might have looked had Lon Chaney lived long enough to portray him. They often imagine a count more along the lines of the terrifying pseudo-vamp Chaney played in London After Midnight, with his buggy eyes and razor teeth. Maybe he would have looked something like Max Schreck’s even scarier bald, rat-like count in Nosferatu. Or maybe Chaney would have gone to the source text and based his creature on Stoker’s hairy-palmed menace. Driven by vanity— and perhaps unconsciously recognizing a powerful image when he created one— Lugosi would have none of this. Lugosi’s Dracula just looked like Lugosi, not even sporting the exaggerated widow’s peak he’d wear in Mark of the Vampire, the 1935 remake of London After Midnight.

Following Nosferatu and London After Midnight, Lugosi’s Dracula must have seemed like a radical rewrite of the vampire. However, there had been dashing, even beautiful, vampires even before Stoker’s novel was published in 1897. The genre’s first significant fiction was Dr. John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819). Dr. John began his story at that same fateful Swiss getaway that saw Mary Shelley conceive Frankenstein. Despite a ghastly pallor, the “form and outline” of Lord Ruthven’s face are “beautiful” and “many of the female hunters… attempted to win his attentions, and gain, at least, some marks of what they might term affection…”  The cutesy-pie named Varney in James Malcom Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1847)—with his “dreadful eyes,” “horrible” face, and “hideous” teeth— was more akin to the creature Stoker would create, but the title character of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871) was “pretty, even beautiful,” and up for some lesbian action intended to titillate readers also invited to condemn her “unnatural” desires; that way everyone could get their rocks off while still feeling morally superior.

Lugosi was not the first good-looking, sexually attractive vampire, but he refined the vampire concept so powerfully and pervasively that he nearly negated the very option that these creatures could be anything less than Playgirl-ready. The ugly vampires of cinema future usually paid explicit homage to Max Schreck (Reggie Nalder’s Kurt Barlow in Salem’s Lot, Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht). More commonly, we could expect super hunks like Christopher Lee, Louis Jordan, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman to don the cape. Perhaps Anne Rice put the final nail in the ugly count’s coffin, opening the crypt door for Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt to take vampire attractiveness to absurd extremes in Interview with the Vampire, and paving the Borgo Pass for Robert Pattinson’s dreamy-weamy Eddie “Munster” Cullen in Twilight.

So should Lugosi be praised or condemned for so assuredly re-vamping the vampire for generations to come? Well, it is what it is, and maybe sexing up the vamp is not even his greatest crime, for he is responsible—unintentionally, of course—for thick, Hungarian accents intoning “I vant to suck your blaahd!” or simply “Blah!” or other such nonsense that appears nowhere in Tod Browning’s film. Without Lugosi, there would be no Groovie Goolie Drac, no Count von Count (“Von bat! Tooo bats! Ha, ha, ha!”), no Count Chocula (“Vith chocolate flavored sweeties!”), and no Count Blah (“Blah!”).

Yet Dracula, has not suffered by such parodies. Only Sherlock Holmes rivals him as the character most often depicted on screen. The count remains un-alive and well in the 21^st century, goofing around in the current cartoon Hotel Transylvania and ready to re-sex y’all as embodied by sexy sexer Jonathan Rhys Meyers in a T.V. series slated to air on NBC next year. While the timelessness of Stoker’s novel must take some credit, Lugosi’s equally timeless portrayal of Dracula is just as responsible for the character’s unbelievable longevity. That’s quite a supernatural achievement.

Bela Lugosi was born 130 years ago today.