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: 'Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the 1930s'

Horror movie guides pop up like grass on a grave, yet they never tend to get it right. Too often they are glib, and they never encompass everything world cinema has contributed to the genre since its inception. There have been good ones. Jonathan Rigby’s American Gothic and the collaborative, two-volume American Silent Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films, 1913-1929, come to mind, but as their titles suggest, their scopes are still limited. A series is necessary to serve a genre with as much breadth and longevity as horror, which Christopher Workman and Troy Howarth realize.

Based on the first volume of their series, a chunky collection of reviews devoted exclusively to the thirties, these guys aren’t cutting any corners (the second volume will actually backtrack to the silent era and pick up with the forties in volume three). Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the 1930s swells with shorts and features from all recesses of the world, which is significant considering that studies of the genre’s key decade are often limited to its most prolific location of production, Hollywood, and often even more limited to a specific studio, Universal.

Each entry features a few technical specs, cast list, synopsis, history, critique, and even some details about the major players’ personal lives and careers beyond the given films. Pieces on lost films may only be a few paragraphs, but major movies may receive an entire page or more. Workman’s entry on King Kong is truly superb, going deep enough to assess the biological accuracy of its dinosaurs! (On the flip side, his more critical assessment of the comparatively fantastical creatures in Son of Kong goes a little too far considering that it is, after all, a movie about a giant gorilla.)

The writers’ tone keeps the discussions enjoyable rather than dry, though I believe they are too hard on certain aspects of the classics, like the oft-denounced “staginess” of Dracula and the performances of Valerie Hobson and Una O’Connor in Bride of Frankenstein, which I believe are integral to the movie’s delicious deliriousness. Of course, no opinionated reader is ever going to completely agree with all the opinions of a movie guide writer, so I’m impressed by how often I agreed with Workman and Howarth. I would have preferred the book to be arranged strictly chronologically instead of alphabetical by year, since how one film develops on the innovations of others is particularly significant in horror. That’s a nitpick since guides of this sort are meant to be dipped into rather than read from cover-to-cover, even though this is one of the few that welcomes that kind of reading. Some might also complain that a lot of the murder mysteries and Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan movies in here only loosely qualify as horror, but I think their presence is further evidence of the writers’ determination to be all-inclusive. You certainly can’t complain that any significant film is missing, which would be the far greater crime. Tome of Terror also scores points for the terrific photos that appear on nearly every one of its pages, but its greatest achievement is fattening up my list of movies to see, which is the ultimate job of any movie guide worth reading. I can’t wait to build that list even bigger when they publish volume two.

Ten Reasons 'Bride of Frankenstein' is the Most!

There’s a lot of brilliance packed into Bride of Frankenstein’s slight 75 minutes. Here are 10 reasons why James Whale’s final monster movie remains cinema’s greatest.

1. What of My Mary?

As we open on Bride of Frankenstein, we witness one of its most inspired scenes. We are not in a laboratory of blasphemous horrors but an opulent living room where literary giants Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley discuss the latter’s most famous creation. Informing her husband that Frankenstein “wasn't the end at all,” she proceeds to tell the tale of the Monster’s quest for a mate. There is literary accuracy in this scene, since Shelley’s original novel did, indeed, include a major subplot in which the Monster compels Frankenstein to build him a bride. There is also great cinematic ingenuity in this prologue. It is a way to directly transition into the second chapter of Frankenstein, to acknowledge its literary origins, and to tie the new monster to her true creator, as Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary and The Bride. As barrier-breaking ideas often do, the prologue had its obstacles. Editor Ted Kent wanted Whale to cut the sequence, feeling it detracted from the horror. The décolletage-baring gown Lanchester wore as Shelley set off alarms with the censors. Fortunately, Whale ignored Kent and a few minor cuts placated the censors enough for the prologue to remain, providing Bride of Frankenstein with its cleverest postmodern touch.

2. Woman… Friend… Wife

She only has four minutes of screen time in the film named after her, but Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein is without question the most memorable female monster in cinema history and certainly the first significant one. With her lightning-streaked fright wig and childlike awkwardness, The Bride has inspired countless imitators and been captured on an innumerable amount of merchandise. Her unsettling combination of morbid weirdness and early-Hollywood glamour (designed by Universal’s resident makeup whiz Jack P. Pierce) laid the groundwork for all of the sexy grotesques that followed her, from Vampira to Princess Asa Vajda of Black Sunday to Morticia Addams to Elvira to Lady Sylvia Marsh of Lair of the White Worm. Her hairstyle has been appropriated in one form or another by personalities ranging from Lily Munster to singer Dave Vanian of The Damned. Her teasingly brief presence in Bride of Frankenstein sparked numerous attempts to fill in the gaps (Elizabeth Hand’s imaginative feminist novel The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride; Franc Roddam’s film The Bride), yet she packs a lot of living into her four minutes on film. She learns to walk by leaning on the shoulders of her creators, takes in all around her with a wide-eyed mixture of wonder and disgust, tentatively considers a romance with an ugly but sensitive brute, and ultimately says “no thanks” to it all. That concise arch from childlike hesitancy to aggressive self-reliance makes The Bride a fully realized personality despite her lack of screen time. Couple that complexity with an iconic appearance and you’ve got the most unforgettable female monster of them all.

3. A Perfect Human

Review: 'Bride of Frankenstein': The Vintage Novelization Reprinted!

Several years ago I attended a showing of Bride of Frankenstein at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The crowd was mostly made up of people who probably first saw the film when it was released in 1935. Without the burden of a modern sensitivity to irony, the older folks in the theater seemed to take the film at face value. As they shuddered and gasped at the Monster’s antics, I understood Bride of Frankenstein as a genuinely horrifying horror movie—as opposed to a knowingly camp monster movie, which is how I always enjoyed it— for the first time. However, I did not feel the film’s horror until reading BearManor Media’s new reprint of Michael Egremont’s vintage novelization. Without being filtered through director James Whale’s ironic eye and acted by camp pioneers like Ernest Thesiger, Una O’Connor, and Dwight Frye, Bride of Frankenstein proves to be a genuinely horrifying tale; more so because Egremont took it so seriously. Yes, there are still all the consciously humorous lines that helped make the film one of our first truly funny horror-comedies (both gin and a good cigar are still Dr. Pretorius’s only weakness). However, the scenes of horror are described so ghoulishly that the comedic aspects shrink well into the background. Egremont pores over the corpse Pretorius procures to serve as the Monster’s bride in grotesque detail, with her eyelids “sunk into the pits beneath,” her eyes “long collapsed and desiccated,” her cheek revealing “the shining jawbone, and the little, even teeth,” and her neck “pitted and corroded by time and time’s grim assistant, the conqueror worm.” Shudder.

To put a fine point on how much the tone of the novelization diverges from that of the film, Frye’s googly-eyed assistant Karl is renamed Franz and given a gruesome back story and a far different and more well-developed resolution. O’Connor’s shrieking housemaid Minnie “might have gone down to History as one of the great investigators of the world”! And that’s how Egremont handles the comic relief! As for our ostensible villain, The Monster (who is so remolded that his iconic flat pate is now described as “domed”) becomes a bit less sympathetic when we actually witness his attack on some peasant girls, a sequence the film largely glosses over. The novelization also restores his wrestling match with a statue of Christ, a scene the censors deemed so blasphemous that the crucifix was replaced with a statue of a generic bishop in the film. Despite that radical move, Egremont still felt it necessary to rewrite history by misrepresenting Percy Shelley’s “The Necessity of Atheism” (misnamed “A Defence of Atheism”) as a “practical joke.” I guess a novelization can only handle so much iconoclasm.

BearManor Media continues to do horror film history a great service with its “Nightmare Series” of novelizations, shedding additional light on familiar cinema classics by dredging up the strange and the rare. One quibble though: I understand that a small press does not have the editorial staff of a large one, but there still really isn’t any excuse for the number of typos that appear in so many of their volumes, including this one. They’re sloppy and distracting. Of course, if you let that stop you from reading this or any of the press’s other fascinating books, you might need a brain transplant. Hold on while I get Franz and Pretorius on the phone…