Perhaps no other genre generated more iconic actors than
horror, and it wasted no time dumping them in cinemas. Even before the advent
of sound, there was Lon Chaney and Conrad Viedt. As soon as we could hear our
monsters groan and growl, we had Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Dwight Frye, Claude
Rains, and Peter Lorre. Then came Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Christopher Lee,
Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, etc.
The key word here, of course, is actors. Actresses were not absent from horror movies. Those
monsters needed someone screaming and helpless to carry off, after all, so we
had Mae Clark, Helen Chandler, Fay Wray, Valerie Hobson, Evelyn Ankers, and
Hazel Court to perform such tasks. Their thankless roles as distressed damsels
are summed up in the term “scream queen” coined decades after the first queen
was heard to scream on screen. But what about the women who made us
scream? They were few in the early days of horror cinema, and though the Bride
of Frankenstein would become an iconic figure only rivaled by the big three
guys—Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Frankenstein Monster—the character only had
four minutes of screen time and Elsa Lanchester would not follow up on her
horror stardom as Bela, Lon, and Boris did. Universal followed its first great
sound scare-fest with Dracula’s Daughter,
though the film is not one of the best-remembered horrors of its day, and the
vampiric Gloria Holden would not capitalize on it any more than Lanchester did
on Bride.
