The distinctive taste of farmer Vincent Smith's is renowned in the small rural community in which he runs a local motel with his sister, Ida. People come from far and wide to sample his deliciously unique meat treats. But the real question is why no one is staying in the motel, despite the "No Vacancy" sign constantly being lit. And the REALLY real question is why on earth did this movie come into existence? Because even though this movie has a weirdly special place in my family's Thanksgiving festivities, the super secret Smith meat treat isn't turkey, it's people. Welcome to Motel Hell (1980).
Motel Hell (U.S.A.)
Released: October 18, 1980
Director: Kevin Connor
Screenplay: Robert & Steven-Charles Jaffe
Tagline: "Checking in is easy…checking out is hell"
Cast:
Rory Calhoun as Vincent Smith
Nancy Parsons as Ida Smith
Paul Linke as Sheriff Bruce Smith
Nina Axelrod as Terry
Wolfman Jack as Reverend Billy
It's hard not to love the campy awfulness of this movie. At its dirty, bizarre core, Motel Hell is a fun, and surprisingly graphic at points, horror-comedy; a parody of films like Psycho (1960), The Last House on the Left (1972), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). It downplays shock tactics and special effects to play up the more satirical aspect of the film and keep the viewer entertained, which in this case usually means laughing your ass off at the ridiculousness of the situation.
In fact, the variety of funny and oddly charming sequences that populate this messy and mashed up film range from heckling televangelists to hilarious send-ups of lives of swingers. Viewers will be treated to a chainsaw duel (potential influence for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)? We'll never know) a garden of human heads preparing to be harvested for dinner, cannibalism (go figure), and a particularly stomach churning conversation of smoking dogs. This movie is, without a doubt, one of the most goofy and tacky horror films of its era, and yet it has a hint of the same intelligence paired with gruesome witty horror-comedy that is to be found in Re-Animator (1985) and Evil Dead 2 (1987). It's not as effective or enjoyable as those two films, and can drag a little near the end, but it's there nonetheless.
Rory Calhoun undoubtedly steals this shlock show with his portrayal of the deranged and creepily pleasant Vincent Smith. The campy yet fairly smooth script provides for an appealing personality for Vincent, though the viewer still spends most of the movie laughing at his God-fearing monologues he slips into when he discusses the creative and artistic ways in which he stray humans to mix in with his meat. That's what the film is about, if you haven't caught on to that, and there's not much more to the plot other than a stranded biker chick who eventually pieces together the insanity with the naive sheriff Bruce, excluded from the family side-business his brother and sister are running.
Come one, who WOULDN'T want to stay with these fine folks?
Calhoun is accompanied by Nancy Parsons in the role of his overweight and dim-witted sister Ida, who comes off, in a strange and unaccounted for way, of being a female, vaguely more intelligent version of Texas Chain Saw Massacre's Leatherface. Given the subpar material these two had to work with, as well as Nina Axelrod in the role of stranded hotel guest and eventual heroine Terry, their performances weren't all that bad, if still poor, but that somehow makes the whole spectacle more humorous.
Director Kevin Connor has a lot of fun sliding in references to some of the horror hall-of-famers, including a captivating comedic illustration of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Zombie Holocaust (1979). His take on horror-comedy is more macabre-weird, and he never really spends much time trying to bring the story to life (perhaps because it's buried neck deep in the ground with vocal chords ripped out and throats stitched up, as Vincent and Ida's victims are?).
Motel Hell has not aged well, looking more like a movie meant to be viewed on a drive-in screen rather than a television screen, but my family managed to get past that one year on Thanksgiving when my father, the King of the B-Movie, busted out his copy of the film to share with the rest of the Ranallos and now, each year, if it's not viewed, it's referenced in fondness. Hey, at least we're all together, rather than running out for Black Friday shopping. Which I will always find more ridiculous than this movie. Motel Hell, for all its faults, became what the filmmakers intended it to be, a cheesy fun-fest for horror and non-horror fans alike.
Dig in, folks. There's plenty more where that came from
Don't worry, you totally read that title right. ThanksKilling (2009) is a completely ridiculous, consciously made B-movie extravaganza of utter schlock, and as such, it's bizarrely enjoyable. Dumb, but actually funny in an absurd, shake-your-head-at-the-world kind of way, like those people who think that Judaism did not come before Christianity, or videos of skateboarders face-planting off of metal guardrails.
Only this has a mass-murdering, talking, demonic turkey.
ThanksKilling (USA)
Released: November 17, 2009 (made in 2007, post-production in 2008, and released straight to DVD in '09. Come on people, like this would EVER see a movie theater)
Director: Jordan Downey
Screenplay: Kevin Stewart & Jordan Downey
Tagline: "Gobble, Gobble, Motherfucker!"
Cast:
Lance Predmore as Johnny (The Jock)
Lindsey Anderson as Kristen (The Good Girl)
Ryan E. Francis as Darren (The Nerd)
Aaron Ringhiser-Carlson as Billy (The Hick)
Natasha Cordova as Ali
General Bastard as Oscar the Hermit
This wonderfully weird holiday guilty pleasure centers around a group of college kids heading out on mini-road trip at the dawn of their Thanksgiving break. When any such scenario occurs in a horror film, even casual fans of the genre know that a certain breakdown is in order: one of the girls will be a bit "loose in the legs," another will be a tad nerdy, and generally virginal, one of the guys will be the "Alpha," ideally a football player, but lacrosse or swimming is acceptable, another guy will be the fool, the comedic idiot who isn't all that attractive but remains goofy enough to keep the attention of the female company, and then there will be the fifth wheel, a painfully inept social outcast.
These tropes are recycled almost on a daily basis when it comes to crafting horror characters, characters pulled from a bin and given different names since we first saw Ned running around in his underwear wearing a Native American headdress in the very first Friday the 13th (1980). Occasionally, for the sake of making a point about these stereotypes and their constant presence in post-1980 horror, a movie like ThanksKilling will present these characters in unabashed, exaggerated stereotypical glory, but often this attempt comes across weak and forced. Then again, sometimes it doesn't.
Our crew of cardboard-cutouts in ThanksKilling encounter car trouble en route to their primary destination (big shocker there, right?) and decide to camp where they land. Because, even though the whole point of the trip is simply to go home for break, they've somehow packed sleeping bags, tents, and camping supplies, so WHY THE HELL NOT? While they drink and flirt about the campfire, the nerdiest kid of the bunch, tag-along friend Darren, tells the tale of a serial-killing turkey imbued with dark spirits immediately after the first Thanksgiving to be used as a weapon against white people (a story that, during which, we get to hear the line, "Turkeyologists all over the world refer to it as…THANKSKILLING"). Unfortunately for them (and, let's be real, for us as well) legend becomes reality when a local hermit's dog pisses on the burial site of said vengeful turkey and resurrects the foul-mouthed, rubber and plastic beast, who then proceeds to stalk our heroes and pick them off one by one.
"You just got STUFFED"
-actual line from the movie
As such, it should come to know surprise to anyone that this movie is not in any way, shape, or form meant to be taken seriously. The filmmakers made a point in the promotions for the film that there would be "tits in the first minute," which there are--some pilgrim woman is running around in her frumpy buckles and what not with the front of her dress inexplicably missing and her boobs hanging out, because WHY NOT? And it's all just downhill from there. At one point, the killer turkey is hitch-hitching (because OBVIOUSLY), and a driver pulls over and asks what the turkey is offering for a ride, "gas, grass, or ass," and the turkey proceeds to present him with this derriere. Before killing him. With a shotgun. That he somehow has. And then driving away in the car. Driving. He also, sometime later, finishes the job that the murdered lover boy started when the requisite "kill during a sex scene" goes down. Prettyyyyyy silly.
And yet, as completely wrong and messed up as it this that ThanksKilling was made, there are moments where you just have to laugh, genuinely. The filmmakers are using their weird and wonderful film to mock the staples of the horror film and all the crap B-movies that other movie-makers actually believe to be good, but at the same time the film works as a send-up for the slasher sub-genre as well. There's a certain underlying respect there that just, for whatever reason, makes it all O.K.
It's slim pickings when it comes to Thanksgiving-related horror. Christmas is actually very well-covered in the realm of horror, and of course Halloween. There's even films centering around Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, April Fools, and hell, even the Fourth of July got covered in Final Destination 3 (2006). But Thanksgiving? Not a lot of choices. Fortunately for me, my family has a weird turkey day tradition that involves another goofy horror gem that I'll be covering on Thursday, but in the grand scheme of campy horror with a holiday theme, you actually could do worse than ThanksKilling, like Blood Freak (1972), in which a man ends up with a giant turkey's head in place of his own and slaughters a bunch of teens in revenge. I'm not saying we can't do better for Thanksgiving horror, since we certainly can, but I have a feeling that because ThanksKilling is just so fun, it'll become the Troll 2 (1990) of a new generation. Gobble, gobble, motherfuckers. Gobble, gobble.
"Now that's what I call FOWL PLAY"
P.S. If you find that you can't get enough of the murderous turkey, have NO FEAR. There is a sequel, ThanksKilling 3 (2012) available to stream instantly on Amazon. Don't worry, you didn't miss ThanksKilling 2, because ThanksKilling 3 IS ThanksKilling 2….YEAH.
When Bela Lugosi was interviewed about his stage performance as the Count, journalists would often ask if he was worried about being typecast in "mystery plays." After Lugosi had starred in Tod Browning's 1931 film, with Frankenstein (1931) in pre-production at Universal as a follow-up and competing studios rooting about for similar properties to chase the Dracula dollars, the term "horror film" slipped into general usage.
When the British Board of Film Censors instituted a special rating for these "distasteful" items, they labelled them as "H" for "Horrific"--which seems to have sealed the deal in so far as naming the genre went. It wasn't a linguistic inevitability: terms like "macabre," "gothic," "weird," "terror," "monster," and "shudder" were also available.
Though Dracula founded a genre, there's a feeling that neither the studio nor the director really had their heart in the film. Both were involved with the project because of Lon Chaney. With his death, it may have seemed like a contractual obligation. Universal gaffed about with casting choices before resorting, essentially because he was cheap, to Lugosi. It may be they didn't go with Conrad Veidt because they didn't see Dracula as a super-spectacular like The Phantom of the Opera (1925), which was then in re-release in a part-talkie version, or The Man Who Laughs (1928). Browning hardly gave Dracula his best shot--though stunningly designed and photographed by German Karl Freund, who had done The Golem (1920) and Metropolis (1926), the picture is basic filmmaking, certainly not on par with The Unknown (1927) or other surviving Chaney-Browning films. Some have argued that the simultaneous Spanish version shot on the same sets (from a translation of the John L. Balderston script) is more excitingly directed by George Melford. Personally, I feel it should be noted that it's far less excitingly script-edited--Browning tore out redundant pages which Melford faithfully plods through. The English-language Dracula has pace to recommend it above the Spanish shadow, not to mention Lugosi' iconic performance in a role Carlos Villarias cannot claim to own in the way the Hungarian did (and does). Browning's film also has a definitive fly-eating Renfield from Dwight Frye, whose cracked laugh is almost as imitable as Lugosi's haunting "I…am…Dracula," accent.
Plus that's one winning smile
There was enthusiasm for Dracula on the part of studio head Carl Laemmle Jr., just promoted by a doting father. But no one seems to have considered how radical the material was. To the Laemmles, Dracula was a solid, proven property--a book everyone knew and a play that was still running. The studio that had coined it in with The Phantom of the Opera and The Cat and the Canary (1927) thought they knew what they were getting. Dracula was even a remake: Nosferatu (1922) might be officially suppressed, but certainly wasn't forgotten--clips turn up in a Universal short, Boo! (1932), so there must even have been a print on th slot for easy reference--and F.W. Murnau was well-known around town as an Oscar winner for Sunrise (1928). The difference between what had come before in Hollywood and Dracula was underlined by the play's epilogue, in which Dr. Van Helsing (played by Edward Van Sloan in the film) comes out from behind the curtain to assure the audience that "there are such things." The Phantom was malformed at birth, the Cat just the secondary heir in a fright mask, and Chaney's pointy-fanged London After Midnight (1927) vampire turned out to be a sleuth playing dress up to catch a killer. Lugosi's Dracula is a real-life, honest-to-Bram Stoker bloodsucking reanimated corpse. Previously, Hollywood had been leery of "such things" and practical Yankee reviewers were a touch sneery about their appearance in highfalutin European pictures which might do for the carriage trade but wouldn't pack 'em into the stalls. Browning didn't care either way. He remade London After Midnight as Mark of the Vampire (1935), with Lugosi in the cloak again, and tried to get away with a Scooby-Doo ending as if he hadn't founded a whole new genre with Dracula. Junior Laemmle took note of the unexpected box office bonanza of Dracula, which hit theaters in February 1931, and immediately began to develop Frankenstein, getting it out before the end of the year, despite a change of director and star midway through pre-production. Originally, the project was set for Lugosi and Robert Florey, but the Englishman James Whale, whom Laemmle valued as a Universal asset, was given the pick of all the studio's properties and plumped for Mary Shelley's "Man Who Made a Monster." Lugosi (who, forever after, claimed to have turned down the Monster role rather than being unceremoniously dumped by a Brit who didn't take him seriously) and Florey were shunted off into Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), a Poe adaptation which is also a lightly disguised remake of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Whale cast his London stage associate Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein, bumping out a possibly interesting Leslie Howard, and scuppered Lugosi' future career by selecting Anglo-Indian bit player Boris Karloff (born William Pratt) to wear Jack P. Pierce's make-up as the Monster.
And he really does wear it well
In the opening credits of Frankenstein, Karloff is billed as "?"--his name, not familiar to the public despite decades' worth of secondary villains and one-scene psychotics, was not revealed until the "a good cast is worth repeating" closing crawl. If Dracula is a thrown-together piece that somehow works, Frankenstein is the result of considered thought by the director, make-up man (a great deal of the film's lasting strength is in that unbeatable, copyrighted Monster) and cast. The script is even more makeshift than that of Dracula, with too many irreconcilable ideas thrown in. Quite a lot of fuss is made of the plot point that the hunchbacked minion Fritz (Dwight Frye, whom Whale did hold over from Dracula) has snatched an "abnormal brain" for use in the Monster's skull, but this "explanation" for why the experiment turns out badly is at odds with Whale's (and Shelley's) depiction of the creature as an innocent who only reacts viciously when abused or rejected, and whose worst crime (drowning a little girl) is simply a tragic misunderstanding.
The early stirrings of censoring grumblers (especially in Britain, the spiritual home of Dracula and Frankenstein) did more to excite than depress box office figures. With two proven hits, Universal realized they had a new-made genre on their hands--complete with iconic stars, supporting actors, standing sets, behind-the-camera talent like Whale, Pierce, and Freund, and a shelf load of suitable source material--and that their horror monopoly would not last long. Lugosi, though he signed for a Poverty Row quickie (shot on the Universal lot), White Zombie (1932), retained some of the Dracula magic in the troubled Murders in the Rue Morgue, and would remain (resentfully) the studio's number-two bet for any horror role. But Whale and Karloff were treasured and were cannier and more ambitious than the Hungarian in parlaying their break-out success into whole careers. The duo reunited for The Old Dark House (1932), adapted from a J.B. Priestley novel, which summed up the entire genre of pre-Dracula "old dark house" horror comedies--Whale even re-creates some of Paul Leni's Cat and the Canary compositions. The gloomy drawing room is filled with clipped, to-be-familiar British players (Raymond Massey, Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton) who sprout sardonic dialogue, and Karloff is cast as a grunting "below-stairs" brute--Morgan, the drunken Welsh butler. Whale was a working class lad who reinvented himself as an "officer material" gentleman and West End wit, whereas Karloff was the public school-educated black sheep of a distinguished diplomatic family who'd oddly served decades as a manual laborer before becoming an actor. Whale disparagingly referred to his discovery as "the truck driver."
Perhaps sensing that he was being "kept in his place," Karloff passed on Whale's offer of The Invisible Man (1933), in which his voice would finally be heard but only on the condition that his face was kept off screen. Claude Rains, another well spoken Englishman of humble origins, landed that plum, and his silky voice established him as a character star. Lugosi moaned that if only he had played the Monster, he would have got all the career breaks which came to Karloff; Karloff never suggested that, if he had played the Invisible Man, he would have landed Rains's stand-out roles in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Casablanca (1943), and Notorious (1945).
Do you know how many children the Invisible Man has?
None, he's not apparent!
Karloff as at last allowed to talk, revealing an educated lisp in The Mummy (1932), a swift rewrite of Dracula mingled with She and tabloid stories about the "Curse of King Tut." With Karl Freund promoted to director and a script that is streamlined rather than eccentric, The Mummy is Hollywood's first conveyor-belt horror film--commissioned by a studio that knew what they were getting, partnered closely on what had worked before, and showcasing a star who was not only a proven talent but a box-office draw in this type of picture. Withal, along with the tunes of Swan Lake over the credits (as in Dracula and several other Universal movies of the period) and another memorable Jack Pierce make-up job, a whiff of graveyard poetry informs the film.
By now, the competition was on the scent. Every studio in Hollywood had their own would-be Dracula or Frankenstein on the starting blocks. Paramount, the most elegant and sophisticated of the majors, looked to classic novels which nevertheless offered an opportunity for lurid, sexualized violence. First, they green lit Robert Mamoulian to direct Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), with Fredric March trumping John Barrymore's silent performance by doing the handsome doctor as a parody of matinee idly Barrymore and the ape-like mister as a shaggy thug in evening dress with a nasty steak of sadistic humor. Paramount's second-string monster was Erle C. Kenton's Island of Lost Souls (1933), with Charles Laughton as a flabby, whip-wielding incarnation of H.G. Wells's Dr. Moreau. An unrecognizable Lugosi hides under face-fur as a beast man added in post-production to beef up the film's horror status. March won a Best Actor Oscar at the Academy Awards that year, which went some way towards silencing prudes tho though the film entirely too explicit about the double man's relationship with Soho tart Ivy (Miriam Hopkins). Island of Lost Souls was actually banned in England for its vivisection and implied bestiality. Meanwhile, Paramount's Murders in the Zoo (1933) is just as nasty, if nowhere near as respectable.
Warner Brothers, who specialized in rattling, contemporary, torn-from-the-headline dramas (even their musicals are realistic) had Michael Curtiz direct a pair of twisted whodunits in lovely Technicolor, Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). These introduce Lionel Atwill as another British horror face, voice, and leer (Paramount would snap him up for Murders in the Zoo and he would inevitably gravitate to Universal's stock company). They also employed Fay Wray as a leggy beauty, even though some might say she was upstaged by Glenda Farrell's wisecracking proto-Lois Lane in Mystery of the Wax Museum. The two films mixed disfigured fiends, mad geniuses, "moon murders," and "synthetic flesh" with snappy reporters doing self-aware gags ("he makes Frankenstein look like a lily") and complaining about Prohibition. Warner never really committed to horror, but Curtiz landed Karloff for The Walking Dead (1935), which has gangsters stalked by a vengeful zombie (it's one of the first "body count" movies), and the studio put contract player Humphrey Bogart in an unlikely "scientific vampire" role for The Return of Dr. X (1939).
Humphrey Bog-eyman?
RKO had their own monster in the works, though King Kong (1933) doesn't seem to have been an attempt to get in on the Dracula and Frankenstein business and probably owes its inspiration to the 1926 film of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which had proved that Willis H. O'Brien's hand-animated prehistoric creatures could carry a picture. While producer-directors Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper were toiling over King Kong, they had time to use the same sets and actress Fay Wray in a quickie classic, The Most Dangerous Game (1932). Here, Leslie Banks is cast in the Karloff-Atwill-Rains mould as Count Zaroff, a Russian huntsman with perfect Shaftesbury Avenue tones and a distinctive way of holding a cigarette. Zaroff's passion is stalking "the most dangerous game," man. The Richard Connell story would be often remade and Zaroff is an archetype of the sadistic mad genius who would feature in many horror melodramas before mutating into the role model for all Bond villains (Christopher Lee's Man With the Golden Gun has many Zaroff traits). After Zaroff and the awe-inspiring King Kong, RKO rushed out Son of Kong (1933), the genre's first disappointing sequel (hooray!), and quit the horror business until the 1940's.
MGM, which liked to think themselves the most prestigious studio on the row, obviously had to make horror movies. Chaney and Browning had worked there through the 1920's, under the aegis of the supposed genius Irving Thalberg--who had a strange streak that responded to stories like The Unknown. Browning was back with Freaks (1932) and Chaney replaced by real sideshow oddities--the result is Browning's masterpiece, though it's wildly inconsistent in tone. It was hastily sold off by the studio to grind house exhibitors who touted it as a roadshow shocker alongside Dwain Esper's astounding Poe-derived Maniac (1934). Since Freaks didn't work (though it's fondly looked on as a genre classic now), the studio played safe by hiring Karloff and adapting a proven property in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Again, MGM vacillated, switching directors and never settling on a proper tone. However, this is the film where Karloff really breaks out and shows he can be more than a dutiful studio employee, relishing sadistic camp in a manner even Whale would never dare and hissing polite hatred as he plans to lead his Asian hordes in an apocalyptic conflict to kill all white men and mate with their women. Myrna Loy is fun as the devil doctor's "sadistic nymphomaniac" daughter too--and puritanical, moralistic studio boss Louis B. Mayer, in a perpetual power struggle with Thalberg, was duly horrified. Browning, though reckoned as a burn-out now, was still welcome on the lot; besides Mark of the Vampire (1935), he managed one other quirky effort, the grotesque science-fiction tale of miniaturized assassins, The Devil-Doll (1936). Perhaps MGM's best horror was another attempt to fit the Universal template, Mad Love (1935), which hired Freund to direct, used source material (Maurice Renard's novel The Hands of Orlac) which had worked in a German silent film, and teamed established second-rank horror player Colin Clive with Peter Lorre, whose performance in the well-crafted Fritz Lang film M impressed all those Hollywood executives who would never have greenlit a film about child-murder and who was well on his way to joining the elect company of horror stars.
The independent Halperin organization gave Lugosi one of his better roles in White Zombie (1932), drawing not the then-hot new topic of Caribbean voodoo. This introduced the apparatus of wax dolls and walking corpses, and exploited the sub-genre's simultaneous fascination with and denial of ethnic cultures: the implication of the title is that "Black Zombie" wouldn't be news. Never a force, even on Poverty Row, the Halperins managed a semi-sophisticated tale of possession, Supernatural (1933), and a near-unwatched follow up, Revolt of the Zombies (1936). Other quickie outfits were ready to sign Lugosi or Atwill and borrow Universal sets. Majestic made The Vampire Bat (1933) with Atwill and Fay Wray, and Condemned to Live (1935). The success of White Zombie inspired Drums o' Voodoo (1934), Black Moon (1934), and Ouanga (1935). If things dried up in Hollywood, there were even jobs abroad. Karloff returned home in triumph for the rickety (but I think still wonderful) The Ghoul (1933) and the calmer The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936), while Lugosi was made welcome in England for The Phantom Ship (1935), from the newly founded studio Hammer Films, and the Edgar Wallace derived shocker The Dark Eyes of London (1939). However, if horror had a true home, it was still the surely on the Universal lot.
I actually kind of really want this on a t-shirt. No joke.
Junior Laemmle's big idea for 1934 was to team Karloff and Lugosi and throw in a big horror name he didn't have to pay for, Edgar Allan Poe. The Black Cat (1934), directed by the ambitious Edgar C. Ulmer, owes more to The Most Dangerous Game than the Poe story, but nevertheless gives the stars material worth chewing over. Karloff plays a perverted diabolist who lives in a modern castle built over the battlefield where all the men he betrayed in the war were killed, and Lugosi is a vengeance-seeking obsessive who plans on skinning him alive. It worked so well that the gang was back together, with Ulmer replaced by the less artsy Louis Friedlander for The Raven (1935), in which Lugosi's Poe-obsessed mad plastic surgeon gives Karloff's gangster a new, hideous face. In this pair of films, the stars are evenly matched, alternating lead villain and vengeful stooge. By The Invisible Ray (1936) Karloff was the undisputed lead as a glowing mutant and Lugosi is just along for the name-value. Meanwhile, Universal--wary of Whale's increasing demands--tried to boost other directors as horror men. Stuart Walker handled a couple of gothic Dickens films, getting good mad work from Claude Rains in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), and was given The WereWolf of London (1935), in which Henry Hull subs for Karloff as a botanist infected with lycanthropy by Warner Oland in the Himalayas. The first talkie werewolf movie, this still wound up being a rough draft for a sub-genre that didn't come together until The Wolf Man (1941). What Universal really wanted weren't just follow-ups, but sequels. James Whale was given carte blanche--along with a dream cast, including Ernest Thesiger and Elsa Lanchester--to make Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which is at once a genuine expansion of his original and a deconstructive parody of it. Waspish, sly, charming, perverse, and emotionally devastating, Bride of Frankenstein shows how far Hollywood had come in only four years: already, the 1931 film, with its lack of music and dull, drawing-room chats, seemed antique, while the sequel has a full score by Franz Waxman, no patience at all with boring characters (Valerie Hobson barely gets a look-in, though she officially has the title role) and enormous visual sophistication to go with his bare-faced, blasphemous cheek. If it had been up to Whale, the horror cycle would have ended with Bride of Frankenstein. He certainly had no more to say on the subject. Like Browning, he didn't really work after the mid-1930's. Universal, of course, saw things differently. They had Dracula's Daughter (1936) in production--albeit without Lugosi (Gloria Holden is luminously odd in the title role by the way) and with a new, efficient briskness that makes for rattling entertainment and gothic charm but sadly few real chills. Around the time of these sequels, the horror film fell off Hollywood's production schedules. Pressure from British censors and moralists mounted due to the rising tension in Europe, whispers of war and atrocious Nazi crimes on the horizon. This brought about a hiatus. It was somewhat bizarre given that the voice of Hollywood horror had a distinctly British accent, much of the subject matter came from British authors and the remarkable Tod Slaughter was in constant employment in tiny studios around London outdoing any depravity Karloff or Lugosi could imagine in the likes of Sweeney Todd, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) and The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936). Still, Karloff was reduced to playing a Charlie Chan knock-off Chinese sleuth for the low-grade Monogram studio and Lugosi was on welfare until the end of the decade, when the horror express was back on the rails.
This might not be exactly what the horror express looks like,
but I'm sure it's similar
Hailed as "the greatest year for film," 1939 was big on super-productions. Besides Gone with the Wind, mammoth Southern drama, and The Wizard of Oz, ultimate children's tale, there were several epic-scale, all-star, A-picture revivals of genres that had fallen to programmer status, notably the Western Stagecoach and the gangster picture The Roaring Twenties.
The usual account of the 1939 return of the horror film suggests that a successful double-bill re-release of Dracula and Frankenstein prompted Universal to produce Son of Frankenstein--inevitably casting Karloff (in his final go-round as the Monster) and Lugosi (in arguably his finest screen role as the broken-necked Ygor), with incisive Basil Rathbone and clipped Lionel Atwill aboard to make up for the absence of the dry, British Whale (replaced by the underrated, in my opinion, Rowland V. Lee). However, Son of Frankenstein wasn't the only horror restart project that year. Rathbone donned the deerstalker for the first time in Fox's Hound of the Baskervilles, Paramount polished off an old Universal property and put Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in The Cat and the Canary (with perennial supporting suspects George Zucco and Gale Sondergaard) and RKO mounted a lavish version of another silent Universal hit with Charles Laughton as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There was even time enough for follow-ups: Universal had Lee, Karloff, and Rathbone do a historical horror (Tower of London), Fox got Rathbone back for a macabre duel with Moriarty (Zucco) in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and RKO got another Broadway mystery remake in the cane with The Gorilla (with the Ritz brothers, Atwill, and Lugosi).
Horror was back.
Boris Karloff climbin' in you windows and snatchin' yo
people up in The Ghoul (1933)
Next in Horror History: Man vs. Animal, a Looming Terror (The 1940's)
A bat flies into a haunted castle and transforms into the Devil. He is represented, as often on stage, as a nattily dressed gentleman with a beard. From a giant, black cauldron, this Mephistopheles proceeds to conjure up and dispel imps, demons, ghosts, witches, and skeletons. A cavalier then bursts in and brandishes a crucifix and the Devil vanishes in a puff of smoke. All of this occurs in just about three minutes. It is, officially, the first horror film ever made, The Devil's Castle (1896).
Didn't think I could post a full movie on here, did ya?
Playing off of centuries of imagery from books, legends, and stage plays (among those figures conjured up by the Devil is an old man with a grimoire--aka a book of magic--presumably Faustus himself), The Devil's Castle has been noted for the bat transformation and the power of the crucifix, leading the vignette to not only be labeled as the first horror film in history, but as the first vampire film as well. It should be noted however that these tropes, evil being associated with bats and shrinking form religious icons, were not exclusively associated with vampires until the publication of Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, a year later.
This one's a real feature film, kids, about 13 minutes
In the early years of the 20 century, movies took hold around the world and there was already competition between nations. In America, pioneers like Edwin S. Porter paved the way for geniuses like D.W. Griffith, and in Italy there were feature-length epic spectaculars in the second decade, the tale of ancient muscle hero Maciste in Cabiria (1914). In Germany, the heirs of E.T.A. Hoffman began to play with shadows and in Britain one-and-two-reel melodramas began to proliferate, like the commercially successful A Fight With Sledge-Hammers (1902).
Activity was so hectic in the new field that oft-told tales would make their debuts and be done over again within a few months. William Selig's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908), a film of the stage play that had been touring during Robert Louis Stevenson's lifetime, is largely considered the first American horror movie. It was rapidly followed by a British remake, The Duality of Man (1910), a Danish version starring Alwin Neuss, Den Skaebnesvangre Opfindelse (1910), and another American version starring James Cruze and Harry Benham in the title roles, an interesting approach that has been rarely reused. In 1913, a German version vied with two American films both called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one starring King Baggot and produced by Carl Laemmle (who would later become the patriarch of Universal Pictures, where the horror movie really began and boomed), and the other a primitive color process. Then, things went quiet until 1920 when three new versions of the twinned tale arrived simultaneously: John S. Robertson's lavish star vehicle for John Barrymore (whose steeple-headed, spider-fingered Hyde pre-empts Max Schreck's similar looking vampire by two years), a quickie imitation with Sheldon Lewis, and F.W. Murnau's Dr Jekyll, a tragically lost adaptation with Conrad Veidt as the transforming doctor who, in this version, metamorphosizes under the magical influence of a two-faced bust rather than mad science. Bela Lugosi also played the doctor's butler in this version. Even the first parody of the story surfaced around this time, with Horrible Hyde (1915), though the more remembered version is the feature with Stan Laurel in 1925, Dr. Pickle and Mr. Pride.
Though Jekyll and Hyde was the most adapted horror story of the silent film era, other famous monsters also made their debuts. Edison's Frankenstein (1910), with Charles Ogle as the wild-haired creature whipped up in a vat like instant soup, was followed by Life Without Soul (1915), in which Dr. Frankenstein becomes "William Frawley" and the Monster is "the Brute Man." Then there was what is, perhaps, the first Italian horror film, The Frankenstein Monster (1920), whereas The Picture of Dorian Gray was first filmed in Denmark as Dorian Gray's Portrait (1910), with other versions from Russia following in 1915, America in 1916 (this version starred Henry Victor, the strongman of Tod Browning's classic 1932 film Freaks), Germany in 1917, and Hungary in 1918 (Lugosi played Dorian's mentor Sir Henry in this version). Sherlock Holmes made his screen debut as early as 1900 in Sherlock Holmes Baffled, featuring an invisible man, while Sherlock Holmes in the Great Murder Mystery (1908) was another crossover: here, Holmes's solves Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," feeling of the collar of the killer gorilla. The sleuth's creepiest adventure was first filmed in Denmark, the source of a surprising number of early gothics, as The Grey Lady (1903), with a spectral woman instead of a Hound of Hell. Germany not only turned out a faithful Hound of the Baskervilles (1914) but followed it with six sequels in which Holmes pursues the novel's dog-training villain. There were also, at this time, multiple early versions of staples like She, Trilby, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sweeney Todd, Maria Marten, Faust or Dr. Faustus, "The Monkey's Paw," and Fu-Manchu.
"Dude, I'm totally seeing two of you right now"
Poe was often adapted in France and America and D.W. Griffith first took a frequently reused tack by combining several Poe stories into one episodic narrative for The Avenging Conscience (1914). The first feature-length British horror film, The Avenging Hand (1915), was like an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Jewel of Seven Stars with a revived ancient Egyptian princess and a severed hand. It was among a run of mummy-themed films popular at the time: The Mummy (1911), The Dust of Egypt (1915), The Eyes of the Mummy (1919). The Vampire (1913) was about an East Indian snake lady, whereas The Werewolf (1913) was an American Indian shapeshifter. A cycle of films about monkey-glandtranslates (evidently a medical fad of the day) and Darwinian theory stretched into a French 1913 adaptation of Gaston Leroux's novel about a humanized gorilla, Baloo. The film was remade as The Wizard in 1927 and as Dr. Renault's Secret in 1942.
Already, some filmmakers were specializing in the macabre, and a few actors were building reputations on the strength of horror roles. Paul Wegener, a German director/actor cut a hefty figure as Balduin in The Student of Prague (1913), adapted from H.H. Ewers's Poe-like noel of a deal with the Devil and a deadly doppleganger, but achieved fame under a clay wig and built-up costume in and as The Golem (1915), the legendary living statue of the Prague ghetto, revived to rampage in modern times. This was such a success that Wegener delivered a parodic sequel, The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917) and a fairly elaborate prequel, The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920). Wegener also took on several bizarre roles in his career, as when he played a warlock modeled on the then-scandalous Aleister Crowley in Rex Ingram's French-American film The Magician (1926), or the title part in Svengali (1927). His last bow in horror was in the multi-episode The Living Dead (1932), written and directed by his rival Richard Oswald, who had come to the genre with a couple of Hounds of the Baskerville sequels and stuck around to deliver adaptations of Hoffman, including a talkie version of Alraune (1930) with Brigitte Helm re-creating her silent role as the artificially fashioned femme fatale.
Wegener and Oswald were principally adaptors of others' work--their films have pictorial virtues and an obvious feel for the material, but little sense of the developing potential of cinema. Others came at horror from a different direction, not just hoping to trade on well-known material but seeing ways to expand the boundaries of film as art. The key title here is the incredibly influential and famous The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Weine. Equally important was the work of scenarists Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, art directors Walter Rohrig and Hermann Warm (who devised the stylized sets, painted shadows and other visual trickster in the film) and even Fritz Lang, who was signed up to direct but moved on to something else after devising the frame story that reveals the whole action to be taking place in the mind of a lunatic. Lang's bookends turned what might have been a confounding art movie into a gimmick picture. The revelation meant patrons disturbed by the imagery could leave the theater thinking they now "understood" what they had seen, the visualized ravings of a distorted mind. Mayer and Janowitz despised this angle, having intended to depict a world that was cruel and insane rather than simply a protagonist who was having bad dreams. The breakout performers were Werner Krauss, as the top-hatted mountebank and mesmerist Caligari, and Conrad Veidt, as the leotard-clad, hollow-cheeked somnambulist/murderer Cesare. Both would join Wegener among the elect group of proto-horror stars: Vedit, whom Universal considered casting as Dracula in 1930, played The Count of Cagliostro (1921), the rumored diabolist-violinist Paganini (1923), the pianist with a murderer's hands in Hands of Orlac (1924), Ivan the Terrible in Waxworks (1924), and the titular characters in Rasputin (1930) and The Wandering Jew (1933). Krauss would later play Iago in Othello (1922), Jack the Ripper in Waxworks (1924), and the Devil in The Student of Prague (1926).
Werner Krauss as sinister doc, Caligari,
and Conrad Veidt as sleepwalking Cesare. Cute couple.
F.W. Murnau cast Vedit in The Head of Janus (1920), scripted by Caligari's Janowitz. Having got away with this full-length Stevenson adaptation by making some name changes (this, my friends, is the strange case of "Dr. Warren and Mr. O'Connor") and plot alterations, he made the mistake of assuming that Bram Stoker's widow would be as negligent as the Stevenson estate and turned Count Dracula into Count Orlok for Nosferatu (1922). Whereas The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's expressionist style was created entirely in the studio, Murnau took his vampire out on location, filming in Slovakian mountains and ruins. Nosferatu still stands as the only screen adaption of Dracula to be primarily interested in terror. Max Schreck's rat-featured, corseted stick insect of a monster has no undead glamor, nor even the melancholy that Klaus Kinski and Willem Defoe bring to variations in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Just as Dracula can serve as a template for the horror novel, Nosferatu, probably far more than The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, serves as a template for the horror film. Murnau added wrinkles to Stoker that have persisted, notably the vampire vanquished by the first light of day.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu aren't the whole Expressionist story, though. Throughout the 1920s, as German society spiraled out of control, German cinema was shadowed by figures as sinister as Caligari, Cesare, and Orlok. Fritz Lang turned out the epic Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), in which Rudolf Klein-Rogge (a bit player in Caligari) incarnates superhuman evil as a master criminal in the tradition of Fu-Manchu and Professor Moriarty. Mabuse is a founding text for all manner of far-fetched thrillers, including the Hitchcock japes of the 1930s, the film noirs of the 1940s, the super-spy pictures of the 1960s, and the paranoid conspiracy dramas of the 1970s. Lang brought Mabuse back, extending malign influence from an asylum cell and beyond the grave in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), but his most influential early talkie is the layered and haunting M (1931), the first great serial-murder film, with Peter Lorre as the pedophile killer stalked by cops (including Mabuse's nemesis, Inspector Lohmann) and criminals. Paul Leni, another interesting German director of the 1920s, put Jack the Ripper on screen in Waxworks (1924) before decamping for America. The missing link between Werner Krauss's tubby, trench-coated Ripper and Lorre's whistling, whining Franz Beckert is the mild-mannered, pathetic Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) of G.W. Pabst's masterly Pandora's Box (1928), killing the innocently fatal heroine Lulu (Louise Brooks) in a clinch under the mistletoe. Alfred Hitchcock had already taken note of what was going on in Germany, where he served an apprenticeship, and essayed his own Ripper story, the British Expressionist horror classic The Lodger (1927).
Hollywood didn't yet have horror films, but it did have a horror star in Lon Chaney, master character actor and make-up artist. Chaney plays full-on monster roles as the ape-man in A Blind Bargain (1921), Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), and the skull-faced Erik in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), plus a very funny and parodic mad scientist in The Monster (1925) and a (fake) vampire in London After Midnight (1927), but his most distinctive work comes in melodramas, usually directed by Tod Browning. Their joint masterpiece is The Unknown (1927), in which Chaney plays a murderer hiding his giveaway double-thumbs by binding his arms and posing as an amputee, performing a knife-throwing act with his feet. The heroine (a young Joan Crawford) affects to abhor a man's embrace, so "Alonzo the Armless" has his arms surgically removed to become her ideal lover--only to learn she's changed her position on hugging and is canoodling with the circus strong-man, whereupon Alonzo plots a revenge nasty enough for the EC Comics of the 1950s. The difference between Chaney's grotesques and the creatures of German Expressionism is that most of Chaney's brilliantly mimed, remarkably made-up freaks are just grumpy guys who don't get the girl (a theme Chaney raised to obsessive levels), rather than the incarnation of evil or insanity in semi-human form. Perhaps this is why his most horrific films, though illuminated by moments of masterful acting, wear less well. Chaney's best work, in Browning's The Unholy Three (1925) and Victor Sjostrom's He Who Gets Slapped (1924) falls on the outskirts of the genre.
Lon Chaney showing off his dentures in London After Midnight
When Universal Pictures, who backed The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, lost Chaney to MGM, they replaced him with Conrad Veidt as the Joker-grinning freak of The Man Who Laughs (1928). That was directed by Paul Leni, who had made the most important American horror film of the decade, The Cat and the Canary (1927). John Willard's 1922 Broadway play was a semi-spoof of the already-established genre of Old Dark House mystery, in which a group of people gather for a reading of a will in an isolated, spooky locale and are menaced by a monstrous figure who turns out to be the most cheerful, helpful suspect. Leni got the most out of clutching hands, secret passageways, and bodies tumbling from wardrobes. There were many similar efforts, among them The Bat (1925), directed by the talented Roland West, who later remade the film as a talkie, The Bat Whispers (1929); Seven Footprints to Satan, directed by Benjamin Christensen, who had handled the striking Danish semi-documentary Witchcraft Through the Ages (1921); multiple versions of Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917, 1925, 1929), a property thought worth rehashing as late as House of the Long Shadows (1983); The Ghost Breaker (1922), The Gorilla (1927), The Thirteenth Hour (1927), The Haunted House (1928), and the first all-talkie, The Terror (1928). Leni even got to do it again, in the Old Dark Theater tale The Last Warning (1929).
As talking pictures caught on, Murnau and Leni were in Hollywood, perfectly positioned to direct horror films. Dracula had been running on stage in Britain and America sine the mid-1920s, and the rights had legitimately been bought by Universal Pictures in the hope that Chaney would star. However, within a few years, Murnau, Leni, and Chaney were all dead through freak accidents or illnesses. The future of Dracula, and hence the entire horror genre, was up for grabs…
Next in Horror History: Exotic Monsters (The 1930's)
If there's one thing everyone seems to love these days, it's an origin story. So from what dark corners of the world did horror and horror cinema spring from? Those who study film know that "the movies" essentially began in 1891 when Thomas Edison, assisted by his colleague William Dickson, took the celluloid roll film invented by George Eastman to create the Kinetograph, a camera capable of exposing images in rapid succession. Developed in a strip and viewed inside a turn-the-crank device called the Kinetoscope, the ribbon of pictures would give the illusion of movement to the viewer. Thus, the Kinetoscope became a fairground novelty, operated by a coin in a slot, and was designed for a rapid turnover of single spectators. Slide-shows, magic lanterns, praxinoscopes and several other pre-cienma spectacles had been popular attractions for decades, but the idea of showing movies to an audience gathered as if for a lecture or a play did not immediately appeal to Edison.
A rollicking good time
Then, in 1895, two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, developed the Cinematographe. This device could take moving pictures (like the Kinetograph) and project them onto a screen. On December 28, 1895, the brothers held the first film show for a paying audience in history. Held in the basement of the Grand Cafe in Paris, they screened brief snippets taken during the year that have since became famous among film students and scholars. Most of the short films were accounts of everyday activities, such as Exiting the Factory (1895), which depicted workers at the Lumiere factory clocking out for the day, while others were staged--The Sprinkler Sprinkled (1895), in which a boy plays a trick on a gardener, possibly the first action film--but the hit of the evening was the first true sensation of the power of cinema, a couple-second film known as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895). Having never seen a motion picture before that night, many Parisian patrons could not quite tell the difference between a silent, black-and-white image of a locomotive steaming towards the camera and a real train crashing through the basement wall and threatening to plough them down.
For about ten years, the Kinetoscope and the Cinematographe co-existed, seemingly not in competition, but it was the Lumiere vision of cinema as a theatrical attraction that caught on around the world, drawing masses of people and inspiring film's earliest pioneers. Edison's gadget, meanwhile, was primarily used for "what the butler saw" type peepshows. By the early days of the 20th century, Edison had moved to the projected-on-a-screen variety of cinema as well. Among his best known productions from this time was the very first film version of Frankenstein (1910). Ironically, by then, the Lumiere brothers were out of business and Edison was raking in the cash thanks to a near-stronghold on American film production. Edison had patented the sprocket holes, the perforations that allowed film to run through the projector. This hold would only be broken by film enthusiasts who fled the Edison-dominated New York film scene to found a new movie stronghold in California--Hollywood.
So that is cinema. But where was horror? Formats that would become movie genres were fairly well-defined in other media well before Edison and the Lumiere brothers came to prominence. Adventure and detective stories were universally developed in prose while the musical was a staple of the theater. Cheap novels were the home of Westerns, and the love story seeped into every form of narrative art. The religious spectacular was familiar in painting, while the great epic had been with us all since antiquity. Even science fiction had coalesced into something recognizable by the late 19th century thanks to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
H.G. Wells--Father of Science Fiction, Sexy-Ass Mofo
Yet for all these distinct genre arenas, no one living in 1890 would have any idea what you meant if you called something a "horror story." This is not to say, exactly, that such stories did not exist, it was just that horror was just now coming together through the efforts of a disparate bunch of creative minds, much like cinema itself.
Horror as a genre had been a long time coming, folks. The earliest known narrative in human history, The Epic of Gilgamesh, has gruesome and fantastical elements strewn throughout. Heroes fight monsters in Graeco-Roman and Norse mythology with astonishing regularity, and this trend continued up through its peak with the eighth century Old English epic poem Beowulf. In a typical horror scenario, some dark and strange force is raiding the hall of King Hrothgar every night, leaving dead and mutilated corpses behind. The hero traces the trail of trouble to the monster Grendel, whom he kills in battle. The story even contains its own sequel (the great stain of the horror genre), as Beowulf must then confront the dead beast's vengeful mother (almost like a weird, backwards version of Friday the 13th)
Countless other myths, stories, and epic cycles conform to the structure of the horror story. With the right slant on things, they could all be made or remade as horror films with ease. In the Bible alone you've got the plagues of Egypt, which were the inspiration for the influential The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), the trials and tribulations of Job, perhaps the first great "conte cruel" or "cruel tale," and the apocalyptic vision of the Revelation to John as the source for such Antichrist yarns as Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Omen (1976), and numerous other "Christian" horror tales. Even classical drama is full of bloody business. I mean, Oedipus blinds himself when he realizes how dreadfully he has transgressed into a world of hate, murder, and revenge.
See what I'm getting at here?
Different bursts of activity on the horror front even helped give rise to horror's many sub-genres. During the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, English audiences thronged to theaters to see "revenge tragedies," which drew on classical models but played up ghosts, grim, and gore. Hamlet had its vengeful specter in the night, an exhumed skull, multiple stabbings, poisonings, and Ophelia's mad scene. And the doom-haunted tone of Macbeth is set in the very first scene by the three witches chanting their wicked prophecy. Shakespeare went balls to the wall for the kind of shock value that 1970's Italian filmmakers would later relish with Titus Andronicus, the source for the lengthy sequence in Theater of Blood (1974) in which rape victim Lavinia has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out so she can't identify her attackers, but foils them by writing down the guilty names with her bloody stumps. But Shakespeare is tame compared to Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Dr Faustus (the archetypal deal-with-the-Devil story) or Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy (which opens with the stage direction, "Enter Vindice, holding a skull). These plays and others would demand increasingly elaborate stage effects, such as hidden bladders of pig's blood prickled by daggers for John Webster's The White Devil, fake heads branched after offstage decapitations for The Duchess of Malfi, or the Duke of Gloucester's bloodied eye-sockets in Shakespeare's King Lear.
In 1764 English novelist Horace Walpole published what he claimed to be was a rediscovered medieval manuscript, The Count of Otranto. It was a saga of ghostly and criminal doings in an old Italian castle and became the first in a series of increasingly lurid "gothic" novels. Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, among others, became the most successful of the gothic novelists. She wrote of imperiled heroines facing magnetic yet repulsive villains, often in old Italian palaces with contested inheritances and secret passages a-plenty. All of the supernatural business was explained away with Scooby-Doo-like deduction and the ghost riders often always turned out to be bandits in disguise. By the time that Jane Austen paid homage to, while also parodying Radcliffe and her many imitators in Northanger Abbey, the gothic form was an established strange of popular culture. Parents were said to be concerned of the effect gothic novels might have on their children, while the rise in mock-medieval architecture indicated how pervasive the influence really was.
Mrs. Radcliffe's works were relatively genteel, however (at least the two or three I've read), but what might have given those cautious parents pause was Matthew Gregory Lewis's 1796 bestseller The Monk, which unashamedly plunges into the supernatural, with an enthusiastic catalogue of wild depravity thrown in for good measure. It is virulently anti-Catholic, as are most British gothic novels, and is a variant on the Faustus story. The Monk follows the saintly Ambrosio, who is visited by the demonic in the form of a young girl that tempts him into a succession of fleshly pleasures and crimes which escalate into matricide, incestuous rape, and worse. In the end, Ambrosio is torn to shreds by the Devil himself. Probably the only contemporary writer more extreme than Lewis was the French aristocrat Donatien Alphonse Francois, better known by his title, Marquis de Sade. In 1800, the marquis wrote that the gothic novel was the "necessary fruit of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe," and thus became one of the first critics to perceive a connection between the upheavals in society and fantastical fiction, a connection still widely examined today.
Dirty, dirty marquis, isn't he?
The later gothic period produced masterpieces like Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and the style lasted into the 19th century where it petered out among the longer novels of J. Sheridan LeFanu, Uncle Silas, The House by the Churchyard, and the much-filmed vampire tale Camilla. The gothic also somewhat evolved into the serialized penny dreadfuls that followed the exploits of such brooding figures as Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampyre, and Sweeney Todd.
Of course, the most famous and lasting horror novel of the gothic period is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818, though, at the time, Mary was not the respectable Mrs. Shelley, but the scandalous Mary Godwin, a teenage runaway adulteress and Romantic poetry groupie. The novel is supposedly the result of a tale-telling competition involving famed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, as depicted in the prologue of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and in other features like Gothic (1986) and Haunted Summer (1988). Frankenstein owes its convoluted structure of stories with stories to the gothic, but it does break new ground in its tale of the callous scientist Victor Frankenstein and the tragic yet malign Monster that he creates. The novel is a cornerstone not only of horror, but of science fiction, and has a complex moral structure. What is interesting about the novel is that Victor's crime is not making the Monster, but in being a bad parent--everything would have been all right if he'd taken care of his creature rather than rejecting it simply because it looked hideous.
Before the supposed contest that birthed horror literature's first true milestone, the Shelley-Byron troupe, which included Dr. John Polidori, who wrote the influential if whiny short story "The Vampyre," a caricature of Byron as well as the first vampire story in English, had been researching folk and horror tales translated from German. It is likely that they encountered the works of E.T.A. Hoffman, whose story "The Sand Man" is about a doll that comes to life and is precedent to Frankenstein.
"I shall write a book about a Monster. He shall not be in 99% of the book.
That will endear me to generations of future college students"
Edgar Allan Poe also acknowledged the influence of the Germanic gothic in his own work. His distinct horror tales, written during the 1830's and 1840's started working with the mechanics of the genre, but then broke away to creep into the minds of his deranged protagonists, presenting torments that were more physical and more spiritual than the typical gothic conflict.
It should be noted, however, that Poe was essentially too awesome to limit himself t one form. Besides horror, he practically invented the detective story. He also wrote important early science fiction, bizarre humor, journalistic hoaxes, puzzle stories, vicious and toadying reviews, and begging letters. It is his core of mystery and horror tales, however, that reveal his true imagination, and that have seen adaptation after adaptation, each one exploring and delving further into the mind of the story. This core includes "The Black Cat," "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "A Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Masque of the Red Death." Whereas gothics tended to revolved around a virtuous but imperiled heroine who would be saved at the end of the day (or night), Poe's tales present women who were dead, dying, or spectral. His stories concentrate on the kinks of male protagonists who are on the verge of madness or transcendent wisdom. They obsess on details to the exclusion of all else and think in a frenzy, made evident by dash-ridden sentences that spill from the author's pen like the ramblings of a drunken lunatic. It's easy to write Poe off as a neurotic who put his own failings into his tales. Just as his poems use complex meter and rhyme schemes, his prose his finely wrought to seem like madness while the author is in complete control of the effect.
By the late 19th century, the gothics seemed quaint and bordering on comical, though trace elements still remained in the more labyrinthine constructions of Charles Dickens (Bleak House) and Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White). Poe was now remembered as much for his messy life as he was for his stories, which were more popular in France than in England or America. However, the decades immediately preceding and following the birth of cinema saw an unparalleled burst of horror writings. More key texts were written in a comparatively short time than in all the centuries before and, arguably, since. In about twenty years, the world was given Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Sir H. Rider Haggard's She (1887), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), George du Maurier's Trilby (1894), Robert Chambers's The King in Yellow (1895), H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903), Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), M.R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), Algernon Blackwood's The Empty House (1904), Arthur Machen's House of Souls (1906), William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (1908), and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1911). And those are just the books that have lasted.
ALL THE BOOKS
While these books were hitting the shelves, along with a torrent of short stories, cinema was advancing from flickering experiments that were essentially moving snapshots to feature-length stories that could compete with the grandest stage productions. Most of the above batch began to be filmed over and over again, and have spun off so many sequels, imitations, homages, revisions, reworkings, and other variants that it's entirely possible a full 50% of the horror films ever made are, in some way or another, drawn from this brief two-and-a-half decades of literary production. Toss in Frankenstein and the works of Poe and that's a safe 3/4.
It may be that this outpouring of what would soon be called horror was linked to the contemporary accelerated development of cinema and other technologies of the time (think telephone, automobiles, and airplanes). When the world changes rapidly people are often both scared and excited. That collective societal thrill encourages storytellers to play on those emotions, which underlie much horror fiction and throb dangerously through many of the above-mentioned masterpieces.
The gothic novels all looked back, their settings either in the past or in a fantasized foreign country. Though they are now viewed through a London fog of gaslight nostalgia, the late-19th century horror cornerstones were up-to-the-moment. Stevenson, Stoker, and Leroux all included newspaper clippings in their works to add weight to their fantastical tales. Wells and Haggard traipsed off to the far corners of the globe only to bring stories home to oak-panelled drawing rooms. Hodgson, James, and Blackwood found ancient ghosts, curses, and sorceries nestling into an uncertain modern world.
Titillating, yet ghastly
In some of the early gothic novels the horror elements aren't even primary. Jekyll and Hyde is a twist at the end crime thriller whose last chapters, in 1886, would have been a jaw-dropper that made Mr. Hyde look like the Keyser Soze or Tyler Durden of his day. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a black satire and though Wells's novels are considered to be scientific romances he wrote better monsters than anyone else--cannibal Morlocks, beast-people, invisible maniacs, vampires from Mars. Heart of Darkness is considered "serious literature," but, you know, with severed heads stuck on poles. And then, Hound of the Baskervilles is a whodunit concerning the rationalized supernatural. But what is remembered, what lingers in pop culture through the years, are the set-pieces that have made them cinema staples: Dorian's portrait in the blue flame, aging to a withered corpse; Jekyll taking the potion and transforming into the "somehow deformed" Hyde; the Martians devastating everything from village to skyscraper; creepily angelic kids under malign, perhaps spectral influence; James's nastily physical little ghosts (side note, James is often labeled as the master of "subtle horror," but I think whoever made that decision missed his short story "Count Magnus" in which someone's face is sucked off the bone); and then, most of all, Dracula in his Transylvanian castle, climbing down the walls and creeping into the bedrooms of English ladies to drink blood and defy an array of heroes only to decay into nothing once his blackened heart is pierced.
If modern horror starts somewhere, Dracula is as good a place as any. It deploys exactly the strategies, learned from Collins and Stevenson, that still serve for Stephen King and almost every horror film, yet has a plot which isn't far removed from Beowulf. A credible, realistic setting--unlike those of the gothic novels or Dorian Gray--is established, which allows for suspension of disbelief when the monster is introduced. There is a mystery element as the normal characters, aided by the scholarly Dr. Van Helsing, puzzle over strange phenomenon and work out who and what the villain is, discovering the monster's powers, limitations, and weaknesses. In the climax, the hero and his heroine overcome the monster through applied knowledge and moral superiority and destroy it, though not without cost (SPOILER ALERT--Quincy dies).
King of the Vampires. And maybe also arthritis
And yet, a full year before the now famous count came to the printed page, the Devil made his movie debut….
Next in Horror History: Beastly Beginnings (1896-1929)
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