Horror History: Exotic Monsters (The 1930's)

Again, it starts with Dracula.

And his mighty claw, apparently

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)