Horror History: Man vs. Animal, a Looming Terror (The 1940's)

If the horror movies of the 1930's had dealt in well-established fictional monsters for inspiration (i.e. Dracula, Frankenstein, werewolves, mummies, etc.), then the 1940's reflected the internationalization of the horror market. Americans looked at themselves as "safe" and separate from Europe, where everything was gradually turning into a chaotic, frightening, uncontrollable, and and unreasonable mess. Banned in Britain, wartime horror movies became solely an American product. Of course, the U.S. did not remain separate and pure. Senses of duty and heritage regarding Europe kept peeking through the American shield, the pull of that link to the land of the nation's ancestors eventually catapulting the States not only into war with Japan, but Germany as well. In the same way, many horror films of this period deal with roots cracking through the ground--men and women becoming subject to the emergence of a primal, animal identity. You can actually see this device used in Disney's Pinocchio (1940), when the bad boys of Pleasure Island turn into donkeys. 

You wanna hear something truly horrific? 

Listen to "Dominic the Donkey"

But it wasn't donkeys that posed the main global threat at the outset of the 1940's. It was wolves. Hitler (though one could easily call him a jackass), identified strongly with legends and symbolism associated with wolves. His first name, Adolf, means "noble wolf" in the Old German tongue and he was known to use "Herr Wolf" as a pseudonym for himself in his early political days. Various headquarters for the Nazi Party were given names like Wolf's Gulch (France), Manwolf (Ukraine), and Wolf's Lair (Eastern Prussia). Hitler often referred to the SS as his "pack of wolves" and several sources, among these his favorite secretary Johanna Wolf (whom he called the "she-wolf") report that he would absent-mindedly whistle the tune of "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?"--a character, it should be recalled, whose desire is to consume people and blow their houses down.

Propagandists of the time were fond of depicting Hitler as the Big Bad Wolf of various fairy tales. It seemed that the figure of the marauding wolf typified the predators that were lurking in the corners of the public consciousness. It is therefore no surprise that Universal, home of those iconic monsters of the 1930's, picked the Wolf as the go-to figure of menace for their horror films of the early 1940's. 

After Son of Frankenstein (1939), Universal looked to their backlist for properties that could have sequels. This move ended up finding Vincent Prince disappearing in The Invisible Man Returns (1940) and Tom Tyler bandaged up in The Mummy's Hand (1941). But this wasn't enough, so the new studio regime developed a fresh horror star in Creighton Chaney, son of their silent Quasimodo, better known under the name he was working under, Lon Chaney Jr. Chaney Jr. had scored critical success in his portrayal of Lenny in Of Mice and Men (1939) and so Universal used a leftover, unfilmed Karloff-Lugosi script to introduce Chaney into their repertoire. The result, Man-Made Monster (1941) prompted director George Waggner to take on a more elaborate project to showcase the character talents of the new, burly Chaney.

"Blitz Wolf," a short Disney farce of the Three Little Pigs

with Hitler in the role of the Big Bad Wolf

And so Chaney Jr. was cast as Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man (1941), a film about an American schlub, probably only a few IQ points smarter than Lenny, who is bitten by a gypsy in wolf form (Lugosi, passing on the "curse" and status of a horror star) while staying in Wales. He is eventually battered to death with a silver cane by his father (played by Claude Rains) at the conclusion of the well-mounted and ambitious script by Curt Siodmak, who had fled the Nazi wolves himself in 1937. The Wolf Man proved that Universal could still found horror franchises. Chaney was then shuffled around to play all of the greats, taking on the role of the Monster in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), the Mummy in The Mummy's Tomb (1942), and the vampiric count in Son of Dracula (1943). It must have burned him just a little when Waggner was producing a lavish, Technicolor Phantom of the Opera (1943) and passed over Chaney Jr. to take his father's old role. The part was deemed too important and so given to Chaney Jr.'s Wolf Man father figure, Rains.

This new version of the masked theater dweller's tale was as much musical melodrama as it was horror and is surprisingly mild compared to the silent version. It was also unusually large-scale for Universal in the 1940's who mostly stuck to making series horror the way other studios were making series Westerns. There were ongoing sagas chronicling the eerie adventures of the Invisible Man and the Mummy and a three-picture series about Paula the Ape Woman, kickstarted with Captive Wild Woman (1943), again pinpointing the cultural fear of man overcome by baser, primal instincts that lead to disaster. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, signed over from Fox, played Holmes and Watson respectively in a series of twelve modern-day mysteries, almost all directed by Roy William Neill, and featuring horror elements, as in The Scarlet Claw (1944) and The House of Fear (1945). In turn, the Holmes films spun off their own monster stars. Real-life acromegalic Rondo Hatton, the "Creeper" in Pearl of Death (1944), became a regular mad lab assistant in an Ape Woman sequel and got vehicles for success in House of Horrors (1946) and The Brute Man (1946). Gale Sondergaard, the black widow of The Spider Woman (1944), returned as a similar villainess (with Hatton playing her minion) in The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1945). Chaney Jr. starred in six Inner Sanctum mysteries, often in unsuitably intellectual roles, as when he plays a college professor in Weird Woman (1944). There were a few stand alones at the time whose familiar sets, players (Karloff, Atwill, Lugosi, etc.) and story lines makes it seem like they were series efforts that never took flight, among them Black Friday (1940), Night Monster (1942), The Mad Ghoul (1943), and She-Wolf of London (1946).

The most significant Universal horror in franchise terms was Neill's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), a dual sequel to Ghost of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man in which Lugosi (whose brain--spoiler alert--was put in Chaney's skull at the end of Ghost of Frankenstein) plays the Monster and Chaney Jr. returns as the cursed Talbot. In House of Frankenstein (1944), Dracula (John Carradine) joined up, Lugosi was ditched in favor of bulky Glenn Strange, and Karloff returned to play a distinguished mad scientist. House of Dracula (1945) lost Karloff, but is otherwise the same deal. These monster rallies remain endearing to fans of the classics (myself included), not least for the strange twists of plotting that get around the monsters' seemingly permanent deaths and contrive to bring them together for yet another rumble. They don't, however, even try to be terrifying, and seem pitched entirely at children's matinees. The end result was one of the first truly great horror-comedies, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in which Universal's premier vaudeville comics run into Chaney Jr.'s Wolf Man, Strange's Monster, and in what was to be his last turn in the role, Lugosi's Dracula. The pair's later run-in movies with the Invisible Man, the Mummy, and Jekyll and Hyde aren't as funny as they should be, but the comedians are spot on in haunted-house mode with Hold That Ghost (1941). 

Many a sleepover with my cousins was spent watching this movie.

Because obviously.

At this point, the days of the lovingly-crafted Bride of Frankenstein (1935) were over, and the horror genre had totally devoured itself like the feral creatures it played up so much in the early 1940's. The series of Abbot and Costello parodies put the final nails in the coffin of this phase of the horror film, forever resigning Dracula, The Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Monster to sequel fodder. Those monsters who had been so terrifying on their debuts would not be frightening again for a long time to come. Meanwhile, the B studios were cashing in on Universal's comedy-horror act with lookalike efforts. Columbia signed Karloff to a run of "mad doctor" movies like The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) before landing Lugosi and his werewolf minion (Matt Willis) in their own monster mash-up picture, Return of the Vampire (1943). Fox and Paramount felt obliged to produce a white slavery/gorilla brain transplant story with The Monster and the Girl (1941) and a foggy werewolf whodunit, The Undying Monster (1942). It seemed that if it wasn't werewolves, it was brains being switched or tampered with, a person made into something they are not, something twisted, devilish, cruel…wolflike. Then, down on Poverty Row, Monogram kept Lugosi on retainer for The Invisible Ghost (1941) and its eight sequels, and played the race card with King of the Zombies (1941) and Revenge of the Zombies (1943), inadvertently channeling subversive societal issues of the times. Studios loved having their comedians mix it with ghouls and spooks in old dark houses with secret passageways, and that became the premise of a whole slew of horror-comedies like You'll Find Out (1940), Whistling in the Dark (1941), The Smiling Ghost (1941), Topper Returns (1941), One Body Too Many (1944), Ghost Catchers (1944), and Genius at Work (1946).

In contrast to all of this cheap bustle, RKO hired Val Lewton to produce their own small-scale horror pictures and got a clutch of polished, doom-haunted, poetic little masterpieces  in Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), The Curse of the Cat People (1944), Isle of the Dead (1945), The Body Snatcher (1945), and Bedlam (1946). Directed by Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, or Robert Wise, the Lewton films are literate, adult, and sophisticated, especially when set beside their competition. But the reason they worked for the audiences of the 1940's is that they are also serious about being scary in a way that Universal had given up on. The stalking scenes in Central Park and a basement swimming pool in Cat People are models of a style of horror cinema that Lewton would perfect, a style that would become the basis of the stalk-and-slash films of the 1970's and beyond. The Lewton films also spill more gore than the average Monogram--the trickle of blood under the door in The Leopard Man was an especial shock at the time--and emphasize extreme emotional states, like the neglected daughter driven nearly to child murder in Curse of the Cat People. Almost all of Lewton's films dealt with vicious animal beats overcoming the human form, though some of his later films, the ones produced as war grew imminent, were measured exercises in psychological horror that revealed the true monsters of the world to be human beings who had lost their moral compass. That Lewton had hit on a style and formula that worked is proved by the way others tried to imitate it. After Cat People, Columbia managed its own effects-free, "subtle" horror, Cry of the Werewolf (1943), and Lewtonesque effects could be seen in The Soul of a Monster (1944) and The Woman Who Came Back (1945) as well.

As far as intelligent, well produced, carriage-trade horror goes, Lewton wasn't quite the whole act in the 1940's. MGM had Victor Fleming, a hero on the strength of his credited direction of both Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). He mounted a big-budget remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) as a showcase for Spencer Tracy's dual performance, with the full Metro glamor treatment for his co-stars, Ingrid Bergman as the abused Soho waitress and Lana Turner as Jekyll's society fiancee. This was followed by other fogbound literary properties, with bravura acting and careful production values: The Lodger (1944), with Laird Cregar as Jack the Ripper, Gaslight (1944), with Bergman persecuted again, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). During the war and its aftermath, there was a run of near-benevolent supernatural pictures, like A Guy Named Joe (1943), the British film A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). This trend took in a few scarier themes. The Uninvited (1944) feels like an homage to Lewton, to the extent of the casting of Elizabeth Russell, Lewton's favorite, as the wispily malevolent specter (who happens to be a nasty lesbian, to boot). The Uninvited was groundbreaking and incredibly influential, and still stands as the model for many, many tales in which nice folks buy a picturesque, remote house and are pestered by spooks, which then prompts an investigation into the cause of the haunting (allowing for that oh-so crucial mystery angle), and a climatic exorcism. From Britain, neglectful of the horror film while fighting against real life monsters, came Ealing's multi-directed Dead of Night (1945), the grandfather of the horror anthology, best remembered for its haunted mirror and mad ventriloquist sequences. It was highly influential in its use of the frame narrative with twists and mixes of moods from supernatural anecdote to clubroom comedy to all-out psychological terror.

Chucky ain't got nothing on this guy

Some horror scholars say that the greatest mystery of the genre is that in the late 1940's, just as in the late 1930's, the horror film completely died out seemingly without warning. In the 1930's the phenomenon is almost entirely down to the unique circumstance of the British horror ban. For the 1940's, some have suggested that after Abbott and Costello it became impossible for moviegoers to take the monsters seriously, but I would point out that the pair didn't "meet" Frankenstein until 1948, when the genre was already withering away. It could equally be argued that it was hard to take the monsters seriously after the third or fourth Mummy sequel in which victims have to maneuver themselves into a corner so that the limping, pot-bellied, not terribly fearsome, bandaged bully can get his single functional hand around their throats. Between 1947 and 1951, Hollywood produced almost no horror films. The Creeper (1948), Jean Yarbrough's weird melange of Lewton shadows and Monogram mad science, is the lone exception. It could be that overproduction had killed the genre, but hollow copycat Westerns had been churned out in even greater numbers without slaking the appetites of cowboy fans. For example, there are five films in Universal's Kharis the Mummy series, which most fans rate as repetitive and formulaic; there are 51 completely interchangeable Three Musketeers pictures. Perhaps the explanation was that after World War II, gothic horror was upstaged by real life genocides--but the First World War had proved a potent inspiration for the Expressionist horrors of the 1920's and 1930's, lingering subliminally in the films of F.W. Murnau (a fighter pilot) and James Whale (a POW). 

The irony is that, in the later 1940's, American screens were as shadowed and haunted as they had ever been, but not in actual horror films. Film noir is a genre that was diagnosed rather than invented. French critics looked at a stream of American films (mostly thrillers and melodrama) and labelled them as noir, in homage to their overwhelming darkness in imagery and in subject matter. Lewton's horror films are also important as early noirs, and Jacques Tourneur proceeded from his woman cursed to turn into a feral and ferocious cat if she cannot consummate her marriage to his noir masterpiece, Out of the Past (1948). Other personnel made similar shifts. Robert Siodmak, Curt's brother, helmed the gloomy, unusual Son of Dracula in which the girl wants to be bitten by Dracula, as well as the early psycho-horror suspense The Spiral Staircase (1946). He also took on many outstanding noir films that doubled as horror, Phantom Lady (1943), The Killers (1946), The Dark Mirror (1946), etc. Edward Dmytryk moved from Captive Wild Woman to Murder, My Sweet (1944), the first major adaptation of Raymond Chandler's work. While Karloff and Lugosi were tied too closely to castles and laboratories, Peter Lorre segued easily from horror to noir roles, reprising his M (1931) act as a sorrowful psychotic killer in what might be the first truly proper noir, Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). 

These were all films about a looming evil, scenes steeped in gloom, scores that pulsed with foreboding atmosphere and dread. Many viewed them as the embodiment of the last decade, dark forays into the atrocities that had griped the globe and unleashed those feral, wolflike creatures in the early 1940's who were responsible for so much cruelty and damage. The noir films worked hard to do horror's job in a less direct but still compelling manner while the genre was on hiatus. Because as any student of the supernatural will tell you, if a thing looks dead, that's the time to be most afraid, as you never know what might come shooting out from beneath the tombstone…

Next in Horror History: Creature Features (The 1950's)