Horror History: Creature Features (The 1950's)

If the cinema of the late 1940's was typified by the high-contrast black-and-white of film noir, with shadows like pools of ink and protagonists slipping into near-insanity, the dominant tone of the early 1950's was semi-documentary grey, with heroes so relentlessly everyday and average that contemporary audiences tend to take them for seed-pods from outer space (and as most films would later reveal, some of them were).

As in the case of the devilishly handsome

Metaluna Monster from This Island Earth

The 1950's presented an image of back-to-business normality. Finned cars stocked suburban garages. New labor-saving devices were being fitted to every gleaming home. And yet this was the decade of the Cold War's birth, Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare, rampant fear of nuclear warfare, "juvenile delinquency," and rock 'n' roll. When the decade began, horror was most certainly out of fashion. And it's not hard to imagine why; the Nazis and the Reds had altered the public consciousness of what a true monster actually was. Gone were the days when Lon Chaney Jr. could don a bit of yak's hair and pass as a reputable envoy of the dark side. No, now there were more human faces attached to evil. Faces who had fought on both sides in a disastrous and brutal global conflict, faces who had developed things like the atom bomb and the death camp, mad scientists whose atrocities against humankind would have unnerved even Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau. A lone Count from Transylvania did not pose much of a threat now. 

Military action alone left 40 million dead when World War II came to a close, and millions more exposed to the full, sickening spectrum of man's inhumanity towards man. Homecoming heroes and bereaved widows had too many horror stories of their own to desire or appreciate big screen fantasies. The world would not and could not ever be the same again. And with the dawning of post-war posterity in the United States, a new breed of monsters, dressed to suit the new era and adapted specifically for survival in the second half of the twentieth century, emerged.

You can gauge how influential The Thing From Another World (1951) was based on subsequent science-fiction monster movies by looking at Edgar G. Ulmer's The Man From Planet X (1951), produced as a "spoiler" for the higher-profile film and rushed to beat it into the cinemas. This means that, uniquely, Ulmer's movie is a 1950's alien invasion film not made in imitation of Christian Nyby's soon-to-be-classic The Thing From Another World. Without any pre-existing model for a tale of a helmeted dwarf from outer space, Ulmer's film opts to look like an old Universal classic. The setting is an isolated, fogbound island--about as credibly Scots-like as The Wolf Man (1941) is Welsh--and the odd looking scientist played by William Schallert there makes first contact with an imp-like alien. When things get out of hand, obviously, the villagers pick up their various agricultural implements and flaming torches from whatever local Angry Mob Supply Store they've got, and harry the monster in exactly the same way earlier and more convincing mobs pursued the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy (though those chase sequences often involved footage that was recycled from Frankenstein (1931) scenes). Ulmer, who was also responsible for The Black Cat (1934), is a Poverty Row Expressionist if ever there was one: his films look like something from decades prior.

He may have been from Planet X, but he was hoping

that Earth was known as Planet XXX

The Thing From Another World knows it's in the line of noble descent from Universal's monster classics. It's alien-vegetable biped looks like a balding Frankenstein Monster in some sort of strange boiler suit and has the Dracula-like habit of drinking human blood for sustenance. The film does follow Sam Goldwyn's dictate by inventing a lot of new soon-to-be-cliches, however. The shadows of the menaced Arctic base may be deep, but in place of the angry mob we have a coalition of quick-thinking, good-humored, professional men, as well as a token spunky woman by the name of Nikki (played by Margaret Sheridan). Together, they show only sensible fear and treat the monster as a problem to be solved. As in The Man From Planet X, a weirdo scientist with a beard (Robert Carrington) wants to communicate with the implacable enemy from the stars rather than exterminate it--but even he isn't a madman in the purist sense, just a "fellow traveler." For five years after The Thing From Another World, almost every alien, dinosaur, or radioactive mutant on the rampage would be dealt with by the kind of straight-arrowed characters found in that darkened Arctic base. Kenneth Tobey, the lead, would go on to join the oh-so exclusive ranks of 1950' monster fighters with John Agar, Richard Carlson, and….yep. This, and the matter-of-fact semi-documentary tone of the film would be copied (less aptly) by many, many, many B movie quickies. 

Space ships alone were not enough to carry the 1950's sci-fi/horror hybrid (Destination Moon (1950) is probably the only exception). Almost every major motion picture at the time included a monster that threatened the peace and stability of earth: the intelligent and elegant The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) has its tall, enormously powerful robot Gort, adventurous and lusty 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) has its tussle with the giant squid, lively space opera This Island Earth (1955) has the bug-eyed, insect-limbed, exposed brain Metaluna Monster, and the philosophical Forbidden Planet (1956) has the roaring, invisible Monster From the Id. Even The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) doesn't forget to have its miniature hero menaced by an ridiculously gigantic cat and a ferocious spider. 

In terms of monster creation, you could say it was an era of great innovation and creativity, or an era limited by the shift in studio support, when the horror film was relegated well and truly to the B-movie category. This was mainly due to the fact that the major studios were attempting widespread technological overhauls (like universal color production, Cinemascope, Stereoptic sound, and 3-D) to keep audiences going to the movies rather than sitting at home and watching TV, a habit that was now on the rise. The big stars became reserved for epic dramas and musicals, films that were sure to draw big, sophisticated, middle-class crowds, and so the main audience for the horror film became teenagers. They flocked to the drive-in, not caring all that much for production value, plot integrity, or character development, to see two-movies-for-the-price-of-one in "double creature features." And they always got their wish. Radiation played a part in almost every major sci-fi/horror film of the decade, either enlarging life forms, as in Them! (1954), Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956), or Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), or shrinking them as in The Fly (1958) and The Incredible Shrinking Man. 

"Gee golly this movie is scary, let's make out to keep safe!"

Existing life-forms made better monsters, as they could be photographed using blue-screen techniques, or recreated in model form and brought to life with stop-motion animation. Otherwise, the tried and true method of a man in a suit--which was actually still used by James Cameron in Aliens (1986)--worked well enough if seen from a distance. Though schlocky by today's standards, these onscreen monsters were viewed as the cutting edge of movie technology at the time and their novelty was seen as a viable strategy for drawing audiences away from their TV sets. Newcomer and star practitioner Ray Harryhausen was the superior animator of the time. For The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), he crafted a radioactive dinosaur that gets thawed out by a bomb test in the North Pole. Gojira (1954), the Japanese semi-remake of the film, founded an entire genre of daikaiju (giant monster) pictures recently paid homage to in Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim (2013). 

Lone troublemakers like the Thing, the Beast, and Godzilla were quite common in the 1950's, as in Phantom From Space (1953) and Devil Girl From Mars (1955). This was primarily due to budgetary constraints, though every once in awhile mass invasions would occur, as when H.G. Well's Martians arrive in sleek, aerodynamic murder machines to terrorize Earth in War of the Worlds (1953) or when giant ants descended from the first ants irradiated by the initial atomic bomb wreck havoc in Them! But soon enough, in the spirit of Jekyll and Hyde, human mutations were resulting from atomic-era mad science, as in The Neanderthal Man (1953), The Fly, Monster on the Campus (1958) and The Hideous Sun Demon (1959). This helped mask-makers and stuntmen get back into the business, including Lon Chaney Jr., who goes on a rampage in The Indestructible Man (1956).

Universal, now Universal-International, once again found themselves at the forefront of the horror genre. With producer William Alland and director Jack Arnold teamed together, the studio made an alien-visitor spectacle, It Came From Outer Space (1953) and a giant-bug movie, Tarantula (1955), that enjoyed respectable success. Alland also produced Jack Sherwood's The Monolith Monsters (1957), one of several disaster movies that inflate natural phenomena into threats worthy of the "monster" tag. The Alland-Arnold team's most significant collaboration, however, was The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), which features a fish-human hybrid described as a "living fossil." The Gill Man became the final addition to Universal's pantheon of copyrighted and franchised monsters. The Creature returned in two sequels (how could it not?), Arnold's Revenge of the Creature (1955), and Sherwood's The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and its gill-filled visage is on merchandise to this day. Arnold's best films tend to depict a sort of tension between the clipped, grey flannel, matter-of-fact style of science fiction and the poetic, lurid, sexualized, perverse feel of a classic monster movie. This is epitomized best in the masterful sequence in which the sinuous Creature swims just underneath the curvy heroine (played by Julia Adams) as she does the backstroke on the surface of the Black Lagoon, whose depths represent the unconscious mind as much as they do prehistory. 

And you thought Jaws did it first, right?

In the mid-1950's, there is a noticeable change in the content of horror films. This was around the time when films were now being churned out by smaller, grindhouse studios like American International Pictures (whom, fun fact, Stephen King credits the survival of horror as a genre), and targeting a completely teenage audience. To kids, heroes in uniform like Kenneth Tobey seemed square. As such, you start to see films like Invasion of the Saucer Men (1958) and The Blob (1958) in which grown-ups are useless and only misunderstood teens know how to combat the menace of bug-eyed monsters (yet again) and all-consuming red jelly, respectively. While the rare Universal effort like The Deadly Mantis (1957), an unrelentingly dreary movie, concerned themselves with some sort of plausibility, AIP took the opposite path, unleashing the imagination of young producer-director Roger Corman onto the big screen with unabashedly lurid, unashamedly entertaining and surprisingly quick-witted projects like It Conquered the World (1956), Not of This Earth (1957), and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that Corman's films are better than their titles suggest, or even that they live up to their posters, they have a healthy pace when compared to other offerings that sprung up in the second half of the decade, like Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man (1957). 

This shift of the front line in horror, from the prepared military men and scientific experts of the early part of the decade to the home front of the latter years of the  decade, helped make room for Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), one of the most influential films in the history of horror cinema. Both Invaders From Mars (1953) and It Came From Outer Space had played with the nightmare potential of parents and authority figures mind-controlled by Martians or replaced my malign xenomorphs, but it took Invasion of the Body Snatchers to life this concept to the status of a sub-genre. Set in a small town where people come down with an epidemic of an unusual delusion--that their friends and relations have somehow "changed"--the film has been read as both a vision of Senator McCarthy's ravings of Communist infiltration into the heartland and an allegory of the way witch-hunting Red-baiters turned America against itself. Both are valid readings, but there are also deep psychological waves emanating from the film. The Body Snatchers, grown from seed, owe a little to stories of dopplegangers, all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson," and The Student of Prague. There are also undertones to the Snatchers that read as vampirism and demon possession. Regardless, the film has set out a modern myth, which has proved useless to the horror genre ever since. The depiction of an American small town, ripe for a real-estate ad, harboring nasty secrets, that is simultaneously penetrated from without and eaten alive from within by the monstrous is a trope that has surfaced time an again in the horror genre, from Jerusalem's Lot, Maine to Twin Peaks, Washington.

Certain studies imply that traditional gothic horror was dead after House of Dracula (1945) and was not resurrected until The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), having been obliterated by Abbott and Costello and the creature feature, but I would argue that this is not strictly accurate. You can see a tentative return to the gothic as early as Son of Dr. Jekyll (1951), or when Universal signed Boris Karloff back for minion roles in The Strange Door (1951) and The Black Castle (1951), which was a rerun of The Most Dangerous Game (1932). Then you have Andre de Toth's House of Wax (1953), a remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), that confidently set a new style with full color, stereoptic sound, and eye-popping 3D. The contemporary setting of the original was pushed back to the 1890's, complete with can-can girls and starched collars, and a plummy Vincent Price--who had flirted with horror as early as The Invisible Man Returns (1940). Price soon found himself elevated to full genre stardom from his role as the mad sculptor. He comes across charming and benign in his wheelchair as he hands out flowers to a terrified patron, adding a slightly more deliberate self-mocking comedy than Karloff or Bela Lugosi would have liked. But he also nips about nimbly stealing corpses and attempting to dunk Phyllis Kirk in wax. 

You're looking a little stiff there, my dear

There were other 3D horrors, of course. Price returned as The Mad Magician (1954), another old war horse was trotted out for Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954), and William Cameron Menzies's The Maze (1953) is actually remarkable by any standard. But the craze came and went quickly. The genre leaned towards specifically supernatural horror after the nine-days wonder that was the Bridey Murphy case, in which a hypnotist claimed he could regress a modern housewife to her previous life as an Irish servant girl. This was filmed as The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956), but also prompted pulpier efforts like The She-Creature (1957), Corman's The Undead (1956), and The Bride and the Beast (1958). 

Universal started to add a few old-style monsters to their roster as well. The snake-woman picture Cult of the Cobra (1955) reminded audiences that a creature didn't have to be atomic to worth making a movie about. Faith Domergue's avenging Cobra Woman pioneered a minor trend for pin-up mutants, followed by Maria English as the modern incarnation of the She-Creature and middle-aged matrons desperate for a return to youth (and damn all the side effects) in The Leech Woman (1958) and The Wasp Woman (1959). Relics of earlier decades still needed work, as Edward D. Wood found when signed Bela Lugosi for his own odd science-fiction/horror/melodrama/autobiography films. The last grasp of a gothic style which was about to get a shot in the arm came from England, with a bunch of quickies built around old stars (Lugosi, Chaney Jr., Carradine, Karloff) or ideas (19th century mad science, voodoo, mummies) either directed by Reginald LeBorg or produced by Howard W. Koch, who handled The Black Sleep (1956), Voodoo Island (1957), Frankenstein 1970 (1958), and Pharaoh's Curse (1958).

Britain's small-scale studio Hammer Films had made forays into semi-horror as early as the Lugosi vehicle Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1936) and the Jack the Ripper drama Room to Let (1949). Hammer became the first British studio to essay American-style sci-fi/horror in Terence Fisher's Spaceways (1953) and Four-Sided Triangle (1953). Their breakout genre hit was Val Guest's The Quartermass Xperiment (1955), adapted from a BBC TV series, involving Richard Wordsworth dragging himself over London waste grounds as an astronaut painfully transforming into a cactus-tripe-squid-creature which threatens to absorb all life on Earth, now considered a solid horror classic. The film was successful enough to produce both sequels (Quartermass 2 [1957]) and imitations (X--The Unknown [1958], The Abominable Snowman [1959]). Other UK producers got in on the act by adapting ITV serials made in competition with the BBC's Quartermass franchise: The Trollenberg Terror (1958) and Strange World of Planet X (1958) being among the most well-known. 

"My God! He's being pickled alive!"

American producer and monster fan Milton Subotsky pitched Hammer Films the idea of remaking Frankenstein (1931) in color, preferably with Boris Karloff in the lead. Hammer paid him off and took the project in another direction. Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), scripted by Jimmy Sangster, seems to have been constructed, probably on legal advice, to be as little like Universal's original classic as possible. This meant that the film was free to establish its own approach to familiar material and devise a look and a feel which would soon become a style of its own. At the time, most attention was paid to the colorful gore which was a new ingredient of the genre--we'd seen several limbs and brains in tanks before, but the blood spurts had not looked as red or the "grey matter" quite so pink. However, Curse of Frankenstein also stressed quality in art direction (compare the under-designed laboratory of The Black Sleep with Frankenstein's array of period scientific equipment), costume, cinematography, supporting cast, and music. Perhaps most importantly, the film also produced two new horror stars: Peter Cushing, who carried the film with his incisive, amoral, chilly yet charming performance as Victor Frankenstein, an aristocratic bastard who lets nothing get in his way, and Christopher Lee, cast as the Monster mainly because other actors demanded more money, and yet who brought a remarkably wounded animal presence to the character. Both men would come to be indispensable in the future of horror cinema.

With Frankenstein coining money, the return of the Count was inevitable. Horror of Dracula (1958) saw all the creatives come back, with Cushing again in the lead as a businesslike Van Helsing and Lee with eight minutes of screen time and no dialogue after his first scene as the black-cloaked and hissing king of the bloody fanged monster. Lee used this role to redefine Dracula as a far more dynamic, sexual being than the stolid Lugosi. Lust was almost just as important with Hammer as gore, and so there were plenty of plunging necklines and women awaiting the Count with open negligees to be found. Bosomy continental starlets and well-bred ex-models recur in British horror, competing with the tight-sweatered rock'n'rollers and white-swimsuited lady scientists of the American creature feature. After Frankenstein and Dracula had soared on their returns, Hammer went on a remake craze that felt a bit like jet lag: Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960), The Curse of the Werewolf (1960), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), and Kiss of the Vampire (1964), a film peddled as an original that is actually a rewrite of The Black Cat (1934) with vampires instead of Satanists. 

Hammer's gothic revival was soon imitated, often by filmmakers who hadn't taken the time to study the style and so resorted to earlier models or their own creativity. Hammer screenwriter Jimmy Sangster dashed off Blood of the Vampire (1958) and Jack the Ripper (1959) for producers Monty Baker and Robert Berman, but these blood-bolstered, theatrical melodramas sing of Tod Slaughter rather than Peter Cushing. When Baker and Berman signed Cushing for John Gilling's The Flesh and the Fiends (1958), Gilling remade a script he had written for a Slaughter movie, The Greed of William Hart (1948). Producer Richard Gordon, who had come to Britain to make mock-American science fiction films like the astonishing Fiend Without a Face (1958) and the Quartermass knock-off The First Man in Space (1959), also looked to the Slaughter style, and signed Boris Karloff to a couple of Victorian melodramas, namely Grip of the Strangler (1958) and Corridors of Blood (1958). He even found room for rising star Christopher Lee as a body snatcher in the latter film. Jacques Tourneur, in the UK after the fizzle of his post-Val Lewton career, directed Night of the Demon (1957), a busy yet influential film.

Time to send Gandalf to stake this fool

Producer Herman Cohen arrived on the monster scene at AIP and started a minor craze for mixing juvenile delinquency with atomic-age takes on old horror tales with I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1958). Cohen came to Britain and hooked up with Anglo-Amalgamated, an outfit that wanted to get in on the horror genre, so Cohen hired Michael Gough, a dreary hero in Hammer's Horror of Dracula (1958), and cast him in Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) as a limping, impotent, misogynist who is meant to be read as slightly gay and sadistic. He's also a megalomaniac crime writer who happens to have Dr. Jekyll's old potion lying around his house for whatever reason. If you've heard of Horrors of the Black Museum before, trust me, it's as extreme as all the critics say. The opening scene features a girl receiving a pair of trick binoculars that sprout eye-gouging spikes when the focus is adjusted. And Cohen and Gough continued their depredations in Konga (1961) and Black Zoo (1963), while Anglo developed more mutilation with Anton Diffring wielding a scalpel in Circus of Horrors (1960) and backed Michael Powell's still-jolting essay in psychosis, Peeping Tom (1960).

Back in America, the teenage-monster boom continued. Edgar G. Ulmer made Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957), Richard Culna contributed Frankenstein's Daughter (1958), Herman Cohen bowed to the inevitable and did a teenage vampire in Blood of Dracula (1958) and the low-rent Jerry Warren threw out Teenage Zombies (1960). Universal noticed their properties were back in business and made the low-key, contemporary-set Return of Dracula (1958), with Francis Lederer as a vampire with a cloak-like coat thrown over his shoulders. This disguised remake of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was the first film to bring Transylvania to small-town USA, but certainly not the last. The studio even tried a vampire Western, Curse of the Undead (1958). Much more distinctive were the films of the producer-director William Castle, famed for cementing Vincent Price's genre star status and catching the cynical, blackly comic tone of EC horror comics in House on Haunted Hill (1958) and The Tingler (1959). Castle would stick with the genre, but arguably never trumped the centipede creature, generated at the base of the spine by fear and prevented from killing the host by a scream, found in The Tingler--one of the strangest premises ever put forth by an American horror film. 

The return of Dracula & Co. was noted farther afield than in Hollywood. After the 1920's, "foreign" horror had been a matter of occasional one-offs like the Dane Carl Dreyer's arty Vampyr (1932) or the Frenchman Henri-Georges Clouzot's thriller Les Diaboliques (1955), a fantastic film that would be the inspiration for Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Now horror was truly becoming an international field. In Mexico, Germane Robles played a Dracula lookalike in The Vampire (1957), which seemed a south-of-the-border Son of Dracula (1943) in its monochrome Universal style, but led to far wilder Mexican efforts, featuring Aztec mummies, brain-sucking alchemists, and masked, monster-fightng wrestlers like El Santo and Blue Demon. It Italy, Riccardo Freda directed I Vampiri (1956), which features another matron who kills to enjoy renewed youth, and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959), in which an all-consuming blob crawls out of a Mayan temple. In France, Georges Franju, perhaps influence by I Vampiri, which is set in Paris, directed Eyes Without a Face (1959), a mix of pulp and poetry featuring a mad plastic surgeon trying to give his daughter a new face. In the Philippines, Well's Dr. Moreau inspired Gerardo de Leon's Terror is a Man (1959), which would trigger the "Blood Island" cycle a decade on. In Germany, mad science and cheesecake met in The Head (1959) and Horrors of Spider Island (1960), and Dr. Mabuse was on the brink of a comeback. Much like the genre itself.

Because at the end of the 1950's, horror was everywhere.

And you ain't SEEN nothing yet

Next in Horror History: We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes (The 1960's)