I thought I had picked out the perfect week to take my vacation. The third week of October, I said, would be my favorite kind of weather—crisp Autumn air. Instead, I find myself in the middle of an Alabama phenomenon called Hot-tober and the week I go back to work, we’ll struggle to make it to highs in the 60s. Oh, well—you can’t win them all.
With Halloween approaching, I usually try to watch something creepy, and I intended on some sort of horror series for my week off. I’m not what you’d call a fan of horror films, preferring true crime documentaries or psychological thrillers, which are more likely to stay with me. There are certainly horror films I admire, but they are usually comical in nature, r. e. the Evil Dead series. But over the last couple of years, I’ve tried to branch out and watch some of the so-called classics of the genre.
Last year, it was the slasher films of the 1980s. What I watched would have been something unimaginable to my younger self. I first caught a glimpse of Robert Englund’s portrayal of Freddy Krueger when I was five years old. The face alone made me run upstairs and nightmares followed several nights after. Yet, last year, I watched all the Krueger movies, up through the New Nightmare and mostly laughed myself silly. Whatever power that face had had dissipated with all my other childhood fears.
So, this year I decided to go back all the way to the beginning—if not the actual beginning, meaning I would eschew certain important silent films like Nosferatu or re-watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the style of which would be copied for decades, including in the films I viewed. Instead, I decided to watch the three most important films of what is a franchise known as the Universal Classic Monsters. A mixed-bag to be sure, these early Universal horror films are still the gold-standard of the horror genre, or at least represent its golden age. A lot of what we imagine when we first hear the names Dracula or Frankenstein come right out of this unofficial film series, which lasted from the early 1930s to the late 1950s before horror would go into a different phase, becoming more violent and wielding, shall we say, a “Hammer.”
The first horror “talkie,” Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) was the first in the series and I had never seen it before, I knew it was important in Hollywood’s history, but I assumed it would have little to no effect on me as a scary film. The opposite was true. A flawed genius, Browning conjures truly terrifying pictures, and it is easy to see that Bela Lugosi was a better actor than his future typecasting would indicate.
It is interesting to note, along with the second film, James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931 also), that Dracula was not a straight adaptation of Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel. In fact, it was an adaptation of a theatrical version by Garrett Fort, further adapted by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. The dramatic version, with Lugosi in the title role, was a smash and probably served as a better foundation for adaptation than Stoker’s novel alone, which is a sort of work made up of “found” materials.
Searching on the streaming platforms, I was delighted to find the version of the film that was later re-scored by Philip Glass, our greatest living composer. He had done this in 1998 with the Kronos Quartet, and I had listened to the score before, wondering how on earth it would gel with the picture, but it works entirely. By using a string quartet, Glass evokes both something of 19th century dread and something totally modern—striking, full of anxiety and fear.
Several Universal sequels followed, including Dracula’s Daughter, Son of Dracula, and House of Dracula and, of course, Dracula has been reimagined by many other studios, most notably with a star-studded ‘90s version by Francis Ford Coppola which has more detractors than admirers. Dracula remains the prototypical vampire and Lugosi’s portrayal hangs over any other, even Christopher Lee who would take over the part in color films.
Frankenstein, I had seen before. Rather I slept through it. So, I had to go back and really give it a fair shot. I liked it more this time, but it still feels staid, inert somehow, especially in comparison to Dracula. Also adapted from a theatrical version, this time by Peggy Webling, I think it comes from a novel that is itself unadaptable. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is an exhausting read. Some have not even called it a horror novel, but more of a precursor to science fiction.
But there is obviously something about it that has mass appeal. The way Dracula became synonymous with “vampire,” Dr. Frankenstein has become synonymous with the mad scientist and Colin Clive’s portrayal in the early scenes is terrifying in its own sort of way as Frankenstein calls God’s bluff. Then, of course, the film leads to mob violence and, being pre-Code, has a surprisingly shocking scene of the Monster tossing a little girl to her death thinking she is akin to the flowers she and he tossed into a pond.
Boris Karloff would be another actor pigeonholed into horror roles and Frankenstein would have the longest commercial appeal of any of Universal’s monsters. The sequels The Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, and (absurdly, though I’m told it’s funny) Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein all followed over the next two decades. Since the portrayal of the Monster is so vague in Shelley’s novel, Karloff’s make-up and neck bolts became the way we have continued to imagine the character. It’s difficult to estimate how much this Frankenstein has pervaded popular culture. One thinks of Phil Hartman’s hilarious impersonation on Saturday Night Live more than Robert DeNiro’s turn as the Monster in Kenneth Branagh’s trashy and maximalist adaptation in the mid-1990s.
I did notice something on this second watching that made me re-think a kind of spinoff of Frankenstein. I have always been mercilessly driven to boredom watching Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. I have often thought Brooks’ films needed quicker editing and his 1974 offering, by today’s comedy standards, is as stiff and stodgy as Whale’s staging—using sets perhaps inspired by German Expressionism, but with none of the remarkable staging of Caligari to show the off-kilter world. I understand Brooks’ film a lot more now because it is clear he was satirizing something he admired. While I cannot share admiration for the original film, I can appreciate his timing more, as it is perfectly in line with the 1931 original.
If you look at the whole Universal line-up, The Invisible Man and The Wolf Man and even the Creature from the Black Lagoon often show up in the line-up. Having limited time, I decided to complete my viewing with 1932’s The Mummy as these first three films in the series (discounting an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue) provided the bulk of the series’ fodder.
The Mummy is a genuine monster movie, but not one that instantly conjures up Halloween. Piggybacking on the early 20th-century excavations in Egypt, the film concerns a mummy who is brought back to life, Imhotep, who longs to reincarnate a love from his past in a contemporary woman. Based on a screen treatment by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer, the film plays on Egyptian mummification practices and The Book of the Dead. While all these things add up to something interesting, fear is not the primary emotion you carry with you. It is interesting, but never much more than that.
Though a modest box office success, it would spawn many sequels from Universal—The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost (you can see the cleverness here, right?), and The Mummy’s Curse. Years later, Brendan Fraser’s versions probably became more iconographic than Boris Karloff’s mummy. But it does go to show you Hollywood hasn’t really changed. Franchises were as important in the early days as they are now. If you have a property that has a guaranteed audience, how can one go wrong financially?
There are, obviously, a lot of things that come into play with people who like horror films. There are people who genuinely get tickled at being scared. There are those that find the humor in the gore of some of the more contemporary offerings. There are those who just like a good scream. There are probably even those who delight in the non-existent“dangers” of the genre (i. e. those who find something pervasive and real in The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity—not that I’m equating the latter two in quality with the former). I don’t find myself fitting into any of these categories. More often than not it is the real monsters who walk among us that I find the scariest. These creatures may display some of the things we fear and magnify them, but the real monsters almost always look like us. I wish it wasn’t so—heck, if they did dress up like Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, they would be easier to catch.
By the way, if you’re in the Birmingham metro area, I’m playing percussion for a Halloween show at the Sugar Creek Supper Club Saturday night with The Cash Domino Killers, a terrific ‘50s-‘60s cover band. More info can be found here.
And Happy Halloween!
Yorumlar