7 Films | Monday, October 31st
The Universal Pictures horror cycle of the 1930s remains one of the high points of the genre’s existence. Over and over, the studio tackled classic works of gothic and horror literature to produce vivid, stylish, wondrous, scary, humorous films destined to become classics themselves. TCM’s seven-title Halloween tribute to Universal horror features some of the most notable productions, with a rogues’ gallery of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Claude Rains and Lon Chaney, Jr. all represented.
Universal’s initial 1930s foray into the genre—even though the term “horror film” didn’t actually yet exist—was Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Released in February 1931, its massive success generated record profits and prompted the studio to concentrate on further scary movies; by late August, cameras were rolling on Frankenstein (1931). Mary Shelley’s great novel about a mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, who creates a monster from the bodies and organs of the dead, was at the time being adapted for a planned Broadway production, but Universal negotiated a deal to allow the movie to be made first. Originally, Robert Florey was set to direct, and Bela Lugosi was tested in full makeup to play the Monster. Lugosi had little interest, however, thinking the part beneath him. Then Florey was replaced by James Whale, a noted stage director with two film directing credits, Journey’s End (1930) and the still-to-be-released Waterloo Bridge (1931). Supposedly, Whale noticed Boris Karloff in the studio commissary and immediately liked him for the part of the Monster. Whale also brought on Colin Clive to play the mad doctor, having just worked with him on Journey’s End.
Karloff had been a struggling actor for well over a decade, usually playing villainous bit roles. With Frankenstein, he would achieve screen immortality. “Whale and I both saw [the Monster] as an innocent one,” he later reflected. “This was a pathetic creature who, like us all, had neither wish nor say in his creation and certainly did not wish upon itself the hideous image which automatically terrified humans whom it tried to befriend... What astonished us was the fantastic number of ordinary people that got this general air of sympathy. I found all my letters heavy with it.”
Karloff’s star-making performance was worth the grueling daily regimen of makeup application and removal by the brilliant Jack Pierce, and through the production Karloff suffered a dislocated hip, a wrenched back and bruised ribs. “There were many days,” he recalled, “when I thought I would never be able to hold out.” He added, “I was never as nervous during the entire filming as when I lay half-naked and strapped to the operating table. Above me I could see the special effects men shaking the white-hot scissors-like carbons that simulated the lightning. I prayed very hard that no one got butterfingers.”
The wondrous electrical laboratory equipment was the invention of Ken Strickfaden. “It was just a lot of experimentation,” he later said. “I’d put something together and then sit back and marvel at it. The styling all depended upon what kind of junk I had at hand.” His “junk” included a giant Tesla coil, and the sparks and lightning effects he generated still enrapture audiences and help make the lab scenes in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) unforgettable.
Frankenstein opened in November 1931, and not without controversy. Two sequences censored for release included Colin Clive’s dialogue about now knowing what it feels like to be God, which was considered blasphemous, and an infamous scene in which the Monster inadvertently drowns a little girl. Both were later restored. The movie’s massive success sparked talk of a sequel. James Whale initially had no interest in doing one, so the studio assigned Kurt Neumann to direct a tale that would feature Karloff reprising his role and Bela Lugosi as the scientist. However, that project fell through. It was resurrected when James Whale—who had meanwhile directed two more superb fright classics, The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933)—came back aboard with the studio’s assurance that he could make it the way he wished.
With The Bride of Frankenstein, Whale turned out a piece of high style and witty sophistication, as much a satire on monster movies as a sincere piece of horror in its own right. By far the best of the era’s Frankenstein pictures (even if it is not the scariest), it blazed a trail for countless future horror comedies, though perhaps no other has achieved as sublime a blend.
In addition to bringing back Karloff and Colin Clive (and Dwight Frye as the doctor’s humpbacked assistant), Whale also cast two supporting players to help give the film its unique comic slant: Una O’Connor, providing broad comedy relief as the housekeeper, Minnie, and Ernest Thesiger, who weaves bizarre humor into his performance as Dr. Pretorious, one of the maddest scientists ever to grace a horror film.
One of Whale’s smartest moves was to demand the opening prologue in which Lord Byron and Percy Shelley encourage Mary Shelley to tell them more of her Frankenstein story. This sets up the movie as coming from her imagination, allowing the audience to accept the stylization to follow, as opposed to the greater naturalism of the first film.
The introduction of the monster’s bride is one of the great moments of Hollywood cinema. In very little screen time, Elsa Lanchester makes an unforgettable impression as a most stylish bride, twitching as if from electrical jolts. Her make-up is glamorous (if one overlooks the neck scars), and there’s simply no word to describe her iconic hairstyle, which was created by means of a cage covered by her real hair and a grey hairpiece. Her hiss was inspired by Lanchester’s visits to Regents Park in London, where she observed hissing swans. And composer Franz Waxman, in one of his earliest and most notable Hollywood scores after arriving from Germany, outdoes himself with a triumphant musical cue complete with church bells. Waxman’s score also adds to the stylized feel of the film. (The more realistic Frankenstein had no score at all.)
By the time of the third film of the series, Son of Frankenstein (1939), Colin Clive was dead and James Whale had moved on. Rowland V. Lee stepped in to direct, and joining Karloff this time were Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill, a top-drawer roster of screen villainy. Rathbone plays Dr. Frankenstein’s son, who journeys to the doctor’s castle and winds up trying to resurrect the monster as a way of clearing his family name. Heavily made-up Bela Lugosi—in one of his best performances—takes over from Dwight Frye as Rathbone’s assistant, here named Ygor, and the film overall is involving, frightening and quite underrated.
Dracula, meanwhile, also spawned a sequel, though it took five years to come to fruition and didn’t even star Bela Lugosi, though he does appear momentarily in the form of a dummy likeness that goes up in flames. Universal handed the assignment, Dracula’s Daughter (1936), to director Lambert Hillyer, who had lately been turning out B westerns. The film picks up right where the first one left off, and Edward Van Sloan reprises his role as Van Helsing. The ostensible hero is played by Otto Kruger, and Gloria Holden plays the vampire daughter—and repeats one of Lugosi’s best lines from the original film: “I never drink—wine.” The movie makes up for a minimum of action with vivid mood and atmosphere. As film scholar William K. Everson wrote, “All told, Dracula’s Daughter holds up rather well. The few big sets look expensive, and standing sets are cunningly disguised. It is almost a model of how care and style can make a fairly inexpensive picture look like a much bigger one.”
Lugosi and Karloff appeared in many films together, but only three times did they ever make bona fide co-starring vehicles. The Raven (1935) stressed Lugosi’s role and The Invisible Ray (1936) stressed Karloff’s, but in their first vehicle, The Black Cat (1934), they carry equal weight. They also deliver among their finest performances—Lugosi as a psychiatrist out for revenge against Karloff for stealing his wife, and Karloff as an evil, brilliant architect in whose country house most of the story plays out. As the opening titles indicate, the script was “suggested by” the Edgar Allan Poe story, not actually based on it. Yet the film conjures a very strong sense of Poe, with feelings of doom, entrapment and oppression dominating. As William Everson wrote, “it may be considered one of the most successful attempts to transfer Poe to the screen, even though it transfers only a mood and not a plot.”
The Black Cat features one of Hollywood’s earliest depictions of devil worshipping, and it culminates with one character getting skinned alive by another, who taunts his victim in graphic detail about the pain he is going to inflict. (The film was released just under the wire before enforcement of the Production Code.)
Karloff is truly frightening as he depicts pure evil with his piercing attitude, black-robed outfit and mesmerizing diction, yet he also brings a three-dimensional charisma to the role. Similarly, Lugosi is hardly an all-good opponent despite our rooting interest in him. The two actors are balanced together perfectly.
A year before The Black Cat, Universal brought another literary classic to the screen with The Invisible Man, based on the H. G. Wells novel. Directing was James Whale, who applied his stylish blend of horror theatrics and witty comedy to a script approved by H. G. Wells himself. Claude Rains plays Jack Griffin, the title character, a scientist who goes mad after inventing and consuming an invisibility serum, but for the vast majority of the film, it is really a voice performance. The film holds up remarkably well, with the invisibility effect still looking so seamless that even today audiences wonder how they did it. Special effects genius Jack Fulton employed all sorts of technical tricks like double exposures, masked negative film, and outfitting Rains in black velvet under the bandages and shooting against a black backdrop.
Through the decade, Universal certainly wanted to make a werewolf movie, and in 1935 they tried with Werewolf of London, starring Henry Hull, but the result was below the studio’s great horror standards and left no mark. In 1941 they tried again, with The Wolf Man, and hit the bull’s-eye. Lon Chaney, Jr.—billed for the first time as “Lon Chaney”—stars as the title character, Larry Talbot, an American who journeys back to his Welsh birthplace to repair his relationship with his father (Claude Rains) but soon finds himself afflicted by an ancient curse that transforms him into a werewolf.
Heavy on characterization and mood, this is a beautifully mounted production, from the cinematography and makeup to the sets and the score. George Waggner directs an exceptional supporting cast for a horror film of this period: Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Bela Lugosi and Maria Ouspenskaya. (Lugosi is billed fifth, in the role of a gypsy named Bela.)
Once again, makeup genius Jack Pierce outdoes himself. Studio press materials claimed that he spent years researching werewolves and five months devising the right combination of rubber, color and hair for Chaney, who like Boris Karloff on Frankenstein withstood hours of makeup every day. “What gets me,” Chaney said, “is after work when I’m hot and itchy and tired, and I’ve got to sit in that chair for forty-five minutes while Pierce just about kills me, ripping off the stuff he put on me in the morning.”
A surprise hit and instant classic, The Wolf Man remains the definitive werewolf movie and launched much of the mythology surrounding werewolves (such as the full-moon transformation) that still drives such yarns today. Even the dialogue is wonderfully evocative, including a spooky sentence that is not an ancient verse but rather the work of screenwriter Curt Siodmak, writing in Hollywood in 1941:
Even a man who is pure in heart,
and says his prayers by night,
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms,
and the autumn moon is bright.
