Saturday, April 15 | 7 Films
In her March 12 Oscar acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress, horror veteran Jamie Lee Curtis gave a shout out to “genre movie fans,” a clear reference to the legions that helped make her famous in slasher pics like Halloween (1978) and Prom Night (1980). “Genre movies” is a term often bestowed on fare that doesn’t follow the prestige of the Hollywood elite. “Genre movies” don’t win Academy Awards, and no one expects them to.
As such, the major Hollywood studios typically left these assignments to the “lesser” film factories in the Golden Age. Upstart Universal Pictures put itself on the map with Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), and in spite of a Best Picture win for 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) the studio would not be seen as really anything other than a lower-to-mid-major for decades. The high-class MGM *very* occasionally dabbled in horror, with 1932’s Freaks being the most famous example. RKO made a classic that approached horror with King Kong (1933).
But of the five major studios, only Warner Bros. was truly consistent in not shying away from the macabre. As the studio evolved, horror remained a consistent staple with WB. In many ways, WB helped to usher in the prestige horror movie. Post-Golden Age in the 1970s, the studio would truly break ground with The Exorcist (1973), which not only grossed buckets of cash but landed a bevy of Oscar nominations.
The die was cast, quite literally, by versatile contract director Michael Curtiz, who made a pair of successful chillers for WB in the pre-code era, Doctor X (1932) and The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Both starred the original scream queen, Fay Wray, both involved mad men with dastardly, deadly schemes and both were shot in Technicolor’s two-strip process, a then-cumbersome, expensive process that produced a near… but just not quite… life-like color and that was waning in popularity at the time. As such, Doctor X was actually shot twice – a black and white take followed every Technicolor take.
For many years The Mystery of the Wax Museum was assumed to be lost until a reference print was found in Jack Warner’s personal collection after his death. Warner Bros. would go back to the wax museum a couple of times, most successfully with Vincent Price in House of Wax (1953), which utilized not only three-strip Technicolor but also the then-new 3D technology. It was, like its predecessor, a hit at the box office.
The 1950s saw new kinds of terror produced by the studio. In 1954, WB elevated the “creature pictures” with the big-budget Them! (1954), a film about giant ants attacking first the desert and then Los Angeles, that was received as well by critics as audiences. It also starred a genuine Oscar-winner, Edmund Gwenn, and used the L.A. River for a pivotal sequence nearly 25 years before Grease (1978) made the river famous with a drag race. Coincidentally, the L.A. River happened to (and still happens to) border the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank. Them! has remained a popular entry in the WB catalog and is slated to be remade by the studio as the directorial debut of Michael Giacchino, the film composer best known for movies like Ratatouille (2007), a decidedly different creature of a picture. Whether a new version will get a child actor to as effectively scream “Them!” as Sandy Descher did is yet to be determined.
On the other end of the horror spectrum was The Bad Seed (1956), only a “creature picture” if you have an aversion to children. Patty McCormack’s titular bad seed is the ultimate argument for not having kids, as she wreaks havoc on the lives of virtually everyone she encounters, children and adults alike. The Bad Seed, bolstered by Warner Bros., once again defied genre-odds with acting nominations for both McCormack and Eileen Heckart in Supporting Actress and Best Actress for Nancy Kelly, who played McCormack’s mother. It also spawned a series of movies that mimicked and expanded upon its tone, including Village of the Damned (1960) and The Innocents (1961).
After being the preeminent leading lady at Warner Bros. from 1932 to 1949, Bette Davis enjoyed a brief resurgence in the Fox-produced All About Eve (1950), before spending much of the 1950s raising a family with then-husband Gary Merrill and only making occasional films, most of which failed to make any kind of splash. Davis returned to her old home studio in the 1960s and mounted a comeback, forging a new kind of horror in the process.
Women over 40 had long been “old news” to Hollywood executives, considered “not box office.” The low-budget What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), pitting Davis against a long-rumored rival Joan Crawford proved the executives wrong. The movie, about two aging sisters, both former stars of bygone eras, was chock-full of horror, from dead rats and murder to grotesque makeup courtesy of Davis herself. It was a huge hit, and even earned Davis her then-record 11th nomination for Best Actress. She’d lose to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker (1962), and the un-nominated Crawford infamously accepted the award on behalf of the absent Bancroft.
Both Davis and Crawford would continue to make horror films, including one more attempt to do so together, but only Davis would continue her mid-1960s popularity streak at major studios. While Baby Jane was shot on the cheap at a rental studio in Hollywood before WB picked up distribution, 1964’s Dead Ringer would see Davis return to the lot that made her a star. The movie’s advertising cashed in on Baby Jane’s success with a poster that features Davis interlocked with a skull and the tagline “they were sisters who looked exactly alike until…” while also promising that the movie is “just what Baby Jane people will adore.”
The movie, though, outside of a couple of suspenseful moments, including Davis (spoiler) murdering her twin (also Davis) and a vicious dog attack, is not truly a horror movie at all. It is really more like an updated version of Davis’ own A Stolen Life (1946), a melodrama where she also plays twins and one of them also dies. In both, she also assumes the other twin’s life. One’s the “good” twin, and the other is the “bad” twin. But the marketing, along with other Davis hits around the time like Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and The Nanny (1965), showcased the public’s insatiable appetite for older women in horror flicks. The movies were so popular they ultimately garnered their own nicknames: “hag horror,” “hagsploitation” and “psychobiddy” among them.
Eventually, most of the classic Hollywood actresses would dip their toes in the horror waters. Even Audrey Hepburn, one of the biggest stars of the 1960s, made a splash in the genre with a film that is often cited as having one of the best “jump scares” of all time: Wait Until Dark (1967). Based on a stage play that starred Lee Remick, Hepburn plays a blind woman who is forced into a physical and mental face-off with a drug lord, played by Alan Arkin. The marketing, again, played up on the scarier aspects of the story, and the movie is certainly tense and suspenseful. Like Dead Ringer, however, the movie also draws much from the classic female melodramas of the 1940s. The challenging, and exceptional, performance by Hepburn earned her the last of her Oscar nominations for Best Actress.
Few studios managed to have the awards and audience success with the horror genre that Warner Bros. did during the Golden Age. While others made attempts, horror was typically relegated to Hammer Studios and other low-budget moviemakers. It would be decades before a film considered “horror” would take home a Best Picture Oscar (1991’s The Silence of the Lambs), but WB was setting the template for prestige horror long before others took the genre seriously.
When Warner got scared, everyone, even critics, paid attention.
