Bloody Disgusting!

Chapter 3: The Universal Classics and 1940s America

Dracula (1931) – Tod Browning

Tod Browning’s first talkie happens to be one of horror’s most famous films. Dracula ushered in the golden age of monster movies. Dracula hit Broadway in 1927, and proved quite popular.

Laemmle sensed a hit and legally acquired the rights from Bram Stoker’s widow. She had previously sued the producers of Nosferatu. After snagging the rights, Laemmle commissioned Garret Fort, who would write many of the Universal monster movies, to adapt the stageplay into a screenplay.

The studio head envisioned a grand scale epic, similar to his gigantic hits in the twenties with Lon Chaney. Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian actor who played the vampire on stage, lobbied hard for the lead role. He was not Laemmle’s first choice.

Laemmle wanted a name. Someone with star power. Fortuitously, Lugosi was in Los Angeles with a touring company. He convinced the studio to hire him, partly by agreeing to take a very small salary. It has become his iconic role.

There is an urban legend that Bela Lugosi could not speak English when he was cast, which would explain his very idiosyncratic line readings. This is most likely untrue. He had been working in the United States for ten years before shooting Dracula. Roger Ebert writes,

“[t]here is something about his line readings that suggests a man who comes sideways to English–perhaps because in his lonely Transylvanian castle, Dracula has had centuries to study it but few opportunities to practice it.”

His line readings are deliberately theatrical and off-kilter, an asset for his characterization. Dracula is a little off, a little less than human.

In the years after filming, Lugosi would appear in public dressed formally, usually with his cape. He had a kinship with the character, which he could never shake. Dracula has no musical score, and few special effects.

It is shot like a play. It moves quickly, I would say too quickly. Nonetheless, it has a very special performance at its core. After all these years, after all the Hammer films, and the remakes, and “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, Lugosi, very simply, is Dracula. Lugosi would return to play the Count in many of Universal’s sequels and crossover films; his final turn in the cape would be seventeen years later in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Frankenstein (1931) – James Whale

In 1930, Universal had lost over two million dollars in revenue. They were sinking. Dracula was their biggest hit of 1931. Laemmle, of course, wanted more horror films, and quickly greenlit Frankenstein. Lugosi wanted to play Dr. Frankenstin, but Laemmle offered him the role of the monster.

Unlike the monster in the completed film, the original script called for a pure killing machine, a character without any pathos. Between the writing and a series of disastrous make-up tests, Lugosi left the project. He complained, “I was a star in my country! I will not be a scarecrow over here.”

In 1930, director James Whale was newly arrived in Hollywood. Whale was born in Dudley, England. He left school to work as a cobbler. When World War I broke out, Whale was able to join officer candidate school. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Worcestershire Regiment in 1916. By 1917 he was in a prisoner of war camp for British officers in Saxony.

He became heavily involved in the amateur theatrical productions in the camp. Whale worked as an actor, producer, and set designer while he was confined in Germany. After the Armistice, he worked as a stage actor and stage manager in London. In 1919 Whale met Doris Zinkeisen, a Scottish theatrical designer.

The two lived together as a couple even though he was openly homosexual. In the twenties he became a well-known stage director. By 1928, he was directing in the West End with Colin Clive, who would later play Henry Frankenstein (the producers changed the character name from Victor to Henry.  They believed Victor would sound ‘unfriendly’ to American audiences), as his star.

By 1929 James Whale was directing on Broadway where he came to the attention of Howard Hughes. Whale directed the dialogue scenes of Hughes’ film Hell Angels (1930), which Hughes had originally planned as a silent feature. Whale was uncredited. In 1931 Laemmle signed Whale to a five year contract and gave him his choice of properties. Whale chose Frankenstein.

To finish Whale’s story it must be said that at the age of sixty-seven Whale committed suicide in his swimming pool. The 1998 film Gods and Monsters is a moderately fictionalized look at Whale’s post-Hollywood life.

However, let us continue with the production of Frankenstein. Whale quickly cast Colin Clive in the role of the scientist. He cast Boris Karloff as the monster. After years of toiling in character parts, Karloff would receive an Academy Award nomination for Five Star Final, which he had made for Mervyn LeRoy earlier in 1931.

Karloff had studied at King’s College in hopes of being in the British Government’s Consular Service. He never graduated, and instead worked a number of odd jobs before he found his way into acting. His brother Sir John Thomas Pratt, however, did become a diplomat. Karloff was born William Henry Pratt. He changed his name when he became an actor, to save his family embarrassment. He chose Boris Karloff because it sounded exotic.

Frankenstein is notable for its lighting, which far more than Dracula defined the look of the golden age of horror, and for its makeup effects. Ken Strickfaden designed the special effects; most notably, the mechanisms and the electricity effects used for the monster’s creation. He would continue to design sets and effects for projects such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Young Frankenstein (1974), and the television show “The Munsters”. Jack Pierce designed the monster’s makeup.

The makeup work allowed Karloff full facial movement. Watch the film to see just how expressive Karloff could be. The monster exhibits more humanity than many of the people surrounding him.

Whale would return to film the sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, in 1935. The sequel debuted a female monster played by Elsa Lanchester. Whale had more power after the success of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, thus some critics argue he suffused The Bride of Frankenstein with a camp sensibility.

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Freaks (1932) – Tod Browning

“We accept you, one of us. One of us! Gooble Gobble!” Oh, the pre-code pre-PC days, how I long for you! Now this is a gross one. Most of the characters are played by real carnival freaks! Browning drew on his real personal circus experience for this film, and because of the success of Dracula, MGM gave him quite a bit of leeway.

It was MGM’s first horror film, and boy did it flop, even after the censors cut into it. This film lost MGM over one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Critics hated it and audiences were disgusted. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Freaks had a critical reevaluation as a counter-culture film. The hippies were now the ‘freaks’. Get it?

In the movie, the freaks are good guys – they are nice and honorable. The two normal people – the strong man and the dwarf’s beautiful wife – are the real monsters. They conspire to kill the dwarf and steal his money. Big mistake! The freaks’ revenge is swift and gruesome. Really gruesome. The kind of gruesome that stays with you forever.

The movie has a bearded woman, conjoined twins, a man with only a head and a torso, an armless woman, an intersex woman, and too many others to mention. After a disastrous test screening, a woman actually threatened to sue, blaming the film for her miscarriage, the studio cut almost half an hour off the film. Much of the final revenge including a castration was cut. The released version was only sixty four minutes long.

This film ended Browning’s career. It was the only MGM film to ever be pulled from release before completing its engagement. The critics were savage. The Kansas City Star wrote, “There is no excuse for this picture. It took a weak mind to produce it and it takes a strong stomach to look at it.” The Hollywood Reporter opined, Freaks is an “outrageous onslaught upon the feelings, the senses, the brains and the stomachs of an audience.” It is now considered one of the greatest horror films of the 1930s.

The Mummy (1932) – Karl Freund

The Mummy was directed by, Dracula’s cinematographer, Karl Freund. Freund was born to a Jewish family in Bohemia. He started his film career as an assistant projectionist for a production company in Germany. He is best known in Germany for shooting Fritz Lang’s German Expressionist sci-fi opus Metropolis in 1927. He emigrated to America in 1929. He shot Dracula (which he also partly directed), Key Largo (1948), and The Good Earth (1937) for which he won the Academy Award. Besides directing The Mummy, he also directed the horror film Mad Love (1935) which starred Peter Lorre. Freund was also the long-time director of photography for “I Love Lucy”.

The opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 caused a furor of excitement about Egyptology. With the successes of Dracula and Frankenstein, Carl Laemmle was searching for another monster. Imhotep seemed perfect. The film is noteworthy for Freund’s deft camera work and lighting, as well as Boris Karloff’s frightening central character.

An oft-repeated close-up of Karloff, his eyes alight, is among the genre’s most memorable shots. Makeup artist Jack Pierce returned from Frankenstein, and considered The Mummy his greatest work. Pierce would begin applying Karloff’s makeup in the middle of the night.

It would take eight hours to apply. Peirce had to use spirit gum on Karloff’s face. Karloff called the removal of the gum, “the most trying ordeal I ever endured.” The gum held the bandages to his face. The Mummy was followed by four sequels and an Abbott and Costello movie. None featured Boris Karloff. The Mummy was successfully remade in 1999 by Stephen Sommers, and poorly as a Tom Cruise vehicle in 2017.

King Kong (1933) – Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack

My grandmother saw King Kong in the theater when she thirteen. It was the most frightening movie she had ever seen. No other movie had effects that realistic. The giant gorilla, the Eighth Wonder of the World, is the screen monster champion.

King Kong was not the first jungle adventure film. It was just the greatest in a long tradition. Its closest progenitor was Harry Hoyt’s 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conon Doyle’s The Lost World. Willis O’Brien, who later created Mighty Joe Young, designed the creatures in both films. King Kong used many of the same crewmembers as The Lost World.

O’Brien was born in Oakland, California. He left home at age eleven to work on cattle ranches. As a teenager he worked a variety of odd jobs and as a rodeo cowboy. He developed a keen interest in dinosaurs while working at Crater Lake as a guide for paleontologists.

After a stint as a professional boxer and then a railroad worker, and later as sculptor, he became the assistant to the head architect at the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco. At the World’s Fair he also worked as a model maker. He created an animated short of a dinosaur and a caveman.

A San Francisco exhibitor saw the footage and offered O’Brien five thousand dollars to make a film. The film was The Dinosaur and The Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915). The film impressed Thomas Edison who hired O’Brien as an animator in 1917. O’Brien had trouble with his bosses, and was consistently underpaid for his work. Nonetheless, the series of prehistoric films that he made landed him the job of lead designer on The Lost World.

Merian C. Cooper, the director of King Kong, decided he wanted to be an explorer when he was six years old. He had read the book Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. He studied at the US Navel Academy, but dropped out during his senior year. He had gotten into a violent argument with a professor and officer, about airpower in the Navy. Cooper believed it was a necessity; the Navy did not. Cooper resigned in disgust.

In 1916 he joined the Georgia National Guard and fought Pancho Villa in Mexico. When WWI broke out he joined the Army Air Service. Cooper served as a DH-4 bomber pilot. He was shot down over Germany. He was burnt badly. A natural warrior, Cooper flew as a volunteer flyer in the Kosciuszko Squadron that supported the Polish army in the Polish-Soviet War.

He was shot down and spent nearly nine months in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. Back in the States he worked a journalist, then traveled half way around the world for a series of articles for Asia Magazine. In 1925 he became a member of the Explorers Club, and lectured about his travels.

He shot documentaries in Africa that were spliced with fictional scenes and turned into movies by Paramount. In 1927 he helped establish Pan American Airways and would serve on their board of directors. Cooper asserts that the idea for King Kong came to him in a dream.

In 1931 Cooper helped David O Selznick land the position of head of production at Paramount. Cooper then pitched Selznick King Kong. They started building sets and casting before they had a finished script. Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong were cast in the lead roles. Four different models of Kong were built.

Kong’s face was made out of rubber. His eyes were glass. His skull was aluminum. Bendable wires that were threaded into the aluminum controlled Kong’s facial expressions. The stop motion animation, matte paintings, and rear projection used were all state of the art.

The composite of real world and stop motion had to be captured in camera. Many of these effects called for bipacking, which means loading two reels of film into a camera, and having them pass through the gate simultaneously.  

The scene with Kong on top of the Empire State Building called for bipacking and an intricate lighting process called The Dunning Process. In the scene in which the plane shoots Kong off the tower, it was actually the two directors piloting the plane. The live action scenes were shot on a jungle set in Culver City. The Film adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game was shot on the same sets at night. King Kong held its world premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on April 10^th, 1933. Kong was a critical and popular success and cemented the giant ape as one of cinema’s most enduring icons.

The Invisible Man (1933) – James Whale

The Invisible Man is the fourth of the Universal Monster movies. It starred Claude Rains, who would in the late 1930s and early 1940s become one of Hollywood’s most popular and enduring actors, particularly memorable in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946).

In 1933, however, he was hardly known at all. The role was originally intended for Boris Karloff. Negotiations with horror’s biggest star fell through when Laemmle attempted to cut his fee. The film about a chemist who goes insane after a perfecting an invisibility formula is best known for its groundbreaking special effects.

Rains’ performance is especially noteworthy. Rarely seen but always heard, Rains perfectly captures the chemist’s gradual insanity. When Claude Rains was not on screen but the character was manipulating objects, effects men used wires to manipulate the diegesis.

Other times he was photographed in a black velvet suit against a black background. This effect was necessary when the invisible man was partly clothed. They would use a matte process to merge the effects shot with the location or set work.

The Invisible Man was Universal’s most successful film since Frankenstein. There were four sequels beginning with The Invisible Man Returns in 1940. Paul Verhoeven remade The Invisible Man quite explicitly and entertainingly as Hollow Man in 2000.

The Wolfman (1941) – George Waggner

The final of the five classic Universal monster films is the furriest of the lot. The Wolfman stars Lon Chaney Jr. – the son of the ‘Man of a Thousand Faces’. Junior only has one face, and it isn’t especially charismatic. My mom says he looks like a thug in the old Superman TV show. I think that’s about right. Claude Rains does most of the heavy lifting.

It’s 1941, so the whole classic Hollywood machine is in full bloom. The film looks great. It’s full of wonderfully smooth tracking shots of immaculately fogged forests. Anyway, Chaney is the prodigal son of a very wealthy man. He returns to his ancestral home, messes around with a local girl who is about to be married (Evelyn Ankers), and is promptly bit by a gypsy turned werewolf (Bela Lugosi).

The werewolf transition scenes are cut with dissolves, as Chaney progressively becomes more wolfy. Jack Peirce is back with more makeup effects. Actually he recycles the effects he used for Werewolf In London (1935).

The transition from man to werewolf takes seconds in the film; in reality it took almost ten hours to apply the makeup. The film was highly successful. Chaney returned for three sequels, and a major role in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

I Married a Witch (1942) – René Clair

I Married a Witch is a terrific fusion of light screwball comedy, romance, fantasy, and a pinch of horror – a fizzy witch’s cauldron Halloween brew!  The singular Veronica Lake, a major star in the early forties before she ruined her career with alcohol, plays Jennifer, a witch who along with her warlock father, was burnt at the stake in Salem.  

Their ashes were buried under a big tree to imprison their spirits forever.  Several hundred years pass, until in 1942 their spirits are released after the tree is split by a bolt of lightening.  The spirits want to take revenge against Wallace Wooley, a governor candidate and descendent of the puritan who executed Jennifer and her father.

Jennifer’s father ends up creating a body for her (they are originally seen as white smoke) and she of course immediately falls in love with Wallace, after accidentally drinking her own love potion, creating an amusing love triangle with his shrewish spoiled fiancee Estelle Masterson (the great Susan Hayward).

I Married a Witch is a wonderful effortless romantic comedy for all ages, and great counter-programming during a Universal monster movie marathon.  By the way, the score is fantastic and was nominated for an Academy Award.

I Married a Witch was produced by the great American screwball comedy director Preston Sturgess, who left the film over creative differences.

Those who just can’t get enough fizzy romantic comedies about witchcraft should check out Griffin Dunne’s (who stars in An American Werewolf in London, which shows up later on this list) witty and just plain fun Practical Magic (1998).