"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 3 (The Wolf Man)

The Wolfman--a tragic victim of a werewolf's bite, marked with the sign of the pentagram. Endlessly throughout this series will you hear the familiar rhyme:

Even a man who is pure at heart

And says his prayers by night

May become a werewolf when the wolfsbane blooms

And the moon shines full and bright

I liked the first one in this series when I was younger, so let's see how this goes! 

(Part One of this Retrospective, and Part Two)

The Wolf Man (1941):

As time goes on we can see that there are tiers to the Universal Horror films--I would consider Son of Frankenstein as A-tier, The Ghost of Frankenstein as B-tier, and Bride of Frankenstein as WTF-tier. With The Wolf Man being another A-tier contender, it seems as if my previous suspicions of Universal were misplaced. I know what I have yet ahead of me, but fortunately this one is good enough to keep me feeling nice for awhile.

Larry Talbot is the prodigal son of a wealthy Welsh family. His father, Sir John Talbot, was grooming Larry's brother John Jr. for the position of running the House of Talbot, but unfortunately John the younger died in a hunting accident. Larry has returned home to learn the ways of tending to the old house. Using his father's telescope, Larry sees a beautiful woman, Gwen, and decides to go into town to be sort of creepy to her. Larry, played by Lon Chaney Jr., is charming but damn if he isn't creepy to Gwen by today's standards. Despite his shortcomings, Gwen begins to fall for him, and we can feel sympathetic when he is attacked by a wolf...actually a werewolf, a Romani man named Bela, played by Bela Lugosi. Larry clubs the werewolf to death with the wolf's head cane he bought from Gwen shop, but he is bitten, and soon, he inherits the curse of the werewolf. We follow Larry as he tries to both hide and solve his curse, before he turns on those closest to him, with the aid of Bela's mother Maleva.

The main tragedy of The Wolf Man is born from the fact that Larry is torn from the life he built for himself in America, and while this tear is based on obligation it still means that he is coming across an unexpected fortune. And yet the trip to obtain this shaky fortune leads him to the threshold of a terrible curse. Chaney does a good job of showing the progress of Larry's desperation--at the end, he is begging his father to lock him up in his room, like the animal he believes he's become. Sir John's refusal to do so leads him to tragedy as well: using the silver cane he bashes his son to death, only realizing the monster's identity when it is too late.

The Wolf Man feels like a legitimate movie, and it is a concise and well-plotted narrative. All of the major performances, and pretty much all of the minor ones, are well-done. Realizing that werewolf stories were not terribly popular prior to this movie's release--even taking the 1935 release of Universal's previous wolf-man effort, Werewolf of London--helps one realize how truly influential this movie was. It's tough to find faults in it, and while I won't watch it often, I'll probably reach for it more than most other films if I feel like a werewolf flick.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943):

Two grave robbers have heard tell of valuables that were buried with werewolf Larry Talbot. When they try to steal them they expose Larry's uncorrupted corpse to the light of the full moon, which brings him back from the dead. Of course, the curse of lycanthropy has not left him, and he seeks Maleva, the Romani woman from the previous film. She in turn leads him to the town that contains/borders Castle Frankenstein (variously called Frankenstein, and Vasaria, and basically any number of other names roughly equivalent to the number of Frankenstein films), where she hopes Ludwig Frankenstein will cure him. But Ludwig is dead, and the villagers do not hide that this is a blessing to them. All the same, Larry finds himself in the ice-caves under the ruins of Castle Frankenstein, where he also finds the Monster, trapped in ice. (Did Ludwig install a freezer unit that went rogue when the villagers dynamited the Castle? Why are there ice-caves down below? Were they scared of using the sulfur-pit trick again?) He frees him, assuming for some reason that the Creature can lead him to Frankenstein's supposed werewolf-cure. The Monster is now played by Bela Lugosi, though ironically there is no evidently of Ygor's persona surviving--I can't imagine that being frozen in ice will do a brain any good. While this is a bust Larry nonetheless learns there is another surviving Frankenstein, Elsa. We then have a musical number, because this movie is not very good. Finally Larry finds the notes of Frankenstein, but they are useless to him. It isn't too long before the scientist who chose to help him, Dr. Mannering, becomes fascinated by the Frankenstein Creature, and can't bring himself to destroy it, just like Ludwig Frankenstein. And with Larry still unable to control his transformations, it would seem we're speeding fast into a Monster Mash.

And yet this climax is, like almost everything leading up to it, flat and boring. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man repeats a lot of stuff we've seen before, and doesn't even have a relevant title. Still going with the idea that the filmmakers know Frankenstein is the scientist/family and not the Monster, yes, Larry does meet Frankenstein, but honestly Elsa is such a non-character that I just don't care--she does nothing to influence the plot and she's only barely teased as a love interest for Larry. I think I conveyed that Ghost of Frankenstein didn't strive to accomplish anything, or even entertain: I was unprepared for the sheer lack of depth that this movie would lay upon me. There's nothing charming or even comically bad here, just the checking-off of boxes: the stop-motion wolf-man transformation sequence, the Frankenstein Monster wrecking things, the cameos of mysterious Romani folk, the hateful villagers, the self-pitying from Larry. Despite not expecting the quality drop this early, I was still expecting exactly this sort of movie when I set out on this quest. It's a shame that The Wolf Man wasn't made earlier--while that would probably subtract from its present quality, it would mean at least that it got sequels that had a chance of being better than this. I've heard nothing but bad things about House of Frankenstein or House of Dracula, except from people who I really don't share film taste with at all, and so I suspect this is the beginning of the end.

In essence, nothing about Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man will entertain you unless you feel like you need more of the raw basics of The Wolf Man and the later Frankenstein films. To which I ask you, why don't you just rewatch those movies?

Weirdly, this movie is said to take place four years after The Wolf Man, meaning that film is actually set in the late 1930s. On a more mortifying note, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten that Elsa was the name of Wolf Frankenstein's wife, meaning that, yep, Wolf married a woman with the same name as his sister. Now, I'm sure that happens--I mean, some guys are going to have sisters and wives named, like, Mary--but suddenly Wolf's sudden embrace of the Frankenstein evil suddenly makes a bit more sense. The man has problems, dude!

House of Frankenstein (1944):

At least Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man gave us room to work up from. Trapped in a German prison are Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) and the hunchback Daniel (J. Carroll Naish, aka Dr. Durea from Dracula vs. Frankenstein). Dr. Niemann is a fan of Dr. Frankenstein, having gained his knowledge from his brother, who had been Frankenstein's assistant--they never specify if it's Fritz, Karl, or Ygor. He promises Daniel a new body, and after the two break jail they kill circus-master Bruno Lampini, with Niemann impersonating him. Lampini's death leaves the pair with a dangerous artifact--the skeleton of Dracula, staked through the heart. (Evidently Marya Zeleska didn't do such a good job of burning her father's body as she thought, unless these are the sun-bleached bones of Alucard.) When he's inevitably resurrected--now with the form of John Carradine rather than Bela Lugosi--he forms an alliance with Niemann: Niemann won't stake him, and Dracula will kill the scientists who scorned Niemann. Eventually, however, the village fights back, and Dracula is killed by sunlight before he can reach his coffin. Thus "part one" of the movies ends, and we follow Niemann and Daniel as they travel to Vasaria/Frankenstein/whatever the village from the Frankenstein movies is called. (In this film, Vasaria is a separate town from Frankenstein, when previously those were names for the same town! Doesn't that help clear things up?) Daniel falls in love with a girl named Ilonka, a thing which appears to be mutual despite his hump, while Niemann finds the ice caves under Castle Frankenstein, where both the Monster and Larry Talbot have washed up after falling off a cliff in the last movie, being frozen in ice. Sounds familiar? Also, seriously, where did those ice-caves come from? Anyway, Ilonka ditches Daniel for Larry, after he and the Monster are thawed out, and Niemann and Daniel set about reviving the Monster so that they can finish out Niemann's revenge. And I know this summary is long enough, but I need to describe the particulars of this plan. I'm far from the first to point out how shockingly, hilariously stupid this scheme is, but I will repeat it again so that I can hopefully further signal boost the sheer idiocy this movie veers into:

Niemann plans to trap the brain of one of his enemies in the body of the Frankenstein Monster. He then intends to transplant Larry's brain into the body of the other man he's kidnapped, so that that man will have the curse of lycanthropy. But...that just means that he'll have given one of his enemies a much larger, stronger body. And it also means that he'll just being giving Larry a different body. I mean, unless the Monster's body corrupts the brain in its head and that's why the Monster no longer acts like Ygor, whose brain it has...but that subverts the idea that the Monster is destructive because it has a criminal's brain, suggesting instead that it's the Monster's body which is evil...AH! They just didn't care! They. Just. Didn't. Care!

Anyway, Daniel tries to warn Ilonka that Larry is a werewolf, but she freaks out, claiming he's jealous, and calling him ugly. Jesus. This eventually leads to Larry falling in love with Ilonka, but he is mindful of the curse. Then another strange thing happens: Larry says that he must be killed by a silver bullet, which is obvious enough, but he also says that the bullet has to be fired by someone who loves him. That turns out to be what kills him, when Ilonka shoots Larry in self-defense, dying from werewolf-inflicted wounds in the process. A grieving Daniel strangles Niemann, failing to notice the escape of the Monster, which kills him and kidnaps Niemann. The Monster and Niemann escape the inevitable mob of villagers but don't get far, with both of them drowning in quicksand.

House of Frankenstein is better than I've made it sound, though I hope I've conveyed the fact that this movie has so much going on that it at least manages to evade being boring. There are a lot of subplots happening, quite a few of them well-fleshed out, with Daniel's tragic love for Ilonka being one of the best. We have a much better cast than we did last time, with everyone turning in a much better performances, save perhaps Lon Chaney. Sadly, Larry Talbot gets virtually nothing new added to his character, and all of the drama of The Wolf Man has burnt out at this point, so it crushes his character and any chance for an arc completely flat. All the same, Boris Karloff, J. Carroll Naish, and John Carradine turn in wonderful performances, which overcome the expected faults of the movie. These include the wince-worthy moment where an idiot side character expresses his wish to own a set of stocks to "keep the wife in line." (Fuck you, 1940s.) More notably, the movie also suffers from repeating things we've seen before, just with different characters. Instead of Ygor using the Frankenstein Monster as a hitman, here it's Dr. Niemann using Dracula as a hitman. Instead of Larry Talbot thawing the Monster from the ice-caves, it's Niemann thawing out the Monster and Larry. So it goes.

As I said, this movie is entertaining enough as a shitty movie that it's all pretty forgivable. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was not effective as a horror movie, but that was to be expected--the horror genre had been largely neutered by the 1940s. But it didn't really work as a monster rally either, and that's probably because it had to serve as the prototype for what this movie would become. Once they had the structure down, they were able to produce something better. I hope they don't squander what they learned...

Obligatory title nitpick: yes, the House of Frankenstein technically appears--if you count the worn-down, blown-up ruins of Castle Frankenstein as an appearance. Really, it's just those weird, weird ice-caves that show up. I can see them using this title to set up a sub-series within the series, the House of Whoever movies, but this is the first of the House movies to appear. Yet another thing they didn't care about, but which I don't care much about either.

House of Dracula (1945):

This is what I came for, yet I was still not prepared. I'm normally loath to reduce my reaction to a film something shallow and pithy, but let's keep this short--if nothing else so that I can get on with my life. House of Dracula sucks. There.

Dr. Edelmann has three peculiar patients: the first is the vampire Count Dracula (John Carradine), who wants to stop being a vampire; the second is Edelmann's own assistant, the hunchback Nina, who wants to stop being a hunchback; and the third is the werewolf Larry Talbot, who wants to stop being a werewolf. No, there is no explanation as to why Dracula and Larry are alive again. We get a wide variety of distractions, mostly consisting of Larry's boring Wolf Man rampages through the countryside. We slowly, slowly find out that Dracula doesn't want Dr. Edelmann to transfuse him his blood to cure his vampirism--he wants to transfuse his blood into Edelmann, so that he becomes this weird sunken-eyed creature who goes back and forth between good and evil. And it is evil!Edelmann who chooses to track down and revive the Frankenstein's Monster. More drawn-out events occur until Edelmann kills Dracula and Nina, Larry (who is cured of his lycanthropy at last) kills Edelmann, and the Monster, more inconsequential than ever, dies as Edelmann's house (which cannot in any way be called a House of Dracula) collapses on him.

I'm of the opinion that every show should be canceled after three seasons. Only rarely have I found exceptions to this: Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, or The Twilight Zone. Or Doctor Who, which shouldn't have been canceled after 26 seasons. House of Dracula feels like a show on Season Five when Season One wasn't really that great to begin with. We are so far away from the source material at this point that it's hard to sustain interest, and I think no one knew that better than Universal. They didn't really expect this movie to find an audience, I think, and God, does it show. I wrote few notes on the movie (and you can see how much effort I put into recapping the plot), and all I can really say is that at least the vampire effects in it are good. They have it so that John Carradine will drape himself in his cape and then be stop-replaced with a cartoon, which turns into a bat. Why, oh, why, could John Carradine not be in more of this movie? He doesn't give as good of a performance as he did last time around, but he's a great Dracula, which is why people still watch him in Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. 

Other thoughts: um. It was sad when Nina died? But I mean, we ultimately got nothing from her aside from "it's sad that she's a hunchback and doesn't want to be," and that she seemed nice. Er. Uh. Introducing the concept of vampire-blood making one evil is kind of cool? Too bad it ripped off Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde without actually porting those movies in. Um. Hm...God, I really have to reach...

This one broke me, I think: all I have is rambling. I just have one thing to say about it before I try to just forget about it: I really don't get why people would enjoy this one, even taking in the "excuse" of "well, duh, it's bad" that I keep seeing used for a lot of these later Universal pieces. It reuses the ending footage of The Ghost of Frankenstein, for God's sake! I attacked Dracula for assuming idiocy on behalf of the viewer but House of Dracula brings that to an even deeper low. And this isn't even the worst of it. Movies were in sorry shape indeed in 1945 if this was considered passable fodder--a thin, weak clone of a clone of a clone, shittier than a Monogram or Roger Corman movie, barely memorable, barely even bothering to tick the boxes like its predecessors. Now let's see what sort of atrocities 1948 will set upon me.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948): 

...o-kay. It wasn't that bad.

Chick (Abbott) and Wilbur (Costello) are two shipping workers who have been charged with delivering crates containing Dracula (Bela Lugosi for the second and final time) and the Frankenstein's Monster. The monsters come to life and escape, with Dracula having befriended the Monster so that he can make him into his slave. Aiding him in this is Dr. Sandra Mornay, Wilbur's girlfriend, who has a perfect brain to transplant into the Monster, one which is so stupid that it will have no choice but to obey Dracula--natch, she is talking about Wilbur, because Lou Costello characters are dumb! Along the way is Larry Talbot, who is a werewolf again (so much for that happy ending, House of Dracula!), and who is hunting Dracula and the Monster. It isn't long before Chick and Wilbur are unwitting captives of what Larry warns them is "the House of Dracula." By the end of it all, Larry and Dracula plunge into the ocean, which apparently kills them, while the Monster dies on a burning pier, but it's not over, because Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. Well. Not yet, technically, but spoiler alert, Vincent Price is in this movie and it is awesome.

Fortunately, I was spared a miserable experience by my own low expectations. I was primarily used to bad comedy of the '30s and '40s, namely the Ritz Brothers, and as a result I was expecting jokes that I'd heard from my 80-year-old customers at the grocery store on top of heaping loads unbearable slapstick. If anything because the ache of some of the comedy from previous Universal movies, I found this to be pretty funny. I wasn't rolling on the ground or anything--we're talking a hit every ten minutes, tops, and even then not a belly laugh. But Abbott and Costello have a strong sense of how comedy is supposed to work, even if their material doesn't do wonders for me, and God, it is a relief to see someone in a comedy film act like a goddamn comedian after all this time. Practicing and training things like timing, and body language, and delivery, can almost sell all of the material, even the obnoxious screaming--almost every comedian I've seen in the last two years should be taking notes. 

It's interesting to see how the comedy actually betters the horror that the movie occasionally reaches for. Most of this attempt at dramatic atmosphere is through Larry Talbot, who Lon Chaney gives more life than he has in the last two films--making him into sort of a supernatural bounty hunter, one with a curse, even, is a pretty nice step, so of course this is the very last film Larry appears in. Thus far, people have laughed in Larry's face over his request to be chained up whenever a full moon comes, but Bud and Lou are common folk! They're not as tight-assed as all those cops and scientists. They actually do it, though of course they undo it moments later and it is played for surprisingly effective laughs. The movie is not heavy on deconstruction in its parody, but it has its moments.

The monsters get much more to do, and more heft given to their actions, than in House of Dracula, making it a nicer end for the series than that film...though you have to ask how sad it is that a parody of the series served as a better conclusion than its last serious entry. It's as official of a line-up as you could ask for, with Lugosi returning as Dracula, and the Monster being played by Glenn Strange, as he has been since House of Frankenstein, thus giving him as many turns as the Monster as Karloff himself. The focus of course is more on shenanigans than the monsters fighting, and in case you didn't notice I sort of gave up on thematic analysis a few films ago. And I'm still not looking forward to the two remaining Abbott and Costello movies on my list, either, because those are notably closer to when they called it quits. For now, I get to pick up on what that ending leaves us with, and watch something good again. After all, the series isn't quite over--but you'll forgive me for failing to notice our next franchise.

Come back next time to see--or rather not see--the horrors and crimes of the Invisible Man!

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Image Source: Classic Horror Posters, Wikipedia, Universal Horror Wiki