"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 4 (The Invisible Man)

The Invisible Man, like Dracula and Frankenstein, is based off a novel, this time by H.G. Wells. That novel is not a horror novel per se but as we'll get to, the common assignment of The Invisible Man and its sequels to the horror genre is somewhat erroneous.

It's worth noting that the Invisible Man and Mummy franchises are only connected by the Abbott and Costello movies, which is a bit of cheating on my behalf as clearly Abbott and Costello do not play the same characters between films. Arguably, one could say that the Invisible Man's appearance at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein counts, but I'll get to that.

(Part One of this Retrospective, Part Two, Part Three)

The Invisible Man (1933):

Watching the first entry of a Universal series is always interesting because so often are one's expectations subverted. It's baffling to think about Dracula creating a franchise. Frankenstein is more believable in that regard, and that The Wolf Man received no sequels besides Larry Talbot's appearances in the monster rallies is flat out depressing. The Invisible Man and its sequels are movies which I've never been involved with, or even really that interested in, despite my enjoyment of the H.G. Wells novel which this movie is based on, but I have always heard that compared to flicks like The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Man is quite good and deserves its place in the "canon." My feelings are mixed, as I find it difficult to either praise or drag the film in the end.

We open in the middle of a snow-storm as a man covered head to toe in coats and bandages barges into the Lion's Head Inn. He quickly proves himself to be a generally rude bloke, violently demanding a room and total privacy. Once he is decently settled we come to a scene introducing Dr. Cranley and his daughter Flora, who is engaged to one of the doctor's students, Jack Griffin. Flora and Griffin's friend Dr. Kemp are concerned about Griffin, who has been missing for some time. Back at the inn, the verbal viciousness of the stranger--Griffin, of course--becomes physical and in a pique of frenzy Griffin reveals that a drug of his creation has made him invisible. When the townsfolk confront Griffin, exposing his invisibility, he loses all of his control, and tracks down and forces Kemp to become his assistant in an attempt to do nothing short of taking over the British Empire, if not the whole world! Griffin commits crimes both serious and silly for the rest of the movie's runtime until at last he is caught up with and slain.

This movie gets off on the wrong foot, even if it jumps back briefly now and again to the right one. Maybe it's because I've been essentially binging these films, but I am getting a little sick of the obsession with obnoxious and/or superstitious peasants. The fact that they are Silly Dickensian Brits in this venture doesn't help matters (though Racial Stereotype Romani Folk are not much better), nor does the fact that Screamy Lady from Bride of Frankenstein is among them, once again screaming in a way that not even the shallowest of shallow preteens would find amusing. So much of this interrupts the genuinely well-made moments; the shots of the tavern patrons laughing and talking with one another, playing darts, and drinking help us forget that there's a weirdo out in the snow, which helps us feel the shock the crowd does when said weirdo bursts in all dramatic-like. And while we are dazzled by the special effects--and we will be throughout the entirety of the film, because Jesus these are amazing--it's sad to see that they're put to use to Griffin playing ring around the rosy with the villagers while laughing like the Joker, which is hardly the peak of Mind-Warping Horror. It could be argued that since this is still early in the film this is meant to build up Griffin's descent into madness and true evil--but that brings to my main criticism, which is the movie's sometimes ludicrous tone problem.

Because later in the movie, Griffin is still being silly! Yes, he kills people, and there's even a reference to an offscreen "train incident" (Griffin talks early on about wrecking a train). But the murders pass so quickly, and the "train incident"'s offscreen nature make them seem almost insultingly hollow, moreso than even a lot of slasher films. It's impossible not to laugh at Griffin skipping down the street wearing naught but a pair of pants, terrorizing some old farm lady, because this is supposed to be happening in close sequence with the train incident, which, if it was the wrecking of a passenger train (this is why we should see it), probably killed dozens and injured hundreds in a best case scenario. If they couldn't present such horrible incidents in full onscreen because of censors or a limitation of budget, they should have cut them from the script.

That having been said, this movie is not a trainwreck. (Ha.) Despite my frustrations I tried watching it as a horror film, and when I found myself unable to solve the problem that I just don't find someone being invisible scary in and of itself, I tried to look for other ways the horror shines through. And I realized ultimately that despite the general glossing-over of the domestics about Griffin, like his relationship with Flora, we are meant to identify with Flora, her father, and Kemp. Griffin was important to them, and to see his decline from their eyes would be genuinely horrifying. The film spends precious little time with this angle, but it is deepened slightly by the fact that Dr. Cranley and Kemp determine that one of the key ingredients in Griffin's invisibility formula is monocaine, an extremely unstable drug pulled off the market years ago. In a sense, then, it's almost like watching a family grieve someone succumbing to meth addiction, except it's just one hit that's needed to start the irreversible descent into decay. Suggesting that Griffin was a relatively reasonable bloke before he became gripped by his experiments helps give him a tragic element--a victim of his own arrogance, definitely, if he was willing to use a drug that he seemingly knew might fuck him up, but a victim all the same.

That in and of itself should be enough to save the film from my hate, but as it's worth repeating, the special effects used in The Invisible Man should be mandatory studying at any film school for people thinking of working in the SFX field. If you can't do chroma keying or double exposure at least as good as these people got it in 1933, maybe think of doing something else. Adding to the awesome visual effects is Claude Rains' acting. He was superb as Sir John Talbot in The Wolf Man, but The Invisible Man is his movie. Not only does he physically act well in the scenes he appears but his voice is marvelous and sells the character perfectly. Some have said Rains should have done radio dramas, and what leads me to agree is the shocking closeness between his voice and that of Geoffrey Beevers, who played one of the versions of the Master on the original Doctor Who series, who reprises the role in some of Doctor Who's Big Finish audio dramas. Beevers' performance for Big Finish has made him one of my favorite actors ever, and so Rains' similarity to Beevers greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the film. While I can't love it wholeheartedly, this movie is good if nothing else for the Invisible Man himself. And given that he's, y'know, the title figure, that means the movie generally succeeds at what it was created to do.

The Invisible Man Returns (1940):

Like its predecessor, The Invisible Man Returns is also a mixed bag--a film full of moments both good and bad. Both fortunately and unfortunately, the good and bad elements are subdued, making the good moments no longer "great," and the bad elements no longer "really bad." This leaves us with a serviceable sci-fi thriller that will leave a lot of people asleep.

Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe (played by Vincent Price) is sentenced to hang for the death of his brother Michael. However, he's not lost quite yet--a secret injection of invisibility serum by Dr. Frank Griffin, Jack Griffin's younger brother, allows Geoffrey to sneak out of his cell, with the intent being to administer the cure before he goes permanently insane as Frank's brother did. The problem is: Frank hasn't invented the cure yet. Aiding them is Geoffrey's fiancee Helen, who is disgusted by Geoffrey's invisibility, which doesn't put her in good hands when the formula starts making him distrust those around him. Complicating matters further is the fact that Geoffrey soon forgets about the cure and becomes dangerously obsessed with using his newfound power to exact revenge for his sentence...as well as possibly take over the world. 

First the good: I jumped on how the real horror of The Invisible Man was not his unnatural appearance, or even his ability to get away with any crime, but his decline into madness. Rather than poke at such a theme, The Invisible Man Returns makes it the central conflict, and to good effect. It allows the film to do what any sequel should: expand on its predecessor. Speaking of things being used to good effect, the movie also toys around with the invisibility effects, which vary in degree of impressiveness. Like all Universal sequels, there's a lot of recycled material, but because even Universal wouldn't stoop so low as to steal scenes from a seven-year-old film, most of what we see is fresh. There's a great shot where a cop literally smokes Geoffrey out with his cigar, with the smoke pooling around the outline of his invisible body. Similarly, the lengthy sequence where Geoffrey bedevils a thug to extract the identity of the real murderer does make the film at least somewhat worth it. Plus, they even get around the inevitable nudity jokes about an Invisible Man (who obviously can't wear clothes if he wants to be invisible), which are pretty bold for what I've seen from '40s films. That's not to say that they're really that controversial or funny.

What's interesting to me about The Invisible Man Returns is that it shows to me why the Invisible Man, despite having five films to his credit by the time of the making of House of Frankenstein, never showed up in any of the monster rallies. While the original film was played for horror, this one works much better as a revenge thriller. I suspect we'll see the full blossoming of this assertion in Invisible Agent, which as far as I know makes no effort to work as a horror film at all.

Obligatory title nitpick: the Invisible Man does not Return in this film, the original one, anyway. He is still dead, and will be for the remainder of the films. Meaning it will presumably be difficult for him to get Revenge in four years too!

Obligatory continuity nitpick: who is the Invisible Man at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein? The fact that he is voiced by Vincent Price seems to suggest that he is Geoffrey Radcliffe, but--spoiler alert--Geoffrey is cured of his invisibility at the end of this film so he can have a happy ending, and one would presume the pain invisibility inflicted on him would make him unwilling to become invisible again just to torment two bunglers! Ignoring a silly Real World explanation like, "Vincent Price was probably the most convenient ex-Invisible Man to put in the cameo and they were also probably not worried about continuity in a comedy film," we can either presume that Geoffrey had a relapse and went crazy again, choosing to fuck with two people he never met, or this is the Invisible Man of The Invisible Man's Revenge impersonating the voice of his predecessor.

The Invisible Woman (1940):

...honestly, what the fuck?

If The Invisible Man started on the wrong foot, then The Invisible Woman had the proper foot amputated. We open with an atrociously stupid sequence of stiff slapstick hijinks with a butler which you'll swiftly notice become extremely awkward if you cover your ears to drown out the ostensibly whacky music. This long-suffering butler (whose actor cannot joke to save his life), works for Dick Russell, playboy extraordinaire. Russell has wasted his fortune on girls and booze, but also on bankrolling/investing in a scientist named Professor Gibbs, who believes he has discovered the secret of invisibility. (There's no mention of the Griffins, meaning this movie shares continuity merely by the title.) After introducing Russell to be our main character we ditch him almost entirely to follow Gibbs as he recruits a model named Kitty Carroll to be our titular Invisible Woman. Both Kitty and Gibbs use her invisibility for a variety of ends, including taking revenge on "Growly Growley," Kitty's abusive boss, and thwarting a mobster plot to steal and sell the invisibility formula. During this time we get supposedly funny invisibility gags that we've seen before, always crowned with repetitious and dull jokes that boil down to "oh my god she is invisible." These are broken up by a new type of invisibility scene--the sexy invisibility scene! Yeah, you never got to see Claude Rains or Vincent Price try on pantyhose while invisible. This sort of sleaziness is the kind I'd expect from a Doris Wishman film, not a fucking 1940s Invisible Man movie. Dick Russell comes back to the movie so that we can shove a romance plot into this and Jesus Christ just let it end. I can't even get into this movie's climax, which involves a callback to a scene which reveals the invisibility formula has a negative reaction with alcohol. Somehow this leads to--I think--a twist where Kitty can become invisible whenever she gets drunk, which helps her regain invisibility after being caught by the mobsters. And this leads into an even dumber ending involving an invisible baby and OH MY GOD

Bereft of nearly any redeeming quality (containing not a single joke that did anything more that slightly alter my breathing rhythm), The Invisible Woman is hopefully the worst Invisible Man movie of the bunch, and easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. I'm not kidding here, folks--this movie was torture. For comparison, two of my other least favorite movies are Night of Horror, a movie in which virtually nothing happens, and Humongous, a movie which spends 90% of the visual space of its runtime in total pitch blackness. Both of those movies, however, are merely boring, whereas this one is offensive. Though it contains significantly less sexism than I was expected, and never gets racist, ableist, homophobic, or generally hateful or meanspirited, it is so unspeakably dumb and lazy that it shames even Dracula. And at times, it contains the boredom of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Don't get a movie that can do both. Boredom plus lazy, stupid comedy is a death sentence for a film in my judgment. There's no use telling me "it was another time" as far as the comedy is concerned: I've seen enough movies to know that this sort of shit would be dated and flat even when it was released. Universal spent nearly $300,000 on this in 1940, which comes out to about $5,000,000 today. Not a single fucking penny of that was justified. I apologize for being brief with the review for The Invisible Woman, but my desire to never remember this film's existence leads me to such brevity; I would say that one would have to watch it for oneself to understand just how bad this movie's plot, acting, and comedy are, but no. Never, ever watch this lousy excuse for a movie.

Invisible Agent (1942):

I was sweating when I started Invisible Agent, fearing a repeat of its predecessor. I couldn't imagine them trying to do something that stupid twice, but mercifully, Invisible Agent is only a comedy in that it is a World War II propaganda film, which has obligatory funny bits leveled against Nazis. While it generally stays within the propaganda mold, being flat but occasionally entertaining, and only sometimes annoying, it doubles in its own way as a superhero film, making it at the very least a fun way to spend eighty minutes.

We open to an American city, in the print shop of Frank Raymond, ne Griffin--nephew, son, or grandson of "Frank Griffin Sr." (The movie itself expresses ambiguity in this relationship, as if unsure how much time has passed since The Invisible Man Returns.) A group of Nazis, led by Peter Lorre (who seems to be intended to be Japanese, reflecting his playing of detective Mr. Moto), confront Griffin Jr. and demand the location of the invisibility formula. He manages to overcome them and escape, and the incident causes the U.S. government to urge Frank to give them the formula, in case they need it for an emergency. "There's no emergency that could necessitate such a thing," Frank assures them, but then, without warning--Pearl Harbor! Suddenly Frank is the first man to sign up for the invisibility program, and he becomes the Invisible Agent. From there we see him fight and sneak his way into Germany, where he befriends Maria Sorenson, wife of a Nazi officer, who is nonetheless opposed to the Nazis. Maria is having several key Nazi officers over for dinner, and Frank takes this as an opportunity to spy on them, and stop some of their schemes.

Really, it was cathartic to get a film of this quality after one as awful as The Invisible Woman. While it's not great--it's a propaganda film, after all--it still manages to hold one's attention. Jon Hall does a good job as Frank Raymond/Griffin, so it will be fun for him to come back, albeit as a different character, in The Invisible Man's Revenge. Peter Lorre holds up his reputation--this is my first movie with him and it was a good show of his talents. He manages to give a relatively dignified white-guy-as-Asian-guy performance by 1940s standards--his natural features made it unnecessary to put him in the usual yellowface makeup of the time, and he doesn't speak with an affected accent, nor does he speak in broken English. The only thing that happens that's stereotypical is when he commits seppuku, but even then, Japanese soldiers and agents did commit seppuku during World War II. The performance he gives, especially in the opening scene, comes across sometimes as something akin to if Marlon Brando showed up in a Bert I. Gordon film. Kinda nice when it's not just stiff guys in suits reciting lines at each other, isn't it? The pants of nearly everyone within five hundred miles of Lorre come off, because he acts them off of those people. I should actually see one of his good movies, I suppose.

Rest assured, the bulk of Invisible Agent is mostly stiff people in various tight clothes reciting lines at each other. It doesn't matter--there's not poorly framed butler slapstick! Joking aside, there are some interesting thematic things of note here. Namely, the only people who end up viewing invisibility as a bad, scary thing as the bad guys. When Frank meets Germans who aren't sympathetic to the Nazis, they call his invisibility wonderful. What's more is that Frank Griffin Jr. was able to work out the old insanity-causing kinks in his forefathers' formulae. This really cements my suspicion that the Invisible Man films are only horror films by distorted reputation only--they are sci-fi thrillers, when they aren't diving into the horrific deeps of humor. Invisible Agent is especially interesting because it shows a Griffin taking back the evil of his predecessors and making it into a force of good. Invisible Men before him wanted to become dictators, but he uses their means to crush dictators. Despite its overall ordinariness, Invisible Agent may resonate with modern viewers most strongly, least of all because of the ongoing popularity of superhero films. After all, would a great deal of us not use the power of invisibility, if we had it, to deck Nazis in the face? Now more than ever do we need the work of Dr. Griffin...

The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944):

We have one more look back at a serious entry in the Invisible Man series before returning to comic relief. I have hopes that Abbott and Costello will be at least a little better than Kitty Carroll and Professor Gibbs, even if I still proceed with trepidation.

On a chilly night, a rude, disturbed man comes into an old tailor shop to buy a suit and hat. He seems paranoid, claiming he doesn't want to be spied on--though he regains control of himself. When he leaves, the tailor goes through his pockets, finding a newspaper article identifying his customer as Robert Griffin, an escaped mental patient! However, Griffin doesn't appear overly crazy, or at least, he has good reasons for his madness: he is a victim of his old friends, Jasper and Irene, who screwed him out of a fortune in diamonds in Africa a few years ago, by knocking him over the head sending him to the mental institution. In doing so, they also cut him off from his girlfriend, their daughter Julie. After nearly drowning and being saved by an annoying comic relief hobo named Herbert, Griffin finds himself in the strange company of Dr. Peter Drury (John Carradine) who wants to turn a man invisible to become famous--he's already succeeded with a parrot and a dog. Griffin agrees, and when the formula succeeds, he forces Jasper to sign over all of his property to him, and tries to interfere in Julie's new relationship with reporter Mark Foster. When it transpires that the only way to become visible again is with a full-body blood transfusion, he drains Drury's blood, despite the doctor's warning that he will lose his visibility again after a short while. When Herbert learns that Griffin has regained visibility he demands money, but Griffin abuses him before finally paying him off. This turns out to be a eucatastrophe of Tolkienesque proportions when Herbert (the beaten, discarded Gollum of this story, allowed to live against his would-be killer's better judgment) helps stop Griffin from stealing Mark's blood when his invisibility fails again. Griffin can't be allowed to live for his hubris and thus Drury's dog tears his throat out. The moral seems to be that this was the intervention of God himself...oh, we are so far from Claude Rains.

The Invisible Man's Revenge is...disappointing. By now the wonder of invisibility effects have worn off and they are used so sparingly and weakly here that they fail to hold our attention. The movie drags, and it doesn't help that one of the things it borrows from its progenitor is the breaking of tone. Both The Invisible Man and its fourth sequel will show us (or more usually tell us about) the power of invisibility used for mayhem and murder, and then show us (more usually than telling us about) the power of invisibility used for practical jokes and other such flimsy forms of comic relief. There's very little gravity in the film to begin with due to its plodding pace, and when these whiplash moments break it up it derails the movie more and more, until the "he tampered in God's domain" ending feels like a slap in the face. If it had been twenty minutes shorter and faster, we would have something on par at least with The Invisible Man Returns. I can say at least that I didn't hate the film, but it was a mediocre effort at best, a sign that Universal was stuck in the rut. It's too bad that they couldn't inject it with some of the spare craziness from House of Frankenstein two doors over.

I don't know what else to say. A member of the Griffin family becomes invisible and takes revenge on those who wronged him. There is nothing to add to that, save for the odd fact that Robert is not overtly connected to the Griffin family we've been generally following so far. In fact, it's specified that he has no family, which I presume means that if he is a relative, Frank Raymond was killed by the Nazis or something. So another Griffin from a good movie bites the dust. C'est la vie...speaking of Frank Raymond, I guess I could also add that Jon Hall does a decent job in this one. He is much better in Invisible Agent as a cocky, invincible Invisible Man--vengeful, sinister Robert Griffin is a bit beyond his acting range. Perhaps if they had ever decided to try for something like House of the Invisible Man or The Invisible Man's Ghost or whatever, we could have seen him try again.

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951): 

And so the largely unpredictable Invisible Man series draws to a close with its obligatory comedy nightcap. My fears were unjustified--this is by far no repeat of The Invisible Woman. While Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man will slip out of my memory in a matter of days, if not hours, it still has a few moments that make it salvageable.

Bud and Lou's characters, this time, are named Bud and Lou. They are recent graduates of a prestigious detective agency and soon open their own practice--their first client is escaped boxer Tommy Nelson, accused of murdering his manager. With the help of the detectives Tommy reunites with his fiancee Helen (the second love interest named Helen featured in the series now) and her uncle, Dr. Gray; the doctor has recreated Jack Griffin's invisibility serum, insanity side effects and all, and Tommy intends to use it to find the real murder. Though they're initially interested in the reward offered for Tommy's capture, they soon side with the Invisible Man, leading inevitably to Lou's own career as a boxer, and a match with the presciently-named champion Rocky. Of course, all is mended--the real killer is caught, and Tommy is made visible again via blood transplant from Lou, who gains some of the invisibility serum in term. Except the serum wears on and off again at random, and also apparently turns his legs around backwards, condemning him to a long life of great pain and inconvenience. Finis.

Pffft...a better title would be Abbott and Costello Meet an Invisible Man. What a ripoff--no Claude Rains, no Vincent Price, not even Jon Hall! And for what lousy excuse, that they actually had careers that were leading them places in a way totally unlike Abbott and Costello? I kid. While it's definitely a step down from Meet Frankenstein, this movie still has a few laughs, even if it's clear that Bud and Lou are sort of going through the motions at this point. Plus the two apparently lack some of their former mobility--shots of Lou crawling under things are sped up, and it's hard to tell if they're trying to play the effect for laughs or if Lou Costello legitimately couldn't crawl at a reasonable speed at his age. I can't be too harsh, though. We'll see where I stand when I see the pair again in four years' time...

Most of what I laughed at was Abbott and Costello's mimery when it to interacting with the invisibility man. All the effect bits with floating books and cigarettes and whatnot is hat eighteen years old by this point, but once again, the professionalism of the pair sells a lot of gags that The Invisible Woman absolutely couldn't. Similarly--and tellingly--the puns and one-liners based around eyes and seeing and not seeing and how weird and shocking invisibility is and all that brainless, skim-at-the-top horseshit that Invisible Woman tried to foist on us is kept to a distinct minimum. Though they pushed their way through a lot of awful scripts in their time, it seems as if Costello and Abbott had at least some standards.

It's also interesting to me that this movie maintains actual continuity. Not only do they mention Jack Griffin by name, but they show a picture of Claude Rains to back this up! This is actually meant to be a sequel to the 1933 film, while Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein seemed to operate in its own universe, barely mentioning any plot details from the original Dracula and Frankenstein (certainly nothing of the sequels) and restoring Larry Talbot's lycanthropy after it was removed in the film that came before. I suppose, though, that fewer people would have seen The Invisible Man, while Frankenstein and Dracula were beloved and memorized the world over. There would be greater need to establish the concept before getting on with the whackiness.

Again, I will not remember this movie or any of its scenes or lines in just a little while, and it's not a worthy end to the series, but it is relatively inoffensive and it did not overly bore me (even if I have to dock points for all the time we have to spend looking at 45-year-old Lou Costello's nearly nude body). Once more I will settle for pale mediocrity to escape the sad depths that this series fell to.

Next time, we wrap things up once and for all with a look back at the Mummy!

---

Image Sources: Wikipedia, Classic Movie Posters, Universal Horror Wiki

"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

"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 2 (Frankenstein)

We continue our look back at the Universal Horror franchise with what may be the most famous movie monster of all time, the Monster of Frankenstein. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley, just as Dracula was adapted from Bram Stoker's novel, Frankenstein is usually seen as a lightning-charged morality play on the dangers of tampering in God's domain. How does it and its sequels hold up after all this time?

(If you didn't let Dracula suck your blood with Part One of this Retrospective, click here!)

Frankenstein (1931):

Tastes do change. I had only one thought on Frankenstein when I first watched it as a young'un: zzzzz. But four movies in, and this is the most fascinating I've seen so far. Frankenstein is not perfect, but it's much easier to understand why this one is hailed as a classic, while Dracula leaves me scratching my head. Not only does Frankenstein have superior character development and story momentum than the Dracula series, but it's shot better and its world feels more immersive. It's astonishing to consider that the two films were made in the same year, when one is so animated and the other so lifeless.

We open with a scene where a completely unnecessary narrator gets up on stage and alerts us that the ensuing movie will be strange beyond our comprehension, weird and terrible, blah, blah. "It might even horrify you!" he warns us. We then go to a cemetery, where Dr. Henry Frankenstein and his hunchback assistant Fritz creep on a cemetery, intending to steal the body for an as-yet-unknown reason. The film takes merciful time in unfolding the awful truth, that the two are stitching together body parts to make a new body, upon which Frankenstein will endow life. Unfortunately, when Fritz is given the task of finding a brain for the creature, he steals the brain of a criminal rather than a healthy person. (Even into the 1930s it was still generally believed that there was a physical difference in the structure of a criminal's brain compared to a non-criminal's. Now we know that's not really the case.) Frankenstein doesn't learn he's using an abnormal brain until later, and before the horrified eyes of his professor Dr. Waldman, fiancee Elizabeth, and best man Victor, he brings life to the body. Of course, it doesn't take long before Frankenstein loses control of his creature, and Fritz is killed. It's decided the creature must be killed, but that's before it escapes. And thus the famous rampage of the Monster begins...

Rewatching Frankenstein surprised me, as I remembered it being much more sympathetic to the titular character and much crueler to the Monster. Yet much like the tragic novel the film is based on, this movie does a good job of establishing that Frankenstein is the Monster. When we first meet the Creature he is rather innocent, craving the warmth of the sun and fearing fire. There is a suggestion that he is not bound to his abnormal brain and that he could be taught humanity--hell, the sequel to the film shows that he can learn to speak, so what's to say he's nothing other than a child in an adult's body, in need of nurturing? Yes, his stiff motions and crude vocalizations make him hard to relate to, but the Creature is more relatable than Fritz or Frankenstein, who whip the Creature and scare him with fire. Yes, the Creature kills a child, but it is by accident, and he is clearly horrified by the act of doing so. Finishing out the tragedy is the ending, where the Monster is killed by nothing short of his worst fear, fire. He screams not in anger or vengeance at the mob that burns the windmill he's trapped in, but in terror. As in the book, he's a Monster only in name, a victim of a heartless creator and a misunderstanding mankind.

Which makes it odd when the producers go out of their way to make Frankenstein sympathetic. I assume this was born out of a desire to give the audience a human character to follow and be comfortable with. He's still an asshole, but he's far from the self-pitying sociopath of Mary Shelley's original novel. The character of Frankenstein then becomes inconsistent from one half of the film to the next--they set him up first a grave robber, obsessed with his own experiments and prideful enough to believe himself to be equivalent to God. But in the second half, we're supposed to care for him because, well, he's Elizabeth husband-to-be and we're supposed to care for her, and also, we're supposed to care because he feels guilty about what he's done. But intriguingly, we get the impression that Frankenstein never would have started the cycle of abuse leading to the Monster seeking revenge on him if he had never learned that the Creature had an abnormal brain, with this tidbit having been passed on by his unwanted friends. If only he had been given the isolation he wanted, and had the chance to mold the Creature in his own image fully, things may have been different. Even if we also get the impression that, like his literary counterpart, Frankenstein is way more concerned with the glory of creating life than parenting, failing to understand that creating a life involves giving that life good chances in the world as well.

Making Frankenstein the hero also casts some doubt on the commonly-perceived theme that one must not tamper in God's domain...many forget that that idiom comes not from Frankenstein, but Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster! Oh, yes, it would have been controversial to include the infamous "Now I know what it's like to be God!" in a 1931 film--that's why it was censored in its original theatrical cut and many cuts released in the years that followed. But by a variety of factors--whether it be the secularization of Western culture over the last eight decades or the popularization of the Mad Scientist as a fun and amusing stock character, whose menace has become cliche--Frankenstein has lost some of his horror as time has gone on. He is still a grotesque figure, but I don't fear him because he's blasphemous; I fear him because he's cold, refusing to put heart outside of manic passion into his work, and of course also because he digs up and stitches together corpses for a living. That will always be creepy.

Perhaps there's a reason to fear the science of Frankenstein after all, however, even if you're not frightened by science encroaching on God, because there's a weird prescient thing in here that I haven't heard other people comment on before. Yes, the Creature is animated by electricity, but also a ray: a ray which Frankenstein says is beyond the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. The Frankenstein's Monster is given life by gamma radiation! Certainly the movie monsters of the 1950s were derived from seeing the horror of atomic weapons in action, but it's amazing to me that Frankenstein managed to slip it in first, fourteen years before Hiroshima. History works in mysterious ways...

Bride of Frankenstein (1935):

What the hell is this? No, seriously. I daren't hope for any of the later ones to be this weird--Bride of Frankenstein is one of the most baffling and stupid movies I've seen in my whole life, which means that it was a thoroughly entertaining sit.

Bride of Frankenstein begins on a bad note, with an introduction even more ludicrous than the one at the beginning of Frankenstein. Instead of a guy on a stage, we're suddenly trapped in that old house where Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron were trapped on the night of that fateful storm, wherein Mary wrote Frankenstein and essentially created science fiction. Lord Byron, portrayed as the gayest aristocrat set to film since A Clockwork Blue got to Louis XVI,  rolls his r's like Sylvester McCoy on cocaine as we see a jarringly bad montage of scenes from Frankenstein, as he recounts Shelley's story. Shelley says that the story is not yet ended, and thus we reach the actual story. We begin where the first movie left off--with the burnt windmill. Here we are subjected to the movie's massive tonal issues as we see a prolonged sequence of the villagers bickering with acting so bad that I can't tell if this is comic relief or not. Then, we cut to the father of the little girl drowned by the Creature in the first film, as he decides to venture into the ruins of the mill. This leads to a horror sequence where he falls into the dark watery depths of the building, where he is drowned just as his daughter was, by the same thing that killed her. From there we follow more comic relief segments laden with astonishingly bad acting, leading up to Henry Frankenstein (not dead, surprisingly) meeting the sinister Dr. Pretorius, who begins to encourage Frankenstein to return to his experiments and create a Bride for the Monster. He shows that he's an even greater master of science than Frankenstein, in an extremely bizarre sequence where he shows some miniature comic-relief homunculi, which he has grown "as Nature has...from Seed." (So he or someone else jerked off into some jars, apparently.) As this happens we see many long vignettes of varying tones featuring the Monster prowling through the countryside. Eventually Pretorius and the Monster join forces to bring Frankenstein's talents once more into practice. Soon the Bride of Frankenstein('s Monster) is complete, but is a match made in Heaven...or Hell?

Imagine if the sequel to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was Troll, or perhaps more properly, a version of Troll that has some scenes cut in from Troll 2. Bride of Frankenstein is such a wildly broken movie that it's hard to believe it was four years in the making, let alone four months. Not only does it have absolutely no sense of where to place comic relief, it doesn't provide nearly enough material for the comedy to relieve us from anything. Not even the plot makes sense: in the beginning, when he's first recovering, Henry tells Elizabeth that he wishes his experiments could have gone even further--he was sure he could even find the secret of eternal life. But later, he begs Pretorius not to force him into continuing his work. Perhaps it's meant to be that Elizabeth's hammy reaction to Frankenstein's persistence changed his heart but I don't think that was properly explained. Never before have I seen such a jarring fusion of what is seemingly two different narratives, short of a Godfrey Ho movie. Bride of Frankenstein is a sequel that's also a parody that's plagued with the same cloning of scenes that Dracula's Daughter experiences, only brought to frivolous extremes. It's like if H.G. Lewis was put in charge of sequelizing the 1931 film thirty years too late.

If it weren't for the fact that much of it is padding, I would be able to appreciate Bride as a whole based solely on its entertaining parts. Genuinely good moments include the famous scene where the Monster learns to speak (and smoke cigars) from a blind hermit; and literally everything with Pretorius is fun. (Curiously, there is a convincing argument that Pretorius is written as gay. That makes two gay villains in sequels to Universal franchise-starters.) But other than that, we are forced to follow one of the ladies of the angry mob who screams shrilly at everything like an Invader Zim fan finding Hot Topic for the first time. You are begging for her death at the end of this movie, and it never comes. And again, there is much padding. Long shots of the Monster running across forest sets, or coming across random villagers who make much ado about him. It's a long 75 minutes, somehow. 

I don't know. This movie feels like something that should have never been released, and you know me--I love that stuff. I can pretend that this is not related to the other Universal movies and take it in a trash film. If you come here expecting a serious sequel to Frankenstein, however, you are as shit out of luck as one can get in this world.

Son of Frankenstein (1939):

It's alive! This movie is alive! It has energy and passion for what it's doing and by God it's actually worth watching.

Henry and Elizabeth Frankenstein had a son, the ominously-named Wolf Frankenstein. Wolf, along with his wife Elsa and son Peter, have decided to move into the old Frankenstein House, neighboring the blow-up watchtower that once served as his father's lab. The entire village hates all the descendants of Frankenstein, but Wolf is undeterred. There's sort of a Let Me Be Evil moment in Wolf's decision, when presented the opportunity, to continue to his father's work--a grave-robbing hunchbacked survivor of a hanging named Ygor (played by Bela Lugosi) leads him to the comatose remains of the Creature, in the ruins of the Frankenstein family tomb, which is weirdly located under the wrecked laboratory. Evidently the Creature was merely buried by the explosion from the end of the previous film. He and Ygor are friends, building on the friendship between the blind man and the Monster seen before. But in this case, it's clear that Ygor sees the Monster as less than equal, taking advantage of his apparently-scrambled brains to use him as a mindless hitman against those who hanged him. (Brain damage is my explanation for why the Creature suddenly can't talk anymore.) Tensions boil over until Wolf kills Ygor, coming to his senses when the Monster kidnaps his son, to throw him into a sulfur pit just as he threw the little girl into the lake. When we conclude, we get our happy ending, with it seeming as though the curse of Frankenstein is over at last.

There are some great scenes in this movie. One of the early ones is a part where Wolf is getting a tour of Castle Frankenstein, and he is introduced to a portrait of his father (who is painted to at least dimly resemble Colin Clive, Henry Frankenstein's actor). Wolf and the butler talk about how it was lightning which gave the power of life to Wolf's father, even as a tremendously violent thunderstorm goes on outside. Similarly, there's the subplot involving the movie's de facto protagonist, Inspector Krogh. Krogh you may remember from Young Frankenstein, which most closely parodies this movie over the first two--he's the one-armed policeman! Krogh's arm was torn off by the Monster when he was a child, ruining his aspirations of becoming a General. When young Peter Frankenstein is telling the story of how the Monster visits him at night, he refers to the Monster grabbing his arm--Krogh, who is protective of Wolf's son, winces at the thought of it, even though the Monster clearly didn't go as far as it did with Krogh. There's depth to this movie which the other five I've reviewed thus far lack. I have little to say about this one save that it actually feels like a studio movie which justified its budget. I encourage you to check it out as a good movie, unlike Bride of Frankenstein which should be watched for how hideous it is.

As far as continuity, then: assuming Wolf Frankenstein to be in his mid-thirties, and the events of the film to be set near to when it was shot, Frankenstein must be set in the early 1900s. This is ignoring the fact that that shitty opening to Bride of Frankenstein has Mary Shelley telling the story of the first film, and unless in this reality she set her story in the future that means the events probably took place in the late 1790s. So, that's non-canon. It's interesting then, that both Son of Frankenstein and Son of Dracula retcon the placement of their first films to the late 19th or early 20th Centuries.

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942):

I wrote my statement about the lifting of the curse of Frankenstein in the review for the previous flick totally unaware that the opening lines of this movie were, "There is a curse upon this village! The curse of Frankenstein!" No, Universal, The Curse of Frankenstein gets made by another company. And from what I've heard, Hammer's Frankenstein movies would be relief from this thing. The Ghost of Frankenstein was not made with the yearning for visual spectacle like Dracula, nor as an authentic attempt at horror like Frankenstein. It wasn't really made with anything in mind, even if it still has some moments of note.

The movie opens with angry villagers feeling like their recent crop failures and deformed births and whatnot are caused by the taint the Frankenstein family left on the land. They believe that this is also the fault of Ygor, who survived being shot and now lives in a hollow space under the sulfur pit that the Creature fell into (!). Ygor helps free the Monster from the hardened sulfur before the villagers blow up Castle Frankenstein--when the Monster is rejuvenated by lightning, he takes it to gain further strength with the assistance of Wolf's brother Ludwig. In the process the Creature is arrested (!) and put on trial (!!). But it's not long before Ludwig gains possession of the Monster, and not long after then when he is haunted by the titular Ghost of Frankenstein (who doesn't even sort of resemble Colin Clive!). The illusory Frankenstein tells his son that the Monster was evil because of its criminal brain--because fuck my analysis, apparently--which gives Ludwig the notion that he should give the Creature a brain transplant, so that Henry's work is not wasted. Ygor desires to be free of his damaged body, and also to be united with his "friend" forever, so he wants his brain to be the one occupying the Monster. Would it be a proper horror movie without that desire coming true? Except Ygor didn't factor on what would happen if he and the Monster had a different blood type...

The Ghost of Frankenstein feels rather like a lot of the monster movies that would be made in the '50s and early '60s, by such folk as Roger Corman. While Son of Frankenstein was grand opera, Ghost of Frankenstein is an episode of Beverly Hillbillies. It's a disappointing contrast but by merit of being relatively unoffensive, albeit pretty dumb, it's simply forgettable. Especially forgettable is Lon Chaney Jr.'s turn at playing the Monster, with Boris Karloff never returning to the role after Son. He legitimately spends most of the film standing around with a mild grimace, staring into space and doing nothing. Man, it's good that he picked up a new brain--compared to what we've seen before, the Monster is borderline lobotomized. Chaney's performance is an avatar of the film itself, which is generally just boring.

That's not to say that the screenwriters inserted some fun bits here and there, if anything to keep themselves going. Probably the most notable scene I remember features the trial of the Monster, where the judge--who's ten-year-old daughter was kidnapped by the Monster but returned safely due to her befriending him--argues about how he refuses to let the court use his daughter to try to talk to the Monster. As he goes on and on, his daughter goes up to the Monster and begins questioning him herself, rendering him speechless. It provoked a little bit of a laugh out of me. As Stockholm Syndrome set in for the Dracula series, however, so too does it seem to be for the Frankenstein series. Ghost of Frankenstein is hardly great and it can't stand on its own, but it was not as bad as I expected.

Continuity time: Ygor mentions having worked with Henry Frankenstein, which is odd, because Henry only worked with three assistants: Fritz, Bride's Fritz stand-in Karl, and Ludwig, also from Bride (did Henry name his son after his fellow graverobber?). Fritz was a hunchback before his neck was broken, and that was the fault of the Creature, not a mob of angry villagers. Karl was a hunchback previously as well and was also killed by the monster. So presumably Ygor is the little-seen Ludwig? Who knows...the filmmakers probably didn't care nearly as much as I do. This movie also technically marks the death of the original Frankenstein's Monster--the body still lives, but the brain of the creature from here on out is that of Ygor. I'll remember that, but will the filmmakers...?

Next time, the moon shines full and bright and the wolfsbane blooms, with the Wolf Man! Featuring the ends proper of the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises with the monster rally films.

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

"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 1 (Dracula)

In my looks at trash films from the '30s and '40s, I've made references to the Universal Horror movies, namely to kick them around a lot. But as I get older in this world and feel a need for literary integrity, even on a forlorn blog such as Ye Humble A-List, I feel like I should start making more connections in my writing and displaying more honesty with my work as a whole. As a result, I should probably stop kicking around movies that I haven't seen in a long time, or haven't seen in their entirety, especially when it's a relatively broad franchise as Universal Monsters. In fact, starting today and continuing over the next four days, I'll be taking a look no less than 24 films--no easy feat, even while being six shy of the 30 I looked at in last year's Godzilla Retrospective. Many of these films I haven't seen since I was a kid--others I haven't seen at all. Hopefully we'll find some gems among what largely consists of bad memories for me. So without any further ado, let's start with the first of the first: Dracula.

Dracula (1931):

I always hated Dracula, ever since I was a child. I think I hated Frankenstein more simply because I found the monster to be completely uninteresting. He lacked the admittedly-thin charisma of Count Dracula and so that film was just a little better. Watching Dracula again now confirms that I wasn't entirely wrong in that hatred: at the very least I can't understand why people would rank this higher than, well, most of the later adaptations of Bram Stoker's novel, including and especially Dracula vs. Frankenstein. While the film spends a lot more time, money, and effort on establishing setting and atmosphere compared to the films that followed, it can't escape the fact that it is a flat and dull thing even compared to Stoker's original tome. A lot of the mechanisms used to film it are stodgy and tired by today's standards, and there is little artistic merit to the film outside of visual spectacle.

We open with a real estate agent named Renfield making the knee-knocking journey up Borgo Pass, Transylvania to Castle Dracula. In an atmospheric scene reminiscent in some ways of the shots of isolated peasantry in The Witches' Mountain, we see the villagers express their hammy horror over the prospect of voyage there. Once he is there we learn that its inhabitant, the sinister Count Dracula, has bought Carfax Abbey in England, and once Renfield signs over the paperwork to him to complete the transaction Dracula's partially vampirizes him, turning him into his human agent. Once in England Renfield is placed in the asylum of Dr. Seward, coincidentally Dracula's neighbor at Carfax. Dracula soon meets Seward and his daughter Mina, as well as Mina's fiance Jonathan Harker, and their friend, Lucy Weston. After this establishment the movie begins to sort of suck, with scenes happening honestly sort of at random. We see Dracula feed on Lucy! Then we see Dracula ask Renfield to do something for him! Then...we see him feed on Lucy some more! Eventually, we meet the extremely dull Professor van Helsing just as Lucy is vampirized and staked, leaving Mina next on Dracula's menu. It leads to a final confrontation with Dracula and Renfield in the spooky old crypt...and a stake in the heart.

I started talking about how this film thrives largely on spectacle, and that in turn is tied to the fact that this movie shot down any hopes I had of the early Universal movies escaping the cheap, crass commercialism I usually associate with their later entries. Yet Dracula, for indulging spectacle to the degree it does, is one of the many reasons why it feels like a commercial film of today--a Transformers for the 1930s. I say that because everything is too flat, too arranged, to be as artsy as it seems to think it. Dracula's emergence from his coffin is legitimately chilling, but it is so unlike the cramped shots that comprise the rest of the film that it seems like nothing but a trailer moment. In fact the shot I'm referencing is in the original trailer for the film! In addition to trying to dazzle us with eye candy, the film cheats on its suspense at times. Notably there is a scare when Dracula sneaks up on Renfield, who is walking backwards through the expansive entrance to Castle Dracula. Why is he walking backwards? I'm sure he's supposed to be taking in the admittedly impressive space behind him (even I have trouble believing it's a movie set), but that's communicated poorly by both Frye's performance and the staging of the shot.

Like a lot of modern blockbuster stinkers it also assumes too much idiocy on behalf of the viewer: for example, they have to explain that Renfield has gone insane, as if him clutching a coffin and calling Dracula "Master" weren't enough. Also, I am far from the first person to comment on this, but Dracula's castle has fucking armadillos in it. One of my middle school teachers, who screened the film in a science class because I live in the United States, tried (somewhat vehemently) to justify that in the '30s few people had seen armadillos and they were frequently used in '30s horror films as a placeholder for what was tantamount to Freud-uncanny horror--maybe what it would be like to come face-to-face with a goblin shark or some other monstrosity of the deep that we've pseudo-popularized today as the poster child for "strange animals." Well, let me tell you, I have seen a lot of fucking 1930s horror movies at this point, and I have never seen a single one of them try to pass off armadillos as the National Vermin of Transylvania--sadly, that explanation makes more sense that the suggestion that they're supposed to stand in for rats, which the studio "couldn't afford" for some reason. (Write me a novel on the Rat Crisis of '31 where there were so few rats available that it was cheaper to get armadillos.) Call me prejudiced to the past, but did they really think that showing these dopey, cuddly little creatures wouldn't shatter the mood they were struggling to establish, unless everyone watching the movie was that terrified of mammals they'd maybe occasionally seen before?

Finally, the film is just dull, and I realized why. In the novel, we follow Jonathan Harker to Dracula's castle rather than Renfield, and Harker escapes Renfield's fate. Hence we have a central character to follow even as the novel branches into many subplots as we see the letters and diaries of the various characters linked to Harker. Here, the main hero is van Helsing, and because he clunks through the whole film without any energy, we suddenly realize how weak the rest of the cast is when we try to get one of them to be the hero instead. Harker and Mina get no characterization; Dr. Seward is ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things; leaving our other protagonist to be Renfield. Fortunately, Dwight Frye's performance is involved and has good physicality, even if I was laughing at how cheesy his parts are even as a ten-year-old. Actually, most of my memories of this movie from age ten that are in any way positive come from laughing at the awful acting of the side cast. The main cast is mediocre, generally, but characters who only get a line or two of dialogue are usually evidence enough to make me question the idea of Hollywood ever having standards.

(And yes, even I will admit that van Helsing's verbal and psychic duel with Dracula is very good, and actually reminded me somewhat of the similarly-slow but nonetheless dramatic duel between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader in A New Hope. But this scene works largely because it's where the writers poured their most effort--it has the best dialogue of the whole film.)

I've also had the distinct pleasure of seeing Universal's other 1931 adaptation of Dracula. Back in the day studios would create non-English versions of their films before the popular practice of dubbing or subtitling took hold, with completely different casts and crews. And so was born the 1931 Spanish version of Dracula, which is a far superior film in almost every way, even though they are virtually identical save for cast and language, being as near to a shot-by-shot recreation as possible. By this I mean the acting is better, although one complaint my theater audience commonly had was that Bela Lugosi was significantly less goofy than Carlos Villarias, who plays the Count here--the Internet seems to agree. But c'mon, it's Bela Lugosi, and he was the epitome of goofy ever since he got his big start here. While Lugosi certainly has very good moments in Dracula (his awkward English often gives him an uncanny, inhuman oddity which later Dracula performers, especially Gary Oldman in my mind, definitely aimed to replicate), he was better in some of his Poverty Row movies. His most compelling performance wouldn't come until years later, in Glen or Glenda. (And as an aside, yes, seeing the 1931 Dracula--either version but especially the Spanish one--on the big screen does make a huge difference in how you watch it. For all its faults: its screen presence, combined with how fresh it must have been in 1931, do make its sizable cinematic impact very believable.)

Dracula's Daughter (1936):

When my family rented the Universal Horror Dracula Collection from Blockbuster back in the day, we watched Dracula and Son of Dracula. I can only suspect that I insisted on skipping Dracula's Daughter because it was about a girl. Well, if I had watched that movie then, I'd probably be one step closer to realizing that I was a girl, for indeed, Countess Marya Zeleska is one groovy lady. Dracula's Daughter is a breath of fresh air after Dracula, showing how Universal mercifully learned how to make movies and not just filmed stage plays in the span of five years. There are still many problems but the general experience makes this probably the best Dracula film of the original three.

We continue right at the end of Dracula, with the police discovering the bodies of Renfield and Dracula. Van Helsing (now "Von Helsing") doesn't disguise his role in the latter's death, and he is arrested. Over the course of ten painful minutes of lame mid-'30s comedy with the bobbies, we are introduced to Marya Zeleska, who steals Dracula's corpse and burns it. She is his daughter, and she views the vampirism he passed onto her as a curse. Yet the destruction of the remains of Dracula do not break the curse, and once more she is forced to feed--a fact her manservant Sandor mocks her over. Along the way Von Helsing recruits Jeffrey Garth, a fellow psychiatrist and one of his former students, to help defend him in his trial for Dracula's murder. His psychiatric methods may be the key to curing Marya's vampirism, as well...yet in trying to cure her obsession, he becomes the subject of it. Soon it's off to the castle in Transylvania--where he must obey her or die.

This movie is instantly more kinetic and lively than Dracula, which is nice for hooking viewers like me. I think I figured out part of the problem: the first film was made in a time when music was not a feature of movies, especially horror movies, since the silent era had only recently ended. This second film was made when movies with sound were cemented as the norm, and as such there is almost constant music in the film. Sadly, the soundtrack is often misplaced, giving weirdly dissonant tones in a movie that already suffers from tonal whiplash. One moment we are out on the foggy moors, watching Marya burn her father's corpse, her eyes bright in a cloud of smoke. Then whacky slapstick music is playing, and the cops are talking about how cowardly they are! What's more is that this kinesis isn't spread through the movie--it has a looong middle, even if there are many scenes throughout that make it worth it. The ending is worth it, too, being well directed. Plus, the acting is generally better, including Von Helsing's, even if he still gives pretentious pseudo-philosophical lectures about how stupid it is for people to disbelieve in vampires. We also get actual characters, with hobbies and motivations, and not just people inserted because they were in the book.

The movie suffers in places from a problem that happens in many sequels, where they have to shout out famous lines or scenes from the first film...like if you're watching a Kevin Smith film, chances are someone's gonna say some variant of "I wasn't even supposed to be here today!" I didn't like it when it happened here but that's just because I still don't like Dracula. The Countess gets to say "I never drink...wine" and crawl her fingers out from under a coffin lid...just like in the first movie! Except it feels clumsy, and oftentimes these shoutouts are rushed or delivered poorly, almost as if they were studio mandates that the director wanted to gloss over. Dracula's Daughter feels much less commercialized than its forebear, and ironically that's probably why it's comparatively forgotten. Which is too bad, because there's actually some interesting thematic stuff here.

The first is the more obviously touted concept of magic vs. science. Ultimately science wins, but there's still an interesting scene where Marya warns Jeffrey that her powers of mesmerism are not hypnosis, as he's been calling it, but something "far older...far greater." Magic still has power even if science has now reached the point where it can conquer it. Thinking about that in the context of Frankenstein makes this even more interesting, as the Frankenstein series, especially Bride of Frankenstein, have comparisons between old-world powers and the rising new world of machines and chemicals.

The second piece worth noting is the implication that Marya is bisexual. In the scene where she corners her shirtless female art model and says, "I have a jewel--very old, and very beautiful--I'll show it to you," you can't help but wonder if she's going to drop trow, as it were, and reveal something that's not just a hypnotic pendant. This is played for horror, if it is indeed intentional (we the audience already know that this topless girl is on her way to a throat-suckin'). This wasn't unprecedented: Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, a much better vampire story, was published in 1871, twenty-six years before Dracula. In it there is no question that the titular Carmilla is a lesbian. Audiences would know the codes planted here, and some of them would have even read LeFanu's novella. This is not positive representation--Marya is bisexual only as a predator. In the 1930s it would have been popular belief that bisexuals were monsters, like vampires. Obviously as a queer person I find this uncomfortable, though I know that queer representation amongst vampires got better over time.

Though it makes some questionable choices and drags in places, Dracula's Daughter is well-made enough and complicated enough to reach my bitter old heart. And yet, this was technically the last of the three Dracula movies I sat through, so perhaps time will tell yet that I am merely caught in Stockholm Syndrome. Decide for yourself with my warnings.

Son of Dracula (1943):

Son of Dracula kind of surprised me because I was expected a much more coherent link to Dracula--wouldn't you? Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention but as far as I saw it wasn't so much about the Son of Dracula and more like Dracula in disguise whose identity is partially divined by historical knowledge of the vampiric history of the Dracula family. That may sound like picking nits, but one of the key revelations of this film is that the villain is none other than Dracula himself! Surely that rules out the possibility that he is Dracula's son, right? (Unless squicky time-travel is involved?) And yet by merit of the title, most of us seem to go with the idea that the family relationship is specified in this movie when I don't feel like it is. This may be one of just a few flaws of Son of Dracula, but sadly, these few flaws generally sink what should be a decent film, one which surpasses its source material.

At the Louisiana plantation of Dark Oaks lives Katherine Caldwell, who is in some sort of cahoots with the mysterious Count Alucard. Alucard's presence causes the sudden death of Katherine's elderly father, but despite that (and perhaps more alarmingly), Katherine blows off her fiancee to take up with Alucard instead. Frank, the jaded man in question, tries to shoot Alucard but bullets are as effective on him as they'd be on a ghost--Katherine, standing behind the immaterial Alucard, is shot instead, but her death proves to be temporary. After all, Alucard is the same man as he whose name is his spelled backwards, and Katherine originally contacted Alucard with the hopes of becoming a vampire and gaining eternal youth. Katherine's family has already contacted Professor Laszlo, our merciful replacement for dusty old Professor van Helsing, and it will take a confrontation of the ages to destroy both vampires.

First the good, which crops up in an unlikely place You may be wondering how Lon Chaney Jr. fares as a European vampire. I mean, look at him! I chose the poster I used for a reason: Lon Chaney Jr. shares acting schools with Alan "The Skipper" Hale, not Bela Lugosi, and it's predictable that any attempt of being actually creepy is beyond him. As we'll get to in The Wolf Man, Chaney did best when he was playing sympathetically innocent losers who got wrapped up in something awful. And his elder sister had taken the angsty vampire gig already in 1936, so there's little room for him to beg to be freed of his curse. Yet he does his best to play an aristocrat, albeit one with an American accent; he keeps the movie afloat, and that he has actual chemistry with lover/victim Katherine helps too. Katherine herself is an engaging character, because she represents the promise that Dracula makes to van Helsing in the 1931 film, concerning Mina: "She will live through the centuries to come, just as I have." It's intriguing to see someone--especially a woman in the 1940s--be shown with the ambition to become immortal even at the cost of becoming a monster, while still being somewhat sympathetic. There had to have been some reason why Katherine's family and fiance find her sudden turn to darkness odd--she was evidently a person they wholeheartedly loved. Yes, she's largely unconcerned with her father's demise, but if she becomes eternally young she'll outlive her entire family anyway. She seems to truly love Alucard, and he probably excites her not merely because he'll give her eternal life, but because he is another immortal to spend eternity with. She doesn't know the full extent of his evil until it begins to corrupt her soul as well--a natural consequence of vampirism.

And yet there is also bad...and it is bad. Son of Dracula introduces racism to the franchise: while the Dracula story was largely based on British fears and biases against Eastern Europeans in the first place, this movie has an American touch and as such we get lots and lots of voiceless, objectified, "happy in servitude" butlers and maids of color wandering in the background. There is one named black person whom we focus on, and she is a voodoo queen named Madame Queen Zimba. Yep. And she drops dead in foreboding of Alucard's approach soon after she is introduced, which, when reported by Katherine to the other white characters, is met with one some of the sickeningly heartless apathy I've ever seen. I don't recall if a character actually says, "Who cares? She was just a Negro," but they come close to it. I shouldn't be surprised: this is four years after Gone with the Wind, arguably the second most famous adaptation of a Klan apologist novel. (Oh sorry did I offend GwtW fans again whoops I don't care)

On a lesser note, it's also odd that the film at its conclusion chooses to frame Frank as the hero of the story, when all that he did was go into a berserk rage and accidentally kill his girlfriend (before later purposefully killing his girlfriend). The movie frames it as his loss even though he was still wildly irresponsible around Katherine. Even if Alucard hadn't been a vampire and his body was affected by bullets, at close range, the bullets probably would have pierced Alucard and struck Katherine anyway! The weird "it's sad that this man must now go through life single" ending contrasts this recklessness as well as the fact that I don't buy his grief as much as the movie wants me to.

And then there's the thing about the title. Ignoring the question of whether Alucard is the Son of Dracula or Dracula himself, the reference to the Dracula family mentions the last one dying in London...in the late 19th Century. Dracula's Daughter, set literally moments after the end of Dracula, features 1930s cars, even if Dracula seems to generally preserve the Victorian setting of the novel. Universal Horror continuity is famously broken but I still want to chart it out nonetheless, because it's fun. I love bad continuity. I'll do an X-Men Retrospective sometime. Kidding.

Again: if it weren't so racially offensive, Son of Dracula would be quite enjoyable, and I would consider it an unsung classic among the Universal sequels. Unfortunately, in today's world, I can't take the film's treatment of black people lightly, even if "it was another time."

By the way, this part of the review contains a hypnotic code-phrase that causes all fans of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to now see Castlevania's Alucard as Lon Chaney. You're welcome!

Next time, we see lightning strike with the coming of Frankenstein!

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