A Universe of Horrors: A History of Universal's Horror Movies and the Men Who Made Them
Author: Adam Roche
Date: 2016-01-29 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; History; Biography
Description: The story of Universal Studios' horror movies is the story of cinema itself. Universal were there at the beginning, being one of the first studios to make Hollywood its home, and more than any other studio, took the horror movie to its heart.In this book, hear the stories of how Universal Studios came to be, of Lon Chaney and his son, of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and genius director James Whale. Of creature designer and make-up king, Jack Pierce, of Gloria Stuart, Claude Rains, of Evelyn "Queen Of The Screamers" Ankers, the Laemmle empire, and of every Universal Horror movie from Hollywood's

A Universe Of Horrors

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A Universe Of Horrors

A Universe Of Horrors

Universal Studios’ Classic Horror Movies

And The Men That Made Them

Adam Roche

© 2016 Adam Roche. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright holder.

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A Universe Of Horrors

The author respectfully dedicates this book to…

Hannah, for always understanding, and for being the blinding daylight at the end of every tunnel.

Molly-Kate, for falling in love with Belgian detectives and following her heart.

Matilda, for doing her best to remain a child, even though her soul is older than any of us.

Maxim, for remaining different from the other boys, and loving every glorious moment.

And to my listeners, the most unique collection of friends a man could have wished for.

Adam Roche is the writer, narrator and producer of ‘The Secret History Of Hollywood’ podcast, and the ‘Attaboy Clarence’ podcast.

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A Universe Of Horrors

Contents

Chapter 1 - Laemmle

5

Chapter 2 - A Silent Scream

14

Chapter 3 - The Man From The East

23

Chapter 4 - It’s Alive!

31

Chapter 5 - Horror Arrives

42

Chapter 6 - Curses…

53

Chapter 7 - Even The Moon…

67

Chapter 8 - Too Vile For Public Consumption 80

Chapter 9 - The Monster Demands A Mate 95

Chapter 10 - The End Of An Era

105

Chapter 11 - A Last Hurrah

109

Chapter 12 - Resurrection

117

Chapter 13 - A Howl In The Night

137

Chapter 14 - Creature Features

153

Chapter 15 - The Birth Of The Rally

163

Chapter 16 - Killing Your Darlings

170

Chapter 17 - The Inner Sanctum!

178

Chapter 18 - A Year Of Sequels

186

Chapter 19 - Houses

192

Chapter 20 - When Monsters Walked The Earth 201

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A Universe Of Horrors

Chapter 1 - Laemmle

On a busy Chicago street, one summer in 1905, a 38 year-old man named Carl was taking a break outside the dry goods store he’d been managing for 12 years.

Carl was a firm believer in the American dream. He’d travelled from a now-disappeared land called the Kingdom of Wurttemberg at the age of seventeen, and while work had been easy to find, he wasn’t satisfied with the life he’d carved out for himself so far.

He’d been saving his money for years, sending a little home to his family now and then, and had always planned on buying his own dry goods store, and expanding it into an empire he could call his own. However, the world of dry goods just didn’t hold a sparkling allure for Carl anymore.

He was beginning to feel a little lost.

But then something across the bustling Chicago street caught Carl’s eye.

A lengthy, four or five deep line snaked its way from around the corner of the block and heaved into the doors of a gaudy nickelodeon theatre.

Every fifteen minutes or so, a hundred or so sweaty, grinning patrons would burst from the exit, and the line would squeeze in through the doors until it was halted by the manager.

Carl figured that a hundred people, each paying a nickel, meant that the theatre was taking $5 every fifteen minutes. That was $20 an hour. The theatre was open from ten in the morning until midnight, and therefore was bringing in $280 a day. $1,960 a week. $7,840 a month. $94,080 a year.

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A Universe Of Horrors

Give or take.

And what if you didn’t just have one of these things? What if you owned two, three? A dozen? A hundred?

At that very moment, Carl Laemmle knew exactly how he was going to spend the money he’d been saving.

Within a few years, Laemmle owned a
large chain of nickelodeon theatres,
and was turning over a handsome
profit showing short films produced by American Pathe, Vitagraph, Star Film

Company and Biograph, bringing the
wonders of the world to members of
the public for a nickel a time.

However, in 1908, Thomas Edison,
who owned most of the patents
relating to motion picture cameras
forced all the motion picture
producers to form a trust, known as
the Edison Trust, which sought to
charge a fee to every exhibitor in the United States each time a Trust
produced film was shown, essentially
creating a monopoly on film production and distribution.

Each nickelodeon owner suddenly saw a sharp dip in profits, but having no alternative, had to cough up the exorbitant tax, or face the project of losing their supply of pictures.

Carl Laemmle, however, wasn’t about to be bullied by Thomas Edison.

Laemmle and a group of nickelodeon owners decided that the best way of avoiding the Edison Trust fee, was to make their own motion pictures.

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A Universe Of Horrors

In June 1909, Laemmle and his partners created the Yankee Film Company, which as it grew, turned into the Independent Moving Pictures Company.

Laemmle proved to be a master of not just film production, but organisation and marketing.

Edison had always believed that the public was interested not in the actors of a motion picture, but in the picture itself, and so refused to give any name billing to any player in one of his films. He didn’t even feature credits at the end of the film.

Laemmle, however, believed otherwise.

Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, the most popular star of the cinema was a beautiful, enigmatic actress without a name.

Because she acted in pictures produced by Biograph Films, she came to be known only as The Biograph Girl.

She starred as a society beauty in

‘Betrayed by a Handprint’, as an Indian girl in ‘The Red Girl’, as the adulterous Katusha in D. W. Griffith’s ‘Resurrection’, and yet although most of America had
fallen in love with her face, only a handful of people knew her name.

Laemmle, sensing a shrewd opportunity, met with The Biograph Girl and offered her a deal. If she would star in films for his Independent Moving Pictures Company,
he would see to it that her name would be featured on all advertising for her movies.

He began by announcing that the name of The Biograph Girl was Florence Lawrence.

Then, he killed her.

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A Universe Of Horrors

No sooner had the country taken Miss Lawrence and her name to their hearts, were they opening their newspapers to read of her sudden death in a road accident.

Shock gripped the country, and a frenzied media poured their efforts into eulogising America’s angel of the screen. When reporters stormed into Biograph Films demanding a statement, Biograph could do nothing but admit that they hadn’t seen Lawrence for some time.

Laemmle watched for a few days, and then exploded into action, issuing ads in every newspaper stating that “We Nail A Lie”, that Florence Lawrence was alive and well, and in fact, was in the middle of making a movie for the Independent Moving Pictures Company, entitled ‘The Broken Oath’ due for release on March 14th, 1910 (if anyone was interested) and that to promote the movie, and to reassure the great American public that Miss Lawrence was indeed well and happy, he would be sending her out on a promotional tour to accompany the film.

Further details to follow…

She began the tour in St Louis, Missouri, and was met by a large, ecstatic crowd, who applauded rapturously as she took the stage to make a short speech after the movie.

At the next town, Laemmle sent word before Lawrence’s arrival that the St Louis crowds had been so excited at the sight of Florence Lawrence, that they had mobbed her, and torn the clothes from her body. When she arrived, the town was in a frenzy.

Florence Lawrence had become the world’s first movie star.

In 1912, seeking to create a powerhouse movie studio that would be able to withstand the bitter onslaught of legal actions being fired off by Thomas Edison, still determined to have his monopoly, Laemmle called a meeting of independent movie producers and proposed that not only should they join forces, but relocate from East Coast New York to the other side of the country, so as to be far from the grasp of Edison and his attorneys.

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A Universe Of Horrors

Together, Carl Laemmle of Independent Moving Pictures Company, Pat Powers of Powers Motion Picture Company, Mark Dintenfass of Champion Films, William Swanson of Rex Motion Pictures, David Horsley of Nestor Films and Charles Baumann and Adam Kessel of the New York Motion Picture Company formed an alliance, and Universal Pictures was born, with Laemmle its elected president.

They relocated to Hollywood, California, where Edison’s patents were unenforceable, and got to work.

By the early Twenties, Universal was the largest studio in Hollywood. It was so big, that it had been named Universal City Studios, and had its own mayor, its own council, its own police department, fire department, hospital, electric plant, water works and sewage system.

Laemmle had by now bought out his partners, and owned the studio outright, which gave him complete control of Universal’s output.

His private secretary was Irving G Thalberg, a prodigiously talented twenty-year-old who had impressed Laemmle so much with his ability to understand and communicate a problem, that when Laemmle had decided to return to New York in 1919 for a spell, he was told by his boss:

“I would like that you should stay here. You are completely in charge of the studio”

The appointment was shocking to many, who saw Thalberg as nothing more than a fragile boy. When the columnist Louella Parsons was introduced to him, she laughed and said “What’s the joke? Where’s the new general manager?”

Executives and studio heads often mistook him as a junior employee.

Lionel Barrymore, almost twice Thalberg’s age, remarked that:

‘I used to go into his office with the feeling I was addressing a boy. In a moment, I would be the one who felt young and inexperienced. I would feel he was not one, but all the forty disciples’

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A Universe Of Horrors Barrymore’s reaction to Thalberg was not uncommon.

Upon meeting him for the first time, visitors would immediately write him off as an upstart, only to have their opinion completely reversed by the time they left his office. The novelist Edna Ferber said of him that:

‘I had fancied motion-picture producers as large gentlemen smoking oversized cigars. But this young man whose word seemed so final at Universal City . . . impressed me deeply’

Within a few months of his taking over at Universal, Irving G Thalberg had been rechristened ‘The Boy Wonder’ by the rest of Hollywood.

Under Thalberg’s leadership, Universal began to step away from producing only cheap serials and westerns, and moved into more prestigious fare. Titles such as ‘Lone Larry’, ‘Six Shooter Justice’ and ‘A Pistol-Point Proposal’ began to be replaced by ‘The Reckless Age’, ‘So This Is Paris’ and ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’.

Famed stage directors, European artists of the screen, and the rising stars of Hollywood began to be lured to Universal by the charming Thalberg. Among them was Erich von Stroheim, the actor and director who was quickly establishing himself as Hollywood’s leading director of prestige pictures.

He was also renowned as a demanding megalomaniac.

In Hollywood at the time, the director was king. Good directors were difficult to find, and even harder to keep, so when Carl Laemmle and Irving Thalberg managed to attract the services of Erich von Stroheim, the burden of power was certainly in the director’s favour. In 1922, however, Von Stroheim began to indulge his artistic tendencies a little too far.

His movie, ‘Foolish Wives’ was given a budget of $250,000, an exorbitant amount at the time, due to Von Stroheim’s lavish tastes and insistence upon recreating to the tiniest detail, the city of Monte Carlo in Universal’s backlot.

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A Universe Of Horrors The budget grew to $500,000, and then to $750,000. When it tipped the million dollar mark, Laemmle got worried. After all, Laemmle was financing the movie from his own pocket. Thalberg called Von Stroheim into his office and said in a cool voice:

"I have seen all the film and you have all you need for the picture. I want you to stop shooting,”

"But I have not finished as yet.” said Von Stroheim.

"Yes, you have," said Thalberg. "You have spent all the money this company can afford. I cannot allow you to spend any more.”

Von Stroheim, who was surrounded by a gang of lackies, leaned over Thalberg’s desk and growled:

“If you were not my superior, I would smash you in the face”

Without flinching, Thalberg replied ‘Don’t let that stop you’

Von Stroheim stormed from the office, slamming the door on the way out.

Thalberg calmly called down to security and asked them to bring him all the film that Von Stroheim had shot. Von Stroheim’s original intention had been for ‘Foolish Wives’ to run for an indulgent six hours in cinemas. Thalberg oversaw the editing and pared the final movie down to three hours.

Instead of hiding their embarrassment, Laemmle and Thalberg advertised the movie heavily, stating that it was the world’s “first million dollar movie”.

Von Stroheim’s next movie was ‘Merry Go Round’, and although Thalberg had made his position clear during ‘Foolish Wives’, it wasn’t long before Von Stroheim was up to his old tricks again. Within weeks, he’d vastly exceeded his agreed budget, and no end seemed to be sight for the shoot.

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A Universe Of Horrors

According to many, Von Stroheim saw himself as invincible, and was completely convinced that whatever happened, Carl Laemmle would never want anything to happen to his most prestigious director.

Thalberg called Von Stroheim to his office, and presenting him with a written list of all his excesses, fired him on the spot, stating as the main reason “your apparent idea that you are greater and more powerful than the organisation that employs you”.

Von Stroheim’s firing caused a storm in Hollywood.

Producer David O. Selznick said that "it was the first time a director had been fired. It took great guts and courage”. Director Rouben Mamoulian later said that the "little fellow at Universal," in one bold stroke, had

"asserted the primacy of the studio over the director" and forever altered the balance of power in the movie industry.

Thalberg also romanced Lon Chaney away from Paramount Pictures, convinced that he was the right choice to portray Quasimodo in Universal’s lavish production of ‘The Hunchback Of Notre Dame’.

Chaney more than stepped up in terms of performance, delivering a mind-blowing portrait of the deformed bell ringer, behind a grotesque layer of make-up and costume, all of Chaney’s own design, and yet still managing to convey a childlike gentleness and capacity to love. The film was Universal’s biggest production of 1923, coming in at a million dollars, but taking three million at the box office.

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A Universe Of Horrors Two years later, Universal staged their most audacious production to date, and Chaney returned to make his mark on horror cinema for all time.

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 2 - A Silent Scream

1925’s The Phantom Of The Opera saw Chaney take the role of Erik, the masked phantom haunting the Paris Opera House, causing death and destruction in his attempt to make the opera singer, Christine Daae his love.

Laemmle had bought the rights to Gaston Leroux’s novel from the author personally when they’d met in Paris in 1922. He instantly knew that it would be a fit for Lon Chaney and his unique talents, and when The Hunchback of Notre Dame became the glittering success of 1923, The Phantom was rushed into production the following year.

For the second half of 1924, Laemmle personally oversaw production, and allowed Chaney the freedom to create the character of Erik as he saw fit. Chaney took the novel at its word, and constructed his make-up effects as accurately as he could. In the book, Erik is described as having a skull-like face with a few wisps of black hair on top of his head.

Chaney began by painting his eye sockets black, giving a skull-like impression to them. He then pulled up the tip of his nose with wire, attaching it behind his head, creating an effect that suggested a snout, rather than a human nose. He also enlarged his nostrils with black paint and fitted a set of jagged false teeth against his own. The result was a breathtakingly ghastly sight to behold.

Erik remains hidden behind a mask for the majority of the movie, but later events see him kidnapping Christine, and taking her to his underground lair. There, he tells her that she is free to come and go as she pleases, but commands her never to look behind his mask. Mystified and intrigued by her enigmatic captor, she enters his chamber, where he sits at his organ, lost in his music of the night.

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A Universe Of Horrors

Stealing up behind him, Christine snatches the mask from Erik’s face, and Chaney’s terrifying creation screams into the camera for the first time.

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A Universe Of Horrors Audiences the world over screamed with him. Reports of faintings were not uncommon. Chaney’s talent for transformation earned him the nickname “The Man Of A Thousand Faces”. His ability to morph into different characters led to a popular joke of the twenties. Whenever a bug was about to be squished or swatted, it wasn’t uncommon to hear the phrase “Don’t step on it! It might be Lon Chaney!”

The fact that Chaney was able to empathise with the maligned characters of cinema was no accident.

Chaney was born in 1883 to Frank Chaney and Alice Kennedy in Colorado. Both his parents were deaf, which led to bullying and abuse throughout Chaney’s young life. By the time he reached adulthood, not only had Chaney developed a thick skin for insults, but due to his creativity in communicating with his parents, had established a remarkable skill for pantomime.

At the age of 19, Chaney went to work on the stage, convinced that his physical abilities could be useful in vaudeville. He wasn’t wrong. He soon became in demand as a physical comedian, and was known to hold audiences spellbound with his stories played out in mime.

In 1905, Chaney married the 16 year old singer, Cleva Creighton, but held back from telling her about his parents’ deafness, for fear she would reject him.

When he finally introduced them, Cleva was unable to hide her horror.

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that she was pregnant with Lon’s child, and was terrified at the prospect of the Chaney deafness being passed down to her baby.

Throughout the pregnancy, relations were stretched to breaking point between Lon and Cleva, until February 1906, when their son, Creighton was born. Although it soon became clear that Creighton was not deaf, the marriage had eroded irretrievably.

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A Universe Of Horrors It soon became common for Cleva to drop young Creighton at the stage door and disappear into club-land, where she eventually found work as a nightclub singer.

Lon found this period intensely difficult as he struggled to raise his son as well as hold down a job on the stage. When it transpired that Cleva was carrying on an affair, Chaney arranged for her to be fired.

Cleva, desperate to ruin Chaney in revenge, walked onto the stage as he performed his famous clown act, and drank a bottle of acid.

She was rushed to hospital, and although she survived, her throat had been destroyed by the acid to such an extent, that she was never able to sing again.

Chaney’s stage career was extinguished by the scandal.

Because his income had been cut off, and because of the volatile home life that young Creighton had endured, the authorities took the boy into care, instructing Chaney that until a regular income could be counted upon, as well as a stable home life, the boy would remain a ward of the state.

Seeing an opportunity for a fresh start, Chaney divorced Cleva and moved to Hollywood in 1912, throwing himself into film work.

His experience on the stage had taught him the art of make-up, and coupled with his remarkable physicality, he soon established himself as a sought-after bit part player in early silent films, racking up over 100 film roles by 1919, when George Loane Tucker singled him out for a role in his drama, ‘The Miracle Man’.

In the movie, Chaney played ‘The Frog’ a contortionist and con man, who along with his gang, pretends that a rural preacher has divine powers, and cashing in on the results. In the film’s most memorable scene, Chaney slithers and twists along the floor, impersonating a hideously deformed cripple, until he reaches the preacher’s feet, whereupon he snaps and convulses his body into normality, until he stands, “healed” by the power of God.

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A Universe Of Horrors The film was a sensation, taking 3 million dollars at the box office, the second highest grossing film of that year. When Photoplay magazine readers were asked to vote for their favourite film, The Miracle Man found itself with far and away the most votes. Chaney went from bit part player to megastar almost overnight.

He followed it up with an astounding performance in 1920’s ‘The Penalty’ in which he played a gangster called Blizzard, whose legs were mistakenly amputated from the knee down when he was a boy. When he reaches adulthood, he tracks down the doctor responsible and kidnaps his daughter, planning to use her as a bargaining chip: he’ll give back the girl, if the doctor will graft his own legs onto Blizzard’s…

Chaney achieved the effect by kneeling in two buckets and strapping his legs up behind him, against doctor’s advice. Each moment spent in the apparatus was excruciating, but the result was so authentic that a special segment had to be filmed to be shown before screenings, assuring audiences that Chaney hadn’t lost his legs.

The same year, he played both Blind Pew and Merry in Paramount’s production of ‘Treasure Island’, a smash hit that ensured that Chaney was now an established star. His newfound financial security, coupled with the fact that he’d remarried, a former chorus girl named Hazel Hastings, with whom he’d discovered lasting happiness, meant that Chaney was finally in a position to take his son out of care.

Life finally seemed to be working out for Lon Chaney, but as Creighton reached adulthood, he began to ask questions about his mother.

Desperate that his son should not be hurt by the deeds of the past, Chaney lied to the boy, and told him that his mother was dead.

With the success of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ and ‘The Phantom Of The Opera’ at Universal, Chaney had established himself as the most versatile actor in Hollywood, but there was one problem.

Despite enjoying his most critically lauded successes at Laemmle’s Universal, he had no devotion to the Universal name itself. Chaney’s 18

A Universe Of Horrors devotion belonged to Irving G. Thalberg, a man he counted as one of his closest friends.

Thalberg had become restless at Universal, and longed for a new challenge. Since arriving, he had turned Universal from a “westerns”

studio, known for haemorrhaging actors due to its uneven pay rates and emphasis on direction over story and stars. Thalberg had reorganised the studio into an efficient movie production facility, ensuring that each script was tightly constructed before it went into production, and insisting that the scripting process became an integral part of movie production; ensured that actors felt valuable and rewarded, according to their efforts, and mounting some of the most lavish, prestigious spectacles that Hollywood had offered so far.

But now he longed for a new challenge, and let it be known that he wished to move on.

Thalberg was offered a position as Vice President in Charge of Production at Louis B. Mayer Productions, and jumped at the chance.

When the company merged with Metro Pictures and Goldwyn Pictures Corporation a few years later to become MGM, Thalberg was given part ownership.

Upon completing ‘The Phantom of The Opera’ for Carl Laemmle at Universal, Lon Chaney jumped ship to be with his friend, and signed with MGM.

With Thalberg’s departure, the quality of Universal’s output dropped considerably. Carl Laemmle had been content to let Thalberg run the studio his way, and while Universal was still his baby, he’d been spending less time producing, and more time enjoying the company of his young family.

Stepping back into the saddle as Production Chief in charge of all output, Laemmle quickly fell into old habits. Adaptations of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ and ‘Raffles’ quickly gave way to a production line barrage of cheapies, such as ‘Gridiron Gertie’ and ‘Chester’s Donkey Party’.

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A Universe Of Horrors Seeking to streamline production and cut costs, Walter Mintz, a producer working under Laemmle, took a look at Universal’s animation division, seeking to trim costs.

Their most popular character was Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, who featured heavily in Universal’s Funny Animal Films. The creators of Oswald were two animators by the name of Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney. Mintz demanded that their fee for producing Oswald cartoons be cut, to which Iwerks and Disney refused. Universal, owning the rights to Oswald, took control of the cartoons and began to produce them in-house.

Furious, Disney and Iwerks began their own animation studio, and seeking a flagship character to launch their new endeavour, came up with Mickey Mouse in the short ‘Steamboat Willie’, launching the Disney dynasty that would dominate animation for decades to come.

Laemmle’s other problem was nepotism.

When it came to hiring family members, Carl Laemmle was a mite trigger-happy. At one point, it was estimated that seventy of Laemmle’s family were working in exalted positions within Universal Studios.

Many of them were his nephews from Europe, resulting in Carl Laemmle being called “Uncle Carl” around the studio.

The poet Ogden Nash came up with a famous rhyme at the time:

“Uncle Carl Laemmle / Has a very large faemmle”

The nepotism reached its peak in 1928, when Carl Laemmle made his son, Carl Laemmle Jr, the head of Universal Studios as a 21st birthday present.

While many derided the decision, not least the heads of rival studios, the decision turned out to be a sound one. Junior was a rabid movie fan, and while he shared his father’s passion for business, he was also a little more discerning in his choices.

In 1928, Carl Laemmle Sr produced the silent melodrama ‘The Man Who Laughs’ based on Victor Hugo’s novel. It told the story of 20

A Universe Of Horrors

Gwynplaine, the son of an English nobleman who has offended King James the second.

The king decides to take revenge against the nobleman by putting him to death in an iron maiden. He then instructs a surgeon to mutilate the face of the child, Gwynplaine, so that he will forever be cursed with a grotesque, exaggerated grin, and so as “to laugh forever at his fool of a father”. What follows is the story of Gwynplaine’s life as he endeavours to find love and acceptance despite his hideous appearance.

Even though ‘The Man

Who Laughs’ is a
romantic melodrama, the
sight of Conrad Veidt
and his monstrous smile
is so shocking, even
today, that the film was
instantly labelled as a
horror.

The effect upon

Laemmle Junior, in
particular, was striking.

Though the image of the mutilated grin was abhorrent, audiences found themselves unable to look away, and Junior, seeing the power of fear upon intoxicated, thrill-seeking cinema audiences, was fascinated.

Sound had begun to sweep through Hollywood, and although Uncle Carl was reluctant to convert to the new medium, Junior was convinced that it was the future, and invested heavily.

By the time Universal was up to scratch on the sound front, Junior had cut his teeth on producing a few dozen movies. Determined to see Universal back at the top, he sank his efforts into producing an epic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’.

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A Universe Of Horrors He poured 1.2 million dollars of the Laemmle fortune into the film, and the result was a staggering success. It took three million at the box office, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Director, and Best Picture, an achievement that Universal Studios wouldn’t repeat until 1973.

Such was the movie’s power that Variety wrote upon its release that:

‘The League of Nations could make no better investment than to buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language, to be shown in all the nations until the word "war" is taken out of the dictionaries’.

With a prestigious hit under his belt, and the fascination with horror still playing through his mind, Junior began to look around for the property that would perfectly marry the two.

He experimented in early 1930 with a sound remake of 1927’s ‘The Cat And The Canary’ entitled ‘The Cat Creeps’, a creaky murder mystery combining a dark house, an escaped lunatic, and a crashing storm, to modest effect.

The Laemmle’s finances, while stable, weren’t so vast anymore than just any chance could be taken. The stock market crash of 1929 had put pay to large swathes of ready cash, and Uncle Carl wasn’t as eager to open his chequebook as he had been five years previously.

The Laemmles needed a solid money-maker, cheap to produce, and easy to exploit.

And so it came to be, that in mid 1930, Junior turned his attentions to another property. A story of a dark gentleman from the East, that would change the face of Universal forever.

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 3 - The Man From The East

Written in 1897 by Irish author, Bram Stoker, ‘Dracula’ was no newcomer to the screen. In 1922, the German Expressionist director F.

W. Murnau had attempted to secure the rights to Stoker’s story, but had failed. Determined to press ahead anyway, Murnau made a few alterations to the plot, changed a few names, and produced the terrifying silent horror, ‘Nosferatu’, starring Max Shreck as the nightmarish Count Orlock.

This was no suave villain, able to blend in and out of polite society.

Murnau’s creature from the grave was just that: foul-breathed, bald-headed, claw-fingered, and creeping up your stairs as you slept. In actual fact, it was remarkably close to Stoker’s original vision of Dracula himself.

When the Stoker estate saw the movie, they sued Murnau, and won, the judge ordering all copies of the film to be destroyed. However, one copy survived, and Murnau’s expressionist nightmare still haunts audiences today.

Two years later, the producer Hamilton Deane mounted a stage version of Dracula with the permission of Stoker’s estate, modernising the story slightly, and setting the events in mainly one room. The play was a huge hit in England, and when it travelled to Broadway in 1927, it thrilled and fascinated audiences.

Heading the New York production was an enigmatic 44 year old Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi, whose thick European delivery and dignified, yet sinister good looks brought massive critical acclaim to the stage production.

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A Universe Of Horrors Junior Laemmle decided that Hamilton Deane’s play, and not Stoker’s novel itself, would make the better, and more economical movie, and after having acquired the rights, set to work on production.

The first decision Junior made, was to select Paul Leni as director, who’d done such stellar work on ‘The Man Who Laughs’. In 1929, though, Leni died of blood poisoning, and Laemmle quickly hired Tod Browning in his place.

Browning had been a solidly reliable director throughout the 1920’s, dipping his toe into the horror genre a few times with ‘The Unholy Three’, ‘The Unknown’, and ‘London After Midnight’, all starring Lon Chaney, Browning’s favourite actor and close friend. However, with the arrival of talkies, Browning, ironically, had struggled to find his voice.

However, knowing that if anyone could secure the services of Lon Chaney in the title role of Dracula, then it was Tod Browning, Laemmle-Junior handed him the director’s seat.

When Bela Lugosi heard that the play in which he had enjoyed so much success was about to be adapted for the screen, he began to lobby Universal for the part. Laemmle and Browning weren’t convinced. As far as they were concerned, there was only one man for the role, and that man was Lon Chaney.

Chaney was having his own difficulties though.

As his son, Creighton had grown, he’d shown an interest in following in his father’s footsteps and carving out a career on the screen. Chaney flatly refused his son.

Arguing that the life of an actor was not a respectable one, he used his wealth to put Creighton through business college instead, much to Creighton’s dismay. However, eager to please the father he admired so much, Creighton worked hard, and excelled at college.

Upon leaving, he quickly found work in a plumbing corporation, and married the boss’s daughter.

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A Universe Of Horrors But in late 1929, as he was filming ‘Thunder’ for MGM, Lon Chaney caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia. When he was hospitalised, it was found that he was suffering from bronchial lung cancer. Although he immediately underwent aggressive therapy, his condition began to deteriorate. Ever the professional though, Chaney forged ahead with plans to remake his early hit ‘The Unholy Three’ as a talkie at MGM, his first foray into sound.

By the time he had finished making the film, he was seriously ill.

On August 26th, 1930, just seven weeks after the film was released to theatres, Chaney died.

His loss was acutely felt not just throughout Hollywood, but across the world. Legions of fans turned out onto the streets for his funeral, which was given an Honour Guard by the US Marine Corps.

No one felt the loss as keenly as his son, though. Creighton, who had recently become a father himself, was bereft.

Shortly after his father’s death, Creighton was visited by a woman who claimed to be his mother.

Cleva Chaney, very much alive, had long been watching from afar as her son grow to manhood, but had been reluctant to contact him while his father was alive. The shock of losing his beloved father, and discovering the mother he had always believed to be dead had a calamitous effect on Creighton, forcing him to reevaluate his relationship with his late father.

Although his love for his father still burned strongly, he was overcome by bitterness at the grand lie he had been told.

For Carl Laemmle Junior and Tod Browning, the death of Lon Chaney left Dracula without a star, and without a Plan B, they began to listen to Bela Lugosi’s overtures.

Directing them to the favourable reviews he’d received for his stage performance in Dracula, he worked hard to convince them that he was 25

A Universe Of Horrors the right man for the role, even pointing to the few silent films he’d made in Germany before reaching America.

Universal wanted an established screen star, though, and sent offers to Paul Muni, Chester Morris and Conrad Veidt, but all turned it down. As a last gambit, Lugosi sent word that if hired, he would work for the paltry sum of $500 a week. The rate being offered to the film’s star was $3500 a week.

Ever the shrewd businessman, and with pressure being applied to turn in the movie for as little as possible, Laemmle finally agreed to screen test Lugosi, and a few weeks later, the Hollywood trade papers announced Lugosi as the film’s star.

For Lugosi, it was a dream come true.

He’d been acting since the age of 19 in Hungarian theatre, and had starred in a few films there, even gaining a reputation as a Hungarian screen idol, but with the onset of the First World War, and Lugosi’s political opinions, he’d quickly fallen out of favour and left his country to seek his fortune.

Acting his way through Europe had earned Lugosi enough money to buy passage to America, and in December 1920, landed in New Orleans.

Over the next few months, he worked his way to New York, finding success in dark, European roles. Now, after a two decade long apprenticeship, Bela Lugosi was about to get his big chance.

From September to November of 1930, the cameras rolled on what would become Universal’s first full-fledged horror movie.

Renfield, played by Dwight Frye, is a British solicitor, sent to finalise the sale of Carfax Abbey to the mysterious Count Dracula, a Transylvanian nobleman.

After receiving the sombre warnings of the local village-folk, Renfield travels to Castle Dracula in the Carpathian mountains, where he meets his sinister host in the tumbledown, moonlit castle.

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A Universe Of Horrors

Over dinner, Renfield is
drugged by his vampiric host,
and fed upon. When he awakes,
he has been transformed from a
simple, officious lawyer, into a
snarling semi-vampire, crazed
with a blood lust, and utterly
subservient to his new master.

Using Renfield’s help, Dracula
is transported to England,
where he takes up residence in

Carfax Abbey, stealing out at
night to drain the blood of
nubile women and
streetwalkers. Renfield,
meanwhile, has been committed
to the neighbouring Seward

Asylum, his usefulness
seemingly over, but when the asylum is visited by the Dutch Professor, Van Helsing, he immediately sees the effects of vampirism in Renfield, and begins to investigate the Seward’s new neighbour for himself…

After a promising opening, which takes full advantage of its gothic setting, all shadows and fog, the emphasis of Browning’s movie unfortunately switches to the drawing room, and the chills give way to some mind-numbing scenes of dialogue that cannot transcend its stage bound rules.

Tod Browning, unfortunately, has to take the blame for this. It’s all very well to adapt a play for the screen, but if the purpose is to simply film a play, then the point is lost.

While there are some delicious visual flourishes (the sight of a demented Renfield grinning from the bottom of a stairway while half-laughing, half-growling, is a particular highlight) the whole thing collapses once the location switches to England. It’s not helped by the fact that the technical department weren’t exactly setting the screen alight. The plastic bat used in the film is still held up today as an example of a 27

A Universe Of Horrors cringeworthy special effect. It wasn’t helped by the fact that continuity was also jettisoned; at one point, the bat flies off stage left, only for Lugosi to appear stage right…

Technical constraints at the time meant that all of Dracula’s transformations, from bat to wolf to man, take place off screen.

However, there are things to enjoy. The sets are particularly dazzling, from Dracula’s cavernous castle, decorated by moonlight, shadows and giant cobwebs, to the crypts of Carfax Abbey, were obviously a labour of love when it came to production design.

Major plot events, such as Dracula as a wolf, running across the grounds of the asylum, or Mina’s meeting with the vampire Lucy, are simply described, robbing the movie of any of the novel’s money shots.

Lugosi, though, is a magnetic presence. Although his delivery is sometimes risible, Lugosi and Dwight Frye are the only actors who seem to be having any fun. Certainly they’re more interesting to watch than the romantic leads, played by David Manners and Helen Chandler, who disappear from the mind the moment the movie has finished.

Ultimately, the fault lies with Tod Browning, who for all the world, directs the film as though it were being made two decades previously.

His choice of camera shots is puzzling, remaining distant from any action, which causes the dialogue scenes to suffer. His insistence on making the cast act with gestures, rather than naturally, makes the whole thing seem as though it were meant to be a silent film.

However, for all its faults, Dracula was a colossal success with 1931’s audiences.

At New York City’s Roxy Theatre, 50,000 tickets were sold in the first two days. Newspapers seized on stories of screaming, fainting patrons, and Universal’s marketing machine, headed by Carl Laemmle, made sure that the country was talking of nothing but Dracula.

Curious to see what all the fuss was about, lines began to build around city blocks.

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A Universe Of Horrors The New York Daily News said that:

“It’ll chill you and fill you with fears. You'll find it creepy and cruel and crazed. It is superbly photographed... Brrrrr! We enjoyed it!”

The Hollywood Filmograph stated that:

“There are times when the force of the evil vampire seems to sweep from him beyond the confines of the screen and into the minds of the audience. His cruel smile - hypnotic glance - slow, stately tread, they make Dracula”

Julia Shawell writing for The New York Graphic called it:

“One of the creepiest mystery melodramas ever screened. Dracula is the best talking picture of its type ever exhibited”

Most importantly for Universal, a horror movie had succeeded at the box office, and was now reaping critical success, as well as prestige for the studio.

Junior Laemmle was applauded by Uncle Carl. For a little while now, the studio had been on shaky ground financially, mainly due to the countrywide recession, and the fact that although Universal was an established studio, it lacked a vital ingredient that most of the other studios had.

Ironically, Universal didn’t own any cinemas.

Almost all of its competitors owned extensive chains of theatres around the country, meaning that when they’d completed a movie, they had a vast number of screens to show it on. Patrons rarely stepped outside their own neighbourhoods to go to cinemas, so would watch whatever was on in their local area. If the local cinema was owned by MGM, then it would show MGM films, sometimes the same film for weeks on end.

Universal had to rely on independent movie theatres to show their movies. While this was successful, Universal’s films would sometimes be 29

A Universe Of Horrors swept aside to make way for rival studio’s films, which meant that Universal’s films, no matter how prestigious, would sometimes never get booked in certain areas.

However, the massive cash boost from Dracula, as well as Junior’s achievement of bringing the movie in almost $20,000 under budget, convinced Uncle Carl and Junior that with horror, they may have found a genre that was too intriguing for any theatre to resist.

And so, while Dracula was still playing to sold out houses, Junior turned his attention to his next project.

30

A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 4 - It’s Alive!

The French writer and director Robert Florey had come to Universal and signed a one-picture deal with the intention of adapting Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders In The Rue Morgue’, but while researching the tale, a different story had caught his eye.

Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ had up until now been considered un-filmable, but Florey, seeing the potential in the story, set to work on adapting it.

Junior was unsure at first. The novel was hardly a dynamic property, mainly focussing on philosophical ideas of Man vs God vs Nature, and littered with leaden dialogue scenes that dragged the speed of the narrative down to a leaden pace.

Florey, though, had plucked the essentials from the story, boiling it down until all that remained was a concentrated horror story. Laemmle demanded a test reel, just to be sure.

The castle sets from Dracula, still standing, were utilised. Florey approached Bela Lugosi, Universal’s hottest property, to star in the film.

Lugosi agreed to help with the test, but wanted further time to think about committing to the full-length movie itself. Lugosi was sent to the make-up department, where Jack Pierce, the head of the department, spent hours transforming Lugosi into The Frankenstein Monster.

When Junior saw the footage, he knew that he’d found his next project.

Robert Florey, however, was about to have his heart broken.

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In 1930, the most talked about play in the Western World was

‘Journey’s End’, a harrowing tale of British soldiers during the trench warfare of World War One. When it came time to adapt the play for the screen, producers Michael Balcon and Thomas Welch agreed that the best man for the job, was the director of the stage play.

James Whale had always had a talent for the theatrical.

A veteran of the First World War, he’d been captured by the Germans and sent to the Holzminden prisoner of war camp. Instead of resting on his laurels though, Whale had used his time to organise amateur theatre
productions among his fellow prisoners.

When he returned home after the war, he found work difficult to come by, and so decided to pursue a professional career in the theatre. After working as a stage manager for a few years, he was given the opportunity of directing R. C. Sherriff’s ‘Journey’s End’, and cast a then-unknown Laurence Olivier in the lead role.

By the time the play had finished it’s two performance run, it had been so well received that Whale and the production found themselves transferred to the West End, where Colin Clive took over the Olivier role.

Maybe it was the timing, but something seemed to click with audiences.

Thunderous ten-minute ovations were not uncommon, and soon James Whale and Colin Clive found themselves the toast of the London stage.

Just a few years later, Whale found himself calling “action” on the movie set of ‘Journey’s End’. He’d insisted upon casting his old friend, Colin Clive in the lead, and when it was released to massive critical and commercial success, Whale found himself courted by every major studio in Hollywood.

Fortune led him to sign a contract with Carl Laemmle’s Universal, and his first movie there, ‘Waterloo Bridge’, starring Mae Clarke as a chorus 32

A Universe Of Horrors girl who falls into prostitution during World War One, was another smash.

As a reward, Uncle Carl offered Whale the choice of any movie property that the studio owned.

Whale cast his eye over Universal’s slate, eager to find something completely different to work on. He was beginning to tire of wartime stories, and longed to flex his directing muscles.

Frankenstein seemed perfect.

Within 24 hours, the gig belonged to Whale, and a despondent Robert Florey found his pet project being handed to the whizz kid from England.

Whale set to work rewriting the script, crucially adding a layer of black humour to the proceedings, something that his subsequent film projects became renowned for. Under Whale’s guidance, the project seemed to spark into life, and Universal, eager for another Dracula sized hit, threw everything they had into the production.

The first snag arose when Bela Lugosi, eager to capitalise on his star-making turn in Dracula, decided against playing the part of Frankenstein’s monster. According to reports, Lugosi was not keen on appearing in a non-speaking role, and declined.

“I was a star in Hungary” he announced. “I did not come to America to be a scarecrow!”

With the rest of the cast in place, including Colin Clive as Frankenstein himself, and with set construction underway, Whale needed to fill the monster’s role quickly.

And then, one afternoon, as luck would have it, Whale was enjoying lunch in the Universal commissary, when he happened to notice a fellow diner sitting a short distance away.

Beckoning him to his table, Whale stared transfixed at the man, introducing himself with the line:

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A Universe Of Horrors

‘Your face has startling possibilities’

The face belonged to an English actor named William Henry Pratt. At 43 years old, Pratt could have been forgiven for thinking his big chances had passed him by.

Born in 1887, Pratt was the youngest of nine. When his mother died, Pratt was brought up by his older siblings. Having Indian blood, Pratt was subjected to bullying as he grew up. It didn’t help that he was bow-legged, and suffered heavily from a stutter and a lisp.

To help overcome his physical impediments, Pratt became involved with the theatre, forcing him to work on his posture, and on his speech impediments. While this did help him overcome his stutter, he found himself unable to lose the lisp, which remained for the rest of his life.

Emboldened by his forays into acting, Pratt travelled to Canada at the age of 22 as part of a travelling theatre group. When his acting skills began to draw attention, Pratt grew worried.

Pratt’s family were all distinguished members of the British foreign service, and he was concerned that his involvement with the stage would be an embarrassment to the family name.

He changed his first name from William to a name he considered exotic.

He changed his surname from Pratt, to the family name of distant Slavic relations. And so, whilst travelling the Canadian stages, he was reborn as Boris Karloff.

Karloff spent a gruelling apprenticeship in the Americas, performing manual labour by day and acting at night. By the time he arrived in Hollywood in 1918, Karloff was suffering from severe back pain, a condition he would endure until the end of his life.

While he did find work, however, money and regular employment were so scarce that Karloff was forced to continue his punishing lifestyle.

Although it left him in agony, Karloff would regularly spend his days on 34

A Universe Of Horrors
construction sites, and his evenings under the studio lights, taking minuscule,
insignificant roles in zero-budget serials.

Because of his darker skin colourings, Karloff was generally cast as an exotic villain, who would inevitably be
dispatched easily and early on by the film’s hero.

While Karloff’s workload grew ever more difficult, his star had remained
inconsequential. With youth no longer on his side, and seeing no break on his
horizon, Karloff had begun to doubt his life choices.

He’d been in Hollywood for 13 years now, and wondered if perhaps he should think about returning to his home in England. As he contemplated this, over his lunch in the Universal Studios commissary, he saw a debonair looking gentleman beckoning him over to his table.

Karloff later joked that he was rather offended at being seen as such an ugly character in the canteen that day.

“I was wearing my most elegant suit” he said, “And I was actually at my most handsome”

Within days, Karloff was being disassembled by James Whale and head of make up at Universal, Jack Pierce.

Whale and Pierce were taking a meticulously scientific approach to their design of Frankenstein’s monster.

If a brain was removed from a cranium, and replaced by a larger one, a new cranium would need to be created, to comfortably house the new brain. Pierce designed this new cranium to be flat. Protruding veins, caused the great stresses of bursting back into life, were created using strips of thick cotton soaked in collodion.

35

A Universe Of Horrors The eyelids would have been subjected to rigor mortis, and therefore would be unable to open fully. Pierce added layers of heavy wax to weigh down Karloff’s eyelids. To effect a stiff, lumbering walk, Karloff was given four inch platform boots weighing 11 pounds each.

Bolts were added to the monster’s neck, so as to provide electrodes capable of diverting the life-giving lightning into the monster’s body. To give the deathly pallor of death, a thick layer of gray/green greasepaint was applied to the face and hands.

Whale and his crew began to roll cameras, and Universal’s new nightmare was shocked into life.

The film begins with Edward van Sloan issuing a grave warning to faint-hearted viewers that the nightmare about to unfold before them, may be too much for the uninitiated. He ends with a gleeful “We warned you”, and we are immediately assaulted by a dark Bernhard Kaun composition, as the audience’s heart begins to beat.

It’s a markedly different opening from the more romantic overtures of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

When the credits finish, we find ourselves in one of the most unsettling graveyards in classic cinema, with its nightmarish statues of demonic angels, and almost black sky, pregnant with doom.

Two men are digging up the coffin of a recently deceased man. This isn’t the first body they have stolen. Henry Frankenstein and his hunchbacked assistant, Fritz, have been stealing bodies for months, using various parts from each of their crimes to assemble an artificial man.

Only one ingredient is needed to complete the man: a brain.

Fritz is ordered to steal a brain from a local medical school. There he finds two specimens, which have been on display for medical students.

Accidentally dropping the jar containing a normal brain, Fritz steals the other, unaware that it has been taken from a recently dead psychopath.

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A Universe Of Horrors

With the brain in place,

Frankenstein sets about
reanimating his corpse using
the power of a storm, and
succeeds among the furious
thunder, God’s anger
perhaps, at a man’s wielding
of his powers.

However, the monster seems
ill equipped with his new
found life, no doubt the
result of his abnormal brain, and when the opportunity arises, he murders Fritz and Henry’s mentor, Dr Waldman, escaping into the countryside.

In the film’s most shocking scene, the monster comes across a peasant girl, Maria, playing by a lake. Unafraid of the creature, Maria invites him to join her game of throwing flowers into the water to watch them float. Unable to contain his joy at the game, the monster grabs the child, intending to make her float like the flowers, and drowns her as she screams.

Sent into a panicked rage, the monster journeys back to the home of Frankenstein to exact revenge on the man responsible for his creation.

Meanwhile, a bloodthirsty mob of villagers, sent into a fury over the death of little Maria, march on Frankenstein’s castle, pitchforks and torches in hand, to put an end to the monster and its creator.

Whereas the staid, plodding Dracula gave rise to only a few chilly moments among the babbling drawing room scenes, Frankenstein arrives fully formed from the first moment, and even when the scares subside to make way for romance or exposition, it never loses its style or panache.

It poses some thought provoking questions too, the most important being could science turn a man into a God? Should the gift of life be placed in a mere man’s hands? And once life is granted, what then?

37

A Universe Of Horrors For surely, this is the dilemma at the heart of the film. Frankenstein is a scientist, striving to prove his theory. Once proved, he must become unwilling father to his creation. If not, he must become murderer to rid himself of it. With this conundrum in mind, reconsider the actions of the Monster, newly birthed in a screaming, chaotic laboratory, instantly confined, and savagely taunted by the psychotic Fritz. Restrained.

Freed. Restrained. Drugged.

Intimidated.

Beaten.

Is it any wonder that he reacts with violence to his aggressors, his fathers masquerading as men of science, who, now that they have created him, want only to subdue and dissect their achievement?

They have granted the monster life, but on their own terms. The first person to show the grotesque creature any kindness, is a small girl, whom the childlike monster puts to death in a moment of pure playfulness.

It’s to Karloff credit that despite his outward appearance, these veneers lie exposed to the viewer. He is as much a child, reaching towards sunlight in his gloomy cell, tossing flowers onto the surface of a lake, as he is deformed avenger, wrathfully spitting his inarticulate thoughts of revenge as he pursues his tormentors.

James Whale and Jack Pierce gave the monster a face. Boris Karloff gave him a soul.

Whale’s direction is nothing short of revolutionary. While the production designs adhere closely to German Expressionist ideals, all long shadows and warped lines, Whale injects a healthy dose of wit into the proceedings, creating a sub-genre of cinema that was unheard of at the time.

Whereas Tod Browning, and all other directors of macabre cinema up until this point, hadn’t even considered adding a touch of humour to their films, opting instead for dark chills, and mostly failing, Whale’s eye for detail allowed for moments of lightness to punctuate the dark: 38

A Universe Of Horrors Frankenstein’s manic irritation at the knocking on his door as he strives to create life, and Baron Frankenstein’s maids and their attempts to have their quota of the family wine.

These asides made the shocks all the more potent. Over eighty years later, the death of Little Maria still retains the power to stop one’s breath. It’s followed closely by another shock, sometimes overlooked by film scholars, but no less appalling, and radically fresh for audiences of 1931; the sight of a distraught father carrying the saturated corpse of his small daughter into town through a festival, her arm bouncing as he stumbles, struck dumb by his own horror, the music of the festival crashing into silence as villagers see the ghastly sight pass before them.

Contrast this with the horrors seen by cinema audiences until now, and it’s easy to see why Frankenstein has often been called the first great horror movie.

Whale never dwells too long on exposition, choosing to bury explanations in witty scenes involving the elder Baron Frankenstein, a blustering comic figure, and played to wonderful effect by Frederick Kerr, determined to see his son marry and raise children, and leave this silly science nonsense alone, while indulging a secret love of the grape, creating special occasions at a whim so as to be able to steal a snifter.

Mae Clarke appears as Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s fiancee, in a rather underwritten role. Clarke was on the brink of notoriety, thanks to her next film, involving a certain Mr Cagney and a grapefruit.

Edward Van Sloan repeats the wise doctor role he played in Dracula, but a little more stylishly. Here he actually rolls up his sleeves and takes an active role, even paying the price with his life.

Also making the journey from Castle Dracula to Castle Frankenstein is Dwight Frye, again the drooling lunatic, only this time with a hunched back. His laboratory assistant, Fritz, is a little more chilling, even though his lines are drastically reduced. When the Monster is held captive, Fritz takes great delight in torturing the newborn creature with flaming torches.

39

A Universe Of Horrors

Colin Clive, Whale’s close friend, turns in a strong performance in the film’s first half, only to become a little submissive in the second half. His manic energy in the film’s opening scenes, as he builds his monster, wildly thrashing his body as his creation springs to life, is somewhat dampened when he realises the gravity of his deeds. Perhaps this was Whale’s intention, to show the weight of the burden on the creator of life, yet it does cause the viewer to look elsewhere for thrills, and the eye rests easily on Karloff. No surprise then, that the film made a megastar of its monster.

Karloff was instantly lauded as “The New Lon Chaney”, a phrase to which Karloff always replied “He was the master. No one suffered as he did to bring a tragic, poignant quality to his roles”.

While this was true for a while, Karloff was to endure many arduous hours in make-up and performance of his own, in creating a gallery of horrors for cinema. However, he was talking with a certain knowledge.

40

A Universe Of Horrors A decade before, while waiting on the Universal backlot, Karloff had struck up a conversation with a heavily made up Lon Chaney, who spent an hour with the starstruck wannabe, advising him to:

“Find something no one else can or will do. The secret of success in movies lies in being different from anyone else”

Just a few months previously, Bela Lugosi had been Universal’s great horror hope. If he’d taken the part in Frankenstein, looking past the fact that the part had no lines, and seeing that there was real opportunity to show his acting prowess despite the horror framings of the picture, then maybe Lugosi’s star would have been confirmed in the Hollywood constellations.

As it was, Lugosi saw his crown passed to Karloff, had to watch as the now 44 year-old English gentleman with the lisp was held before the world’s flashbulbs, and tried to ignore the effervescent reviews of Universal’s new horror smash.

Variety said that “Frankenstein looks like a Dracula plus, a new peak in horror plays”

The Sunday Times called it “The most sensational motion picture ever made”

The Daily Dispatch called it “Brilliant to the point of genius”

In the world at large, Frankenstein was having a radical effect on movie theatres themselves. Such was the frenzy surrounding the film that studio-owned theatres, committed to screening movies produced by their studio owners, had to acquiesce to staggering public demand and screen Universal’s colossal hit instead of their own pictures.

Frankenstein went on to earn $12 million dollars at the American box office alone, making it by far the highest grossing film of 1931.

Horror, it seemed, had taken the world by storm.

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A Universe Of Horrors

Chapter 5 - Horror Arrives

MGM threw its hat into the ring with ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, a prestigious adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic that netted its star, Frederic March, the Oscar for Best Actor the following year.

Warner Brothers jumped on the bandwagon with “Doctor X”, a grisly tale starring Lionel Atwill, that included murder, rape, cannibalism and prostitution.

Tod Browning returned to MGM, and hoping to emulate the financial success of Dracula, the studio gave him carte blanche to create his choice of shocker. The project he developed was entitled ‘Freaks’, the grim tale of a travelling circus, and the sideshow characters that exact a sickening revenge when one of their number is almost murdered by a fortune seeking, villainous acrobat named Cleopatra and her strongman lover.

The film took the bold step of
casting real-life carnival
sideshow performers with real
deformities. While Browning
insisted that his movie was
informative and not
exploitative, MGM producer
was not convinced and refused
to allow him the use of Myrna

Loy and Jean Harlow in
pivotal roles.

The result didn’t just shock audiences, it appalled them.

42

A Universe Of Horrors The film was a catastrophic failure and was quickly pulled from cinemas after angry complaints from patrons, who felt that MGM had gone too far, especially after its hideous finale.

Finally catching up with Cleopatra, the sideshow performers mutilate the acrobat in gut-churning ways, and install her in their sideshow, having forever changed her from a woman into a repulsive half-human, half-chicken creature.

To save its name, MGM disowned the film, and although Browning directed a few more films, his career never recovered.

Paramount tried their luck with ‘Island Of Lost Souls’, a lurid little shocker based on HG Wells’ novel, ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ starring Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi, but although it had an impressive pedigree, its themes of man-playing-God paled against that of Frankenstein, and its subject matter, namely the deformation of the human body, ran a little too closely alongside Tod Browning’s ‘Freaks’, leading it to be banned in Britain and other countries.

Even HG Wells himself spoke out against the film, remarking that Paramount had been too keen to shock.

It seemed that Universal were the only studio using the correct recipe when it came to horror.

The next film from the Universal stable was an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders In The Rue Morgue’, directed by none other than Robert Florey, having returned to the property after losing Frankenstein to James Whale. Another refugee from the Frankenstein set was Bela Lugosi, who favoured the speaking role of Dr Mirakle over the mute Monster from James Whale’s movie.

On paper it must have looked like a sure bet.

The film tells the story of Mirakle, a mad scientist in 1845 Paris, who runs a sideshow attraction starring his ape, Erik, where he delivers scientific monologues to penny-paying audiences, telling them of their own ancestry to the ape world.

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A Universe Of Horrors

In 1845 Paris, this is,
of course, considered
blasphemy, and

Mirakle finds himself
the target of ridicule.

To prove his theories,
and to fuel his own
sadistic tendencies,

Mirakle has taken to
abducting girls from
the streets, and
torturing them,
injecting them with ape blood in order to transform them into an ape bride for Erik.

He soon grows clumsy though, and hot on the trail of discarded female corpses is Pierre Dupin, literature’s first detective, whose fiancee, Camille, has been chosen as Mirakle’s next victim.

Although the film is mainly an unremarkable affair, especially in its central romance story, it is enlivened no end by the presence of Bela Lugosi as the cackling Dr Mirakle, who chews up the scenery as though he hasn’t eaten for months.

The scene in which Lugosi tortures a prostitute he has abducted from the streets is nothing short of diabolical. With his devilish eyebrows and wicked glare, he truly looks as though he’s getting some kind of sadistic kick out of inflicting pain on the poor girl. It’s a genuinely shocking scene, even to modern eyes.

Unfortunately, it falls down when he’s not around, especially when it focuses on Leon Ames as Dupin, who it has to be said, is one of the most pathetic heroes in classic horror cinema. He yelps and whines when Mirakle kidnaps Camille, wailing and throwing his arms around as he overacts.

Mainly it’s the odd blend of ingredients that ultimately leave the viewer far removed from the movie. It’s a period film with a distinctly European air, but there’s a thick blend of accents, from Lugosi’s sometimes impenetrable Hungarian and Leon Ames’ whining American, mixed 44

A Universe Of Horrors
with the supporting characters’ mock-Cockney. The lack of budget shows, especially in the interior scenes. Erik the gorilla is a man in a suit in long shot, but close-ups use a chimpanzee, meaning that Erik shape shifts dramatically from one shot to the next.

And yet, for all its faults, ‘Murders In The Rue Morgue’ is a mischievous piece of Grand Guignol that makes the most of its Pre-Code status.

Lugosi’s torture of the
girl as she lies bound
to a cross is
surprisingly hardcore
stuff. One wonders if a
little of the

Hungarian’s darker
side seeped out when
they filmed it. At some
moments, he looks as
though he’s lost in the
role… And although
he overacts in the
quieter scenes, as per
usual, you can tell that

Lugosi relished the chance to slime up the proceedings. He’s as sinister as a spider.

The critics were thrilled.

Today’s Cinema stated that it was a better movie than ‘Frankenstein’, saying that: “The atmosphere of creeping evil and terrifying detail will have a marked effect. Bela Lugosi plays the part of Dr Mirakle in a most realistic fashion”.

The Philadelphia Daily News called it: “A horrifying and nerve-shattering motion picture”.

Despite the best efforts of Lugosi, of Florey, and of the critics though, the film failed miserably at the box office.

Such was its crashing loss to Universal, that they decided not to renew Lugosi’s contract, which had only been for two pictures. The same fate 45

A Universe Of Horrors befell Robert Florey. His time at Universal had been one of crashing disappointment and humiliating failure. Upon leaving, Florey went to Warner Brothers, where he would consciously avoid the horror genre, guiding fledgling Warners stars such as Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck in early roles.

His last movie would come in 1946, a return to the genre in which he so longed to excel, directing the histrionic Peter Lorre in ‘The Beast With Five Fingers’, finally achieving a modicum of success in the scares department, displaying an amusing insight into what the thirties might have been like, had Florey been given a chance to flourish.

As such, his most remarkable foray into horror, in 1932’s ‘Murders In The Rue Morgue’ is a devilish treat, creaky to be sure, but with enough wickedness on display to paper over the cracks.

Carl Laemmle Junior was disturbed, though. Although his first two horror movies had been smash hits, ‘Murders In The Rue Morgue’ had proved to him that the formula wasn’t invincible. What Junior needed, he decided, was a return to the recipe that had conjured up box office gold. And for that, Laemmle once again needed the singular talents of James Whale.

After ‘Frankenstein’, Whale had taken on ‘The Impatient Maiden’, a forgettable little love story about an intern and a secretary, starring Lew Ayres and Mae Clarke. While it hadn’t set the world on fire, the Laemmles were keen to keep Whale pampered, consoling him with the counsel that maybe his talents were best suited to the flamboyant.

Whale was won over, and accepted the Laemmle’s offer to direct another horror.

He selected as his next project, an adaptation of the JB Priestley novel,

‘Benighted’, now renamed as ‘The Old Dark House’, a grim little tale about a group of travellers who find themselves stranded in a remote part of Wales, and take shelter in a gloomy house that belongs to the Femm family, a bizarre collection of dusty eccentrics, and their villainous butler, Morgan.

46

A Universe Of Horrors

Somehow, the unlikely group must survive through the night, despite the murderous, lusty intentions of a drunk Morgan, the foreboding warnings of religious fanatics, Horace and Rebecca Femm, and the malevolent plans of the psychopathic arsonist, Saul Femm, the brother that the rest of the family have been keeping locked up in the attic…

Whale first set to work injecting an air of black comedy into the dour source material, creating a motley crew of gurning caricatures that, when held up against the gothic surroundings, create a perfect blend of comic and grotesque.

Seeking to capitalise on their new megastar, Universal insisted that Whale reteam with Boris Karloff, much to Whale’s delight. He was cast in the role of the butler, Morgan, his mute, lumbering presence echoing his performance in Frankenstein, but without the sympathetic side. His Morgan is a menacing figure, drifting in and out of rooms, intimidating with his size, and scarred face, and never revealing a softer side. When 47

A Universe Of Horrors
he gets drunk at the halfway point, he turns from servant to antagonist, chasing Gloria Stuart’s terrified Mrs Waverton through the Femm house with a firm desire to sample her flesh in a most ungodly way.

Morgan, it seems, is not just any butler. He’s also the only man capable of restraining the murderous Saul Femm, and when Stuart’s husband, played by Raymond Massey, incapacitates the drunken butler, Morgan avenges himself by releasing the lunatic from the attic.

Rounding out the cast were up-and-coming star Melvyn Douglas as the disillusioned ex-soldier determined to forget the war by indulging in a drink and talking fluent sarcasm; Charles Laughton as the nouveau riche Sir William Porterhouse; Lillian Bond as Gladys DuCane, the good time chorus girl who falls for Douglas despite the dour surroundings, and the masterful Ernest Thesiger as the skeletal Horace Femm, religious zealot, warning deliverer and hand wringer par-excellence.

Whale had longed to cast Thesiger in a role in one of his films from the beginning, and with complete
control over casting ‘The Old

Dark House’, quickly set about
bringing his old friend to

Hollywood.

Whale had known Thesiger
since 1919 when they’d both
been involved in a production
of ‘The Merry Wives Of

Windsor’, and they’d struck up
a deep friendship. Thesiger had
always moved in artistic circles,
counting as friends George Bernard Shaw and Somerset Maugham.

Hopelessly theatrical and unashamedly homosexual, Thesiger was known throughout London circles for his quick wit, withering put-downs and dramatic flourishes.

When he’d enlisted in the Army at the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914, he’d asked to be assigned to a Scottish regiment, because he’d always fancied wearing a kilt. Upon returning from the war, he attended a 48

A Universe Of Horrors dinner party, where a fascinated guest asked him what it was like to serve in France, to which Thesiger groaned:

“Oh, my dear, the noise! And the people!”

Although he made no effort to disguise his homosexuality, Thesiger married Janette Ranken in 1917, a marriage of convenience that lasted until his death in 1961.

By bringing Thesiger from London to Hollywood, Whale had brought a valuable piece of home with him, and Whale delighted in the company of his old friend. Whale was also homosexual, and at a time when it was discouraged, the presence of Thesiger gave Whale a flamboyant British cohort.

By the time cameras began to roll, Whale and Thesiger had established a new British colony on set. At eleven am and four pm, production would shut down for tea, no matter what the state of filming was. Karloff, Whale, Thesiger and Charles Laughton would disappear until the teapots were dry, much to the umbrage of their American crew.

Gloria Stuart was particularly vexed:

“The British were very clannish on that picture. They felt they were a rather superior colony and they didn’t pretend otherwise. They had tea at eleven and four, the whole English cast and Whale, and they never once asked me or Melvyn or any other American to join them. It put me off”

When he wasn’t in front of the cameras, Thesiger would sit pointedly in a chair and cast a withering eye over the proceedings, while indulging in some needlepoint.

By the time filming was finished, Whale had crafted a story all his own.

While retaining the gothic sensibilities of Priestley’s novel, it does away with the ponderous musings on the human condition, and replaces them with a jet black humour, full to the brim with witty observations, such as 49

A Universe Of Horrors the sight of Raymond Massey irritatedly scooping out black spots from his potato, and Eva Moore wolfing down a plateful of pickled onions, while Karloff serves dinner to Gloria Stuart, his eyes trained unerringly on her white flesh.

Audiences were keen to get their next glimpse of Karloff. His name was given top billing; actually his surname was given top billing. He was simply “Karloff”…

The film also came with an extraordinary pre-credits announcement stating that the Karloff they were about to see was definitely the same Karloff who had so successfully portrayed Frankenstein’s monster, stating that: “We explain this to settle any disputes in advance, even though such disputes are a tribute to his great versatility”.

This top billing was slightly misleading. While Morgan does play a pivotal role, he gets less screen time than the other leads, coming out of the film as a minor supporting player. However, his name did ensure that the public flocked to the film when it opened.

Unfortunately, word of mouth soon spread, and ticket sales fell off sharply.

It wasn’t for lack of good notices.

The New York Times said that “There is a wealth of talent in this production… Mr Karloff is, of course, thoroughly in his element as Morgan. He leaves no stone unturned to make this character thoroughly disturbing”

The Kinematograph Weekly called it “A marvellously exceptional picture with big box office potential - should be sensational!”

But something wasn’t clicking with audiences.

In the film’s second week, audience numbers dropped to less than half.

After ten days, theatres were ending its run early. The problem, it seemed, was that audiences were expecting the raw, concise thrills of Frankenstein, and instead were being given a slightly rambling character study with horror inflections.

50

A Universe Of Horrors The Old Dark House is an acquired taste, that’s for sure. Upon first viewing, it’s hard to know exactly what you’re watching. Certainly, the horror tropes are there: crashing thunder, gloom, shadows, a foreboding sense of menace. But the film takes its time in establishing its characters.

Over half the film is spent in conversation, albeit unsettling conversation.

It also has a grimy, grotesque feel to it. The dust lies thick on the screen, and the Femm family are a repulsive sight, whether its the cackling, half-deaf Rebecca Femm, the cadaverous, sunken eyed Horace, or the screeching father of the clan, Roderick Femm, his skin cracked and flaking as he glares madly around his bedroom.

He was actually played by a she. Although billed as John Dudgeon, Roderick was actually played by Elspeth Dudgeon. Gender aside, the patriarch is a hideous wretch. You can practically smell the acrid mould on his breath.

Nevertheless, this is a film about an Old Dark House, and as such, it’s not mis-sold. Perhaps it was the lack of Karloff, perhaps it was the gallery of grotesques, remember that audiences had voted with their feet in exactly the same way earlier in the year, by staying away from Tod Browning’s carnival of ‘Freaks’.

The general consensus, in the end, seems to be that the film was a little too outlandish for American audiences. By 1957, Universal had disowned the film. Having lost the rights to the Priestley novel by then, and with the stain of box-office failure hanging over the memory of the movie, they allowed their negative to fall into disrepair, and threw it into the basement. It was only by the efforts of director Curtis Harrington and the George Eastman House that modern audiences have a copy to enjoy today.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, Whale’s creation was simply too ahead of its time. It swings wildly from high camp to horror, from romance to murder, from comedy to terror. Audiences at the time had seen nothing like it before. Audiences today, having experienced a hundred years more of cinema’s evolution, are friendlier to Whale’s vision.

51

A Universe Of Horrors The film is regularly now held up as one of Universal’s best of the horror genre, a true curio that offers up a grim yet hilarious slice of camp horror. If it had been made in the 1980’s, next to other films of the same sub-genre, such as Re-Animator and Evil Dead 2, it would have been right at home.

The film review website Rotten Tomatoes report that 100% of modern critics give ‘The Old Dark House’ a positive review, and it was recently voted as the 57th best horror film ever made by Time Out.

For a 1932 Universal though, expecting the same adulation that had been poured on Frankenstein, it was a disappointment.

They wouldn’t have to wait long though, for the disappointment to vanish…

52

A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 6 - Curses…

In 1922, Howard Carter had become the most famous man in the world by discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of The Kings at Luxor. Upon opening the tomb, Carter sent a messenger to his home to run an errand. When the messenger arrived there, he heard a faint cry from inside, and opening the front door, found Carter’s canary being consumed in its cage by a cobra, the symbol of Egyptian monarchy.

When news got back to the locals, it fuelled rumours that by entering Tutankhamun’s tomb, the archaeologist and his team had invoked upon themselves, a curse. Six weeks later, Lord Carnarvon, the man who had opened the tomb alongside Carter, died of blood poisoning after being bitten by a mosquito.

The newspapers began a blizzard of supernatural theories regarding Carnarvon’s death. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle released a statement saying that he believed Carnarvon’s death to be the cause of “elementals”

created by Egyptian priests in the tomb, adding fuel to the fire.

Carnarvon was bitten on the left cheek. When the first autopsy was carried out on Tutankhamun, it was discovered that the boy had also carried a small lesion on his left cheek. Carter made a gift of a mummified hand to his friend, Sir Bruce Ingram. Soon afterwards, Ingram’s house burned to the ground.

The world was enchanted by the prospect of “The Curse Of The Pharaohs”. Ten years after the tomb was opened, and still in the honeymoon period when it came to horror movies, Carl Laemmle Jr remembered the chilling effect of the Egyptian curse on the public’s imagination, and cast about for a story to base a movie on.

53

A Universe Of Horrors Universal script-writer John Balderston, who’d worked on Dracula and Frankenstein, came up with a story about a 3000 year-old magician.

Changing a few details, and adding an Egyptian slant, Balderston finished with a complete script entitled ‘Imhotep’, which was subsequently renamed ‘The Mummy’.

Balderston was well-qualified to write the film. A decade previously, he’d been one of the journalists who’d covered the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Karloff was instantly announced as the movie’s star, and Jack Pierce was given the job of creating an authentic make-up, a task he threw himself into straight away.

As director, Laemmle selected Karl Freund, who had up until now, been Universal’s star cinematographer, having photographed All Quiet On The Western Front, Dracula and Murders In The Rue Morgue, as well as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927.

Although he’d directed short films, this was to be his first feature-length film. Laemmle wasn’t concerned though. Freund had spent the last 25
years being educated under such directors as Lang, EA Dupont and FW

Murnau. Freund had also earned his place in the director’s chair with a simple flick of his imagination.

Lewis Milestone, the director of All Quiet On The Western Front had been unsatisfied with the film’s original ending, and with only three days before the film’s premiere, turned to Freund for suggestions on how to end the movie.

In a sudden flash of inspiration, Freund suggested the simplest of ideas.

Lew Ayres, dug deep in his trench is bewitched by the sight of a fluttering butterfly as it passes by. Entranced by its beauty, a flickering white flame against the black, rotting horror all around him, he reaches out to touch it, absent-mindedly wandering into the range of the enemy, and is shot down. Moments later, an announcement rings out; the fighting on the Western Front is halted, and the war comes to an end.

Freund earned a contract allowing him to direct two movies a year. The Mummy was to be his first.

54

A Universe Of Horrors For seven weeks, the crew toiled under Freund, who as a director, proved to be a demanding boss. 18 hour days weren’t uncommon, and the shoot rarely finished before midnight. Zita Johann, the film’s romantic lead hated Freund from the off.

‘Karl Freund made life very unpleasant’ she said. ‘It was his first picture as director, and he felt he needed a scapegoat in case he didn’t come in on schedule. Well, I was cast as the scapegoat, and I saw through it straight away’

‘Late one Saturday night - exhausted - I fainted in the middle of a scene with Boris Karloff. I was out for an hour - dead. The crew, generally friendly and this time again, on my side, gathered beside me.

“What that son of a bitch has done to her”, I heard. “You don’t know the half of it!” my secretary, Ruby Holloway answered. ‘

‘They couldn’t get a doctor - it was 11 o’clock at night. So the crew prayed me back to consciousness’.

‘I rested all day Sunday. Morning morning, I was at Universal on time. And there were lions! They had this great big enormous arena outside on the back lot, and everyone was protected. Karl Freund was in a special cage all his own (a very large one), the cameraman was safe, the whole crew was safe. No cage for me, or for Ruby’.

‘I was guided to the huge gate leading to three enormous lions, Ruby at my side. “He saved this for my last day” I said. “Look, I get paid, I’m going in - I don’t care. What difference…?” was all I could say.

‘The gate was opened, I went in. That I remember. The lions were indifferent. My lack of sex appeal perhaps. Those lions saw no fear in me - just exhausted bones. And they must have figured, “Who needs them?”’

Freund constantly complained to the producers about Johann, blaming the long shoots on her temperament. In turn, Johann complained to Laemmle Junior about Freund, branding him a taskmaster. In retaliation, Freund made Johann rest between takes by leaning against a 55

A Universe Of Horrors
wall, insisting that she shouldn’t sit down for fear of wrinkling her
costume.

He also told her he planned for her
to play the part of the reincarnated

Egyptian princess nude from the
waist up. Johann, seeing that he
was trying to get her to run to

Laemmle again, called his bluff:

‘Well, it’s all right with me as long as you can get it past the censors’

she said.

Freund stared at her for a while,
and then walked away. The subject
was never raised again.

Zita Johann wasn’t the only one having a wretched time on the set of The Mummy.

At 11am on the day he was due to film his now iconic scenes in full mummy make-up, Boris Karloff placed himself in Jack Pierce’s hands.

Over the next eight hours, Karloff would endure the excruciating ordeal of having cotton, collodion and spirit gum laboriously applied to his face, his hair caked in clay, being painstakingly bound in bandages that had been treated and burned with acid.

Once the gruelling experience was done, Karloff was barely able to speak, such was the abundance of glue and cotton attached to his face.

He did manage one remark to Pierce, though:

‘Well, you’ve done a wonderful job’ he murmured. ‘But you forgot to give me a fly’.

At 7pm, Karloff arrived on set, creaking and cracking as he moved.

Shooting would last throughout the night, until 2am. Exhausted, and in great pain, Karloff would then return to Jack Pierce’s chair, to have the creation removed. The removal of the spirit gum, especially, scraped and 56

A Universe Of Horrors
pulled off in tiny, tearing
fragments, was unbearable and
prolonged. Karloff said, forever
after, that The Mummy was the
most trying ordeal he had ever
endured.

By the time the make-up had
been removed, it was dawn.

Shooting went on for seven
weeks and wrapped on October

30th.

Bearing a rather similar plot line
to Dracula, and kicking off with
the now-familiar Swan Lake

Theme, ‘The Mummy’ tells the
story of an archaeological
expedition led by Sir Joseph

Wemple, to find the mummy of Imhotep, an Egyptian high priest who had been mummified alive as punishment for trying to resurrect his lover, the princess Anck-es-en-amon.

When the mystical Scroll Of Thoth is also found, Ralph Norton, Sir Joseph’s assistant, reads aloud a forbidden spell, raising Imhotep from the dead. When Norton sees the mummy walking, he descends into lunacy. Imhotep steals the Scroll Of Thoth, and escapes from the museum, vowing to search the world for the reincarnated spirit of his princess.

Ten years later, Imhotep returns in the guise of Ardath Bey, an Egyptian historian who directs Sir Joseph’s son, Frank, now in the middle of an excavation himself, to a site that had been previously ignored. There they find the tomb of Anck-es-en-amon, and bring her remains to the museum, where Imhotep attempts to resurrect her using the Scroll of Thoth.

It fails, however, and Imhotep realises that Anck-es-en-amon’s spirit, or KA, has been reincarnated in the twentieth century socialite, Helen 57

A Universe Of Horrors Grosvenor. Using all his power, Imhotep takes control of Helen’s mind and convinces her of her true heritage. Torn between her life in the twentieth century, and the past lives she is being forced to confront, Helen finds herself being consumed by the long-dormant spirit of the Egyptian princess, and allows herself to be led to Imhotep’s altar with the intention of being sacrificed, so that she can be resurrected and reborn as Imhotep’s long-lost love.

At the last moment, however, Helen regains her senses and prays to the looming statue of the goddess, Isis, for help. The statue comes to life, lifting her hand to emit a dazzling flash of light, destroying the Scroll of Thoth, and with it, Imhotep himself.

Taking a remarkably different tack with their villain here, The Mummy gave Boris Karloff a chance to show off a different side of himself. His brutish, physical villains so far had comprised of Frankenstein’s monster and the loutish Morgan the Butler, so his turn here as the tortured, determined, and foremost, romantically motivated Imhotep was a drastic departure.

Imhotep is all contained anger, driven to obsession with the remaking of his lost love. His is a different category of menace. He is far superior to anyone who stands in his way, and if they present an obstacle to his goal, he will either force them under his control, or destroy them.

More importantly, Karloff is allowed to display his romantic side. After all, Imhotep is a man who was made to suffer an appalling fate so as to be with the woman he loved. An audience could be forgiven for sometimes siding with this movie’s monster.

Edward Van Sloan, Universal’s go-to wise-man/doctor/monster-expert returned yet again to play Dr Muller, a straight facsimile of his performances as Van Helsing in Dracula and Dr Waldman in Frankenstein. Once again, he’s the doggedly determined man of knowledge who seems omniscient in his knowledge of all things occult.

While hardly breaking any ground, at least audiences had a familiar cliche to go into the movie with. It was hardly necessary by now for Van Sloan to spend time establishing his character, and he doesn’t.

58

A Universe Of Horrors Zita Johann, on the other hand, gives an exceptional performance, despite her woes on set, that makes her subsequent fade from the public eye all the more tragic.

After filming, Carl Laemmle Junior called Zita Johann to talk about renewing her contract. ‘Do me a favour’ she snapped. ‘I had a lousy rotten time at your studio’.

In punishment, Laemmle dropped Johann’s name from its co-star position, to top of the supporting players.

She’s a magnificently alluring presence on screen, her large exotic eyes and air of aloof mystery convincingly communicating the mature, worldly soul in the young body.

Although she had the world at her feet in 1932, Johann was disillusioned with Hollywood. She loved to act, but preferred the purity of theatre to the business-like, chop-and-change methods of the Hollywood Studio system. Her experiences with Karl Freund, no doubt, hadn’t improved her opinion.

She went on to star in a few more movies, most notably the 1933 Pre-Code classic ‘The Sin Of Nora Moran’ in the title role, but in 1934, Johann walked away from Hollywood and the silver screen, using her considerable talents to teach acting techniques to people with learning disorders. She did return to the horror genre one last time, though.

54 years after her tantalising performance as the resurrected Egyptian princess, Johann appeared in a film whose title could well have acted as the tagline for The Mummy.

In ‘Raiders Of The Living Dead’ she played a librarian who gives aid to a teenager who builds a laser gun out of a laserdisc player to fight zombies with.

It was her final film performance. Zohann died in 1993 at the age of 89.

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As well as Karloff and Johann, though, the real star of the movie was Jack Pierce.

Pierce had come to California from his native Greece in 1910 at the age of 21. Movies were in Jack Pierce’s blood. He’d started as a cinema usher, working his way up to manager. From there, he’d turned movie stuntman, graduating to actor and eventually to assistant director.

Hanging around the Universal set had taught Pierce many things, but the most important lesson had been to keep his eyes and ears open.

Pierce had struck up a friendship with Lon Chaney after meeting him on the Universal backlot several times, and Chaney had allowed him to observe as he created his magnificent designs.

In 1926, on the set of ‘The Monkey Talks’ Pierce was asked to lend a hand with make-up, and designed and created the look for actor Jacques Lernier, who was playing a monkey with the ability to communicate. Carl Laemmle was so impressed, that he hired Pierce to work in the make-up department full time, where he created the iconic design for Conrad Veidt in ‘The Man Who Laughs’.

With the death of Lon Chaney, and Universal’s decision to go all in on horror, Pierce was in a unique position. Having learned many of Chaney’s techniques, and possessing of an ingenious talent for character design, Pierce soon established himself as one of the most important factors in Universal’s success.

Each design was
meticulously thought out,
logically planned and
perfectly executed. With
his trademark slicked
back hair and surgeon’s
smock, Jack Pierce
exuded the air of a
quietly professional man,
and yet his reputation at

Universal couldn’t have
been more different.

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A Universe Of Horrors Gil Perkins, the stuntman and actor, who was forced to undergo a Pierce transformation for the 1957 movie ‘Teenage Monster’ described Jack Pierce as “a miserable old bastard”. Elsa Lanchester, who would become one of Pierce’s most iconic creations in a certain 1935 sequel, described Jack Pierce as “meting out wrath and intolerance by the bucketful. He had his own Sanctum Santorum” she explained, “and as you entered (you did not go in, you entered) he said good morning first. If I spoke first, he glared and slightly showed his upper teeth”

It wasn’t just the talent that found Pierce to be a cantankerous old bastard. Laemmle and the executives stayed out of Pierce’s way whenever they could. However, one person who got on famously with Jack Pierce from the very beginning was Boris Karloff.

Lucky thing too, considering that over half of Karloff’s time on a Universal set, would be spent at the mercy of Pierce and his box of tricks.

They’d hit it off immediately whilst working on Frankenstein in 1931.

Karloff was willing to surrender completely to Pierce, and readily went along with any suggestion the make-up man made. While trying to come up with a way to make Karloff’s face seem more hollow, rotted out from the inside if you will, Karloff raised a finger and said “Ah!”. Reaching inside his mouth, he removed a dental plate he’d had fitted, which instantly cause the side of his cheek to sink. Pierce grinned and patted Karloff’s shoulder.

Spending as much time as he did in the hands of Pierce, it was inevitable that Karloff and Pierce would talk for hours at a time. Although Pierce wasn’t always the most genial of conversation partners, Karloff was a constantly warm and good-natured person, who was renowned for bringing out the best in people.

During production on Frankenstein, there was doubt over whether seven year old Marilyn Harris, who was to play the tragic Little Maria, would be too frightened when she saw Karloff in all his make-up.

On the day that they were to shoot their scenes next to the lake, cars were brought to Universal to take the cast and crew to the location.

Karloff did his best to stay out of Marilyn’s way, so as to limit the shock 61

A Universe Of Horrors
when she saw his horrifying appearance, but when she saw the giant, shy man who smiled nervously at her and turned away, she approached him and took his hand.

‘May I ride with you?’ she asked.

‘Would you, darling?’, he replied in a delighted voice.

By the time they arrived on set, Karloff and the seven year old were the best of friends.

Karloff and Pierce became collaborators. Karloff was always trusting of Pierce, allowing him to use his face as a canvas, and fully trusting that Pierce would turn in something special. It was a partnership that has created some of horror cinema’s most iconic designs.

Contrast this to Pierce’s relationship with Bela Lugosi, who refused to use a specially designed greasepaint created by Jack Pierce for Dracula.

Lugosi insisted that he knew the role better than anyone, having played it on the stage so many times, and applied his own make-up.

When Lugosi was being prepped for Frankenstein, before he pulled out, Pierce had designed a completely different make-up than the one eventually used on Karloff. According to Edward Van Sloan, Lugosi’s version of The Monster looked more like the Golem from the 1920 German

Expressionist film ‘Der Golem’.

‘He had a large, broad wig, and polished clay-like skin’, said Van Sloan when
interviewed later. Unfortunately, no
footage from Robert Florey’s test reel is known to exist. The only evidence of

Lugosi in the role is a poster, released while the film was in pre-production, depicting a giant Monster terrorising a modern city, laser beams shooting from his eyes, carrying the tagline: “No man has ever seen his like! No woman ever felt his white-hot kiss!”.

62

A Universe Of Horrors It’s clear that early versions of the movie were going to be something entirely different to the classic we ended up with. Pierce’s designs for the Monster certainly improved, although it’s a shame we will never have the opportunity of comparing the two.

‘The Mummy’ was released into cinemas on December 22nd, 1932, just under two months after filming wrapped. The movie stormed the box-office. Because of its exotic setting, the movie also travelled well abroad, becoming one of the biggest hits of the year at the British box-office.

Although the movie ends up as more of a supernatural thriller than an out-and-out horror, the slow-building of dread, and the fearful, all-powerful presence of a sinister Boris Karloff helped to earn Universal a huge profit.

The LA Times singled out Karloff in particular, saying that his

“portrayal of an unholy thing in this film aided by magnificent make-up, establishes him as not just a good character actor, but as a finished character star”.

Jack Pierce was a little irritated though. Since Universal had embarked on a horror spree, the world had been talking about the fantastical monsters as though they had been created by the stars themselves. This was mainly due to the fact that Pierce wasn’t given an on-screen credit.

Pierce began to grumble.

The studio rolled its eyes.

Although 1932 had proved to be a financially successful year for Universal’s horror department, it had seen failure with ‘The Old Dark House’, which according to Laemmle Junior’s formula of Whale +

Karloff + The Kitchen Sink should have equalled Success.

When Laemmle Junior sat down to consider his horror slate for 1933, he decided to be a little more cautious.

63

A Universe Of Horrors Bela Lugosi, meanwhile, seemed to be at a crossroads. Eager for more screen work, he approached Universal for more roles. Because of his success in Dracula, and his appearance in Murders In The Rue Morgue, the public viewed him simply as a horror star. Romantic leads and dramatic roles, it seemed, were out as far as Lugosi was concerned.

Because of Lugosi’s belligerence regarding Frankenstein, and with Karloff’s star in the ascendent, Universal refused him. If they were going to employ anyone in a star horror role, it was going to be Boris Karloff.

Utterly resentful, but perhaps a little regretting of his choices, Lugosi began to look elsewhere for film work. His contract with Universal had only been for two movies, and they’d been completed. He was almost instantly contacted by Mascot Pictures, a tiny studio operating on a shoestring budget and producing mainly serials and low-rent Western movies.

Mascot were interested in producing a twelve-part serial on a horror theme, and offered Lugosi the princely sum of $10,000 to appear.

Lugosi, becoming accustomed to a certain lifestyle, but unable to fund it, had begun to fall into debt, and $10,000 would go a long way to bailing him out.

The result was ‘The Whispering Shadow’ a generally well-received serial in which a dark, underworld figure known as The Shadow has created a device which allows him to murder by radio control.

Although it wasn’t breaking any boundaries, ‘The Whispering Shadow’

was a hit, and the presence of Lugosi brought with it a certain cache for thrill-seeking audiences.

He then took a supporting role in Columbia’s ‘Night Of Terror’, but allowed his name to top the marquee. Concurrently, he worked on a supporting role in Paramount’s ‘International House’, escaping his stereotyping for a while to play a Russian General in a mainly slapstick comedy.

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A Universe Of Horrors Lugosi found himself sometimes working twenty hour days, travelling between studios and snatching sleep whenever possible, while searching for more work.

Karloff, meanwhile, had accepted a job in Great Britain, for Gaumont Pictures, to appear in ‘The Ghoul’ alongside Cedric Hardwicke and his Old Dark House cohort, Ernest Thesiger.

The movie was a heady blend of two of Karloff’s previous hits; the Eastern supernatural mystery of The Mummy, combined with the crashing gothic gloom of ‘The Old Dark House’, and adding in a smart murder mystery. It eventually turned out to be a well-received hit in the United Kingdom, albeit a lesser success in the United States.

Karloff wasn’t so concerned with the success of ‘The Ghoul’, though. He had accepted the job for more than one reason.

For years, Karloff had been haunted by his family’s opinion on his career choice. They had always frowned upon his path in early life, but because he had been relatively obscure, mainly working in the theatres of Canada and California, it had never been a problem.

With worldwide fame, however (his face was now internationally recognised), there was no escaping the fact that one of the well-to-do Pratt family, a family that consisted of British diplomats and members of the foreign office, was now acting in films, dressing up as monsters and growling into cameras.

For years, Boris Karloff had worried about the effect of his fame on his family, but he couldn’t run away from it forever.

And so, in 1933, he journeyed to England to star in The Ghoul, ostensibly to add another credit to his name, but more importantly, to give him the opportunity to call on the family he adored and missed.

He set out as Boris Karloff, and arrived as William Henry Pratt at the family home for tea one evening, to be welcomed in by his sisters, who showed him into the parlour, where he found his entire family, seated silently.

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A Universe Of Horrors For a long, painful moment, the youngest member of the Pratt family surveyed the room before him, feeling for all the world like the grotesque creatures he’d been bringing to life for movie audiences over the past two years.

And then, as if on cue, all those seated before him rose up and approached him, applauding, hugging, grinning, kissing and congratulating their little brother. Young William found himself unable to answer one question before another was asked. A camera was produced, and he found himself pulled from brother to sister to brother as the Pratt family jostled for position so as to be photographed with their youngest sibling.

For William Henry Pratt, the youngest and smallest of the Pratt family, born with bow legs and a lisp, and who had always retreated in family circles so as to admire the brilliant, celebrated careers of his older brothers and sisters, the moment was more than he could ever have hoped.

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Chapter 7 - Even The Moon…

Back in Hollywood, Junior Laemmle had begun work on 1933’s horror slate.

He began with ‘Secret Of The Blue Room’, a murder mystery with horror ambitions, set in the storm-battered Castle Helldorf, where three suitors to Gloria Stuart’s heiress take turns to spend the night in the sinister “Blue Room”. A legend has built up around the room. No man has ever survived a whole night there.

Sure enough, each suitor has vanished come the morning, and the Helldorf family, seeking to lay the legend to rest for good, call in a particularly clever Police Commissioner to solve the mystery.

The film starred Lionel Atwill as Gloria Stuart’s father, a sinister suspect who is obviously hiding something, as well as Edward Arnold as Commissioner Forster, a supernaturally-gifted detective, and Paul Lukas as Captain Brink, one of Stuart’s suitors. The film marked the first of Lionel Atwill’s twelve appearances in Universal chillers, and he would go on to become one of the most popular supporting stars there over the years.

While the film itself wasn’t exactly a horror, it did borrow heavily from the Universal horror department. Hardly a minute passes without a good helping of crashing thunder, and the gloom creeping in from the edges of the screen is palpable. Even the Swan Lake theme gets used again.

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A Universe Of Horrors All in all though, ‘Secret Of The Blue Room’ was more of a mystery thriller with horror elements. Perfectly enjoyable, and actually rather clever, it stands as one of Universal’s better efforts into the mystery genre of the 1930’s, and is well worth seeking out.

Gloria Stuart, who’d been so magnificent in ‘The Old Dark House’, began a rather regretful slide into shrieking heroine here, though.

Whereas in James Whale’s hands, she’d come across as a sexy and feisty scream queen, here she was utterly reliant on the men around her for any kind of characterisation. Her character is simply there to be married to someone, and she doesn’t seem to have the force of will to make her own decision, relying instead on whoever can survive the night in the Blue Room.

Stuart’s film career had had an interesting start.

Strikingly beautiful and completely unafraid when it came to her performances, she’d been one of the brightest lights in her high school drama classes. Upon graduation, she went to the Pasadena Playhouse and quickly attracted attention in prestigious roles such as ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘The Sea Gull’.

When Hollywood came calling, she was initially reluctant. She wasn’t the greatest fan of movies, and claimed at the time to have only seen a dozen or so in her entire life. Her real ambition was to act on the New York Stage, but Carl Laemmle requested that she make a screen test before any decision was made. The tests were immaculate, and sensing her potential, Laemmle offered her the moon and stars.

Paramount, who’d also seen her on the stage, stepped in and offered her a contract with them. The situation got ugly for a while, and to settle matters, the MPAA was called in to make a ruling.

Ultimately, the decision of which studio to sign with, came down to a game of chance. Stuart tossed a coin, and the next day joined the players at Universal Studios.

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A Universe Of Horrors However, despite appearing in some of Universal’s biggest hits, Stuart wasn’t satisfied with her career at Universal. Despite a constant stream of roles, she simply wasn’t enamoured with the films that they were making, longing to make the acclaimed, critic pleasing films being made elsewhere.

‘I should never have gone to Universal’ she said much later. ‘It was a second-rate studio and Paramount was first-rate and I was very badly advised’.

After a few years, in which she fulfilled her contractual obligations to the studio, she made the move to 20th Century Fox, where she starred alongside the likes of James Cagney, Lionel Barrymore and Shirley Temple. To modern audiences, she’s best remembered for her role as the 100 year-old version of Rose in James Cameron’s ‘Titanic’ for which she received her only Academy Award Nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1998. She remains the oldest person ever to be nominated for an Academy Award.

In 2010, she died, ironically, at the age of 100 from lung cancer, but not before living out a final flourish as one of Hollywood’s greats.

Stuart also starred in Universal’s next great horror hope, the film that Laemmle Junior decided was worth betting the farm on.

To direct the film, Junior once again chose James Whale, attracted to the project by not only its literary pedigree, but by the technical challenge of creating HG Wells’ ‘The Invisible Man’.

The Invisible Man had actually been discussed at Universal since 1931, and had been an early project for Robert Florey, but in those days, the cost of production had been too prohibitive. It had remained on the back-burner, though, and as Universal had developed its special effects department, down had come the costs involved.

Whale arrived on the production and immediately jettisoned the working script. It had been written by Preston Sturges, then a fledgling screenwriter for hire, who had transposed the action from rural England 69

A Universe Of Horrors
to Czarist Russia, making Wells’ character more of a hero of the revolution than a murdering megalomaniac.

Eager to remain faithful to the source material, but add his own layer of British eccentricity, Whale asked his friend, RC Sheriff, the man who had written Whale’s first success, Journey’s End, to write the script.

Universal wanted Boris Karloff to play the lead role, but Whale was unconvinced. Firstly, he was worried that Universal would be too afraid of not showing their star, so would insist on framing devices showing Karloff before and after the transformation, something he was determined not to have in his version.

Secondly, although Universal considered the movie to be a horror, Whale had other ideas. He was afraid of being typecast as a horror director, wanting the opportunity to broaden his horizons as the mood took him. With ‘The Invisible Man’, he had found a property that reeked of distinction and literary prowess, but could allow him the chance to add his own sense of wit to the fantastical proceedings.

In the end, Universal had to acquiesce to Whale’s demands, and allowed him to look elsewhere for his leading man.

Whale was intent on casting Claude Rains, an actor he’d known on the British stage, and who had always
impressed him with his formidable
stage presence. Whale was looking
for a commanding voice, something
that could slip between sinister and
affecting without missing a beat, and Rains was famous in Britain for
possessing such a voice.

Laemmle Junior wasn’t convinced.

No one in America had ever heard of

Claude Rains, and to make matters
worse, Rains had only recently tested for RKO with disastrous results.

The question, however, was whether

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or not Rains, a notoriously traditional actor would even want the role.

“For five years, five years mind, I was prating to The Theatre Guild about my artistic integrity”, Rains said later. “I was so cock-a-hoop about it. My artistic integrity. Then the first day at the studio, James Whale brought over some bandages. I asked about them and he said, oh yes, I was to be bandaged during most of the picture. And there I had been fighting with the Theatre Guild about my artistic integrity. Oh, it served me right”

Eager to begin a screen career, Rains took the role, even though his face was only to appear on screen for a few seconds at the film’s end. It’s credit to Rains’ discernment that he was able to see the potential the role had to offer, and Whale was correct when he insisted upon casting Claude Rains’ voice.

The movie tells the story of Jack Griffin, a brilliant scientist, who discovers the secret of invisibility while experimenting with a dangerous narcotic known as Monocane. Unable to reverse the invisibility effect, Griffin takes his research and goes into hiding to escape his family and friends, lodging at an Inn at the rural village of Iping.

Unable to stem their curiosity, though, the villagers continue to pester Griffin, eager to know who the mysterious stranger, swathed in bandages, really is. Unknown to Griffin, however, is that Monocane possesses psychologically destructive properties, and it is slowly driving him insane.

One night, when the
prying eyes of the
villagers goes a step
too far, Griffin
explodes in madness
and attacks the
entire village,
exposing his secret
and setting off a
national alarm.

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He turns to his old lab partner, Dr Kemp, to help him, but instead of wanting to simply return to visibility, Griffin’s new drug-warped vision is to simply find a way to slip in and out of his invisible state so that he can cause a national panic, and eventually force rule of the country and ultimately the world, under his control. He begins by enacting a reign of terror, robbing banks, derailing trains, and murdering a few influential figures.

Betraying Griffin to the police, Kemp is taken into custody, but Griffin swears to kill him on the following day at 10 o’clock.

In a blood-curdling sequence, Griffin manages to extract Kemp from the prison in which he is being held, and murders him in cold-blood by tying him up and placing him in a car, which he then pushes off the side of a cliff.

With the country in a state of emergency, doors and windows are locked.

With the onset of winter, Griffin finds it difficult to find shelter, and when the snow begins to fall, he becomes easier to spot, with his footprints betraying his whereabouts.

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A Universe Of Horrors Eventually, he is traced to a barn, which the police set ablaze, hoping to smoke him out. As he staggers out into the snow, the waiting law see his footprints in the snow and open fire, mortally wounding him.

In the film’s final scene, Griffin is shown in hospital in the last moments of his life, as his tearful fiancee finally bids him goodbye. As life slips from him, the effects of the invisibility serum wear off, and we see Griffin’s face for the first, and last time.

Rains’ performance is nothing short of astonishing.

Although he is visible for much of the film, albeit covered in bandages, he commands the screen with a dazzling power. Utterly believable as an English country gentleman, man of science, drooling lunatic and cold-blooded killer, its a performance most actors dream of beginning their career with.

Indeed, such was its impact, that Rains found himself on the A-list of Hollywood overnight and never left it again, going on to appear in a host of bonafide classics of the silver screen, including ‘Casablanca’, Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Notorious’ and ‘The Adventures Of Robin Hood’.

Whale’s direction, similarly, is beyond compare, effortlessly weaving in and out of suspense, slapstick comedy, high drama and bone-chilling horror. He brought a sense of British eccentricity to the proceedings that would otherwise have been lost had an American director been given the megaphone.

In the role of the inn’s landlady, he cast the shrieking Una O’Connor, whose knack for hysterics fitted perfectly with the high-concept of an invisible man declaring war on a pub.

Gloria Stuart does little more than pine and beseech in her efforts to find out what has happened to the man she loves. It’s a shame that the script didn’t offer her a little more, but in the end, she has to content herself with being another appendage to the men around her.

In the role of Kemp, William Harrigan does his best, but for all his trying, he’s blown off the screen by a man the audience can’t even see.

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A Universe Of Horrors Even by 1933’s standards, Harrigan’s acting ability wasn’t the most modern, more suited to silent cinema in his use of over-gesticulating, and straining at the seams in the more intense scenes.

Also slightly underserved is Henry Travers, Clarence the angel himself, as Stuart’s father, and Griffin’s old mentor. He’s perfectly watchable in the role, but horribly miscast as a wise man of science. Still, it’s a pleasure to hear the film’s scientific exposition coming from the mouth of an angel.

The true star, in fact, was a man by the name of John P. Fulton, whose special effects remain a high-watermark for fantastical cinema, even today.

Fulton’s nickname was “The Doctor”, a name given to him by the rest of the technical crew at Universal, such was his ability to pull off the most magnificent effects. “If you can dream it, the Doctor can pull it off” was a popular phrase at the studio. Fulton was given the task of creating the invisible effect. Many believed that he would simply construct complex frameworks in the shape of a man, that could be manoeuvred to give the impression that the clothes were inhabited by an invisible being.

Fulton was thinking bigger, though.

Along with Whale, Fulton devised an ingenious system whereby Rains would be completely clothed in black, and then dressed as normal. Rains would then be filmed as he acted out his scenes against a black backdrop. When watched back, the clothes appeared to be moving on their own against the blackness.

Using duplicate prints, Fulton was able to intensify the moving clothes and then mask them off on subsequent prints, until the black in the background disappeared and all that remained were the clothes. The print would then be sent down for touching up, and the invisibility effect was achieved.

Audiences were entranced. The Invisible Man was unlike anything that cinema had yet seen. Word of mouth spread quickly and furiously.

Theatre attendance was through the roof. At New York’s Roxy Theatre, 74

A Universe Of Horrors over eighty thousand people crammed in to see the movie in the first four days of release.

Critics alike were wowed.

Variety said that: “Considering the problems involved, both from a technical and entertainment standpoint, it is in many respects, astounding”

The New York Post called it: “A wholly distinguished thriller - It is not, of course, merely the camera work which accounts for the excellence of the film. The success of the picture is due as much to the intelligence with which RC Sherriff has dapped the story to the screen and the quality of awesomeness and suspense which James Whale, in his direction, has managed to inject it. The intelligence of the author has been matched by the director, and the picture stands as a testament to intelligent collaboration. The Invisible Man is one of the best thrillers of the year”

In financial terms, the film was the second biggest hit in Universal’s history, second only to Frankenstein. If Junior Laemmle had been concerned about waning interest in the horror genre, then at least for now, he had nothing to worry about.

‘The Invisible Man’ succeeds because not only is it a remarkable technical achievement, on both sides of the camera, but that it is a thoroughly entertaining film; scary, funny, charming, thrilling and awe-inspiring in equal measure. While some of the supporting turns let the film down, they are inconsequential to the brilliance of Whale’s film.

With the pedigree and imagination of HG Wells, and the ingenuity of James Whale’s film-making, Universal had scored a huge fantasy-thriller hit, and by doing so, had created a brand new cinematic genre all its own.

The massive success of ‘The Invisible Man’ had done wonders for Universal’s finances, but the Great Depression was taking its toll on audience numbers.

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In 1934, Universal, always looking to produce movies as cheaply as possible, produced four movies with their horror department.

The first to go into production was ‘The Secret Of The Chateau’.

Despite the poster claiming that “Shadows Come To Life!” “Trunks Swallow Men!”

and “Bells Toll Out Death!”, as well as its eerie setting of a creepy old chateau in the country, it was low-rent stuff that actually contained precious few thrills.

Its story revolved around the theft of an original Gutenberg Bible by the notorious criminal, Prahec, and a whodunnit set in the chateau that featured blackmail,
burglaries and a hunchback.

Universal knew how to market a film
though, and promising bone-chilling
shocks, drew in a generally disappointed crowd, who quickly told their friends not to bother. It disappeared from view within weeks of release, and was quickly forgotten.

Seemingly infatuated with misleading their audience, the next film from universal was the luridly entitled ‘The Man Who Reclaimed His Head’, boasting the return of 1933’s biggest star, Claude Rains, who starred here as a poverty stricken writer who’s duped into writing pacifist editorials for a crooked newspaper publisher, played with relish by Lionel Atwill, who uses Rains’ pieces to make millions in munitions sales at the outbreak of the First World War.

When Rains finds out about the double-cross, and the fact that Atwill is also romancing his wife, Rains explodes with madness and decapitates Atwill with a bayonet.

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This grisly turn of events doesn’t come until the end, though, so audiences expecting the advertised “Thrills and horror galore!” were rightfully disappointed to find that they were being served a discourse on the evils of war and the corruption of the press, albeit with a violent finale.

Much was made of the fact that Rains had appeared headless in the previous year’s ‘The Invisible Man’, and so many thought that this was to be a sequel, a rumour that Universal “failed to suppress”. It didn’t help that they made helpful suggestions to theatre owners with regards to their publicising of the film, even encouraging them to use old Frankenstein Monster cut-outs, but with its head removed, to attract audiences in the lobby.

The problem is that ‘The Man Who Reclaimed His Head’ is actually a very good film, a hard-hitting, anti-war statement that would no doubt have been quite a prestigious hit for Universal had it been marketed correctly.

The third “horror” movie of 1934 was ‘Life Returns’, a screaming bore that ended up being lost for decades, such was its insignificance. It could have been so different too.

In May of that year, real-life scientist Robert E. Cornish had succeeded in restoring a recently deceased dog back to life by means of surgery and chemistry. When Universal had found out about it, they’d wasted no time in approaching Cornish and securing the rights to not only the story itself, but to the primitive footage Cornish had made of the experiment. A few months later, and ‘Life Returns’ found its way into cinemas.

You’d naturally assume that another

Frankenstein would be on the cards, with the story of the re-animation of life into a dead subject providing rich fruit for a spiritual successor to James Whale’s masterpiece. Ironically, considering the film’s title, the world got a thoroughly lifeless lump of low-budget sludge, in which a 77

A Universe Of Horrors team of scientists variously fall out with each other and have children (one of which owns a dog called Scooter). Scooter dies, and the film’s

“climax”, one of the doctors brings the dog back to life.

It’s a shame he couldn’t have done the same to the film.

To call it a horror film is an insult to the genre. Some of Cornish’s original footage is included, and because it’s of a much poorer quality, jars with the rest of the film, even though the rest of the film is a poorly constructed mess. To top it all off, Universal’s big selling point was to include Cornish himself in the cast as one of the team of doctors. The

“thrill” of seeing a non-actor trying to act must have been as painful for audiences back then as it is now.

Variety summed the film up perfectly with the review: “Every performance is plodding, colourless, and it’s a pic much longer to the audience than its accredited running time would indicate”

Certainly, Life Returns does possess the remarkable power of being able to make sixty minutes seems like six hundred.

It suddenly seemed as though Universal had run out of steam. Whereas 1931 to 1933 had been a boom town as far as horror was concerned, producing some classics of not only the horror genre, but of cinema itself, 1934’s ideas were looking a little desperate.

Junior Laemmle cast around for inspiration, and found it in his good friend, Edgar Ulmer.

Ulmer was a brawny, 30 year-old Austro-Hungarian, who’d come to Hollywood after a stint as an all-rounder in German cinema, working under such masters as FW Murnau and Max Reinhardt.

When Reinhardt came to America to make films, Ulmer accompanied him, and upon arriving, offered his services to Carl Laemmle as an art designer. Work was occasional, not steady, and so Ulmer took the opportunity of learning other trades, ending up as an accomplished assistant director and cinematographer, prop builder and production designer. When worked slowed up in one department, he went to help 78

A Universe Of Horrors out in another. If the work dried up at Universal, Ulmer found himself being loaned to Fox and Paramount’s art departments. In 1930 he directed his first prestige piece, a foreign language version of ‘Anna Christie’ for MGM.

Though he tended to move around a lot between studios, Ulmer’s spiritual home was Universal, and every time he returned there, he always went to see Junior Laemmle first. The two men were roughly the same age, had much in common, and over the years, had developed a close friendship.

Impressed with his work on ‘Anna Christie’, Junior offered Ulmer a directing job for Universal. Knowing of Junior’s predilection for the horror genre, Ulmer asked if he could take a fresh look at a property that had been gestating at Universal for several years, to no effect: a screen adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story, ‘The Black Cat’.

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 8 - Too Vile For Public Consumption In actual fact, the story that Ulmer had in mind had absolutely nothing to do with Poe’s original story, save for the fact that a cat appears. Ulmer knew that the Poe tale carried a certain reputation, and would guarantee curiosity from audiences. He also knew, rather astutely, that hardly any of them would have read the original story, so he could tell any story he wanted.

He drafted in the screenwriter Peter Ruric and laid out the story he wanted to tell. Ruric was shocked, but listened attentively. A few weeks later, he turned in his script, warning Ulmer that he didn’t think it would get past the censors.

‘You let me worry about that’ smiled Ulmer.

Next up was casting.

With Karloff’s British trip over, he had returned to Hollywood and was eager to take on another role. Universal signed him as the movie’s villain, Hjalmar Poelzig, and once again billed him by his surname only.

The story that Ulmer had crafted, however, required two leads. The movie’s anti-hero, Vitus Werdegast, was a war hero, wrongly imprisoned for 15 years, and returning to take his revenge on Poelzig, the man who betrayed Vitus and his regiment. For this part, Ulmer had a very special man in mind.

The next day, as talk of casting began to heat up, and with all the parts announced, Ulmer introduced his Vitus Werdegast to the rest of the crew.

‘Gentlemen’, he announced. ‘I give you… Bela Lugosi’

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The prospect of a Karloff Lugosi movie in 1934 was the stuff of dreams.

Here were the world’s premiere movie monsters, not only appearing in a movie together, but facing off against each other. Not only that, but Lugosi was to be the movie’s hero.

For Lugosi himself, the part couldn’t have come at a better time. Over the past year, he’d been so desperate for money and employment, that he’d played a Chinese crime lord in ‘The Mysterious Mr Wong’ at Monogram Studios, the place that careers went to die, and made another twelve-part serial called ‘The Return Of Chandu’, playing Frank Chandler, the heroic crime-solving magician.

Carl Laemmle himself was out of town, so Ulmer set to work bringing to the screen his nightmarish vision. Junior didn’t ask any questions, trusting his friend to bring in a finished product that would revive Universal’s fortunes for 1934.

The film tells the story of
newlywed couple, Peter
and Joan, on their
honeymoon in Hungary.

Whilst travelling by train,
they meet and befriend

Vitus Werdegast, played by

Lugosi, who has returned
after 15 years in a prison
camp to confront the man
he believes to be
responsible for not only
betraying his army unit to
the enemy, but for stealing

Werdegast’s wife and child
by telling them that he had
been killed.

When their connecting bus
crashes, Werdegast and the

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newlyweds hike to the home of Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Karloff, the man Werdegast is after.

Stranded at the bizarre house, the truth about Poelzig slowly emerges.

Not only had Poelzig betrayed Werdegast in the war, and stolen his family, but murdered Werdegast’s wife, keeping her body on display in a glass cabinet in his cellar. Poelzig then proceeded to make Werdegast’s daughter, Karen, his wife. When Joan overhears this, she runs to find the girl, explaining that her father, Vitus, has come to find her.

When Karen asks if this is true, Poelzig murders her. It soon transpires that Poelzig is the leader of a group of devil worshippers, and has chosen Joan as his next sacrifice. Determined to save her, Werdegast challenges Poelzig to a game of chess, with Joan’s life as the prize.

Poelzig defeats Werdegast in the chess game, and leads Joan down to the cellar where he and his coven begin The Rites Of Lucifer.

Werdegast, however, with the help of his manservant and Peter, snatches Joan from the ceremony and attempts to escape with her, but accidentally stumbles into the preserving room where the body of his daughter now lies.

Driven mad by the sight of his dead daughter, Werdegast finds and confronts Poelzig and the two men engage in a vicious fight. Gaining the upper hand, Werdegast ties Poelzig to two posts, his arms outstretched, and in revenge for
his evil deeds, takes
a sickle and skins

Poelzig alive.

Peter, arriving at the
wrong moment,
mistakes

Werdegast’s actions
and shoots him dead.

The newlyweds
escape from the
house as a fire
begins, destroying
the evil forever.

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A Universe Of Horrors With its themes of sadism, revenge, murder, incest, torture, Satan worship, necrophilia and rape, as well as the horrifying skinning scene (seen only in silhouette, but still devastatingly effective), it was no surprise that when Ulmer turned the movie in to the office, he was called back a few days later.

The studio executives, including the now-returned Carl Laemmle Senior, had decided that ‘The Black Cat’ was too too vile for public consumption. They ordered reshoots and a rewrite. Ulmer said he’d get to work straight away. Instead of removing anything, Ulmer shot more.

Karloff’s tour of the glass caskets was added, so as to give Lugosi’s insane revenge more context. A musical score that ran throughout the entire film was added, a first for any movie, so as to make re-editing more difficult.

Moreover, subtle character changes were made to Lugosi’s Werdegast, who in the original version had shown more lust towards Joan. In the finished version, he was simply parental.

Ulmer showed the film to Junior Laemmle, and insisted that he could have a smash if he released it Ulmer’s way. Wisely, Junior sided with his friend. The critics, on the other hand, did not.

‘The Black Cat’ garnered some of the most vitriolic notices in Universal’s history.

Time Magazine called it: “A dismal hocus-pocus which seems to confuse its actors as much as it fails to frighten its audience”

The New York Times said: “The Black Cat is more foolish than horrible”

Variety said: “With the aid of heavily shadowed lighting and mausoleum-like architecture, a certain eeriness has been achieved. Skinning alive is not new, a truly horrible and nauseating bit of extreme sadism. Its inclusion in a motion picture is dubious showmanship”

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A Universe Of Horrors The Hollywood Reporter stated that: “The writing and directing both combine to do the almost impossible. To make an Edgar Allan Poe story dull”

Audiences, on the other hand, scrambled to see the movie.

So successful was the teaming of Karloff and Lugosi, coupled with the controversial subject matter, that the movie played to sold out houses for weeks on end. In fact, despite the Universal executives’ opinion that the movie was “too vile for public consumption”, it went on to be Universal’s highest grossing movie of 1934.

Karloff’s villain, based heavily on occultist Aleister Crowley, is a sinister delight, with his severe widow’s peak and stony grimace. He calls to mind Karloff’s performance as Imhotep in The Mummy, stoic and determined, yet smouldering with an undercurrent of malice.

Lugosi, however, is the real revelation.

Although he spend most of the film trying to deliver simple lines as dramatically as possible, the real delight is in seeing him roll up his sleeves and getting stuck into the proceedings. By the end of the film, he’s as gleefully malevolent as Karloff, his sculpted hair falling out of place, his eyes lit up in a frenzy of revenge. Contrast it with his earlier scenes, where he bears all the countenance of Count Dracula himself.

The film went some way to boosting his star in Hollywood, although it didn’t break him free from his stereotyping in any significant way. The following year he was appearing as Count Mora in Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s attempt at a horror, ‘Mark Of The Vampire’, alongside such distinguished company as Lionel Barrymore and Jean Hersholt, and under the direction of Dracula’s Tod Browning.

He also starred in the newly created Hammer Studios film ‘Phantom Ship’ aka ‘The Mystery Of The Marie Celeste’ in which he played a meek sailor on the verge of a nervous breakdown, involved in a murder plot aboard the ill-fated ship.

As for Edgar Ulmer, ‘The Black Cat’ would no doubt have taken him to the top had it not been for true love.

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A Universe Of Horrors Whilst working on the movie, Ulmer had met and fallen in love with Shirley Alexander. The problem was that she was married to producer Max Alexander. The other problem was that Max Alexander had a rather powerful uncle in Hollywood. The uncle’s name was Carl Laemmle.

Choosing love over his career, Ulmer found himself blacklisted not just by Laemmle and Universal, but by every other major movie studio in Hollywood.

Although he went on to work in smaller studios over the next few decades, Hollywood’s odd-job man for hire disappeared after one, shining, grisly moment in time, content to have the girl of his dreams in return.

They remained married until his death in 1972.

With ‘The Black Cat’, Universal had once again had their fortunes turned around. Although their horror division had generally remained in profit, Universal’s other films hadn't fared so well with audiences.

Though hits such as a Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Black Cat had injected much-needed cash back into the pockets of the Laemmles, over half of their remaining movie productions, the B-movies, were struggling to turn a profit.

Many other studios sought movie financing from backers and investors, promising healthy returns on hits. Partly financing movies and sharing the profits with wealthy investors meant that production slates at MGM, Warner Brothers and the others were always full, with solid relationships being forged with money men, who always seemed willing to take a punt for a few thousand dollars.

At Universal, things were run very differently. The Laemmles had stockholders, but the budgets for every film made there came straight from the Laemmles' own pockets.

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A Universe Of Horrors The fact was, that even though they’d had some huge hits over the past few years, the costs of running a studio were prohibitive, and audience numbers were generally down. What the Laemmles needed were some big hits for 1935, and horror had so far proved to be the most consistent way of making money.

The horror division began the year with ‘The Mystery Of Edwin Drood’, the famously unfinished Dickens novel about an opium-addicted choirmaster, John Jasper, whose nephew, Edwin Drood, is betrothed to the beautiful Rosa Bud, with whom Jasper is infatuated.

One night, Edwin mysteriously vanishes, much to the shock of the community, and creating one of literature’s great puzzles. Is Edwin dead? Has he simply left the village? And who is the mysterious Mr Datchery, recently arrived in the sleepy English area?

Over the years, the unfinished puzzle had confounded readers and scholars alike. The subtle clues that Dickens had planted in the completed work led to many theories regarding Drood’s fate. Most centred on John Jasper, and asserted that he had murdered his nephew so as to have a clear path to the affections of Rosa Bud.

In 1914, the character was literally put on trial in a sensational court case held at Kings Hall in Covent Garden by the Dickens Fellowship.

Jasper was played by Frederick T. Harry, while the mystery writer and Dickens expert G.K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown stories, acted as the judge.

The proceedings continued in a light-hearted fashion, with the court eventually finding Jasper guilty of manslaughter, at which Chesterton fined everyone except himself for contempt of court, ruling that the crime was unsolvable.

Other theories of the time concluded that Jasper himself believed that he had murdered Drood in an opium-addled haze, but that Drood was actually alive, and returned at the end of the tale to provide a happy ending. Another was exactly the same, but had Drood returning just 86

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after Jasper had committed suicide out of guilt, thereby providing a bittersweet finale.

Whatever Dickens intentions had been for the story’s ending, the unanswerable mystery of the tale certainly caught the public’s imagination. Universal, never one to miss an opportunity for sensationalism, snapped up the story and aggressively marketed their take as

“finally answering the unanswerable!”.

Claude Rains starred as the sinister John Jasper, with David Manners as Drood, Heather Angel as Rosa Bud, and a supporting cast rounded out by Douglass Montgomery, EE Clive and Valerie Hobson.

While the film certainly has an interesting way of tying up the story’s loose ends, with Jasper being the murderer, and the mysterious Mr Datchery being a disguised Neville Landless, eager to bring Jasper to justice so that he can clear any doubt left in Rosa’s heart, it was hardly the groundbreaking eureka moment that many Dickens fans were looking for. The Jasper theory was by far the most accepted, and audiences wanting to be enlightened simply found themselves mildly justified.

Next came the bizarre curio ‘Night Life Of The Gods’, based on a novel by Thorne Smith, the man who’d come up with ‘Topper’.

The story in this case was about a scientist named Hunter Hawk, who by a series of experiments and mishaps, accidentally creates a magic ring that can not only turn living things into marble statues, but turn statues into living beings.

He starts by turning his irritating family into stone, then meets a leprechaun whose
daughter, Meg, is the 900 year-old daughter of 87

A Universe Of Horrors one of the three furies.

Hunter and Meg become a couple and set about turning anyone who annoys them into stone, before taking a trip to the Metrpolitan Museum Of Art in New York and bringing a group of Greek gods and goddess statues to life. What follows are the wacky adventures of this bizarre group as they try to fit in with twentieth century life.

Yes, that’s honestly the plot.

While the film is definitely fun, it’s also no masterpiece, and comes across as a little too pleased with its own sense of humour at times. The concept is great, but the morality of the tale is a little fudged. We’re supposed to root for a man who offs his entire family on a whim, and then follow him on a magical odyssey that seems a little too conveniently entered into.

It kicked off with a pre-credit scroll that told audiences to “Park your gum under your seat where it belongs, and let’s all go crazy together!”.

It also suffered from a surfeit of characters, and a lack of killer gags. The only really funny thing about the film is the situation itself. As long as you find the idea of constantly watching people in togas doing things like getting out of taxis or drinking in bars, you’ll be fine.

Nevertheless, it’s light-hearted, high-concept fun that should be sought out if you’re a Universal completionist.

Universal had greater artistic success by teaming Karloff with Lugosi again in another Edgar Allan Poe titled story that had little to do with its source material.

Eager for another ‘Black Cat’ sized hit, Laemmle Junior went into production with ‘The Raven’.

Instead of using Poe’s original poem though, it told a wholly original tale about a sadistic brain surgeon, Richard Vollin, played by Bela Lugosi, a man obsessed with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, even going so far as to 88

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create his own fully functioning torture chamber inspired by the Spanish Inquisition’s methods in Poe’s The Pit And The Pendulum.

At the film’s opening, a dancer named Jean Thatcher is involved in a violent car crash, and falls into a coma. Desperate to save her life, Jean’s father, Judge Thatcher, seeks out Vollin at his imposing home and begs him to save his daughter’s life.

Although he initially refuses, Vollin eventually gives in, but while performing the operation, falls in love with Jean, much to the disgust of Judge Thatcher, who has begun to suspect Vollin of being a malevolent personality. He’s proved correct when Vollin decides to murder not just Judge Thatcher, but Jean’s fiancee, Jerry Halden, so as to clear a path to the beautiful dancer for himself.

As he is contemplating the best course of action, he is visited by Edmond Bateman, an escaped murderer, who wants Vollin to perform an operation to change his looks, so that he may evade the law. Seeing an opportunity, Vollin agrees to perform the operation, but when Bateman wakes after the procedure, is horrified to discover that he has been grotesquely disfigured by Vollin, who maniacally threatens to abandon him to his new face unless Bateman helps him to dispose of his opponents.

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A Universe Of Horrors Seeing no alternative, Bateman becomes Vollin’s unwilling henchman in a plan which sees Judge Thatcher being kidnapped and fastened to a slab in Vollin’s torture chamber, above which a razor-sharp pendulum is set swinging into motion.

Ultimately, Bateman turns on his master. Although fatally wounded, Bateman throws Vollin into one of his own Poe-inspired traps, where he is horribly crushed to death, leaving the Thatchers to escape.

Although Lugosi is undoubtedly the lead in the movie, with Karloff not even arriving into the story until a third of the way in, and then only playing a supporting character, Lugosi’s name again appeared below Karloff’s.

To compound matters, Universal, knowing of Lugosi’s financial woes, refused to pay him more than $5000 for appearing in the film. Lugosi was assured that due to money being tight, they couldn’t go higher. He accepted.

It soon became known, however, that Karloff, as well as receiving top billing for his supporting role, had been paid $10000, double the fee paid to Lugosi.

While Lugosi could essentially do nothing about it, he’d already signed the contract, it did hurt. More than ever, Lugosi was consumed with remorse for not having taken the part of Frankenstein’s monster. To make it worse, Karloff wasn’t the sort of man that Lugosi could feel anything but kindness for. Karloff was a perfect gentleman, and was nothing but warm and genial to Lugosi, which made the fact that Lugosi resented him bitterly, all the harder to take.

The film itself was remarkably daring for its time. As well as the grisly methods of murder and torture that Lugosi devises for his victims, the Jack Pierce make-up job on Karloff is thoroughly repellant to look at.

Lugosi takes great pleasure in explaining to Karloff the simple steps he’s taken to desecrate his face, with cold, clinical logic.

While it never scales the gothic heights of earlier Universal entries, The Raven is a deliciously entertaining chiller that takes its high-concept and 90

A Universe Of Horrors relishes in delivering a Grand Guignol slice of thrills. The use of Poe’s torture devices is especially fun, with Lugosi’s cackling, mad doctor explaining the effects with macabre glee to his terrified victims.

Universal took the daring decision to encourage cinema owners to write to their local schools, to urge teachers to bring along their literary classes, in the misguided hope that the film would act as some kind of English lesson, but its difficult to see anyone finding anything other than illicit thrills in its dastardly goings on.

Unfortunately for Universal, the film didn’t manage to spark the public’s imagination. Perhaps it was the nastiness of the whole thing, although that hadn’t seemed to bother 1934’s cinema-goers, who had flocked to

‘The Black Cat’, equally as gruesome. The most likely explanation is that with Ulmer’s 1934 Poe film, starring the very same duo of horror icons, audiences had already had their thrills. More of the same, perhaps, just wasn’t what the public wanted.

Or maybe it was just the sound of Karloff doing his best to sound like an American hoodlum…

Slightly more daring for Universal was ‘Werewolf Of London’, which carried the distinction of being the first mainstream Hollywood werewolf movie.

The film sees a noted botanist named Dr Glendon, played by Henry Hull, journeying to a forbidden region of Tibet in order to find the fabled Mariphasa Lupino Lumino, otherwise known as the Phosphorescent Moon Flower in a hidden valley.

Although he finds the flower, he also makes another discovery; a strange beast, who seems to be half-man, half-wolf, skulking in the shadows.

The beast strikes, mauling Glendon’s arm, but Glendon manages to wound the creature in return with his knife, causing the monster to retreat in pain.

Glendon returns to London with the Moon Flower and begins to cultivate it in his laboratory, but is soon visited by the mysterious Dr Yogami, played by Warner Oland, a fellow botanist who has also been 91

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searching for the fabled Moon Flower, and beseeches Glendon to let him study alongside.

Glendon, sensing that Yogami is somehow familiar, asks if they have ever met before.

‘Once’, replies Yogami, cryptically, ‘but only for a moment, in the dark’

Yogami then tells Glendon that the Moon Flower is the only known cure for lycanthrophobia, the condition that causes a man to become a wolf when the moon is full. Yogami then touches Glendon’s arm, and the meaning is clear.

Derisive of Yogami’s claims, but disturbed by the warning that a werewolf will attack the thing it loves best, Glendon starts to grow worried for the safety of his beloved wife. And then comes the day when the full moon begins to rise…

Despite its interesting set-up, its impossible to feel anything but dissatisfaction with ‘Werewolf Of London’ due to its constant missed opportunities.

Firstly, while Henry Hull is no doubt an accomplished actor (he was a celebrated stage actor), his performance as Glendon is largely uncomfortable, as is the sight of 45 year old Hull making love to a 17
year old Valerie Hobson.

While Jack Pierce does a
fantastic job in
transforming Hull into a
wolf, using a subtle

Satanic combination of
lower fangs, pointed ears
and a jagged widow’s
peak, it’s not enough to
turn Hull himself into a
beast. He’s far too
retrained in his
performance, and his
scenes as Glendon are

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A Universe Of Horrors equally as unremarkable. Also it’s difficult to accept a werewolf that puts on a hat, scarf and coat before he ventures out into the foggy London night.

In actual fact, Pierce’s original design for the werewolf had involved a much more elaborate make-up, with hair covering the entirety of Glendon’s face, hands and feet, but Hull flatly refused, preferring instead to have his face mostly visible so as to better convey his emotions when he acted.

Pierce was thoroughly angered by Hull’s decision, and spent the rest of the shoot in silence whenever Hull came to be made up in his chair.

However, he would get the opportunity of using his original design in another project, in just six years time…

Warner Oland fares somewhat better, especially in his scenes as Yogami.

Oland had been playing Charlie Chan for years by this point, and had nailed the technique of imparting wisdom with a wry smile and a perceptive gaze. His warnings to Glendon at the beginning of the film are loaded with smiling menace, which fits perfectly, however, it can’t be denied that if Bela Lugosi had played the part, as he was originally scheduled to do, the whole film would have been infused with a greater sense of danger.

Despite all the what-ifs though, there are things to enjoy. Glendon’s transformation in the open as he walks past a series of pillars is quite well executed, as are the Tibetan scenes at the film’s outset. It’s just a shame that Glendon’s wolf takes so long between appearances, and that the story signals its intentions so far in advance. By telling the viewer at the outset that a werewolf will attack the thing it loves most, the audience is essentially told that Gelndon will attempt to kill his wife, and that he will die trying.

Amazingly, the film didn’t have a title while it was in production. To perk up interest in the film, Laemmle offered a $50 prize to the employee who picked the best title, which led to a string of risible suggestions, including ‘Moon Doom’, ‘The Whelp From Tibet’, and ‘Bloom, Flower, Bloom!’

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A Universe Of Horrors Despite Universal’s best efforts, though, the film was flop at the box-office. Most saw it as too similar in plot to MGM’s ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, which certainly boasted a more interesting take on the man-becomes-beast legend.

The world, it seems, wasn’t ready for werewolves just yet. But that would change.

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 9 - The Monster Demands A Mate After their trio of experiments had received lukewarm responses, Laemmle Junior decided to wheel out the big guns once more.

Since filming had finished on ‘The Invisible Man’, James Whale had made no secret of the fact that he was bored with fantasy subjects. The technical challenges of the film, as well as the fact that his non-fantasy movies had received a ho-hum reaction, was starting to worry him. The last thing he wanted, was to be typecast as a horror director.

His romantic comedy ‘By Candlelight’ in 1933 was full of his trademark mischievousness and wit, but hadn’t set the box-office alight. The same fate had befallen his rather more high-brow effort ‘One More River’ in 1934. While artistic ambitions were all very well, Whale’s position as Universal’s most bankable director had started to slip.

To clear his head, he took a holiday and returned to England for two months, where he met up with RC Sherriff and began to toss ideas around for something new.

By the time he returned to America, he was fizzing with excitement.

Whale and Sherriff had come up with a radical new idea for a film.

Entitled ‘A Trip To Mars’, it told the story of a group of Earth-people who are abducted by an underground Martian civilisation. Whale announced that he wanted to go into production in March of 1934, with Boris Karloff in the lead.

The Laemmles, however, had other ideas.

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A Universe Of Horrors For some time, Junior had been harbouring ambitions to produce a lavish remake of Universal’s 1929 smash-hit, ‘Show Boat’, featuring an all-star cast. Whale was wowed with the idea. ‘Show Boat’ had been one of his favourite musicals. However, to get the gig, he had to do a little favour for the Laemmles first.

Since 1931, Laemmle had been trying to make a sequel to Frankenstein.

Originally, Robert Florey, always the bridesmaid, had been attached, and had turned in a script entitled ‘The New Adventures Of Frankenstein - The Monster Lives!’, but it had been dismissed as unsatisfactory.

In 1933, Tom Reed had written a script entitled ‘The Return of Frankenstein’, which Junior loved. Whale was given the script, read it, and declared that “it stinks to high heaven”

Gritting his teeth, and deciding that if he was going to do this thing, then he’d do it his way, Whale knuckled down to write his own story, based on a segment from Mary Shelley’s original story, in which The Monster confronts Frankenstein, and demands that he create him a mate.

The film would go on to be acclaimed as the greatest of the Universal Horror movies.

Its name, was The Bride Of Frankenstein.

Karloff was signed again as The Monster, with Colin Clive returning to play Henry Frankenstein. Mae Clarke, who’d played Elizabeth in the original, was in ill health, so her part was taken by Universal’s new starlet, Valerie Hobson, in her second big horror role of 1935.

To play the Bride herself, Brigitte Helm, who’d played Maria the Robot Girl in Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’, and in doing so, created one of the most iconic female images in 1920’s cinema, was considered, as was the model, Phyllis Brooks, and the rebellious Louise Brooks.

However, when it was decided that the actress playing The Bride would also play the part of Mary Shelley in the movie’s opening, Whale 96

A Universe Of Horrors decided that he needed someone with a little more gravitas, yet also a remarkable face.

He settled eventually on Elsa Lanchester, an English actress who was married to the celebrated screen actor, Charles Laughton, and who had been a consistent supporting player since her arrival in Hollywood in 1934.

Finally, Whale’s script needed one more player. An exuberant presence to bring to life the original character of Dr Pretorius, the warped rival scientist and former mentor of Henry, who determines to use Henry’s past mistakes as his jumping off point.

Owing Universal one more picture in his contract, Claude Rains was chosen, but Whale had other ideas. This character required a little more flamboyance, a little more of the sneering grotesque, yet imbued with wicked wit and charm.

The requirements were a perfect description of Ernest Thesiger, who within days was injecting malevolent glee into rehearsals over his needlepoint.

Whale’s film picks up mere moments after the conclusion of Frankenstein, where the assembled mob have just incinerated The Monster inside the windmill. Unbeknown to them, is that instead of perishing in the flames, The Monster has simply fallen through the floor of the burning mill into a flooded pit.

As the mob disperses, Hans, the father of Little Maria from the original film, investigates the wreck to see the body of his daughter’s murderer.

Falling into the pit himself, he encounters the monster who strangles Hans.

When Hans’ wife, Little Maria’s mother goes to see where her husband is, The Monster springs out of the pit, throwing her to her death, also, before stumbling away into the forest.

At Castle Frankenstein, Henry is nursed back to health by Elizabeth, when he is visited by his former mentor, the sinister Dr Pretorius, who desires to learn all about Henry’s work. He shows Henry an assortment 97

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of miniature human beings he has created, and then explains that the best way to be rid of The Monster is to create a mate for it.

Allowing himself to be convinced, half out of fear, and half out of desire to finish his work, Frankenstein agrees, setting to work on creating the body, while Pretorius begins work on an artificial brain.

Meanwhile, the Monster, being pursued by hunters, takes refuge in the cottage of a blind hermit, who befriends him. Through spending time with the hermit, The Monster begins to speak, simple words such as

“friend” and “good”, but the hunters arrive at the cottage and chase the Monster away.

The Monster encounters Pretorius, who tells him that he is in the process of making a mate for the Creature.

Henry however, has changed his mind about the whole endeavour, and retreats to his castle. When he tells Dr Pretorius that he no longer 98

A Universe Of Horrors wishes to be involved, Pretorius signals to the Monster, who snatches Elizabeth and spirits her away. Now holding all the cards, Pretorius forces Henry to complete his work on the Monster’s mate, by threatening the life of Elizabeth.

Harnessing the power of a lightning storm, Frankenstein and Pretorius bring the creature to life, with Pretorius proudly introducing her to the world as “The Bride Of Frankenstein”, a twitching, shock-haired being, who stares in shock at the new world around her. The Monster approaches her, arms outstretched, and says “Friend?”, but instead of welcoming arms, the Bride begins to hiss and scream, violently rejecting him.

Realising that he will never find true happiness in the arms of another living thing, The Monster sorrowfully tells Henry and Elizabeth to escape and live, before destroying the laboratory by throwing a high-voltage lever, telling the Bride and Pretorius that “We belong dead!”.

The ceiling falls, flames burst, an explosion rips out the sides of the laboratory, and the trio are left to their doom as Frankenstein and Elizabeth escape into the night.

In recreating the Monster’s make-up, Jack Pierce again used logical thinking in his design. After being half-destroyed in the mill-fire, it was clear that The Monster’s features would be altered somewhat, so scars were added, and a shorter hairline was given, as much of his head would have been burned.

As the film progressed, The Monster would naturally heal, and so Pierce gradually let the fringe become longer, and the scars subsequently fade and vanish.

Also, The Monster was called upon to speak, a decision that Karloff was unhappy with.

‘Speech! Stupid!’, he later said. ‘My argument was that if the monster had any impact or charm, it was because he was inarticulate – this great, lumbering, inarticulate creature. The moment he spoke you might as well ... play it straight’.

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A Universe Of Horrors Certainly, The Monster’s few lines are to the detriment of the movie, and seem unnecessary to the film. Karloff’s physical abilities are more than enough to make clear the Monster’s thoughts, without the gratuitous dialogue he is given.

At the film’s climax, when The Monster throws the lever that will put himself, Pretorius and The Bride to death, he utters “Yes! You go! You live!” to Frankenstein and Elizabeth, before taking a last look at his mate, a tear rolling down his cheek as he grants them both peace.

The words are unnecessary. Karloff’s few gestures say it all.

In order for Karloff to be able to speak clearly, he was required to keep in his dental plate, therefore also removing the hollow-faced look that had succeeded so well in the original film, giving The Monster a rather more healthy appearance here.

Nevertheless, despite these minor quibbles, Karloff’s performance in

‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ is astounding; sympathetic, naive and menacing all at once, it is a performance that compliments his original portrayal, adding further layers to The Monster. Here, we are seeing the natural progression of the childlike creature birthed by the lightning in the 1931 film.

If the first film was The Monster taking its baby-steps, here are its lusty, adolescent years.

Elsa Lanchester’s Bride was based on the image of Nefertiti, with her hair being structured around a wire frame to emulate the Egyptian queen. Jack Pierce added long, vivid scarring to the Bride’s jaw to show her patchwork nature, and reams of bandages around her hands and fingers, no doubt hiding a hideous surgical job. At one point, Karloff’s monster takes her bandaged fingers and smooths them with his scarred own, only for the Bride to recoil with a shuddering scream.

Lanchester detested Pierce, saying ironically that “he really did feel that he made these people, like he was a God…”

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Nevertheless, Pierce’s Bride, although a flamboyant high-camp creation, was an instant classic, coming to represent the theatrical side of Universal’s horror movies.

Lanchester based her performance on the swans of Regent Park, with their jerking heads and hisses when provoked. Nevertheless, despite her scars, her wild, white-shocked hair, and the epileptic nature of her movement, Lanchester’s Bride remains an enchantingly beautiful vision of gothic womanhood, due in large part to Whale, who was instrumental at every stage of her design.

Whale was equally as instrumental in creating the movie’s third monster, the downright immoral Dr Pretorius, who almost manages to steal the film from Karloff.

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A Universe Of Horrors Thesiger injects the role with such diabolical camp, literally plucking Henry from his marital bed and thrusting him back into the laboratory, whilst parading an array of wicked sneers and grins that would make Lucifer burn with envy, and tending his newly created Creatures with necrophilic tenderness.

It is Thesiger’s presence and performance that tips the film over from horror to horror-comedy, and yet Whale had designed things that way.

Growing bored with the horror genre in general, Whale had early on decided that The Bride of Frankenstein was going to be something completely different, and indulged heavily in his own flamboyant tastes.

This does mean that ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’

make for an awkward double-bill, stylistically at least, and yet they are the red and green sides of the same apple.

If the first film was a director taking his baby steps, then the second shows his lusty, adolescent years.

Una O’Connor again starred for Whale as Minnie, a virtual facsimile of the shrieking innkeeper she’d played in Whale’s ‘The Invisible Man’.

Her role here is strangely large, with her character appearing to be almost omniscient. She pops up first at the burning mill, shrieking as the Monster rises from the flooded pit. She is the first to realise that Henry is not dead, but merely concussed, and then she seems to have become the Frankenstein Castle maid, admitting Dr Pretorius into the story.

She’s also present when the Monster is caught and imprisoned by the villagers, Whale seemingly intent on including her at every major point of the story.

Not that it’s a bad thing, of course. The likes of Una O’Connor are sorely missing from today’s stable of character actors.

Colin Clive’s performance is slightly more hysterical this time round, mostly due to the chronic alcoholism that was consuming him. For some over-the-shoulder shots, a drunken Clive had to be held up by crew 102

A Universe Of Horrors members. It wasn’t unusual to have the cast and crew searching for him on set, only to find him passed out in a corner.

During military training in his early years, Clive had damaged his knee badly, and the aggravated complications that had resulted, had forced doctors to suggest an amputation. Faced with this, Clive had descended into a spiralling alcoholic dustbowl, and had long since ceased to be the matinee idol he’d begun as in Hollywood. Whale had to fight to keep him in the production, determined to support his friend, but the situation grew ever more hopeless.

Apart from The Bride of Frankenstein, and an appearance in the same year’s ‘Mad Love’ for MGM, alongside Peter Lorre and Frances Drake, Clive was consigned to lesser films. Two years later, he was dead, after suffering from complications from tuberculosis.

He was 37 years old.

Although The Bride Of Frankenstein has its frightening moments, it’s not the purely horrifying experience that its predecessor was. Instead it is a carnival of grotesques acting on their basest human instincts, under the watchful eye of a master showman.

This was Whale’s crowning achievement, containing his opinions on religion, on men and women, on the role of the outsider in society, on homosexuality, on the dark side of human nature. In short, The Bride Of Frankenstein perhaps says more about James Whale than any biography ever could, and rightfully stands as the torchbearer for the entire Universal horror cycle.

The New York Times called it: “a first rate horror film”. The Reynolds News called it: “An amazing spectacle. A wonderful example of cinema technique”. In 2005, TIME Magazine asked readers to vote for the 100

Best Films Of All Time. The Bride Of Frankenstein easily found itself on the list.

Universal were hoping that their formula was going to net them huge returns, but while The Bride Of Frankenstein did make a large profit, it wasn’t the stupendous success that Frankenstein had been in 1931. In fact, the horror genre itself was currently facing a problem.

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A Universe Of Horrors Universal’s ‘The Raven’, from earlier in the year, which had teamed Karloff and Lugosi was facing a censorship problem in the United Kingdom, and MGM’s ‘Mad Love’, the tale of a mad surgeon obsessed with a pianist’s wife, who grafts the hands of a murderer onto his love rival, had been savaged by British Censors.

The British market was vital for Universal, with its immensely popular movies turning great profits there, but with the enforcement of the Production Code in America being more rigorously enforced in 1934
and 1935, British censors suddenly seemed more determined to clean up their screens too.

A few years before, British Censors had created a new rating, the “H”, denoting horror, which advised audiences that the film they were about to see was of a horrific nature, and that no child under 16 should be admitted. Up until 1935, they’d been lax about using it too often, but when ‘The Raven’ and ‘Mad Love’ arrived on British shores, the H
certificate was dusted off, and used heavily.

Suddenly, Hollywood horror movies were all being given the H at British cinemas, and studios began to see their profits massively injured.

The sudden drop in box-office began discussions about the horror genre back in the US, with many declaring that the sudden decline in overseas profits was the result of the horror genre becoming passé. Some ignored the fact that the H certificate was being used, and stated that horror films were being banned in the United Kingdom. Studios reacted by altering their slates for 1936, with some dropping horror completely from their upcoming productions.

For Universal it was one of two devastating blows.

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 10 - The End Of An Era

Alongside The Bride of Frankenstein, Junior Laemmle’s other passion project was his elaborate remake of 1929’s ‘Show Boat’, a production he was sparing no expense on. His plans involved hiring as many of the original cast of the stage version as possible, as well as some of the largest, most dazzling sets ever designed, fifty-eight of them to be exact, as well as a hundred and fifty extras per day. James Whale, having completed The Bride Of Frankenstein, was handed the director’s chair.

The cost of production for this one film was estimated to be three fifths of Universal’s entire annual budget for production. As production went on, it became clear that even the budget they’d agreed wasn’t going to be enough. Show Boat ran over its shooting schedule, meaning that smaller projects were canned.

For the Laemmles, it was sink or swim. If they stopped production, they were ruined. The only chance they had, was to complete the movie and hope it was the stupendous success they’d been selling it as.

Junior approached the stockholders and asked for more money, but was denied. For the first time in Universal’s history, the Laemmle family was forced to go outside for funding.

They found it at Standard Capital, where they borrowed $750,000 in order to finish the movie. As all their assets were tied up with the studio, the only collateral that the Laemmles could offer, was their controlling interest in Universal Studios itself.

The two bigwigs at Standard Capital, J. Cheever Cowdin and Charles R

Rogers, also insisted on a clause, stating that if their $750,000 loan 105

A Universe Of Horrors hadn’t been repaid within three months, then they were instantly entitled to buy the studio from the Laemmles for the paltry sum of $5.5 million.

With their fresh injection of cash, the Laemmles raced to finish Show Boat, but the scale of the film was too much, and on April 2nd, 1936, Cowdin and Rogers arrived at Universal and exercised their right to purchase.

Within hours, Carl Laemmle and Junior were no longer a part of Universal Studios.

The Laemmle era, the brave period in cinema that had begun with a man counting the patrons at a nickelodeon theatre, and a war with Thomas Edison, was over.

Laemmle and Junior knew that they were licked. Their one final hurrah, the $1.5 million musical, Show Boat, released a month later, was a staggering success, both critically and financially. Had the movie been released on time, then the Laemmle empire would have been saved.

Carl Laemmle was 69 when he was ousted, and deciding that enough was enough, retired in peace to Beverley Hills. Three years later, he died from cardiovascular disease.

After his death, the true extent of Carl Laemmle’s legacy was brought to light.

Throughout the thirties, Laemmle had been largely absent from Universal Studios, with many assuming that it was because in his later years, he had begun to slow down. In actual fact, Carl Laemmle had been travelling and lobbying extensively on behalf of his home land of Wurttemburg.

Seeing the Nazis rise to power had given Laemmle great cause for concern, and it later transpired that between between 1933 and 1936, he had spent much of his personal fortune on emigration and immigration 106

A Universe Of Horrors for as many of Wurttemburg’s jews, bringing as many as he could to America, and thereby saving them from the Holocaust.

If difficulties arose at immigration points in America, Laemmle would work tirelessly to convince authorities to allow entry, remaining in constant contact with the House of Representatives and the Secretary of State.

Laemmle’s predictions about the Nazis proved correct. When the party rose to power, they decimated the Jewish population of Wurttenburg, with many being sent to Dachau. Laemmle’s lasting legacy, as well as his permanent place in cinema history, was the fact that due to his actions, over three hundred lives were saved.

As for Junior, he lived until 1979, dying forty years to the day after his father. He never produced another film.

With the Laemmles out, James Whale struggled at Universal.

Although Show Boat had swelled Universal’s coffers, it was still seen by many as the movie that had ruined the studio. Also, with Junior Laemmle gone, Whale was no longer as protected and pampered as he had been. He could no longer sit back and wait for offers. He had to pitch his ideas and hope for the best.

In 1937, he managed to pitch successfully to direct a sequel to Universal’s early blockbuster ‘All Quiet On the Western Front’. Erich Maria von Remarque, the author of the original novel, had actually written a sequel entitled ‘The Road Back’, and with the rights secured, Whale began work.

Although the film garnered decent reviews, it flopped at the box office.

While a story about the horrors of war were one thing, a melodrama about the reintegration of soldiers, post World War 1, didn’t attract audiences. This fact, coupled with the fact that the film was banned across half of Europe for showing Germany in a negative light, meant that Universal didn’t even make back the shooting budget.

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A Universe Of Horrors Whale directed only a few more films, with little success. With his artistic freedoms limited due to cautious studio producers, Whale retired from the screen in 1941.

Over the next decade, he took an active role in the theatre, directing plays on Broadway and London’s West End, before returning to California in 1952 to retire for good.

Over the next few years, Whale busied himself with parties and romantic entanglements, until in 1956, he suffered a stroke and on doctor’s advice, underwent shock treatment. Now needing full-time care, Whale employed a live-in nurse, becoming increasingly dependant on others as his physical and mental faculties slowly deteriorated.

On May 29th, 1957, Whale was found dead in his swimming pool, at the age of 67.

He had left a suicide note that read:

“To All I Love,

"Do not grieve for me. My nerves are all shot and for the last year I have been in agony day and night—except when I sleep with sleeping pills—
and any peace I have by day is when I am drugged by pills.

I have had a wonderful life, but it is over and my nerves get worse and I am afraid they will have to take me away. So please forgive me, all those I love, and may God forgive me too, but I cannot bear the agony and it

[is] best for everyone this way.

The future is just old age and illness and pain. Goodbye, and thank you for all your love. I must have peace and this is the only way”

“Jimmy"

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 11 - A Last Hurrah

The new bosses of Universal were J. Cheever Cowdin and Charles R.

Rogers.

Cowdin in particular, wasn’t interested in making art. He was there to make money. Cowdin slashed Universal’s production budgets to pieces, meaning that the only films that filmmakers could afford to produce were cheap B-movies with aspirations. As a result, many of Universal’s contracted stars didn’t sign fresh contracts and left for other studios.

Charles R. Rogers became Vice President in charge of Production, essentially controlling Universal’s output. Because of the almost ban on horror in the British Isles, and the various issues that the MPA was having with horror in general, Cowdin and Rogers decided to strike horror from Universal’s slate. But two productions were already so far down the line upon their takeover, that to cancel them would have meant an exorbitant amount of money down the pan.

And so, in 1936, Universal produced two films that would be its last in the horror genre for some time.

The first of these re-teamed Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, in ‘The Invisible Ray’, a science-fiction tinted thriller about a disgraced scientist named Janos Rukh, played by Karloff, who invents a telescope that can see far into the Andromeda Galaxy, picking up rays of light that have captured the history of the universe.

Through this method, Rukh discovers that a meteor struck Africa thousands of years ago. Assembling a team of explorers and scientists, Rukh journeys into the heart of the jungle to find the rock, but when he 109

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does, is exposed to its radiation, which poisons him to such an extent, that he develops the power to kill with a simple touch.

His friend, Dr Benet, played by Bela Lugosi, manages to develop an antidote, but soon the effects of the radiation cause Rukh to lose his mind, and he embarks on a rampage of revenge against those he feels have wronged him.

While it hardly scales the heights of the previous year’s ‘The Bride Of

Frankenstein’, ‘The Invisible Ray’ is a remarkably enjoyable film, well scripted by John Colton, and directed with a
certain flair by Lambert Hillyer.

The supporting actors are all fine,
especially Beulah Bondi as Lady

Arabella Stevens, the mother of Rukh’s love rival, and Frances Drake as Diana, Rukh’s wife. The real surprise of the film, though, is that despite a heavily moustached, glow-in-the-dark Boris

Karloff with murder on his mind, the film is stolen by Bela Lugosi, who after years in the B-movie wilderness, acting in films such as ‘Murder By Television’ for Poverty Row studios, throws himself wholeheartedly into the proceedings, no doubt delighted to be back for Universal, making films with a higher budget than the average hotel lunch.

His performance as Dr Benet is wise, funny and assured. Gone are the stagey drawls between words. Also, he’s sporting some rather fetching facial hair, and comes across as less of a bit-part monster player, and more of a debonair leading man. When he’s offed by Karloff in the final reel, it’s a genuinely disappointing moment.

He also popped up, in spirit anyway, in Universal’s other horror of 1936,

‘Dracula’s Daughter’, a straight sequel to 1931’s Dracula that takes place mere moments after the original story ends.

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A Universe Of Horrors With Dracula put to death by means of a stake through the heart, with Renfield’s body lying broken on the stone steps of Carfax Abbey, and with Van Helsing still wiping the blood from his hands, the police arrive at the scene, shocked at the sight before them.

It isn’t long before Van Helsing finds himself in a police cell, arrested for what the police are viewing as a double murder.

With the body of the Count laid out at the police station, and with Van Helsing being questioned by detectives and psychiatrists, a mysterious woman enters the picture. Dark and enigmatic, she arrives at the police station and uses the power of suggestion on a weak-willed constable to gain access to Dracula’s body.

Spiriting it away, the mysterious woman enacts a ritualistic burning, putting Dracula to rest for all time. It is revealed that the woman is Countess Marya Zaleska, the daughter of the Count, who is struggling with the vampirism that was passed down by her father upon her birth.

By burning her father’s body, Zaleska hopes that the curse will be lifted, but as night falls, she feels the intoxicating desire for blood again, and realises that her plan has failed.

Meanwhile, Van Helsing has enlisted the help of one of his star students, Dr Garth, played by Otto Kruger, to help prove his vampire story to the police. While at a party, Garth meets Countess Zaleska, and instantly falls under her charm. When she asks him to help her defeat the fearful curse using his knowledge of science, he readily agrees, believing Zaleska’s curse to be all in her mind, and sensing a connection to Van Helsing’s dilemma.

Zaleska’s manservant, Sandor, prowls the streets, meanwhile, trying to find food for his mistress, and comes across the homeless waif, Lili, played by Nan Grey, offering her food and money in return for modelling for a painting.

Lili arrives at Zaleska’s home, and while initially willing to go along with the painting, becomes afraid at Zaleska’s manner and tries to leave. The Countess, with her blood-lust increasing, attacks and drinks from the girl.

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A Universe Of Horrors Lili survives though, and is found in a catatonic state, where she begins to speak of “The Woman”, and Garth, called in to consult on the case, realises through certain key words used by Lili, that she is speaking of Countess Zaleska.

Before he can confront her, however, Zaleska kidnaps the woman Garth loves and takes her to Transylvania, hoping to lure Garth there so that she can turn him into her immortal love. At the last moment, Sandor fires an arrow into Zaleska’s heart, revenge for her having gone back on a promise to make him immortal, and the police arrive just in time to save Garth and his lady love, as the sun rises.

From the beginning, the Breen Office of Censors were against the movie.

The first thing they objected to was the film’s original prologue, which was to tell the story of how Dracula came to be a vampire. The sequence was to have starred Bela Lugosi in his original role, and saw the Count as a mortal man, engaging in a debauched orgy of wine and women.

Surrounded by his fellow noblemen, the Count kidnaps an entire village’s young women and forces them to dance for him. As the dancing turned to more, a “white wizard” was to have arrived, using his potent magic to turn the noblemen into a writhing herd of pigs.

Deciding that this punishment was too good for the malevolent Count, the wizard instead casts a spell that turns Dracula into a vampire.

In the end, this scene went unfilmed, yet it displays the tone that the original script was aiming for, a rather more daring film than the one eventually made.

Unable to make the sequence work under the Breen Office’s strict guidelines, it was eventually eliminated altogether, along with Lugosi himself, who was no doubt upset at not featuring in the sequel to his biggest success. Universal were contractually obliged to pay him the sum of $4,000 though, for having signed on, which almost certainly went some way towards sweetening the blow.

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The main cause of contention for the Breen office, though, were the lesbian overtones. Although the trope of the lesbian vampiress would be used heavily in later years, mainly by Hammer Studios, here it was a decidedly new innovation, and one that the censors weren’t happy with at all. Love, or sexual activity of any kind between two members of the same sex was one of the main tenets of the Production Code, and

‘Dracula’s Daughter’ was practically built on it.

Of especial concern was the scene between Countess Zaleska and Lili, whereupon the girl is required to remove her clothes, in order to sit for the painting.

Nan Grey, who was just eighteen at the time, was originally to have removed all of her clothes, only for the Countess, seeing the young girl’s flesh, to be suddenly overcome by an all-consuming desire to sink her teeth into it.

This, of course, was out as far the censors were concerned. Instead, Lili was to only remove her shirt, keeping her petticoat on, and covering her clothed breasts with her hands, just to make sure.

Breen himself wrote to Universal, saying that: “This will need very careful handling to avoid any questionable flavor… The present incomplete sequence will be followed by a scene in which Lili is taken to a hospital and there it will be definitely established that she has been attacked by a vampire. The whole sequence will be treated in such a way as to avoid any suggestion of perverse sexual desire on the part of Marya or of an attempted sexual attack by her upon Lili."

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A Universe Of Horrors Universal’s marketing men, smelling an opportunity, decided to subtly use the lesbian angle in their advertising, emblazoning the posters for the movie with the phrase: “Save the women of London from Dracula's Daughter!”

Despite the censors attempts to bury the lesbian themes, though, it was instantly picked up on by reviewers when the film hit cinemas.

The New York World Telegram made a point of highlighting the Countess’s habit of wandering around “giving the eye to sweet young girls”. Entertainment Weekly described the scene between Zaleska and Lili as “so hot, it’s impossible to imagine how it got past ’30’s censors”

Another scene that provided fuel to the fire came later, when Zaleska holds Janet, Garth’s lady love, prisoner and hovers longingly over the girl’s face for an inordinate length of time. It has since been described as

“the longest kiss never filmed”. Horror author Anne Rice has often cited

‘Dracula’s Daughter’ as a direct influence on her own homoerotic vampire fiction, as has the author Ramsay Campbell.

The role of Countess Zaleska was Gloria Holden’s first starring role.

Despite her name being above the title, though, Holden was crushed at being given the role, and made no secret of her displeasure, playing the part with mainly indifference.

Despite her obvious dislike of the part, however, her playing of it actually benefits the film. Zaleska comes across as a weary, cursed traveller, who is exhausted with her misfortune. The film critic Mark Clark later said that "Her disdain for the part translates into a kind of self-loathing that perfectly suits her troubled character.”

While it isn’t perfect, and although it could have benefitted enormously from the presence of Lugosi, even in flashback, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ is a thoroughly entertaining film that improves considerably upon its predecessor. Gone are the drawing rooms and the stilted direction. Here, we get a real sense of doom as Zaleska and Sandor prowl the fog-plagued streets of lamplit London, with each actor hamming it up in their respective roles, no matter how small the part.

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A Universe Of Horrors Even the policemen get their chance to shine, played to comic effect by Billy Bevan, Halliwell Hobbes and E. E. Clive.

Overall, Dracula’s Daughter actually holds the title of being the best vampire film of the 1930’s, a dubious distinction seeing that its main rivals are the original ‘Dracula’, a yawn at the best of times, and MGM’s 1935 film, ‘Mark of The Vampire’, a soul-crushing experience that features one of cinema’s all-time biggest letdown endings. No coincidence, perhaps, that both films were directed by Tod Browning.

In recent times, ‘The Bride Of Frankenstein’ has often been cited as a rare example of a sequel outdoing its predecessor in terms of style and quality. By this criteria, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ deserves a place on that list, also.

With Cowdin and Rogers in charge of Universal, horror films vanished from Universal Studios.

Boris Karloff found work in the thriller genre, popping up in ‘Charlie Chan At The Opera’, ‘Night Key’, ‘The Invisible Menace’ and ‘Mr Wong, Detective’.

Bela Lugosi fared worse, with even work at the smaller studios being hard to come by. In 1937, he starred in one serial for Republic Pictures, a twelve part dud entitled ‘SOS Coast Guard’, where he received second billing. For the remainder of 1937, Lugosi was unemployed.

By the time his son was born in January 1938, Lugosi was so poor that he was forced to borrow money from the Actors’ Fund to pay the hospital bills.

Universal themselves, weren’t faring so well under Cowdin and Rogers.

Concentrating mainly on B-Westerns and unsuccessful comedy vehicles, the studio was rapidly sinking into debt. Even at $5.5 million, it suddenly seemed as though Cowdin and Rogers had gotten a bad deal.

Flailing around for ideas, Rogers cast his eyes overseas and found Joe Pasternak, who’d been producing light comedy vehicles for Universal’s 115

A Universe Of Horrors German division, and finding European success. Hurrying him over to America to see if he could repeat his magic, Pasternak discovered a 14
year-old singer named Deanna Durbin, and cast her in his new musical comedy, ‘Three Smart Girls’.

The film was released to instant success, made a star of Deanna Durbin, and restored Universal’s fortunes to such an extent, that it has been called “the saviour of Universal”.

Scratching out a living for the next few years, it looked as though even the movies of Miss Durbin weren’t going to be enough to stop Universal’s slide into bankruptcy again.

And then a curious thing happened.

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 12 - Resurrection

In August 1938, with horror all but dead in American cinemas, a theatre owner by the name of Emil Ullman, decided to play against type, and looking for something quick and easy to exhibit on his screen, came up with the unusual idea of showing a triple bill, consisting of ‘Dracula’,

‘Frankenstein’ and RKO’s ‘Son of Kong’.

To his surprise, the showing sold out almost immediately.

By popular demand, Ullman scheduled the same bill for the following week.

It sold out again.

Ullman took a chance and booked the triple bill in for the entirety of the week. Every performance sold out immediately.

A few weeks later, Bela Lugosi received a phone call. The call was from his agent, who’d received a request from Emil Ullman.

That Saturday, with the end credits rolling on the double bill, Ullman walked on stage as the lights came up and asked everyone to remain seated. To their surprise, from stage left, Dracula himself walked into the middle of the stage and smiled wickedly.

An electrified audience screamed in delight and took to their feet in rapturous applause. Dracula, and the man who played him, had risen from the dead.

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It wasn’t long before word got back to Universal about the roaring business of Emil Ullman’s Regina Theatre, and never one to miss out on an opportunity, officially re-released ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein’ as a double-bill in theatres nationwide.

To the astonishment of Hollywood, the success of the double-bill was repeated across the country. The performances were regularly sold out, with theatres holding over the films for weeks on end.

One thing was clear. The world was hungry for a new wave of horror.

Taking its cue from the success of the double bill, Universal’s first horror film in three years would see the return of its most famous monster in a new script by Wyllis Cooper, as well as the re-teaming of the two most famous horror stars in the world.

‘Son Of Frankenstein’ tells the story of Wolf von Frankenstein, played by Basil Rathbone, the son of

Henry Frankenstein, who
returns to the village in
adulthood and takes up
residence in his father’s castle
with his wife and young son,
determined to wipe clean the
sins of the past.

However, the village, still
hostile to the Frankenstein
name after the events of the
first two films, are
mistrustful. Seeking to
discover Wolf’s intentions, the local police officer, Inspector Krogh, played by Lionel Atwill, attempts to befriend the castle’s new resident, but Wolf, seeing the Inspector’s true intentions, grows irritated at what he views as the ignorance of peasants.

Meanwhile, Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi, is a demented blacksmith, who was hanged for grave-robbing, and survived, only to have his neck permanently broken as a result. When Wolf goes to visit his father’s old 118

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laboratory, he meets Ygor in the ruins, who shows him a secret tomb in which lies the body of his father’s creation, The Monster, played once more by Boris Karloff.

Deciding that the best way to win the villagers trust is to finish his father’s experiments successfully, Ygor and Wolf set to work reviving The Monster, but when it is awakened, Wolf discovers that it will only answer to Ygor, due to the fact that in its half-dead state underneath the laboratory, Ygor spoke into its ears for years on end.

Instead of using The Monster to prove the Frankenstein theory, Ygor commands the Monster to murder those responsible for his hanging, which sparks a new wave of terror in the village of Frankenstein.

Wolf confronts Ygor, and shoots him dead. When The Monster discovers Ygor’s body, he kidnaps Wolf’s child in revenge. To get him back, Wolf and Inspector Krogh search in the old laboratory and discover a secret chamber above a molten sulphur pit. Confronting the 119

A Universe Of Horrors monster, Wolf and the Inspector eventually manage to catch the creature off-guard and knock him into the molten sulphur, seemingly destroying him forever.

Universal’s first masterstroke was to cast Basil Rathbone as the heir to the Frankenstein legacy. Rathbone’s touching performance early on in the film, in which he is a family man, only interested in settling into his new community with his wife and child, is particularly touching, and sometimes awkward, as his impassioned pleas to the assembled locals fall on deaf ears.

Little wonder then, that his constant attempts to fit in become a source of determination, as he decides the only way to heal the wounds between the village and his family is to finish his father’s work once and for all.

Lionel Atwill, also, is a highlight as the steely-eyed Inspector Krogh, a frustrated soldier whose military career was put to an end in his youth by the careless actions of the Frankenstein monster, who tore out his arm as a child. Krogh is now saddled with a wooden arm, often imitated in later spoofs of the Universal horror genre, such as Mel Brooks’

‘Young Frankenstein’.

His performance is one of the film’s many anchors, a suspicious protagonist who lurks in readiness should the Frankenstein blood begin to boil once more into action. Part hero, for wanting an end to all this chaos, and part villain, for wanting an end to all this chaos.

Karloff’s much-heralded return to the role of the monster was on his terms this time. Gone was the Monster’s voice, trusting instead on Karloff’s ability to communicate without words.

A shame then, that for this, Karloff’s swan-song in the role, that a little more care couldn’t have been taken with The Monster’s story. Here he is firmly a lumbering supporting actor, dangerous, yes, but lacking in that spark of sympathy from the first two films. Wyllis Cooper’s screenplay was far more concerned with the naturally born humans than with The Monster himself. The Monster is simply a thug, controlled by Ygor to take his personal revenge against his tormentors.

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A Universe Of Horrors When filming finished, Karloff realised that The Monster had outlived his dramatic potential, and vowed never to wear the make-up again.

‘I’m too fond of the Monster’ he said later. ‘I’m grateful to him for all he did for me, and I wouldn’t like to watch anybody make sport of him…

After ‘Son of Frankenstein’, I decided the character no longer had any potentialities - the makeup did all the work’

But by far the juiciest performance in the movie came from Bela Lugosi, as the crooked Ygor, who steals every scene he’s in. His cackling, evil little maniac is the surprising heart of the film, and Lugosi, relishing the chance to chew the scenery in a knowingly silly role, in a gloriously overblown and prestigious film, takes every opportunity to shine.

Gone is the suave, romantic Lugosi of ‘Dracula’, from eight years earlier.

Here he is hunched, with prosthetics jutting from his broken-neck, his face covered in a grizzly beard, false teeth fixing his face into a wicked grin. Also disappeared is the drawn-out, enigmatic del-ee-very of his words, replaced by a growling cackle of every line.

Here was a man enjoying the chance to be back in front of the world, and finally, after eight years of disillusionment, Bela Lugosi outshone his horror rival, Boris Karloff, in what would become his greatest screen performance.

One afternoon, just as filming commenced, Rathbone, Karloff and Lugosi were discussing their recent work. Karloff had remained extremely active in the thriller genre, and Rathbone was hot from ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’.

Feeling a little awkward, Lugosi modestly explained that employment had been difficult, and that over the past two years, his only acting work had been in a production of ‘Tovarich’, playing the part of the commissar. The part had lasted for eight weeks, and he had been forced to stretch the money over the past two years.

He then explained about Emil Ullman’s horror triple bill, and the personal appearance at the theatre.

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‘I owe it all to that little man at the Regina Theatre’ he said. ‘I was dead and he brought me to life’.

He showed the two men a picture of his young son, Bela Lugosi Jr.

Karloff, who was about to
become a father himself
for the first time, was
particularly taken with
the picture, and warmly
congratulated his co-star.

He asked Lugosi about
the terms he had agreed
with Universal, in order
to work on the film.

Lugosi told them that

Universal had hired him
at a salary of $500 a week.

Karloff and Rathbone
exchanged horrified glances. They had been hired at $4000 a week.

A few moments later, they confronted the film’s director, Rowland Lee, demanding to know if he had been aware of Lugosi’s salary.

Lee was as revolted as his two stars, and immediately called to the studio office, demanding that Lugosi’s salary be increased. Lee was dressed down for involving himself, and advised that Lugosi’s minuscule part in the movie was the reason for his smaller wage packet.

Fuming, Lee called in Willys Cooper and explained that Lugosi’s part needed to be beefed up in order to make Ygor the movie’s main villain, initially the movie’s main antagonist was to have been The Monster himself, who develops a scientific mind and even sets to work on creating his own mate with the help of Rathbone, with Atwill’s police inspector taking a larger role.

Lee and Cooper toiled to expand Lugosi’s role, so that Ygor became the movie’s villain, a scheming hunchback with revenge on his mind, using the Monster as a pawn in his strategy.

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A Universe Of Horrors As the cameras began to roll again, Lee received word that his plan was a bust. Lugosi’s salary was not to increase. Universal’s top brass, it seemed, knew that Lugosi was desperate for work, and they were determined to pay him as little as possible.

Furious, Karloff and Rathbone sent word to the front office that if Lugosi’s salary was not increased to match their own, then they would refuse to act in the movie.

An hour later, Lugosi received a package containing a new contract, matching his salary to that of Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone’s.

Although ‘Son of Frankenstein’ was the third outing for Mary Shelley’s by-now-bastardised-beyond-all-recognition creation, there is much to enjoy, least of all the sight of four of cinema’s finest horror icons doing battle amid the lightning.

The sets are marvellously designed, a genuine air of intrigue is created, and all involved gave it their camp best. In short, no expense was spared, both financially and artistically, and although Karloff’s final appearance as the Monster is muted, quite literally, the rebirth of Lugosi as a screen star is an overwhelming compensation.

While the Monster may have missed out on finding his mate in James Whale’s ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’, here he finds his soul mate in the equally outcast Ygor, doomed to take shelter together forever more on the outskirts of society. Both are grotesques who long for nothing more than their own companionship.

In its own way, ‘Son Of Frankenstein’ is a love story between two demented rejects. Witness the Monster’s howls of pain when Ygor is struck down by Rathbone’s bullet. Again, the Monster has seen a friend robbed from him, raising blood-stained fingers as he breaks down into pathetic sobs.

It may be lacking in the wickedly witty ways of Whale, but Son Of Frankenstein is a tremendous end to Karloff’s trilogy.

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A Universe Of Horrors The New York Times got to the heart of the matter in their review, stating that: “Son Of Frankenstein isn’t the silliest picture ever made. It’s the sequel to the silliest picture ever made”

The question was, would it work at the box office?

Universal soon got their answer.

In New York City, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that ‘Son of Frankenstein’ was doing the best box-office business in the history of horror movies, in the cities key openings. It wasn’t unusual for theatres to be sold out for up to two weeks in advance.

Such was the box-office draw, no doubt spurred on by the double-bill success of 1938, that by the time it had finished in theatres, ‘Son Of Frankenstein’ had single-handedly paid for a year’s worth of movie production at Universal Studios.

Rival studios sat up in their chairs as the cash began to pour into Universal’s pockets.

Paramount answered with the horror-comedy ‘The Cat and The Canary’

starring Bob Hope, which had its chilly moments in-between the light comedy. 20th Century Fox came out with ‘The Gorilla’ starring comedians The Ritz Brothers, alongside Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill, in another horror-comedy about a escaped killer and an escaped gorilla.

Columbia engaged the services of Boris Karloff for ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’, their tale of a mad scientist who discovers how to bring the dead back to life, and uses it to wreak revenge on the officials who have him executed.

Warner Brothers’ ‘The Return of Dr X’ had Humphrey Bogart as a shock-haired vampire, in one of horror cinema’s truly odd pieces of casting. The result was awkwardly interesting, but Bogart himself hated the film so much that he refused to even acknowledge it in later years.

Universal themselves followed it up with ‘Tower of London’, again reteaming Boris Karloff with Basil Rathbone, but this time in a historical setting.

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Rathbone appeared as the villainous, hunchbacked, Richard of Gloucester, as he schemes and murders his way to the throne, assisted by his club-footed executioner and private assassin, Mord, played by Boris Karloff.

Less an out-and-out
horror, and more of a
political thriller, it
nevertheless
contained some
grisly scenes, such as

Karloff’s torturing of
prisoners, and

Rathbone’s cold-
blooded murder of
his two young
nephews.

Universal, however,
were keen to play up the film’s horror pedigree, and when the film premiered in San Francisco at the end of the year, they made sure to book personal appearances by Karloff, Nan Grey, and even Bela Lugosi in a bid to attract the horror fans.

Returning to the director’s chair was Rowland Lee, fresh from the success of ‘Son of Frankenstein’. Obviously hoping to repeat his success, Lee managed to inject a dark air of gothic gloom, but when it came to the film’s larger set-pieces, namely the two battles at Tewkesbury and Bosworth, Lee reportedly had massive problems during the filming of both.

At one point, the fake rain being showered on the hundreds of actors playing the soldiers, caused their cardboard helmets to disintegrate. Fog machines were brought in to shroud the battlefield in an enigmatic mist, but high winds blew the effect away. No provision was made for the three hundred extras to cool down, and disgruntled actors, in full armour, and baking under a 100 degree summer heat, took to disobeying the crew, and even causing destruction to the sets.

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A Universe Of Horrors As a result, the battle scenes came across as rather half-hearted in the finished film, instead of the epic spectacle that they were meant to have been.

As a history lesson, it may have been slightly embellished, but Universal’s sheen of the macabre around the whole thing lift it immeasurably, as do the performances of Rathbone as the wicked hunchback, and Karloff as his evil lapdog, Mord.

It’s rare for a film of the era to have such a hateful bastard as it’s main character, and yet there is a perverse delight in seeing Richard’s rise to power, as well as his downfall. He’s wisely played as a charming man, whom no-one suspects of being an insidious threat, as opposed to the rotten monster of later adaptations.

Rathbone is commanding in the role. Up until this point, he had played nothing but snivelling rotters, generally third-billed obstacles for the hero to put a sword through in Act 2. Here he was given the chance to create a truly memorable villain, ironically, just as he was about to become the screen’s definitive Sherlock Holmes in 20th Century Fox’s

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’.

The forties began with Universal hoping to cash in on another of its horror hits of the thirties, with a sequel to James Whale’s ‘The Invisible Man’. This time round, the story, ‘The Invisible Man Returns’, followed Vincent Price, in his first horror role, as Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe, a man who has been wrongly convicted of his brother’s murder.

Dr Frank Griffin, the brother of the original invisible man, believing Radcliffe to be innocent, visits him in prison where he injects him with his brother’s invisibility serum, allowing Radcliffe to escape and find the real murderer.

Originally, the studio were thinking of Bela Lugosi as the lead, but after his sterling supporting work in ‘Tower Of London’, Vincent Price was selected. Seeing as how he’s actually only visible on screen for a minute or two during the movie, maybe it’s a role that Lugosi wouldn’t have wanted to play anyway…

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Whatever their reasoning, Price was ripe for the role because he also possessed a wonderfully rich voice, much like Claude Rains. He also spoke fluent German, which afforded him an opportunity not available to many others from the cast. The movie’s director, Joe May, was only able to
communicate in

German, and while
it didn’t really
matter in the long
run, as a translator
was easily able to
convey May’s
directions to the
cast, it did mean
that Price could
converse on friendly
terms with the
director.

Robert Fulton, the man who had created the special effects for Whale’s first movie, was again drafted in to head up the special effects, and with the advances in technology since 1933, was able to create some masterly screen illusions.

The problem was that the movie was nothing more than a rather plodding murder mystery with an invisible man thrown in for good measure. There are no real horror elements, other than a large, foreboding house, and a breathless chase on a mining cart.

There’s an attempt to recreate some of the broader comedy in Whale’s original, by mainly showing the flabbergasted yokels react to an invisible presence, but its crucially lacking in the charm of the original, as well as the dazzlingly inventive direction of Whale. Nevertheless, it did decently at the box office, and most importantly, hadn’t cost Universal the earth to produce, unlike ‘Tower of London’, which had run up tremendous production costs with its costumes and sets.

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With the advent of the Second World War, and the prospect of America entering it soon, Universal decided that expensive period pieces were out, and cheap, thrilling quickies, were to be their staple for the next few years.

Lugosi and Karloff were cast together again for ‘Black Friday’, in which Karloff played Dr Sovac, an eminent brain surgeon, who in order to save the life of his friend, George Kingsley, recently involved in a car accident, illegally transplants the brain of another man into his friend’s head.

The problem is that the man whose brain was used is a violent gangster, and it isn’t long before Kingsley is acting like a thug. Sovac is about to reverse the operation when he discovers that the gangster has half a million dollars hidden somewhere, and so attempts to persuade him into telling him where it is. Lugosi plays Eric Marnay, a rival gang leader who is also after the cash.

128

A Universe Of Horrors Karloff and Lugosi don’t actually appear together in the film, and it relies more on its concept than any of Universal’s standard horror tropes. Again, it’s almost difficult to describe the film as a horror, other than the fact that minds are swapped. Other than that, it’s a fairly half-baked crime caper with some interesting touches.

The main problem is that it would have benefitted immeasurably if the roles had been switched around. Karloff would have been a far superior gangster heavy, and Lugosi would have been a much more believable brain surgeon. His delivery of gangster-rific Americanisms clangs with a thunder.

Originally, they were in these roles, but for some reason were switched just before shooting. Perhaps each man wanted to challenge himself?

Whatever the reason, the experiment didn’t pay off. Karloff is fine, but unremarkable, and Lugosi just comes across as miscast.

At the film’s climax, Lugosi’s gangster is shut in a cupboard and left to suffocate to death. Always ready to pounce on a marketing opportunity, the film’s director, Arthur Lubin was instructed to use hypnosis to give Lugosi an extra edge in his death scene. Lubin had already filmed the scene where Lugosi is left to his death, and while it had gone okay, it wasn’t the greatest death scene he’d ever worked on.

Publicists and invited press assembled to watch Lugosi hypnotised in a chair and placed into the two-sided closet, whereupon Lubin called action.

The hypnotist told Lugosi that the closet was locked, and that he was running out of air. Lugosi began to squeal and begged to be let out, his voice growing higher and higher. Soon he began to pound on the door, and then put his shoulder against it a few times. Eventually, Lugosi gasped and slumped to the floor.

Lubin called cut, Lugosi was brought to his feet and took a bow.

The press weren’t convinced, although Boris Karloff, who was on set and saw the whole thing insisted that Lugosi must have been 129

A Universe Of Horrors hypnotised. ‘I’ve never seen him keep his back to the camera for so long’, he grinned.

In the end, the whole stunt was fruitless. When Lubin asked for the footage, a sheepish cameraman informed him that he hadn’t loaded enough film, and had only gotten half of the performance.

The theme of brain switching wasn’t a new one. In fact Karloff himself had appeared in ‘The Man Who Changed His Mind’ in 1936 for Gaumont-British, a far better film in which Karloff’s mad scientist discovers the secret of switching brains and uses it to further his own ends, placing the mind of his deformed accomplice into the head of a wealthy newspaper baron.

But ‘Black Friday’ was also notable for one other reason. It was to be the final time that Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi would appear together in a Universal film.

In later years, at RKO, they would go on to star together in the comedy

‘You’ll Find Out’ and the Victorian horror ‘The Body Snatcher’, but as far as the studio that had made their names, this was to be their last ride out together.

Over the years, wild legends had grown about a deep-seated hatred between the two, an ever-escalating rivalry caused by Karloff’s ascent to horror stardom over the corpse of Lugosi’s career.

In the 1994 film ‘Ed Wood’, Martin Landau’s Lugosi regularly spits his foul-mouthed fury whenever Boris Karloff’s name is mentioned.

While it is fair to say that Karloff was the King Of Horror at Universal, and perhaps of all cinema during the thirties and forties, Lugosi’s envy was only ever fleeting. Indeed, as the years went on, the two developed a friendly working relationship, and while it would be pushing things to suggest that they were ever close friends outside of their work, it’s clear that the two men harboured a deep respect for each other throughout their lives.

Alex Gordon, a producer on many of their films, and a personal friend of Bela Lugosi said that: “He and Karloff were very good friends. They 130

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worked in a number of pictures together, and although they didn’t see each other socially, I never heard one say a bad word about the other”

‘Black Friday’ did well at the box office, and the fact that it had been light on effects, relying simply on performance to show its mind-swapping concept, meant that it had been ultra-cheap to produce.

Universal, keen to cash in on their back catalogue, next decided on a sequel to ‘The Mummy’, entitled ‘The Mummy’s Hand’.

Imhotep had been destroyed by Isis at the end of ‘The Mummy’ in 1932, but there were still opportunities to be had, and industrious screenwriters Griffin Jay and Maxwell Shane weaved a new tale
concerning a newly resurrected mummy
named Kharis, magical tana leaves that can restore the dead to life, and the Curse of Amon-Ra.

This time, there was no overarching love story. Kharis is the guardian of the tomb of Princess Anankha, who has been kept in a half-mummified, half-living state by having three mystical tana leaves
administered to him over the centuries by sworn guardians, who are under strict instructions to administer nine leaves if the tomb is ever discovered by explorers.

This of course takes place early on in the film, and Kharis is given nine leaves, which brings him to life as a marauding monster who takes revenge on the infidels who have desecrated the tomb of the

Egyptian Princess.

Sticking to their new edict of spending as little as possible on movie production, Universal budgeted a measly 131

A Universe Of Horrors $80,000 on the film, meaning that to complete the film, producers had to re-use footage from the original Mummy movie.

Nevertheless, ‘The Mummy’s Hand’ is a perfectly enjoyable little romp that doesn’t outstay its welcome. It certainly looks cheap and nasty, and has a rather unfortunate comic strain running through it, thanks to its lunkhead lead, Dick Foran, who would do similar damage to the upcoming ‘Horror Island’, but as far as re-establishing a horror icon for 1940’s audiences, the movie did its job.

Whereas the original Mummy had been a darkly romantic tale of obsession and the supernatural, with a brooding, malice-filled performance from Boris Karloff, who only actually appeared fleetingly in his Mummy make-up, ‘The Mummy’s Hand’ was far more Mummy-centric, with Kharis wandering through the shadows, stalking his victims with arms outstretched. When modern audiences think of the Universal Mummy films, with their bandaged villains taking revenge on the Western tomb invaders, they are inevitably thinking of the Kharis sequels, not the Karloff original.

In ‘The Mummy’s Hand’, Kharis was played by former Western star, Tom Tyler, a tall, good-looking man who’d played hundreds of cowboys throughout the twenties and thirties, and who would soon go on to play superheroes on the screen, starring as Captain Marvel in a 1941 serial entitled ‘The Adventures of Captain Marvel’, as well as “The Ghost Who Walks” himself, ‘The Phantom’, in a 1943 serial.

Buoyed on by their success with zero-budget horrors, Universal took a wild step sideways and came up with ‘The Invisible Woman’, a so-called sequel to the two Invisible films that had been made so far, but in all actuality, bearing no resemblance or continuity with the previous films.

Gone are the murder and mystery elements of the previous films, replaced by a light-hearted comedy spirit. It starred Virginia Bruce as Kitty Carroll, a model who answers an advertisement promising adventure. The ad has been placed by Professor Gibbs, played by the eminent John Barrymore in one of his later roles, who has come up with a machine that can render a person visible for a time.

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Kitty agrees to be his
guinea pig, and the mad
professor turns her
invisible, much to Kitty’s
delight, as she can now
take her revenge against
the bossy shop manager
who’s been making life
hell for her and her fellow
models.

Unbeknown to Professor

Gibbs, though, is that

Blackie Cole, a local
gangster has gotten wind of the Professor’s invention, and determines to steal it so that he can begin an invisible crime wave.

While it certainly isn’t high art, ‘The Invisible Woman’ is a ton of fun; one minute a wise-cracking comedy with saucy overtones (Bruce’s nakedness is commented on more than a few times), and the next a light-hearted love story between Bruce and Gibbs’s playboy benefactor, played by John Howard.

While it may have lost its eerie, dangerous slant, this was a merry new direction, and put the Universal horror department to fresh use. It also gave a last chance to John Barrymore, whose career had been on the slide for years, and who was virtually unemployable at the time.

Barrymore, while a legendary screen presence, was a notorious hell-raiser.

Once, on stage, and needing to relieve himself badly, a staggering Barrymore stumbled over to an ornamental pot-plant on stage and watered it in front of the audience.

Another time, he wandered, by mistake into the ladies room at a New York Hotel. A female patron shrieked when she saw him and said:

‘How dare you! This is for ladies!’. Barrymore span around, his manhood still in his hand and replied: ‘And so, madam, is this!’

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In 1934, to try to cure himself of his alcoholism, Barrymore had journeyed to India. Four months later, upon his return, he came back, not only un-cured of his alcoholism, but with a new sex addiction.

Apparently, he had spent the entire four months in a brothel.

Nevertheless, despite his immense acting talent, by the mid-thirties he had drunk himself into near oblivion, and found it near impossible to memorise his lines. By the time he appeared in The Invisible Woman, he was unable to remember more than two or three lines at a time.

To get round this, his co-star John Howard, who also starred with Barrymore in the Bulldog Drummond series, devised a system of cutting out chunks of the written script and hiding them around the set.

“Behind vases, behind phones, on the backs of other actors, whatever”

Howard said. ‘This way he could just look around and find the lines.

And of course he was such a superlative actor, it looked as though this 134

A Universe Of Horrors was an inspirational way to say the lines. It worked very well, but it must have driven him nuts. He must have realised what was happening to him and I felt terribly sorry about that’

Barrymore found himself being hired by Poverty Row studios at the end of the thirties, who were always looking for washed up actors to inject a sense of grandeur into their films.

Barrymore, who had once been renowned as the greatest Shakespearean actor alive, was ultimately reduced to playing supporting roles in films such as ‘Hold That Co-Ed’, ‘Nightclub Scandal’ and a parody entitled

‘Playmates’, in which he played a spoof version of himself, second billed behind the bandleader Kay Kyser.

In 1942, while appearing on The Rudy Vallee Show on radio, Barrymore collapsed in his dressing room and was rushed to hospital. A few hours later, he was pronounced dead, a victim of hard living.

Even in death though, his legend continued…

While mourning their friend, Errol Flynn and the director Raoul Walsh were at Flynn’s house, where after a few tears, and a few dozen toasts, Flynn gazed glassily at a chair in the corner of the room and said, ‘I just can’t believe he won’t sit in that corner of the sofa anymore’. A short time later, Flynn was called on the phone by his lawyer, who needed him to come to his office. Flynn asked Walsh to stay there until he got back, as he had more drinking to do, to which Walsh agreed.

The moment Flynn had left, Walsh called his car and went to the funeral home where John Barrymore was laid out to rest. The attending mortician was a friend of Walsh’s, and a part-time actor who’d appeared in a few of Walsh’s movies. Walsh told the man that he needed to borrow Barrymore’s body, because a close friend was so arthritic that he wasn't able to attend Barrymore’s funeral. Reluctantly, the man agreed, and Walsh transported Barrymore’s corpse back to the home of Errol Flynn, where he promptly sat it in the corner sofa, and poured it a drink.

When Flynn returned from the lawyers office an hour later, he made his way into the room and had another drink, not even noticing Barrymore’s body. When he finally caught sight of it, he jumped in fright and ran out 135

A Universe Of Horrors of the house screaming: ‘Get him out of here! You’re going to get us put into San Quentin!’.

When Walsh took the body back to the funeral home, the mortician asked him where he’d been. When Walsh told him that he’d taken the body to Errol Flynn’s house, the mortician said: ‘Why, if I’d known you were going to take him up there, I would have put a better suit on him’

With Barrymore’s hamming, and terrific supporting turns from Margaret Hamilton, the wicked witch of the west herself, and a risqué, charming lead in Virginia Bruce, as well as some big laughs from John Howard and Charlie Ruggles as his put-upon butler, the film is closer in tone to a Tom and Jerry cartoon than a Universal horror film.

Nevertheless, its horror pedigree is there for all to see, once again employing the astonishing special effects of John Fulton, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it running time that means that audiences didn’t get bored. As a result, ‘The Invisible Woman’ ranks as a guilty pleasure for many fans of vintage comedy with a twist.

All in all, 1940 had been a relatively successful year for Universal’s horror department, but with the exception of ‘Black Friday’, the studio had really not produced anything revolutionary, concentrating mainly on sequels and spin-offs.

They began to cast around for the next big thing.

What Universal needed, was someone fresh and exciting. Someone who could be their next horror icon. What they needed was the next Boris Karloff. The next Bela Lugosi.

The next Lon Chaney.

What they got, was his son.

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 13 - A Howl In The Night

By the time Universal tapped Creighton Chaney to be their next horror star, he’d already made something of a success for himself on the screen.

The year after his father’s death, he’d appeared in his first film, a serial entitled ‘The Galloping Ghost’ for Mascot Studios, in a tiny role as a henchman.

While his subsequent films had mainly been pulpy little potboilers, with titles such as ‘The Black Ghost’, ‘Lucky Devils’ and ‘Son of the Border’, there had been genuine hits such as ‘Bird of Paradise’ starring Dorothy Lamour, ‘Charlie Chan on Broadway’, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, and a breakout role as Lennie, the mentally challenged hulk in John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ in 1939.

It was Chaney’s role in this that had caught Universal’s eye. Indeed, it had caught everyone’s eye. The film, while not a soaring financial success, had been the toast of critics, and nominated for four Oscars.

Chaney’s performance was often singled out as deeply impressive, and genuinely affecting.

By now, Creighton Chaney was being billed as Lon Chaney Jr, a moniker he wasn’t altogether happy about, but one he had learned to accept as a posthumous gift from his father.

Throughout the thirties, Chaney had struggled with his legacy, distraught at disobeying his father’s wish for him not to be a screen actor, but ultimately disillusioned by his father’s concealing of the truth surrounding his mother. Offers of work from Hollywood, and from producers still eager to cash in on the Chaney name, meant that Creighton could leave the salesman job he hated, and provide lavishly for his young family. No doubt, a desire to prove his father wrong was 137

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also part of his decision to
pursue a career on screen.

And so, throughout the
thirties, Lon Chaney Jr had
steadily carved out a career
as a supporting heavy in
good and bad films.

After ‘Of Mice and Men’,

Chaney was offered the role
of Quasimodo in RKO’s
opulent remake of ‘The

Hunchback of Notre

Dame’, a film in which his
father had set the bar for
physical transformation and
performance. The prospect
of Chaney’s son re-enacting
his father’s great screen
performance with the added
advantage of newer film
technologies no doubt appealed to the marketing men at RKO, but eventually the role went to Charles Laughton, and Chaney instead went to work on United Artists’ ‘One Million BC’ with Victor Mature and Carole Landis.

Although he got third billing, Chaney began to impress as a solid character actor, much in the mould of his father. In actual fact, Chaney had designed an entire make-up to go with his part, that of Akhoba, the father of Victor Mature’s character, and leader of the tribe.

Chaney’s make-up consisted of a swarthy facial hair set, and ape-like features, but union rules stated that make-up had to be designed and applied by union approved make-up artists, so Chaney’s design was eventually binned.

A year later, he was summoned to Universal’s front office, who persuaded him to sign a contract for a series of films with their horror department.

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The first of these was a cheap, run-of-the-mill shocker entitled ‘Man Made Monster’. It starred Chaney, alongside established Universal horror stars Lionel Atwill and Samuel Hinds, as Dynamo Dan, part of a sideshow attraction, who for the price of admission, performs tricks with electricity for the yokels.

Dan is travelling on a bus which crashes into an electricity pylon, which electrocutes everyone on board. Dan survives, however, and at first, doctors are mystified as to why. They later work out that because of his sideshow act, Dan has built up an immunity to electricity.

Dr Lawrence, played by Samuel Hinds, wants to observe and learn from Dan’s power, but Dr Rigas, played by Lionel Atwill, wants to harness Dan’s power with the intention of creating a horde of electro-super-zombies.

As you do.

Rigas begins to subject Dan to
greater and greater doses of
electricity, until Dan becomes
utterly dependent on them to
live, which also ruins his free
will. Now under the complete
control of Rigas, Dan
embarks on a murder spree,
using his electric super power
to kill with a simple touch.

With ‘Man Made Monster’,

Universal were clearly moving the horror genre from the more literary efforts of the Laemmle era, to an altogether more action-oriented style.

These films were cheap to produce and people liked them. Indeed, ‘Man Made Monster’ cost a paltry $86,000 to produce, marketing included, and made four times that when it hit cinemas.

The project had been around since 1935, when it was going to be called

‘The Man In The Cab’ starring Karloff and Lugosi, based on a story entitled ‘The Electric Man’.

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George Waggner was hired to revive the project in 1940, and under his eye, the script took shape. As a reward, Universal let him direct the film, a wise choice, as Waggner was to prove an adept horror director over the coming years.

They got the services of Atwill for a song. Atwill had recently finished his contract at 20th Century Fox, and was essentially a free agent.

Atwill longed to become an independent producer, and had bought the rights to one of his favourite novels, ‘The Dark River’, with the intention of raising enough money from his acting work to
finance the film’s production. He had even approached James Whale in the
hope that he would direct the movie.

Needing to raise cash quickly, Atwill let it be known that he was happy to act in any low-rent, quick to make potboilers at Universal, and they were keen to take him up on the offer. Atwill wasn’t the biggest star in the world, but his name did carry a certain cache in Hollywood.

During the thirties he’d starred in some huge hits, such as ‘Captain Blood’, ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ and ‘The Three Musketeers’, and had by now settled into well respected supporting roles. At Universal, he was seen as a dependable character actor, who always injected an air of gravitas into whatever schlocky proceedings he was thrown.

He’d always been a headline grabber since 1928, when he featured in a stage version of ‘Napoleon’ in the title role. The play had been savaged by critics, and closed after only twelve performances. On the last night, he strode to the front of the stage and verbally abused the seated critics who had slammed the show.

He didn’t have much luck with houses either.

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A Universe Of Horrors In 1935 his California mansion burned to the ground, and a coastal storm in 1936 forced two of his homes to slide into the ocean, taking a huge collection of antiques with them. In 1940, Atwill was visited by tragedy when his beloved son, John, was killed in action at the age of 26. Ever the trouper, Atwill threw himself into his work to forget.

As production drew to a close on ‘Man Made Monster’, Atwill found himself the subject of notorious scandal, where he was accused of allowing screenings of pornographic films, followed by wild orgies, at his Hollywood home. When it was discovered that in order to protect the identities of his friends, Atwill had lied to the Grand Jury, who were investigating a reported rape at one of his parties, it irreparably damaged his Hollywood career.

Atwill was never to achieve leading man status in a Hollywood movie again, and his ambitions to become an independent producer, were destroyed forever. He died in 1946, just six months after the birth of his second son, Lionel Anthony Atwill, his blazing legacy from the 1930’s forever tarnished by the tawdry revelations of the forties.

Despite Atwill’s woes, his presence adds immeasurably to any film in which he appears. His sonorous tones and air of authority cast a commanding presence over his entire filmography, but never more than in the films made at Universal. Characters such as Inspector Krogh, Dr Rigas and Professor Moriarty could have been so throwaway in different hands.

Maybe Atwill was unable to achieve his ambition of becoming an independent producer of films, but his mark on cinema, in his own words, is indelible.

‘Man Made Monster’ isn’t the most sophisticated of horrors, for sure, but it has its effective moments, especially towards the end, when Chaney becomes an electric zombie. It also doesn’t waste a single moment. The bus crash happens in the first few seconds of the film, and within five minutes, we have met every character, and know their true intentions.

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A Universe Of Horrors It also doesn’t clog up the works by giving Dan a love story to waste his time with. This is a film about an electric killer, and that’s what you get.

In many ways, it’s a watershed movie for Universal. With this very brisk little action horror, Universal, and George Waggner set the pace for much of Universal’s horror output in the forties. And while it wasn’t the classiest of starts for Chaney at Universal’s horror department, it certainly proved that he had presence.

Lugosi had long been Universal’s Eastern-European-Mystery-Man, and Karloff had been their Imposing-Thespian-Concealing-A-Monster.

With Chaney, Universal established a new type of horror star. The Burly-Physical-Threat. And not just that. He was The Burly-Physical-Threat with the name…

In actual fact, Chaney had never wanted to use his father’s name. In his first few movies, he’d appeared as Creighton Chaney, but after making the decision to enter the movies and give up his career in business, he needed to make a steady living in order to support his family.

Many producers had urged him to taken the name Lon Chaney Jr, but as Creighton himself put it: ‘I didn’t feel I was entitled to take my dad’s name. I didn’t feel I was an actor yet’

In 1935, though, Creighton Chaney’s screen career was slowing down, and with a young family to support, he found himself having to make a terrible decision.

His father had been vehemently opposed to Creighton becoming an actor, but when he had died, and Creighton had discovered that his father had lied to him about his mother, something was lost between father and son. Taking a screen career, despite his father’s wishes, was hard enough. To then use his father’s name in order to further that career, felt like sacrilege.

As he said himself at the time, ‘I tried for three years to make a go of things without capitalizing upon dad’s name, but the cards have been stacked against me. If I had only myself to think of, I would battle it out 142

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to the end. But I’m getting older every year and I don’t think it’s right to make my family suffer just so I can fight for a principal’

With ‘Man Made Monster’ Chaney finally saw his name next to the title.

However, the pulpy little shocker (pun intended) wasn’t the literary, classic affair that had launched the careers of Lugosi and Karloff, and the critics were keen to point the fact out.

Bosley Crowther for The New York Times said: “We grew rather fond of Dan. Silly? Of course he’s silly, and the picture is low-grade shocker fare”

The New York Daily News said that: “Chaney is a curious looking sight on the screen, but is not as frightening as his creators tried to make him… A synthetic screen story”

George Waggner immediately began work on another low-rent horror for Universal, ‘Horror Island’ starring Dick Foran, Peggy Moran and Leo Carrillo, a thoroughly mind-numbing piece of tripe about a link-headed ship’s captain who tries to cash in on the old dark house he owns, by conducting ghost tours around it, while a caped menace known as “The

Phantom” does his best to cause trouble.

Foran was far more suited to the cowboy roles he’d become famous for, and Peggy Moran is instantly forgettable. The only shining spot is Foy Van Dolsen as The Phantom, looking for all the world like a mixture of The Shadow and a lost

Carradine brother. His angry shadow
gliding across Peggy Moran’s bedroom is a wonderful raindrop in a very muddy
puddle.

The supporting cast includes Walter Catlett, who voiced Honest John in Walt Disney’s

‘Pinocchio’, and Lewis Howard, a good looking character actor, and a favourite of the Holocaust diarist Anne Frank, who had a picture of him on her bedroom wall.

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Lewis Howard himself would come to one of Hollywood’s strangest ends.

In 1951, with his career on the skids, Howard, in a fit of depression, went to a shooting gallery on Broadway and paid for a full gun. He shot a few ducks on the shooting range, then took two notes from his pocket and tossed them into the air, before placing the muzzle of the rifle underneath his chin and firing a bullet up into his head.

One of the notes was a suicide letter, and the second was a list of instructions for his funeral.

Incredibly, Howard didn’t die. Instead, he climbed to his feet, bleeding heavily from the wound in his jaw, and picked up the gun, staggering towards horrified onlookers, begging them to take the rifle and finish him off.

When the police arrived, he was subdued and taken to a local hospital, where a few hours later, he finally died of his injuries.

It’s a shame that ultimately, Howard’s most famous film was ‘Horror Island’, a truly vacuous, unimaginative film that constantly ranks as one of the worst in Universal’s canon.

Unfortunately, Universal’s next effort was equally as dire. Seemingly intent on ruining their horror legacy, a remake of ‘The Black Cat’ was ordered, but instead of malevolence, murder and mayhem, audiences got a comedy spoof of

‘The Cat And The Canary’ starring a
thoroughly bored Basil Rathbone
alongside Gale Sondegaard, and which
tried to blend comedy and scares with disastrous results.

The only thing going for it was that it provided Bela Lugosi with a few weeks work. Here he played Eduardo the
gardener, a big fan of standing outside on 144

A Universe Of Horrors stormy nights and glaring through windows.

Instead of Boris Karloff being skinned alive, audiences were tortured with the even more painful sight of comic Hugh Herbert as he trampled around the large house, breaking vases and being scalded by Sondegaard’s housekeeper. Although the effects were their usual chintzy Universal best, all lightning flashes and bellowing thunder, the only thing it had in common with its predecessor was that it starred Lugosi, and that it too had absolutely nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe.

It was beginning to seem as though Universal Monsters had had their day. The shocking sight of a newly resurrected Boris Karloff in

‘Frankenstein’, or Bela Lugosi’s fiendish Count Dracula framed by a giant cobweb, welcoming a naive Renfield into his lair, or Claude Rains happily murdering the cowardly Kemp in ‘The Invisible Man’ seemed to be a distant memory.

While Universal’s current programme of low-budget horror quickies was financially successful, they no longer garnered the rave reviews, or chased the artistic intentions of years gone by.

And then, out of nowhere, George Waggner, the director of ‘Man Made Monster’ and ‘Horror Island’, struck horror gold, and in doing so, created the last of the great Universal horror movies.

Eager to exploit their newest star to his full potential, Universal began to throw Lon Chaney Jr into a few different projects to see if anything would stick.

He appeared in ‘San Antonio Rose’, a musical comedy with a western slant, then ‘Too Many Blondes’ another musical starring Rudy Vallee.

He got eighth billing in ‘Badlands Of Dakota’, a low-grade western starring Robert Stack, and then starred as Butch the Henchman in

‘Riders of Death Valley’, a one-dimensional villain role that was barely even noticeable.

But while all this was happening, George Waggner had been busy trying to get another project off the ground.

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Anxious to create Universal’s next big horror icon, Waggner had been working tirelessly alongside screenwriter Curt Siodmak to create a new type of monster. This one would be less lumbering, less one-dimensional.

One with a tragic slant to his nature, and one steeped in folklore.

Werewolves had been attempted before at Universal, six years before, with ‘Werewolf of London’, but while that film had been a generally humourless affair, with a static story and hokey atmosphere, Waggner could see the potential in the werewolf subject, and pressed Curt Siodmak to try something different.

‘The Wolf Man’ tells the tale of Lawrence Talbot, the prodigal son of Sir John Talbot, a Welsh landowner and squire, who’s returned to his hometown after the death of his brother, to help take care of the family interests.

He instantly falls for a local girl named Gwen Conliffe after seeing her through his father’s telescope. In order to meet her, he visits the antique 146

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shop in which she works, and buys a walking stick with a large silver wolf’s head handle.

Later that evening, Lawrence accompanies Gwen and her best friend Jenny, as they visit a band of gypsies to have their fortunes read. Bela, the palm-reader, takes Jenny into his tent, and Lawrence uses the opportunity to romance Gwen.

While Lawrence and Gwen go for a walk, Jenny is chased down and attacked by a wolf. Her screams are heard by Lawrence, who runs to her aid, and beats the animal to death with his silver headed cane. In doing so, though, he is bitten by the creature during the struggle.

When the police arrive on the scene, they find not only Jenny’s body, but that of Bela, the gypsy, the man who had told Jenny’s fortune, his head smashed in by Lawrence’s cane.

Finding no trace of the wolf, and with Lawrence’s bite wound having mysteriously vanished, the village is soon calling Lawrence a deranged murderer, but Bela mother, the gypsy Maleva, knows the truth and tells Lawrence that her son was a werewolf, and that his curse has now passed to Lawrence because
of the bite.

The following night, with the
arrival of a full moon,

Lawrence transforms into a
werewolf and kills a local
gravedigger by tearing out his
throat. When he awakes the
next morning, he realises
what’s happened, and begins
to panic. The village
meanwhile are now convinced
that a murderous wolf is on
the rampage and begin to lay
snares and traps, as well as
organising a hunt to track
down the creature.

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A Universe Of Horrors That night, having pleaded with his father to help him, Lawrence is bound to a chair by Sir John, who goes out to join the hunt for the wolf.

Gwen, having fallen in love with Lawrence, enters the woods in the hope of finding him. Lawrence, who has now transformed into a wolf once more, breaks free of his bindings and picks up Gwen’s trail.

He attacks her in a deserted spot, and her screams alert Sir John, who, armed with Lawrence’s cane, violently beats the creature to death.

Maleva the gypsy arrives on the scene as the Wolf Man’s last breath leaves him, and Sir John watches in horror as the beast he has savaged to death transforms back into his son.

Here at last was an effective showcase for Lon Chaney Jr’s talents. The role of Lawrence Talbot would make powerful use of Chaney’s size in fascinating ways. Chaney was a burly man, and came across on screen as almost childlike at times. It was easy to believe that Lawrence Talbot was a gentle giant, who wanted nothing more than to please his father and fall in love.

In the film’s opening act, Chaney comes across as a softly spoken giant with a twinkle in his eye. It’s therefore all the more heartbreaking to see him feverishly panicking as the full moon rises, knowing that he’s going to turn into a murderous maniac, but being helpless to stop it from happening. It’s telling perhaps, that the best Universal monsters were always the ones who were cursed with the body they lived in.

Waggner had certainly gone to town on the production, assembling a stunning cast to support Chaney in his first true horror role.

As Sir John, he enlisted the services of Claude Rains, who seems as though he’s destined to play an undistinguished part in the proceedings, but who ultimately becomes the film’s second tragic hero. His performance as Sir John is warmly tender as he welcomes his one remaining son back into the fold, but devastatingly aghast as the final moments play out, his second son dead at his own hand.

In fact, Rains had thrown himself into the part to such an extent that when it came time to film the final scene, he got slightly carried away, and during the frenzied beating struck Chaney a little too hard with the 148

A Universe Of Horrors ten-pound silver headed cane, giving him a black eye and extensive bruising. Though Rains was thoroughly apologetic, it still meant that filming on some of Chaney’s romantic scenes couldn’t go ahead until he’d healed.

Ample support is given by Ralph Bellamy as Colonel Montford, the local law enforcer, and Pre-Code cinema’s favourite leading man, Warren William, as the slightly inconsequential Doctor Lloyd.

For the role of the gypsy woman, Maleva, Waggner signed up the distinguished Russian actress and acting teacher, Maria Ouspenskaya, who’d travelled with the Moscow Art Theatre during the twenties, before settling in New York City.

Over the next couple of decades, Ouspenskaya had trained some of Hollywood’s brightest talents, before making the move to the screen herself in the film ‘Dodsworth’ in 1936, where she played Baroness von Oversdorff, and earned herself an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, even though her character was only on screen for a couple of minutes.

In 1939, she was nominated again for her role as Charles Boyer’s grandmother in ‘Love Story’, and took notable roles in ‘Waterloo Bridge’

and ‘The Mortal Storm’. Her appearance in ‘The Wolf Man’ does add a certain Eastern mystique to the film. Certainly it’s an un-glamorous role, and Ouspenskaya definitely looks the part, all suspicious eyes and croaky voice, but it’s also one of the weakest performances in the entire film.

In the scene where she visits her son’s body in the chapel of rest, it’s perfectly obvious that she’s reading her lines on the inside of the coffin lid, and such is her monotone delivery, it seems as though it was the first time she’d ever seen them.

Also, while her appearance at the end of the movie is a necessary bookend to the film, her constant monologues, where she’s called upon to deliver some line or two of folklore to further the film’s mystical slant, always come at the expense of the action around her.

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How much more effective the film’s ending would have been if it had ended with the sight of Claude Rains’ horrified face as he stared down at the battered body of his son, instead of Maleva’s monotone mumblings of thorny paths and tears running to predestined ends?

Faring better in the gypsy stakes was Bela Lugosi, as (incredibly) Bela the gypsy, saddled with a giant moustache and pentagram scar, whose drawling delivery as he reads Jenny’s fortune, and then realises that she is about to become his next victim, is pitch perfect.

It’s not a showy part, in fact it’s relatively tiny compared to everyone else’s screen time, but it’s a crucial role that casts a long shadow over the film and resonates until the final frame.

For the role of Gwen Conliffe, Waggner hired Evelyn Ankers, a British actress who’d made a relatively inauspicious start in British romance films, before making the move to Hollywood in 1940. Ankers’ first film for Universal had been ‘Burma Convoy’ in early 1941, where she’d established herself as a romantic actress, but after appearing in ‘The Wolf Man’, her career took a decidedly different turn.

Following this movie, Universal took the decision to make her their Queen Of Horror Movies, and Ankers found herself appearing in ‘Hold That Ghost’, ‘The

Ghost of

Frankenstein’,

‘The Mad Ghoul’,

‘Son of Dracula’

and countless
more horror
yarns in which
her screams
could be heard so
often, that she
soon found
herself being
referred to as

‘Queen of The

Screamers’.

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A Universe Of Horrors She also appeared in the first Sherlock Holmes film for Universal, 1942’s

‘Sherlock Holmes and The Voice Of Terror’ which reunited Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce after their two movies at Fox in 1939. Here she played the heroic Kitty, the wife of one of Holmes’ informers who is murdered by the Nazis. Using her underworld connections, Kitty, Holmes and Watson put an end to a devilish Nazi invasion, only for Kitty to die a hero’s death in the film’s final tragic moments.

Ankers and Chaney would star together numerous times, and while their movies generally depicted them as a romantic couple, off-screen things couldn’t have been more different.

Chaney would often sneak up behind Ankers in full wolf make-up and give her the fright of her life. When she began to respond to him by telling him the only thing she objected to about the sneaking was that he had bad breath, Chaney got offended, and things got worse from there.

Chaney started referring to the actress as Evelyn Shankers, and she began to tell everyone that he was a “brute with bad breath”.

In a later deleted sequence, Lawrence Talbot takes up a challenge at the travelling fair to wrestle a bear. Talbot enters the ring, only for the bear to sense the beast within the man and back off. Growing frustrated, Talbot charges at the bear and begins to pummel the creature as the horrified crowd look on.

When the time came to film the sequence, the bear broke loose from its chains and chased Evelyn Ankers through the studio. To escape it, she climbed into the rafters of the soundstage while the animal was subdued.

Chaney was openly heard to be laughing.

The other star of the film, of course, was Jack Pierce, who toiled at creating yet another iconic monster design. Gone are the subtle enhancements to the human face, such as the ones seen in ‘Werewolf Of London’. In ‘The Wolf Man’, Pierce went all out, covering Chaney’s face, hands and feet in yak hair, adding a prosthetic nose and fangs. This had been Pierce’s original design for ‘Werewolf Of London’, the design that Henry Hull had refused to wear, and Pierce was determined to see it used this time.

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To create the transformation effect, Chaney was made to sit motionless for hours upon hours, as layers of make-up were added, filmed, and then added again. At times, the scenes took so long to film that Chaney had to remain in position as the entire crew left the set to have lunch, returning an hour later to continue working on him. He later claimed that in order to keep his hands and feet in the absolute correct position, tiny pins were driven through the loose skin on the sides of his fingers and toes, essentially tacking him to the floor.

Nevertheless, despite the difficulties in making the film, Universal had created another sensation. The film broke box-office records for 1941, and made a bonafide megastar of Lon Chaney Jr. Within weeks, he was receiving more fan mail than anyone else at Universal Studios.

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Chapter 14 - Creature Features

Keen to revive their biggest horror cash cow, but unable to secure the services of Boris Karloff for the part, Universal turned to their new horror star to play the monster in ‘The Ghost Of Frankenstein’.

It was an inevitability that The Monster would be given another outing, given the huge box-office returns of the previous three movies, but the question was ‘Would it succeed with Karloff?’.

The film opens with the villagers once again fearful of the Frankenstein curse, blaming everything from bad harvests to the lack of tourism on the scientific experiments of the Frankenstein family.

Moreover, it seems that Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi, wasn’t killed by Wolf Frankenstein’s bullets at the end of ‘Son of Frankenstein’, and has
been hiding out in the ruins of

Frankenstein’s castle.

Determining to put an end to the

Frankenstein legacy once and for all, the villagers march on the ruins and
attempt to dynamite the walls in the
hope of killing Ygor and destroying
the godforsaken rubble heap.

Instead, the dynamite sends Ygor
into the underground caverns
beneath the castle where he

(surprise, surprise) finds the body of The Monster, played by Lon Chaney

Jr this time, perfectly preserved by

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Ygor and The Monster escape under the cover of a thunderstorm, and journey together to the village of Vasaria to enlist the help of yet another of Henry Frankenstein’s sons, Dr Ludwig Frankenstein, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke. The village of Vasaria are completely unaware that Ludwig is connected to such a horrifying legacy, and using this fact, Ygor blackmails the doctor into giving The Monster a new brain.

However, longing to escape the deformed body he is trapped in, Ygor conspires with Frankenstein’s assistant, Dr Bohmer, played by Lionel Atwill, into putting Ygor’s brain into The Monster. Unveiling his creation, Ludwig is horrified to hear Ygor’s voice come from the Monster’s mouth, but due to the incompatible blood types of Ygor and The Monster, he has been rendered completely blind.

Thrashing about the laboratory, the Monster first flings Dr Bohmer into an electrical panel, killing him instantly, then inadvertently starts a fire which claims the life of not only the Ygor-Monster, but Ludwig Frankenstein himself.

The Saturday Evening Post on May 23rd, 1942, perhaps summed up

‘The Ghost Of Frankenstein’ best when it wrote: “Horror movies help people to get away from the horror of realism. A Chinese baby crying in the midst of a bomb-blasted station is heart-rending, but a monster strangling Sir Cedric Hardwicke is entertainment”.

It was clear by the time that ‘The Ghost Of Frankenstein’ was released, that Universal Studios were not so concerned with making horror movies any more. What they were making now, were monster movies.

Gone were the subtle chills of the Laemmle era, replaced forever by the lumbering crashing of an arms-outstretched Monster who blindly crashed around a laboratory as a heroine shrieked, and the lightning crashed on cue.

Whereas the films of the thirties had been gothic nightmares brought to life with an element of wit and creativity, these “Creature Features” were cheap, slick and artless.

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A Universe Of Horrors But it wasn’t as though horror was dead everywhere. Over at RKO, Val Lewton was in the midst of a horror revolution, turning out genuinely terrifying, low-budget scares with ‘Cat People’, ‘The Leopard Man’, and

‘I Walked With A Zombie’.

But for the studio that had pioneered the horror genre, and shepherded it through two decades of cinema, things were beginning to fall a little flat.

That’s not to say that ‘The Ghost Of Frankenstein’ isn’t a fun watch. It’s certainly entertaining to see Lugosi as Ygor once more, supported by Lionel Atwill and Evelyn Ankers, and Lon Chaney’s attempt at The Monster isn’t terrible. It just isn’t Karloff.

Originally, the film was to have been a much tawdrier affair, seeing the return of Basil Rathbone as Wolf Frankenstein, caught up in monsters again, as Ygor rallies The Monster and a whole collection of other deformed men to take over a town. Thankfully, this plot line was deemed too distasteful, and certainly carried the scent of Tod Browning’s

‘Freaks’ from 1932.

Ultimately, the film played out safer in terms of plot, but despite The Monster being on the rampage from the off, there’s a strange lack of threat in the film. The only real standout sequence is near the beginning, when the Monster and Ygor arrive in Vasaria.

A small girl has lost her ball, which has been thrown onto the roof of a nearby house by a bully. Unafraid of The Monster, she asks him to help her get the ball down. He picks her up and carries her onto the roof in a remarkably suspenseful sequence, as the villagers gather below in abject terror.

Also, Lugosi, once more, is terrific as Ygor, as he chucklingly blackmails the pompous Ludwig into helping him. If the film had ended with The Monster triumphantly speaking in Ygor’s voice and escaping into an uncertain future, it would have been a superb ending to the series, but Universal, perennially unsure of their next step in the franchise, chose to kill him off once more, convinced that they could resurrect him whenever needed, without anyone asking too many questions.

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A Universe Of Horrors As for Chaney, the part of The Monster was simply wrong for him.

Whereas his fuller figure was a perfect fit for The Wolf Man, here he was supposed to be playing an emaciated corpse. Karloff had even removed a dental plate to give himself a hollow-cheeked expression.

Chaney’s monster is positively overweight in comparison. Goodness knows what he was feasting on in that sulphur pit, but the fact that he now sports a pot-belly and a double chin, does make The Monster rather less frightening.

The critics weren’t fans of the film either.

“The new monster picture is horrid, not horrendous”, wrote The New York Daily News, “even though a lot of good players do the best they can with the dreadful material”.

Bosley Crowther for The New York Times said: “The replenished monster is being consumed by fire when we see him last, but the thought that he may yet return fills us with mortal terror. That is the most fearful prospect which the picture manages to convey”.

By 1942, the United States had entered the Second World War, and a concerted effort was being made to insert a little flag-waving into most of Hollywood’s output. At Universal, it was an absolute priority.

They’d recently purchased the rights to the character of Sherlock Holmes, and were about to kick off their twelve film series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, with ‘Sherlock Holmes and The Voice Of Terror’ seeing Holmes battle the Nazis, ‘Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon’, where Holmes was to do battle with the Gestapo and Professor Moriarty, and ‘Sherlock Holmes In Washington’, where Holmes was to travel to America to retrieve a vital microfilm and do battle with a deep-rooted Nazi secret agent.

Elsewhere, horror was being used to fight the Nazis.

At Poverty Row’s PRC Studio, George Zucco was starring in ‘The Mad Monster’ in which he played a mad doctor on the side of the Allies, doing his best to beat the Nazis by breeding an army of werewolves.

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A Universe Of Horrors Warner Brothers came out with ‘The Mysterious Doctor’ in which a Nazi secret agent terrorises a small English village, disguised as a headless ghost.

Deciding that their monster movies could do with an anti-Nazi slant, Universal came out with ‘Invisible Agent’.

The movie sees Frank Griffin, the grandson of the original Invisible Man, who’s recruited by the military to use his grandfather’s formula to parachute into Nazi Germany, in order to obtain a list of Japanese spies, living and working in the United States.

What follows is a fairly entertaining spy-thriller with special effects. And oh, what effects!

Seemingly a little too pleased with themselves, Universal opt to make the most of them at every opportunity, with Frank regularly picking up objects and making a nuisance of himself when he should surely be using his invisibility to, you know, actually do some spying?

When he should be stood silently, listening, he’s moving furniture around, eating food, smoking cigarettes, and stamping on Nazi toes. He even carries on a romance, albeit while his face is slathered in cream.

That’s not to say the film isn’t fun, it is. The supporting players, especially, are what makes the film work. You have Sir Cedric Hardwicke, possibly the most British man who ever lived, as Stauffer, a high-ranking member of the S.S.

Peter Lorre, definitely the most un-Japanese man who ever lived, plays Baron Ikito, a Japanese agent in league with the Nazis. Both are fun to watch, if totally unbelievable in their parts.

As for the lesser Nazis, they’re headed up by J. Edward Bromberg, an actor who was best known for bumbling turns on screen. His most famous role was that of Quintero, the main protagonist in ‘The Mark Of Zorro’. His portrayal of the stupid Nazi was especially prevalent in the 1940’s, with many wanting to see their oppressors as cowardly, ineffective and clumsy oafs.

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Originally, the film was to have featured a scene in which the Invisible Man kicks Hitler himself in the seat of the pants, but it was removed for fear of offence. Still, the Invisible Man’s foot does find itself planted squarely in Bromberg’s behind, so America was seen to be kicking literal Nazi ass in the film.

Lon Chaney Jr next tried his hand at playing Kharis in ‘The Mummy’s Tomb’, a sequel to ‘The Mummy’s Hand’ set 30 years later, in which Kharis stalks the desecrator’s of Ananka’s tomb, yet again, with the new twist of transporting the mummy to American soil.

The film was absolute dud, with even George ‘One-Take’ Zucco demanding to be written out of future films by being killed off here.

Universal seemed determined to cram Chaney into as many monster make-ups as possible, and he spent a gruelling eight hours a day being made up in bandages and clay. Unlike Boris Karloff, who had taken the opportunity to nurture a friendship with Jack Pierce while sat in his chair for hours at a time, Chaney was inclined to whine and bristle at the prolonged make-up sessions.

Whereas Pierce had done his best to make the sessions as fast and painless as possible for Karloff, whom Pierce regarded as a gentleman, Chaney’s complaining had the opposite on Pierce’s disposition, and 158

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instead of streamlining the process, he began to apply a little more here and there than was necessary, especially the glue, which Chaney detested.

To add an air of authenticity to the Wolf Man make-up, the process involved laboriously gluing individual yak’s hairs to Chaney’s skin and then singeing them with a hot iron. The more that Chaney complained, the more often Pierce’s iron would… slip… burning his skin.

Still, Pierce’s design here was masterful, following the logic of the previous movie in which Kharis had been burned at the climax. In this film, Kharis’s bandages were singed, and instead of a left hand, a smouldering stump. For all of Pierce’s work though, the sight of an Egyptian mummy skulking around the back alleys of a New England town wasn’t scaring anyone.

‘Night Monster’, the next bag of horrors to come out of Universal carried the tagline “What Kind Of Thing Is It?”. Indeed, audiences could have been forgiven for asking the same question.

Although relegated to the supporting slot in its double-bill release with

‘The Mummy’s Tomb’, it was actually a far better film than it was given credit for, although it was a little
difficult to categorise. Essentially, the film was a horror, but with a wickedly clever whodunnit element, and bags of thrills for horror audiences.

It tells the story of a small town next to a swamp, where a series of bizarre murders have been taking place. The
rumour around town is that the evil
stems from the dreary, foreboding
house of Curt Ingston, the wheelchair-bound patriarch of the Ingston estate, and his house full of assorted misfits.

First of all there’s Rolf the sinister butler, played by Bela Lugosi, who

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A Universe Of Horrors skulks around the house using threats to keep the staff in order. Then there’s Lawrie, the chauffeur, a hulking womaniser. Guarding the gate is a twisted old hunchback named Torque. And living alongside Ingston is his insane sister, Margaret, and an Eastern mystic called Agar Singh.

The three doctors who failed to cure Ingston of his paralysis are invited to the house, and quickly murdered by an unseen creature, who dispatches them in various grisly ways.

Because of his hatred for the men that failed him, suspicion quickly falls upon Ingston himself, but when he’s revealed to be not just paralysed, but paraplegic, having had his arms and legs amputated, the investigation fizzes to a halt.

However, the bodies keep mounting up, and the killer must be found…

Joining Lugosi in the cast was Lionel Atwill, still in the throes of his sex scandal, but while he and Lugosi received top billing, their parts were simply cameos, much to the disgruntlement of horror fans.

However, the film is a wicked delight, despite the fact that Lugosi and Atwill don’t get the screen time that their billing promises. First of all, it’s directed with a definite flair by Ford Beebe, a solid B-movie director who'd honed his skills by directing Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials throughout the thirties and forties. While these pictures hadn’t been high-art, they had a certain efficiency of storytelling that had bled down into Beebe’s movies. Every single shot told a story. There was nothing extraneous. As far as Beebe was concerned, if it didn’t need to be there, then out it went.

Secondly, the blending of horror, thriller, mystery and Eastern mysticism turned out to be a potent mix, with the solution to the killer’s identity proving a mischievous surprise. Most audiences worked out the twist, indeed, it was signposted enough, but that doesn’t stop it being a thrill when it’s revealed.

Also, for a cheapie B-movie, it’s a surprisingly macabre little film, with a whole stack of murders, and a grisly little fascination with body parts.

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A Universe Of Horrors While Lugosi’s top billing was something of a white lie, and Atwill barely makes it to the second reel, despite being next on the bill, there was enough dressing on the salad to keep audiences eating.

Beebe later said of the film: “Though it was a quickie, I always was kind of proud of it. Hitchcock, who was also making a picture on the lot (1943’s Shadow Of A Doubt) and who screened a rough cut because he was interested in Janet Shaw for a part in his film, was impressed with

‘Night Monster’ and seemed to think it was a much more important picture than the studio thought. He couldn’t believe the picture was shot in 11 days”.

The New York Sun said of the film: “It’s not good, but it’s crowded with killings”. The New York Herald Tribune said that: “Old hands at the game like Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill are simply present for atmospheric purposes”.

Personally, I think it’s a cut above many of the Universal potboilers that were being kicked at audiences in the early forties. If you’re a pulp horror exploitation fan, and you don’t mind that Lugosi and Atwill have second rate screen time, seek it out. At least it doesn’t star Dick Foran.

By now, Universal was pitted directly against RKO Studios in the horror stakes. Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur had been knocking it out of the park with their unique brand of creeping horror. ‘Cat People’,

‘The Leopard Man’, ‘The Seventh Victim’ and ‘The Ghost Ship’ had been critical and financial successes, despite hardly revealing their monsters.

Lewton’s direction was in stark contrast to Universal’s. Whereas Lewton’s ultra low-budgets forced him to be creative with shadow and sound in order to build an atmosphere of terror, Universal’s methods were becoming increasingly heavy-handed.

Karloff’s romantic performance as the lovesick Imhotep in ‘The Mummy’ had given rise to Lon Chaney’s lumbering Kharis trampling around American alleyways. Claude Rains’s power-mad, classically murderous Invisible Man had become Nazi-battling, bland Every Man.

With every sequel, Universal were diluting their brand. Their only nod 161

A Universe Of Horrors to the fineries of a decade previous, was to include in their casts a classical actor, such as a Rains, an Atwill, or a Hardwicke. But as the forties ground on, they had to look for new ways to attract a crowd.

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 15 - The Birth Of The Rally Just about the only monster who hadn’t been given a sequel yet was the Wolf Man. The screenwriter of ‘The Wolf Man’, Curt Siodmak, as well as its director, George Waggner, were eating lunch in the Universal commissary one afternoon.

Siodmak wanted to buy a car, and to pay for it, he needed one of his scripts to be produced. Competition was fierce, especially in the horror genre, and what Siodmak needed, was for Waggner to take him up on an idea.

‘George’ said Siodmak. ‘Why don’t we make a picture, “Frankenstein Wolfs The Meat Man”, er, “…Meets The Wolf Man”?’

‘He didn’t laugh’, said Siodmak later. ‘I wanted to buy an automobile and I needed a new writing job so I would be able to afford it. George would see me every day and ask me if I had bought the car yet. I said

“George, can I get a job?”. He said, “Sure, you’ll get a job, buy the car”.

Well, the day finally came when I had to pay for the car. George asked me that day, “Did you buy the car?”, and I said “Yes, I bought it”.

“Good!” said George. “Your new assignment is Frankenstein Wolfs The Meat Man, er Meets The Wolf Man! I’ll give you two hours to accept”’

Though it may have started as a joke, ‘Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man’ became the start of another phase for Universal.

The Monster Rally.

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Though the thought of two screen icons meeting in one film seems a little hackneyed now, back then, the idea was revolutionary. The closest thing that modern audiences have to this idea is the recent development in comic book mash up movies, such as Marvel’s ‘The Avengers’ and DC’s

‘Batman vs Superman’.

Back in 1943, the idea that two such huge stars as Frankenstein and the Wolf Man could be on screen together, was a tantalising prospect.

Siodmak’s script sees Larry Talbot resurrected by the full moon after two grave-robbers remove the Wolfsbane from his grave. After killing one of the robbers, Talbot journeys to Cardiff to find a doctor to help him find a cure for his curse.

After failing to convince anyone of his problem, he instead hunts down the gypsy woman, Maleva, and beseeches her help. Maleva remembers talk of a certain Doctor Frankenstein who may be able to help Larry, and together they journey to Vasaria, to consult with him.

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A Universe Of Horrors When they get there, however, they find nothing but a hostile village, and a ruined castle. Larry determines to find Doctor Frankenstein’s notes, hoping to discover something there to help him, but instead finds The Monster encased in ice.

He breaks The Monster free and together they hunt for the records of Doctor Frankenstein, with The Monster believing it will restore the sight he lost at the end of ‘The Ghost Of Frankenstein’, and with Larry Talbot hoping it will reveal to him a way to end his life for good.

Unfortunately, just as the records are found, a full moon rises, and a battle between The Monster and the Wolf Man begins to rage.

While it was inevitable that Lon Chaney Jr would once again play the Wolf Man, that left the rather important question of who would play The Frankenstein Monster this time? After all, Chaney had taken on the role since Karloff had walked away, but he could hardly play two parts.

In 1931, Bela Lugosi had made a terrible mistake by turning down the role of The Monster.

Arguably, Lugosi’s screen career would have been a very different one had he obeyed Universal and accepted the role that he thought was beneath him. Certainly, Lugosi knew this. He’d been suffering for over a decade in squalid little movies, whereas Karloff had blossomed into a true screen icon, effortlessly switching from genre movies to distinguished dramatic roles.

The idea of Karloff returning to the role was floated and quickly shot down. Karloff was currently enjoying enormous success on the stage, as the villainous Jonathan Brewster in the slapstick farce ‘Arsenic And Old Lace’, plus at the age of 54, he didn’t feel physically prepared to undergo the painful transformation involved in the Monster role.

Consequently, Universal instead threw the part to Lugosi.

Lugosi had played Ygor in ‘The Ghost Of Frankenstein’, which saw Ygor’s brain transplanted into The Monster’s body, rendering The Monster blind. With this brief, Lugosi attempted to carry on the continuity, and played The Monster in this film as blind.

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Arms outstretched, and stumbling as he walked, the subtlety of earlier performances was lost. Originally, The Monster was to talk at regular intervals, but Lugosi’s accent was so thick that all his dialogue was cut.

This had the unfortunate effect of removing all references to The Monster’s blindness, which the original script played up heavily.

These factors together had the jarring consequence of creating an entirely different type of Monster. With his movement erratic and clumsy, and his dialogue
missing, The Monster was
now a lumbering, inept
thug, staggering from
point to point.

It is Lugosi’s performance
that is so often lampooned
by impressionists, that of a
dim-witted, arms
outstretched

Frankenstein’s Monster,
trudging around like a
zombie. The action figures
created over the decades,
of the slit-eyed Monster,
his sleeves halfway up his
arms, chin raised, and
mouth barely open, are all
characteristics of Lugosi’s

Monster, not Karloff’s.

Though Karloff’s version was the more classical, and the one more revered by horror fans and film fans alike, ultimately, it is Lugosi’s performance that has become the most stereotypical. Whether by design or by happy accident, Lugosi had avenged his decision of 1931.

Lon Chaney Jr came off slightly better. His Larry Talbot in this film is less concerned with “What the hell is happening to me?” than he is with

“How the hell can I stop this from happening to me?”. The first part of the movie, when he’s resurrected and journeys to Europe with Maleva is 166

A Universe Of Horrors the highlight of the movie. Sadly, it takes a dip when The Monster is thawed out, and dips further when the focus switches to Patric Knowles’s doctor, who like every other doctor before him, is seduced by the possibility of creating life from death.

Chaney got a chance to flex his acting chops, as well as his biceps, in a few scenes where the tragic results of his curse become a little too hard to bear, playing up the sympathetic side of his murderous monster. His wolf scenes are a definite improvement on the original, his brawl with The Monster on the rooftop at the film’s finale being a particular highlight.

Lionel Atwill popped up again as the Mayor to add a touch of class to the proceedings, and Maria Ouspenskaya returned as Maleva, this time a little less wooden, and with a bit more to do. Her first scene with Chaney, when she agrees to help him beat the curse, actually carries with it a healthy dose of pathos, as she sees the chance to redeem her own family’s tragedy by aiding Larry.

Also included in the cast is Dennis Hoey as Inspector Owen, an absolute carbon copy of the lunk-headed Inspector Lestrade he’d been playing so well in the Sherlock Holmes film series opposite Basil Rathbone. He even wears the same raincoat and bowler hat. To see him pop up here is a delight. Hoey was an imposing figure, with a lantern jaw and a hangdog expression, but he always played the police officer that you’d want on your side in any situation; quick with the handcuffs, and willing to go along with a crazy story. Along with Nigel Bruce, he was the absolute heart of the Sherlock Holmes films.

Unfortunately for Universal, Siodmak wasn’t exactly a fan of continuity, and many fans of the Universal horror movies still find themselves confused by the film’s many blunders.

Characters refer to Ludwig Frankenstein as the Monster’s creator, even though he didn’t turn up until the fourth film…

Larry tells Maleva that they met in England, when The Wolf Man was set in Wales…

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Elsa, Ludwig’s daughter, says that her father became obsessed with power. If he did, then it certainly wasn’t shown in ‘The Ghost of Frankenstein’…

Elsa here is played by Ilona Massey. In ‘The Ghost of Frankenstein’, she’d been played by Evelyn Ankers, only they couldn’t have her back here, because she’d also played Gwen Conliffe in ‘The Wolf Man’…

Patric Knowles’s doctor decides to electrify The Monster back to life at two minutes before moonrise, with Larry present, even though he’s fully aware that Larry will turn into a wolf while he’s doing so!

Larry and Maleva arrive in Vasaria and ask about Dr Frankenstein. For this, they’re shunned and ejected. However, when Elsa Frankenstein, the daughter of the man who brought all the horror down upon them, she’s made guest of honour at the Festival Of the New Wine!

And who knew that Lionel Atwill’s mad scientist from ‘The Ghost of Frankenstein’ had a twin brother who was the Mayor of the same village? And why doesn’t Elsa even mention the fact?

Other actors recycled from ‘The Wolf Man’ and ‘The Ghost Of Frankenstein’ include Dwight Frye, Patric Knowles, Doris Lloyd, Tom Stevenson and Harry Stubbs. This wouldn’t be a problem except that with its themes of resurrection, you’re never quite sure if they're the same people from the first film, or playing someone different.

Tom Stevenson’s character is particularly amusing.

In ‘The Wolf Man’ he played the grave-digger who becomes the first victim of the Wolf Man. In ‘Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man’, he plays the grave-robber, breaking into the crypt of the man who killed him in the first film!

Even though the film falls well short of expectations, it’s still kind of fun, and there is a certain illicit thrill in watching two titans do battle, even if The Monster is slightly more subdued here, and less sympathetic.

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A Universe Of Horrors This was the last time that Frankenstein’s Monster was part of a whole film. From here on in, he became a prop, and generally didn’t show up until the final reel. Conversely, it was also the best outing for Chaney’s Wolf Man, who really got a chance to shine here.

It’s not a classic, by any means, but it is important for beginning the brief run of monster mashes that would follow. Unfortunately, it’s also the best of them.

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Chapter 16 - Killing Your Darlings Next up came an odd little experiment in sexy horror, with ‘Captive Wild Woman’, starring the enigmatic Acquanetta as Paula Dupree, a woman created by a mad scientist after he grafts glandular material onto a gorilla named Cheela. This turns a normal gorilla into a sultry, leggy brunette, complete with bikini, who is able to control her fellow animals using her mind…

However, unbeknown to the mad scientist, played by John Carradine, Cheela the gorilla was in love with her captor, an animal trainer named Fred Mason. As a gorilla, he’d had no romantic feelings for her, but as a leggy, sultry brunette in a bikini, he… has no feelings for her. He’s too busy being in love with his fiancee, Evelyn Ankers.

Jealousy, it seems, has an odd effect on Paula Dupree, the former Cheela-Ape-Woman. It causes her to transform back into an ape, at least a little bit. In a remarkably unremarkable scene, Paula sprouts hair, a la the Wolf Man.

The sight of a well-
formed brunette in a
short skirt and skimpy
top with a hairy face and
gorilla teeth is rather
confusing to the red-
blooded male. One
minute, you’re ogling the
marvels of mad science,
and the next, you’re
feeling a little confused at
the fact that despite the

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A Universe Of Horrors hairy face… you’re still ogling the marvels of mad science.

Instead of wasting time with expensive special effects, the mind control powers of Paula The Ape Woman are conveyed by a close up on her eyes, which widen ever so slightly, causing any animal to do her bidding.

Despite its lack of budget, and overtones of bestiality, ‘Captive Wild Woman’ is a silly little romp that does the job admirably. It was never going to win Oscars, especially with a personality-vacuum like Acquanetta in the lead role, but as a fun, action-filled science fiction horror yarn, it ticked every box.

Acquanetta played the role in the sequel, ‘Jungle Woman’, a year later, which saw Paula terrorising more love rivals. That was followed by ‘The Jungle Captive’ in 1945, but even Acquanetta could see that the series was going down the toilet, and handed the role to Vicky Lane.

Although bestowed with an exotic name, Acquanetta was actually born Mildred Davenport, and although her nickname during the forties was

“The Venezuelan Volcano”, she was actually born in Wyoming to Native American parents who gave her up for adoption at the age of two. While this doesn’t seem like a particularly controversial thing to modern eyes, in the forties, being of mixed race was a scandal that some stars were desperate to hide.

The British actress, Merle Oberon, was so determined to bury the fact that she was half-Indian, that she told everyone that she had been born in Tasmania. The Indian maidservant who travelled with her throughout her career was actually her grandmother.

When some of Universal’s stockholders found out about Acquanetta’s beginnings, film roles were suddenly more difficult to come by for the exotic actress. By the 1950’s she’d retired from the screen, and married a car dealer named Jack Ross. She appeared in a few commercials for her husband, and ended up hosting her own late-night television show,

‘Acqua’s Corner’, on Friday nights, introducing the late night movies and handing out the sponsors spiel.

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A Universe Of Horrors In 1990 she returned to movies, starring in ‘The Legend Of Grizzly Adams’, but shortly afterwards was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.

She passed away in 2004.

Still, for one brief moment in time, Mildred Davenport was “The Venezuelan Volcano” in a madly camp classic about an ape woman in a bikini, who told lions what to do by blinking at them.

Back in 1943, Universal were keen to keep on killing their darlings, and next for the remake treatment was ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, this time with Claude Rains in the role of The Phantom, and with the intention of making the whole thing in dazzling Technicolor.

But whereas Lon Chaney’s 1925 Phantom had been the star of the show, here Claude Rains was inexplicably shunted down the credits to third billing, behind the film’s romantic musical stars, Nelson Eddy and Susanna Foster.

It was clear that while their intentions were vaguely honourable, Universal were looking to make a prestige piece, perhaps with awards on their minds. Instead of going heavy on “The Phantom”, most of the film was given over to the “of The Opera” part of the title, with so many mind-numbing musical interludes, that audiences walking in after the credits had rolled could have been forgiven for thinking that they’d wandered into the wrong film.

Originally, Charles Laughton was sought for the role, and after his stellar work in ‘The Hunchback Of Notre Dame’, it’s not hard to see why, but he wasn’t interested in playing another grotesque. Still hot on pushing their newest horror star, they next considered Lon Chaney Jr.

The prospect of Lon Chaney’s legacy being carried on by his son in a remake of his most famous role, certainly got tongues wagging in the media. However much of a curiosity it would have been to see a Chaney in both films, though, he was never going to be right for it, of course, and for once, good sense prevailed at Universal.

Claude Rains was drafted in and gave a wonderful performance as the deformed Eric Claudin, hideously disfigured after acid is thrown in his face. Rains’ casting is further proof that Universal were treating this film 172

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less as a horror, and more as a prestige piece, playing down the horrifying angle, and playing up the cultural side of the story.

To top it all off, the whole thing was filmed on the set of the 1925
version, now repainted and restored. Seeing the magnificent set in glorious technicolor is a wonderful sight, and yet, although the film looks wonderful, it is definitely a hollow experience.

While it was an interesting idea to make The Phantom a more rational figure in this film, he’s so underdeveloped, and crucially, underused, that it ruins the story.

Too much time is spent showcasing the voices of Nelson Eddy and Susanna Foster, and The Phantom’s appearances, whether in shadow or in the flesh, are half-hearted.

Also, the backstory of many of the characters was set aside to make room for more music. Eric and Christine, in this version, are revealed to be father and daughter, a fact made more explicit in the original script.

This goes a long way in explaining The Phantom’s motivations in wanting her to succeed, but because the dialogue was pared down to make way for music, the point is almost lost in the finished film.

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As Bosley Crowther for the New York Times put it, in 1943: “Who is afraid of a Phantom that is billed beneath Mr Nelson Eddy in the cast?”

For all their efforts, ‘The Phantom Of The Opera’ actually did solid business on Oscar night. Nominated in five categories, it won in two; Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.

It also did well at the box office, netting Universal a tidy sum. It needed to. The cost of such a lavish production had cost Universal over a million dollars.

To modern audiences however, the slow pacing and lack of thrills mean that it has been more maligned than other films of the period. Perhaps if they’d concentrated on the first half of the film’s title, instead of the second, it would have aged a little more favourably. But then, maybe it wouldn’t have garnered the critical success that Universal were obviously striving for.

As such, to modern audiences it’s a minor footnote in Universal’s filmography, and desperately inferior to Lon Chaney’s macabre 1925
delight.

Still, due to its success, Universal quickly moved to capitalise on its themes and signed Boris Karloff to appear in a thinly disguised remake entitled ‘The Climax’, which saw Karloff as Dr Hohner, a lunatic obsessed with the opera, who murders his fiancee, the Prima Donna of the Vienna Royal Theatre. Years later, he hears the voice of Angela Klatt, played again by Susanna Foster, and determines that if she won’t sing for him, then she’ll sing for no-one…

Again filmed in technicolor, this was obviously a no-expense spared production, especially since it starred the returning Boris Karloff, who had signed a new contract to make two films for Universal, his run in

‘Arsenic And Old Lace’ on the stage having come to an end.

A shame then, that ‘The Climax’, for all its 174

A Universe Of Horrors pretensions, and with Universal’s biggest star in the lead role, was a bomb, both critically and financially. Karloff almost immediately regretted returning to Universal, having been lumbered in such a one-dimensional role.

Lon Chaney Jr’s quest to appear as all the Universal monsters was completed when he took the role of Count Anthony Alucard in ‘Son Of Dracula’, the long gestating sequel to ‘Dracula’, and ‘Dracula’s Daughter’.

Bela Lugosi had been hearing about Universal’s plans for a Dracula sequel for some time now, and had been lobbying them hard, but they were having none of it. Lugosi was over 60 by now, and the direction they were going in was definitely younger. Depressed at being passed over, and seeing no hope for kickstarting his career back to its glory days, Lugosi began to grow depressed.

For a few years, he had been suffering from chronic sciatica, which had developed from injuries he had suffered during military service. These pains were worsening now. Doctors had been trying for years to treat Lugosi’s pains with natural remedies. For a long time, they’d been prescribing asparagus juice to him, but now, at the age of 61, they had begun to prescribe opiates, namely morphine.

Trapped at Monogram Pictures, a bargain basement of cheap, badly made C-movies, Lugosi’s depression worsened, as did his dependence on morphine. Just a couple of years later, he would begin to supplement his daily intake of drugs with black market methadone.

Now that he had stepped into Lugosi’s shoes for the Dracula role, Chaney had become the only Universal actor to play all of the major Monster roles, that of Frankenstein’s Monster, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, and Dracula.

In ‘Son Of Dracula’, he is badly miscast in the role of a suave European Count, with a laughably disguised surname. Even in the movie, it isn't more than a few minutes before someone works out that Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards.

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Alucard proceeds to inveigle his way into the home of a New Orleans plantation owner, slowly poisoning the family against each other and secretly marrying one of the family’s daughters, who has a taste for the morbid.

The script is so inept that by the end of the film, you’re still left wondering as to why the Count was there in the first place, other than to simply visit a family he’s never met before. Also, it can’t be stressed enough, Chaney is horribly miscast. His overweight, pencil-moustached vampire looks anything
but undead. He looks
rather more like a hastily
concocted fancy dress

Dracula at a swingers
party.

Support from the likes of

Evelyn Ankers and J.

Edward Bromberg is
sorely underused. Ankers
is barely seen, playing
the sister of the girl
infected by Alucard’s
vampirism, and

Bromberg plays the Van

Helsing-like Professor

Lazlo.

Gone are the erotic
overtures of ‘Dracula’s

Daughter’, which seem
worlds away from this overblown tripe. And although 1931’s ‘Dracula’

was a sullen stagey affair, at least it was well cast. Director Robert Siodmak, brother of Universal horror writer, Curt Siodmak, rarely rises above serviceable in the direction stakes, and Eric Taylor’s script is extremely clumsy.

In fact, Curt Siodmak had been the original writer of the film, but when his brother had taken over director’s duties, he promptly fired Curt and replaced him with Taylor. Although this will always lend an air of “what 176

A Universe Of Horrors if?” to the film, it’s also fair to say that Siodmak hadn’t written a decent horror script since ‘The Wolf Man’, so maybe Robert was doing the world a favour.

Always on the look out for cost cutting opportunities, Universal insisted on bringing the action to America so as to save money on expensive European sets. This was understandable, given that the war was forcing most studios to save money wherever possible, but it’s a shame that the Count and his children didn’t get to stalk the gothic parapets of a fog-addled castle at least once more.

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Chapter 17 - The Inner Sanctum!

One of the most popular horror anthologies on the radio at the time was

‘Inner Sanctum Mysteries’, a suspense show which dealt out weekly doses of mystery and murder, sometimes with a supernatural edge.

They’d begun in 1941 and had instantly attracted some of Hollywood’s top horror talent in macabre roles that were fun and easy to play, and which paid well. Boris Karloff was regularly heard throughout the show’s first season, and later stars included Peter Lorre, Claude Rains, Frank Sinatra and Orson Welles.

The show was extraordinarily popular, especially with younger listeners who listened every Sunday night under the blankets, even though its body count usually outnumbered the
advertisements. Bob Dylan regularly
quotes the show as one of his all time favourites as a child.

The radio show was based on a line of books by Simon and Schuster, who
used the Inner Sanctum branding to
market a line of pulpy horror mysteries, some of which were used as fodder for radio stories later on.

In June of 1943, Universal bought the movie rights to the books from Simon
and Schuster and set about creating an ultra-low budget series of six horror mysteries for the screen, all of which were to star their biggest star, Lon Chaney Jr.

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Chaney was pleased to do the films. For once he could leave the makeup behind. The Inner Sanctum stories were generally about a horrible, inexplicable murder with an unlikely suspect, which meant that Chaney could work without being subjected to Jack Pierce’s make-up designs.

Another hook of the Inner Sanctum Mysteries, were that they were mainly narrated by the main suspect, describing his inner torment as events took place around him. Chaney saw this device as an opportunity to extend his acting skills past the usual growling and grimacing that was fast becoming his stock in trade.

Having signed on for all six, the first to go before the cameras was

‘Calling Dr Death’, which told the story of neurologist Mark Steele, whose faithless wife, Maria, has been cheating openly on him. Steele has become despondent over the affairs, and finds solace in the arms of his adoring nurse, Stella.

One night, however, Maria’s activities cause him to black out in rage, and when he awakes two days later, he is confronted by two detectives who inform him that his wife has been brutally murdered.

Although he initially believes that he may be guilty, he assists the police in following the clues, which lead back to his clinic. After placing Stella in a hypnotic trance, it is revealed that she murdered Maria in a twisted plot to get her hands on $10,000 and Maria’s last boyfriend. The police overhear the confession and arrest the hysterical Stella.

The movie begins with the disembodied head of actor David Hoffman staring out of a crystal ball and moaning dramatically about the fact that audiences are about to enter…

The Inner Sanctum!

This device was reused for all but one of the Inner Sanctum films, and although it seemed to suggest that the upcoming film was 179

A Universe Of Horrors flavoured with the supernatural, the Inner Sanctum film series always seemed to follow the same formula of an innocent man being accused of one or more murders at the star of the film, spending an inordinate amount of time wondering whether he actually committed the crime or not, and then being found innocent in the final reel when it’s revealed that someone very close to him, usually a lover or a business associate, is the real culprit.

While the inner monologue device was sometime cleverly done, and did allow a certain amount of insight into the mind of someone accused of murder, it was heavily used, almost to the point of parody, and always seemed to be whispered, even though no one else was capable of hearing it. As such, it soon began to wear around the edges.

One nice touch in ‘Calling Dr Death’ was the use of a subjective camera for the scene in which Chaney arrives at the crime scene to see his wife’s body. The camera here is Chaney’s view, and the surrounding characters speak into it as though it were a character.

The idea was copied for Robert Montgomery’s ‘Lady In The Lake’, in which the entire film was shot subjectively, but Montgomery, not the most skilful of directors fumbled the effect somewhat, and the film was a huge flop.

Reginal LeBorg, the director of ‘Calling Dr Death’ said that: “For one sequence that was all right, but it couldn’t sustain an entire film. One critic wrote about ‘Lady In The Lake’ that it was a copy of ‘Calling Dr Death’, but Montgomery made the mistake of doing the whole picture that way”.

The effect was perfected in the 1947 noir thriller, ‘Dark Passage’, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, where the first hour of the film is seen through Bogart’s eyes. Wisely, director Delmer Daves switched to the third person as soon as the story dictated that he should.

‘Calling Dr Death’ was also notable for the scene, shown in flashback, where Patricia Morison’s nurse murders Steele’s wife by beating her to death with a poker, and then pouring a bottle of acid over her face.

Brave stuff for a run of the mill cheapie mystery, and although the actual 180

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deed is committed off screen, it’s still capable of making you wince in pain.

The next in the series was ‘Weird Woman’, where Chaney implausibly played another highbrow intellectual, this time Professor Norman Reed who returns from a holiday in the South Seas with a wife on his arm.

She’s a mysterious girl, having been raised by Laraua, the high priestess of Kauna-Ana-Ana, and who has been brought up on a diet of voodoo and black magic all her life.

Despite these exotic, uncanny beginnings though, her name’s Paula.

Having
brought Paula
back to

America with
him, Norman
soon begins to
worry that his
wife is too
heavily
influenced by
her island
heritage.

When his old
flame Ilona,
played by

Evelyn

Ankers offers
him a little extra-curricular comfort, he turns her down, infuriating her.

In revenge, she starts a campaign of hate against Paula, labelling her a

“witch wife” and accusing her of using black magic to further Norman’s college career.

Soon afterwards, Norman discovers his wife performing voodoo rites over an effigy of Ilona, and angrily smashes up her voodoo paraphernalia, not realising that Paula was actually creating a circle of protection, a circle that he has now broken…

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A Universe Of Horrors In the following days, everything seems to go wrong for Norman and Paula. Norman’s college rival commits suicide, and Norman is accused of murder. Norman’s young secretary makes a pass at him,which causes him to fire her. As a result, a rumour starts to spread that he’s a philanderer. Paula begins to receive threatening voodoo chant phone calls.

Things come to a head when Norman accidentally shoots a student during a struggle. Now in jail, Norman begins to piece the whole thing together and realises that Ilona is responsible for the entire thing, and the only way that he can clear himself is to get her to confess. When he’s bailed, Norman puts a voodoo flavoured plan into action in the hopes of drawing out a confession from the insane Ilona.

The story was based on the story ‘Conjure Wife’ by Fritz Leiber, and this wouldn’t be the only time it would be adapted for the screen. In 1962 it was turned into ‘Burn, Witch, Burn’ starring Peter Wyngarde and Janet Blair, and in 1980 it surfaced again as ‘Witches Brew’ starring Teri Garr, Richard Benjamin and Lana Turner.

While you could hardly call ‘Weird Woman’ an out-and-out horror, its slow-burn story and voodoo elements are high camp fun, as are the histrionics that come later, with evil phone calls, voodoo dolls and suicides.

Evelyn Ankers makes for a hysterical enough villain in a rare change of pace for her. Chaney is, yet again, miscast as the drop-dead gorgeous college intellectual, whose pure animal magnetism and staggering brain power has the entire female cast falling at his feet.

Despite its minor faults though, it’s a campy, well-loved film that stands among the better of the Inner Sanctum movies.

‘Dead Man’s Eyes’ had Chaney as artist David Stuart, who accidentally rubs acid into his eyes. Yes, you read that correctly.

The father of his fiancé offers to donate his own eyes to David upon his death. When the old man is promptly murdered, the blind man is prime suspect.

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A Universe Of Horrors Following this was ‘The Frozen Ghost’, where Chaney played a psychic who believes he is responsible when a drunk man, under hypnosis during the act, drops dead. After much inner turmoil, narrated in whispers throughout the entire film, and following a completely unrelated murder plot involving a wax museum, a lovesick patron and suspended animation, Chaney uses Evelyn Ankers and his psychic powers to reveal the truth.

Next was ‘Strange Confession’, the dullest of the series, and hardly worthy of the mystery tag. Instead this was a melodrama about a scientist searching for a cure for influenza, and who is betrayed by his scheming boss, played by J Carroll Naish, who sends Chaney off to South America to perfect the formula, then takes the credit for the discoveries and tries to romance Chaney’s wife.

This entry seems to have been heavily based on Universal’s 1934 film

‘The Man Who Reclaimed His Head’ starring Claude Rains and Lionel Atwill. Indeed, many of the story beats and plot developments mirror the earlier film exactly. Even the framing device of a man’s confession as he holds the evidence of his terrible crime, are identical.

The last of the series came in 1945, with the wonderfully titled ‘Pillow Of Death’.

Here, Chaney is Wayne Fletcher, an Attorney, who wants to divorce his wife and marry his secretary. When his wife is found suffocated to death, he naturally becomes the main suspect. Things are further complicated by the fact that a fake medium named Julian Julian (yes, really), played by J. Edward Bromberg, states that powers from beyond have told him that Fletcher is guilty. Plus, it seems that Wayne is receiving messages from beyond the grave from his dead wife, who is accusing him of her murder. But what is the truth?

The truth is, that despite it’s endlessly peculiar title, ‘Pillow Of Death’

takes the rare step of making Chaney the actual murderer, a turn of events that must have surprised even the hardest of Inner Sanctum fans, who had by now gotten well used to the plot devices of the previous five films, and had no doubt taken to discounting Chaney as the culprit from the off.

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And so, to finish the series with a flourish, Chaney turned out to be the guilty party. Furthermore, it turns out that the messages he’d been receiving from his
dead wife, really were
from beyond the
grave. The film ends
with her ghost
enticing Chaney to
jump to his death
through a second-
storey window,
thereby killing

Chaney’s villain, and
ending the series with
him dying for once.

While it hasn’t fared
particularly well with
critics over the years

(Leonard Maltin
called it “the must
miss movie of 1945”),

‘Pillow Of Death’ at least got a little inventive with the Inner Sanctum series. Sure, it’s a lot of hogwash, but then again, it wasn’t meant for the highbrow crowd.

The Breen Office of censors took particular exception with the method of murder in the film, fearing that if the method of suffocation by smothering was shown or explained, then it might cause a rash of such crimes among the dastardly elements of American society. As such, all of the murders had to be committed off screen. Even a scene which showed a murder victim lying on a bed with a pillow over his face was ordered out.

Because of this, it’s almost impossible to understand the movie’s title until much later in the film, when smothering with a pillow is hinted at.

Critics hated the film, and the box office wasn’t fantastic enough to make Universal seek out a renewal of their contract with Simon and Schuster.

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A Universe Of Horrors As a result, the Inner Sanctum experiment came to an end with ‘Pillow Of Death’, perhaps just in time…

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A Universe Of Horrors Chapter 18 - A Year Of Sequels

Back in 1944, Universal had more franchises to sequel-ify!

‘The Invisible Man’s Revenge’ took an interesting turn with invisibility.

Instead of using it to kick one’s nasty boss in the seat of the pants (as in

‘The Invisible Woman’), or to kick Nazis in the seat of the pants (as in

‘Invisible Agent’), or to prove the innocence of a wrongly convicted man (as in ‘The Invisible Man Returns’), Ford Beebe’s turn at the series saw Robert Griffin, apparently no relation to the Griffins of previous films, using an invisibility serum given to him by a mad doctor after escaping from an insane asylum, to take his revenge on the family he believed had cheated him out of a fortune years before.

However, right from the get go, it’s clear that Robert Griffin’s plans aren’t in any way honourable, In fact, this Griffin is as much of a psychopathic killer as the original Invisible Man, taking delight in casually slaughtering the doctor who has bestowed invisibility upon him, in order to regain visibility. Blood, it seems, is the only way back to visibility, and if you aren’t a willing donor, then Robert will take your blood without your consent.

The only fly in the ointment is the doctor’s dog, Brutus, who tracks Robert down after his master is killed. At the film’s climax, with Robert about to take the blood of Evelyn Ankers’ fiancé in order to regain his visibility and make her his wife, Brutus arrives on the scene and savages the evil Griffin to death.

The whole thing is brought to effervescent life by a few factors.

First of all, it’s set in jolly old England once more, which adds a certain charm to the proceedings, and returns the franchise to its place of origin.

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Many of the scenes are set in the palatial home of the Herrick family, but a few, such as at the doctor’s laboratory and at the local pub, are charming little asides. Universal’s version of the traditional British pub is never less than picturesque.

Secondly, the supporting cast here is magnificent.

Gale Sondegaard is her wily, snarling best as the malevolent Lady Irene Herrick. She’s an absolute devil of a woman, constantly plotting eight moves ahead in order to keep the fortune she helped to steal from Griffin. Evelyn Ankers is slightly underused in her role as Julie Herrick, the wide-eyed innocent who thankfully hasn’t picked up any of her parents’ villainy. Although her part is small, she’s an always welcome sight.

Leon Errol plays Herbert Higgins, the local ne’er-do-well who teams up with Griffin in his plot and adds the film’s comic element. Although Griffin’s plan is an unholy one, Higgins remains a loveable rogue throughout, especially in his fumbled attempts at blackmail.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, he and the invisible Griffin take on all comers at pub darts, and with Griffin’s unseen help, Higgins manages a few trick shots that raise the roof.

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A Universe Of Horrors The casting, the setting, and the inclusion of the vampire element to the story lift this entry into the series immeasurably. Unfortunately, it was to be the last in the series. If only Beebe had been handed the series earlier, it might have had more ups than downs.

As it stands, the first and the last films in the Invisible Man series turned out to be the finest of the bunch. Revenge succeeded because it didn’t concern itself with continuity, instead choosing to come up with an interesting story and telling it well.

The Hollywood Reporter called it: “One of the best and most entertaining of the series”.

The Hollywood Reporter was right.

1944 also saw the release of not one, but two Mummy movies.

The first of these was ‘The Mummy’s Ghost’, starring Lon Chaney Jr once more as Kharis, who spends the film murdering his way through backwoods America to find the reincarnated soul of his princess, Ananka, who has passed into the body of the exotic beauty Amina Mansori.

Finally reunited with his long lost love, Kharis and Ananka are hunted down by the police, who force them into a swamp, where Kharis and his bride sink into the water, clasped in each others arms.

In ‘The Mummy’s Curse’, set 25 years later, The Southern Engineering Company decide to drain the swamp, despite the warnings of the local townsfolk, who don’t seem keen on unearthing the immortal, psychopathic murdering mummy in the swamp.

Common sense never dissuaded the good folks at the Southern Engineering Company, though, and they press on with their excavation, of course unearthing Kharis, and later, the princess Ananka, who, once the mud is removed, is revealed to have grown younger, and is now a strikingly attractive brunette.

Talk about your mud packs.

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A few deaths later, and Kharis meets his doom again by bringing down the walls of a building down on himself.

Continuity be damned, if
the timeline in the

Mummy;s films is to be
believed, then ‘The

Mummy’s Hand’ was set in

1940, ‘The Mummy’s

Tomb’ took place 30 years
later, making it set in 1970,
as was ‘The Mummy’s

Ghost’, and finally ‘The

Mummy’s Curse’ was set

25 years later, meaning that

Kharis’s final adventure
took place in 1995.

Not just that, but incredibly, Kharis and Ananka sank into a swamp in New England at the end of ‘The Mummy’s Ghost’, and were excavated in a swamp in Louisiana in ‘The Mummy’s Curse’.

Talk about your climate change.

Having completely run out of ideas by now, ‘The Mummy’s Curse’

proved to be the Mummy franchise rattling to a spluttering halt. Having started as a darkly romantic eastern fable of love and obsession, and ending as a knockabout creature feature, heavy on action and light on subtlety, Universal did the honourable thing, and let the fallen walls act as Kharis’s eternal tomb.

Not that Lon Chaney Jr minded. Kharis was his least favourite movie role.

Having whined and complained so much about Jack Pierce’s make-up, Universal ordered Pierce to create a costume and make-up design that was easier to apply and remove. Pierce had come up with “mummy trousers” and a “mummy shirt”, both of which zipped up at the side, and both of which were terrible at concealing said zip.

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A Universe Of Horrors He was also given a full head mask, which was slipped over his head and painted by Pierce.

This didn’t stop Chaney from complaining though. When reporter Frederick C. Othman visited the set, Chaney didn’t hide the fact that he hated making the films.

‘I sweat and I can’t wipe it away. I itch and I can’t scratch’ he said. He also told Othman that anyone who went to see the mummy films was nuts as far as he was concerned.

By now, Chaney was drinking heavily. He later revealed that throughout the filming of the final two Mummy films, he’d hidden away a flask of vodka in his costume with a flexible rubber hose running from the flask to his mask. At every opportunity, he would slip the hose into his mouth and take another suck of vodka.

A few weeks earlier, in a drunken rage, he’d smashed a vase over Robert Siodmak’s head. During the filming of ‘The Mummy’s Ghost’, Chaney got a little too tipsy, and when it came time to film a scene in which Kharis strangled Professor Norman, he got a little carried away and crushed actor Frank Reicher’s neck so hard that he blacked out. The shot was left in the movie, and is horribly awkward to watch.

The actor Robert Stack, who was a Universal player at the time, said that Chaney and Broderick Crawford were known as “the Monsters”

around the Universal backlot for their violent, drunken behaviour that often resulted in spilled blood.

One scene in ‘The Mummy’s Ghost’ called for Chaney to smash through a window pane, but when it came time to film it, the crew discovered that real glass, and not breakaway glass had been installed. Director Reginald LeBorg told him to do the scene without breaking the window.

A few drinks to the brave, Chaney began the scene, but again got carried away and smashed through the glass, gashing open his hand.

Once filming had wrapped on ‘The Mummy’s Curse’ in 1944, Chaney swore blind that he’d never play a mummy again. As far as his films for Universal were concerned, he kept to his word.

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A Universe Of Horrors However, in 1959, he starred in the Mexican schlock horror ‘La Casa Del Terror’, as a mummy, who… wait for it… is also a werewolf!

From here on in, The Mummy would only appear for Universal in spoofs, such as 1955’s ‘Abbot And Costello Meet The Mummy’, in which Ed Parker donned the bandages and staggered around with his arms outstretched, while Bud and Lou strained for laughs…

Watching from the sidelines, and shaking his head at what The Mummy had turned into, was Boris Karloff, who at the time was fulfilling his contract for two final Universal horror movies.

The first of these had been ‘The Climax’, the sequel cum remake of ‘The Phantom Of The Opera’. The second, was far more interesting for all sorts of reasons.

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Chapter 19 - Houses

Originally entitled Chamber Of Horrors, ‘House Of Frankenstein’ was Universal throwing everything at the wall. The enthusiastic response to

‘Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man’ had proved that when you couldn’t produce quality, then quantity was the next best thing.

The film starred Karloff as Dr Niemann, Lon Chaney Jr as Larry “The Wolf Man”

Talbot, Glenn

Strange as The

Frankenstein

Monster, J

Carroll Naish as

Daniel the

Hunchback,

John Carradine
as Count

Dracula, as well
as George

Zucco and

Lionel Atwill in
supporting
roles.

The story this
time was of the vengeful Dr Niemann, a mad scientist who was imprisoned for attempting to replace the brains of animals with that of humans. When lightning strikes the jail, Niemann escapes with his follower, the hunchbacked Daniel. Together they journey towards the ruins of the Frankenstein castle so as to retrieve the records of 192

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Frankenstein’s experiments, in the hope that they reveal a method of curing Daniel of his deformity.

Along the way, they encounter Professor Lampini, the owner of a traveling circus of horrors, containing the skeleton of Count Dracula as well as other macabre exhibits.

Daniel and Niemann murder Lampini and take over his show, travelling from town to town until they reach the village where Niemann was prosecuted. There, Niemann removes the stake from Dracula’s skeleton, bringing him back to life. Niemann commands Dracula to murder the Burgomeister
who had him
thrown in jail,
and afterwards
hides Dracula’s
coffin so that
the vampire
cannot return
to his native
soil and
perishes in the
sunlight.

Niemann and

Daniel next travel to Castle Frankenstein where they find the bodies of The Frankenstein Monster and The Wolf Man preserved in ice. After thawing them out, Niemann determines to revive The Monster to avenge himself further on the men who wronged him, but The Wolf Man has other plans for Frankenstein’s medical secrets…

On first inspection, the film had so much going for it. Frankenstein’s monster, The Wolf Man, a mad doctor, Lon Chaney Jr in full tragic mode, the return of Boris Karloff, wily supporting turns by J. Carrol Naish, “One Take” Zucco and Lionel Atwill, three of the most reliable character actors in horror. A huge budget and an extended shooting period.

A shame then, that the man chosen to wrangle all the pieces into a narrative whole was Edward T. Lowe, who admittedly had enjoyed a 193

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few successes with 1923’s ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ and 1933’s

‘The Vampire Bat’, but who was much more suited to the B-movie quickie, having worked on a couple of Charlie Chan movies, and the Bulldog Drummond series.

For all it’s lowly origins, ‘House Of Frankenstein’ was an A-movie masquerading as a B-movie. As far as Universal was concerned, this was a prestige picture, not
likely to win any awards,
for sure, but an opulent
spectacle that was going
to cost a ton to produce,
and featured some
heavyweights of the
horror genre.

Edward T. Lowe, for all
his skills, didn’t have the
skills to keep so many
balls in the air. While the
story of Daniel’s love for a
gypsy girl was mildly
diverting, far too much of the script was given over to it, taking precious time away from the monsters.

Frankenstein’s Monster is barely seen until the final act. Karloff practically disappears halfway through. The same goes for Lionel Atwill.

George Zucco was given mere minutes. Larry Talbot was made part of a love triangle. Dracula is resurrected, then killed off.

The wild lurches in tone and plot betray a writer not used to the responsibility of taking such beloved characters and building on their legend. He was only interested in putting them on screen and killing them off at the end.

Certainly, Frankenstein’s Monster fared the worst. Since ‘Son Of Frankenstein’, he had been slipping further and further down the credits list, but here he was barely noticeable. He was played by Glenn Strange, an actor who’d appeared in mainly Westerns throughout the thirties, and 194

A Universe Of Horrors who had been cast here as The Monster because of his height and stocky build.

Strange later said that he had been extremely nervous about playing The Monster in a film starring Boris Karloff, the originator of the role, but was happily surprised when Karloff offered to coach him in how to play the role.

Either Karloff was out to sabotage Strange’s performance, or he wasn’t a very good acting tutor.

Strange’s performance was light years away from Karloff’s childlike beast. It was as though he’d studied Bela Lugosi’s performance from

‘The Ghost Of Frankenstein’, and then removed any vestige of humanity. Strange’s monster is a limp, shuffling caricature of past creature glories.

Even Karloff was later forced to admit that: “Glenn Strange wasn’t as lucky as I was. I got the cream of it, being the first to play The Monster.

I know I wished him lots of luck, hoping it would do as much for him as it did for me, but…”

As for Karloff, gone is the energy with which he had imbued so many lesser roles for Universal in earlier years. Whether he had been playing monster, scientist or murderer, Karloff’s eyes had always before danced with fury, insanity and vitality. Here, he looked as though he were half asleep. Truly, the man was marking time, simply fulfilling the last of his contracted films for Universal, and probably hating every moment.

That wasn’t to say that Karloff as a horror star was finished. In fact, he’d just signed a contract with RKO producer Val Lewton, and was about to embark on a series of horror roles that would reaffirm his position as the

“King Of Terror On The Screen”, in films such as ‘The Body Snatcher’,

‘Isle Of the Dead’, and ‘Bedlam’.

John Carradine’s Dracula is a different take to Bela Lugosi’s with his pencil moustache and top hat worn at a jaunty angle. Many preferred his take, especially the scene in which he appears wild-eyed at the study door of the Burgomeister with murder on his mind.

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A Universe Of Horrors It’s followed by a particularly grisly scene in which Dracula becomes a bat and feeds on the neck of the Burgomeister. Even though it’s only shown in silhouette, it’s a dark little moment, as is Chaney’s first transformation into the Wolf Man, the breathless prison escape sequence at the film’s opening, and the scene in which Daniel finally turns on Niemann at the end.

Conversely, despite the all-star cast, it’s little J. Carroll Naish as Daniel the Hunchback, who’s the real star of the film. Despite being a murdering psychopath, his hunchbacked character is also a sympathetic anchor among the film’s many horror caricatures.

Although it takes up far too much of the running time, his unrequited love for the gypsy girl is surprisingly tender, and his underplaying and restraint in what could easily have been a drooling lunatic role, is in stark contrast to all the overblown theatrics going on around him.

Naish was an Irish-American workaholic, who had frequented the horror and thriller genre for almost every studio in Hollywood. Despite never having broken through into leading man status, Naish’s mantra, repeated whenever he got the chance, was ‘Do it real, do it honestly, and don’t worry about being big’.

He went on to play memorable supporting roles in the Bulldog Drummond series, as well as a series of schlock horrors for Poverty Row, but it’s for his work for Universal that he will be remembered best.

Ironically enough, for an actor who spent his life standing in the shadows of the great monsters, his final role was in 1971’s ‘Dracula vs Frankenstein’, playing a mad doctor. The role of his mute assistant was played by Lon Chaney Jr.

This was to be Karloff’s final horror film for Universal during its golden age of horror. He would go on to better things, just as Universal would begin to run out of steam.

It’s altogether more poignant then, that in the movie’s final shot, a near-dead Karloff is carried by Glenn Strange to a swamp in the hopes of escaping a torch-bearing mob.

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The Monster wanders into the waters, Niemann in his arms, and unable to free himself, slowly sinks to his death, Niemann drowning with him.

The Monster and his Maker dying together, in every sense of the phrase.

1945 saw a movie directly inspired by ‘House Of Frankenstein’, but only partly concerned by its continuity.

Although John Carradine’s Dracula had been fried by the sunlight, and Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man had been destroyed by silver, and even though Glenn Strange’s Frankenstein’s Monster was at the bottom of a swamp, they were rounded up and forced into action one last time, in 1945’s

‘House Of Dracula’.

Dracula, still very much alive (or dead depending on how you looked at it), visits the home of Dr Edlemann, in the hopes that this doctor can cure him of his vampirism. Edlemann is initially mistrustful of Dracula, refusing to believe that he is the vampire king he claims to be. However, he changes him mind when Edlemann shows him his coffin, that he has inexplicably had hidden in Edlemann’s own basement.

Edlemann agrees to
help, and just in time
too, as Larry Talbot
also shows up,
demanding the same
help, typically, on the
night of a full moon.

When he turns into the

Wolf Man in the local
jail, Edlemann believes
his story too, and with
the help of his
hunchbacked nurse and beautiful secretary, Miliza, he starts to concoct a treatment for the afflicted men.

Talbot can’t wait, however, and throws himself off a nearby cliff. When Edleman climbs down the cliff to investigate, he finds that Talbot has 197

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been washed into a cave, which coincidentally contains the remains of Frankenstein’s Monster, who somehow has been pushed through the bottom of the swamp in which he lay, all the way to this random cave.

The local police inspector, played by a fed-up looking Lionel Atwill, begins to suspect foul play at the house of Edlemann and begins to investigate.

Meanwhile,

Dracula begins a
love affair with

Miliza, Talbot is
now sporting a
moustache, and

Edlemann, like
every single other
doctor in a

Frankenstein
movie, becomes
intoxicated by the
idea of resurrecting

The Frankenstein

Monster, and
slowly goes insane, using Dracula’s blood to turn himself into a crazed monster.

The movie ends with Talbot shooting dead the now evil Dr Edlemann, Dracula being disintegrated yet again by sunlight, Lionel Atwill being electrocuted to death, and the whole house bursting into flames, with the fire consuming the only just resurrected Frankenstein’s Monster.

The screen fades to black, and “THE END” is shown.

No overture.

No cast list.

It’s as though the film itself just couldn’t be bothered to go on.

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A Universe Of Horrors For a film entitled ‘House Of Dracula’, it was surprisingly Dracula-lite, and the house certainly wasn’t his, although he did set up his bed there.

Rumours suggested at the time that Bela Lugosi was to return, but again Universal didn’t follow through, casting John Carradine instead. With his silly little moustache and Southern accent, he’s more Colonel Sanders than European Count.

Also, his logic is ridiculously fuzzy. Why keep your coffin in the house of someone you’re about to betray? And why does he keep putting his nefarious plans into action three minutes before dawn?

Glenn Strange is entirely inconsequential here. His main task is to lie still until the end, where he flounders around for a few moments.

Chaney comes off okay here, even surviving for a change, but the Breen Office of Censors, who demanded that any wrong deeds go punished at the end of the movie, had sent down an edict after reading the script.

Originally, the Wolf Man was to have killed a villager, but as he couldn’t escape unpunished, the script was changed so that his wolf transformation takes place inside a cell, and he can’t harm anyone.

This was actually a fortunate decision, as Jack Pierce was short of yak hair, and no more could be sourced. As a result, the Wolf Man is barely seen in this film, a shame considering that it was to be his final appearance in a straight horror film.

‘House Of Dracula’ was, as Boris Karloff called it, nothing more than “a clam-bake with everything thrown in”.

This time, it wasn’t the British censors, or the Production Code that was responsible for the downturn in box-office takings. It was the movie itself.

‘House Of Dracula’ was the last straw for movie audiences who were no longer thrilled by Universal’s exhausted library of hackneyed cliches.

Gone was the care, the attention to detail, the ambition, the vitality, and most importantly, the horror.

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A Universe Of Horrors The head honchos at Universal could tell when they were licked, and a few months after ‘House Of Dracula’ was released, they took a good long look at the horror department.

Lon Chaney Jr was the first casualty.

His hard-drinking, erratic behaviour around the studio was increasing by the day, and when contract negotiations came up in mid-1945, they declined to renew, instead assuring him that they’d call him if anything came up.

They next turned their attention to the massive costs incurred by Jack Pierce and his make-up department. Over the past few years, huge leaps in make-up technology had been made. Latex masks could be easily produced, and crucially, they were vastly more comfortable to wear than an eight-hour application of glue, clay, wax and hair.

Despite all his legendary work, his iconic designs for monsters that have transcended the monsters themselves, Pierce was fired, and had to scratch out a living in the newborn world of television.

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Chapter 20 - When Monsters Walked The Earth Although Universal continued to make films with a darker nature, such as ‘House Of Horrors’, ‘She-Wolf Of London’ and ‘The Brute Man’, the emphasis on horror was gone. These films were nothing more than murder mysteries, and cheap and nasty murder mysteries at that.

With the end of the war in 1945, Hollywood was less concerned with downbeat tales, and more interested in lifting people’s spirits. For Universal, it was a chance to let their comedy stars take the stage, and the likes of Abbott & Costello and Olsen & Johnson began to feature heavily on Universal’s production slate.

That’s not to say that Universal was entirely finished with horror. In the 1950’s a breed of science fiction horror became fashionable, with a wave of atomic-fuelled creatures stalking
the land, including giant tarantulas, mammoth ants, and evil aliens from
beyond the cosmos.

Universal’s most memorable
creation in this phase was ‘The

Creature From The Black Lagoon’,
which defied the films around it and
saw a prehistoric fish man picking
off a band of jungle explorers one by one.

While the horrors of the fifties
certainly had their moments, and
took advantage of decades of film
technology and newly minted

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A Universe Of Horrors special effects departments, they have somehow aged less well than the horror movies that came before it. For all of the advantages in cost-cutting measures, there is something more inherently scary in the sunken cheeks of Karloff’s Monster than there is in the fixed, plastic eyes, and stiff movements of The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

One last, unlikely flourish came in 1948, when Universal took the hazardous step of uniting horror and comedy, in ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’, a knockabout farce with genuinely chilling moments, in which the hapless comedy duo play a couple of baggage-clerks who must save the world from Universal’s gallery of monsters.

Returning as The Monster was Glenn Strange, who finally shines, especially in the film’s climax, where he violently hurls a nurse through a window to her death.

Lon Chaney Jr was also back as Larry Talbot, joining forces with Bud and Lou, while trying to hide from the rays of the full moon. Since losing his contract with Universal, Chaney had hit the bottle especially hard, and work had been nigh on impossible to come by. Pulling himself together for one last time, Chaney turned in a grand performance, saying goodbye to his most famous role, while also taking time to save the day, plunging over the edge of a balcony to grab Dracula’s bat form, and falling to his death on the jagged rocks below.

But the finest element of ‘Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein’, was the return of Bela Lugosi to the role that had made his name. Here he appears for the final time as the cursed Count Dracula, hamming it up in the comic scenes, but adding a wonderful sense of gravitas to the darker themes in the movie.

Over the last few years, Lugosi had all but vanished from the screen. By now, he was hopelessly addicted to morphine and methadone, barely able to function, and hardly leaving his home.

When the idea of ‘Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein’ had been initially suggested, producers weren’t even sure if Lugosi was still alive.

The offer of the film, his first “A” picture for some years, spurred Lugosi into a temporary bout of clean living, and he enthusiastically threw himself into the part, relishing the chance to prove himself one last time.

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Despite winning plaudits for the role, Lugosi’s movie career was not resurrected. A year later, he accepted an offer to appear on Milton Berle’s television show, Texaco Star Theatre. Lugosi, determined to succeed, worked hard to memorise the script given to him by Berle, but when the skit he had rehearsed was transmitted live, Berle began to ad-lib, something Lugosi wasn’t used to. Flustered, he lost his place in the script, while Berle awkwardly joked, and the skit, along with Lugosi’s future in television, died in front of an audience of millions.

In 1950, Lugosi was invited to revive his greatest screen role in a stage production of ‘Dracula’ that was to tour Britain, in the hope that, if it was a hit, would transfer to London’s West End.

To prepare himself for the task, Lugosi checked himself into a rehab centre, where he spent many agonising months trying to rid himself of his drug addiction. When he emerged in early 1951, he was frail and painfully thin. But he was clean, and ready to go.

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A Universe Of Horrors On April 16th, the production began rehearsals above a pub in Kensington. Lugosi’s presence in Britain had caused a minor stir, and he was featured on several radio shows, most notably being interviewed for BBC’s ‘In Town Tonight’.

The tour began in Brighton and travelled to Streatham Hill, Dudley and Eastbourne. Lugosi made personal appearances at a British Legion Fete at Drayton, Norwich, at a Garden Party at Morden Hall Park in Surrey, and in August, was given the honour of opening a wet pea cannery for the Batchelor’s Soup Company in Sheffield.

Reviews of the play were quite positive, and a genuine buzz began to build. Lugosi had been all but forgotten by British audiences until now, who had long ceased to think about Universal’s chiller thrillers of twenty years previously.

However, not everyone was impressed by the production. The provincial audiences found themselves enraptured by Lugosi’s vampire. But the more sophisticated city audiences, used to the tricks employed by horror movies of the forties, were less than enthused.

His co-star in the British stage production, was Sheila Wynn, who recalled that: “Audiences were inclined to giggle. They didn’t in Brighton, I don’t think, and they certainly didn’t in Belfast, where they screamed, but there was a bit of giggling in Golder’s Green, and also in Manchester, and I think this distressed Bela very much indeed. He once said to me, “You know, Dracula is Hamlet to me”’.

Although he had hoped that the production would win its way to London’s West End, audiences of 1951 had moved on from the static chills of decades previous. The sci-fi horror boom, it seemed, had overtaken the creeping gothic stylings of literary horror.

The tour was cancelled early, and at a loss, Lugosi accepted a part in the Arthur Lucan comedy ‘Vampire Over London’. in which he played an evil mastermind named Von Housen. The film marked a career low for Lugosi, who had to watch from the sidelines as Arthur Lucan’s character, Mother Riley, an Irish charwoman who had been a smash success with British audiences of the thirties, but who was on her last 204

A Universe Of Horrors legs by now, mimed to songs and performed a pitiful music hall act that seemed horribly dated.

Disillusioned, Lugosi rode the ocean liner back to America, and an uncertain future.

A month later, despondent at his lack of success, Lugosi drifted back into his drug addiction, and found himself suffering the tortures of another period in rehab.

On November 20th, 1957, Boris Karloff was the subject of the long running celebrity biography programme, ‘This Is Your Life’ for NBC
television, where much of Karloff’s past was recounted and celebrated.

Towards the end of the programme, the host, Ralph Edwards, brought out Karloff’s old friend from the Universal days, make-up king Jack Pierce, the gruff, bad-tempered little man who had irritated so many during Universal’s glory days, and who had, for the past decade, been eking out a living on shows such as ‘Mr Ed’, and ‘Bullwhip’.

The two men warmly embraced each other, and Pierce, almost frantic with emotion at the sight of his old friend, presented Karloff with the original bolt props that had sat on the neck of Frankenstein’s Monster.

It would be the last time the two men would ever see each other.

On July 19th, 1968, Jack Pierce, the man who had imagined and created the most renowned of Universal’s gallery of monsters, died alone.

His funeral, held on August 11th of the same year, was attended by so few people, that barely a row of pews was filled by mourners. His eulogy was given by a minister who had never met him, and who stammeringly summed up the life of one of Hollywood’s greatest artists in a few mumbled compliments, and a prayer.

Flowers were sent from the make-up union in Hollywood, to its fallen brother, little realising that when Pierce was lowered into the ground, so too was an indelible part of its cinematic legacy.

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In later years, special effects and make-up heroes such as Rick Baker and Tom Savini would rightfully declare Jack Pierce as the greatest innovator of material design and character creation in Hollywood’s history. Undeniably, the image that springs to mind when the names of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man are mentioned, were conceived and created not by their literary parents, but by the diminutive, hot-tempered mind of Jack Pierce, in his surgeon’s outfit and dentist’s chair.

Lon Chaney Jr continued on his road to self-destruction throughout the fifties and sixties, appearing in a string of low-budget horror roles that harked back to his wasted glory days back at Universal in the the early forties.

Surprisingly though, he found a second home in television in the sixties, appearing in everything from ‘Wagon Train’ to ‘The Monkees’. In 1962, he appeared as both the Wolf Man and the Mummy in the fantasy anthology show, ‘Route 66’, as did his horror contemporaries Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff.

His final role came in 1970’s ‘Dracula vs Frankenstein’, but so severe was the throat cancer from which he was suffering, that his voice was inaudible, which led him to appear as the mute assistant to J. Carrol Naish’s mad doctor.

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Three years later, on July 12th, 1973, Creighton Chaney and his father were reunited in death, no doubt with a few things to discuss.

Ever the fan of the macabre postscript, Chaney’s body was donated to medical research, and after having been dissected by medical students, his lungs and liver were preserved in jars as warnings of what extreme alcohol and tobacco abuse can do to a human being.

While many may profess that Creighton Chaney’s greatest success was in his portrayal of the Wolf Man, the fact remains that had he not defied his father’s wish, the Chaney screen legacy would today be a little dimmer.

Bela Lugosi was resurrected from the dead by director Edward D.

Wood Jr, a super-fan of Lugosi’s who saw something more in the Hungarian than a failed horror actor.

Lugosi, who was living in obscurity and near poverty at the time, found himself charmed by the enthusiastic Wood, and threw himself into several appearances in his films, including the mad scientist in Wood’s

‘Bride Of The Monster’ and the narrator of Wood’s notorious cross-dressing classic ‘Glen Or Glenda’. In 1955, Wood offered Lugosi the lead role in his upcoming film, ‘The Ghoul Goes West’.

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A Universe Of Horrors Eternally grateful for Wood’s faith in him, Lugosi endeavoured to clean himself up, checking himself, once more, into rehab.

When he left the centre three months later, he found himself the subject of an impromptu interview by a waiting television crew, where he happily laid out his plans for the future, while the reporter probed awkwardly for details of Lugosi’s past pains, including the details of his recent break-up from his much younger wife.

Lugosi went straight to work for Wood, filming test footage for his upcoming film, where he walked out of his house, and then back inside, plus footage outside the actor Tor Johnson’s home, where Lugosi donned his Dracula cape and performed for the camera.

On August 16th, 1956, Bela Lugosi died of a heart attack at his home in Los Angeles, mere days before filming on Wood’s project was to start.

Ever the resourceful man, Wood incorporated the test footage shot with Lugosi into his next film, the notorious sci-fi horror, ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’. In order to complete the film, Wood hired Tom Mason, his wife’s chiropractor to stand in for Lugosi’s remaining scenes, even though he was four inches taller, and markedly thinner than Lugosi had been.

When he was laid to rest, Bela Lugosi was dressed in his Dracula costume, complete with cape, upon the request of his son, Bela Lugosi Jr.

Time has been kinder to Bela Lugosi’s screen legacy that perhaps even he could have foreseen. And yet, despite his determination to distance himself from his most famous role, perhaps he always had more in common with the vampire than he realised.

Ultimately his greatest success, that of Count Dracula, was the blessing that has cursed him eternally.

It brought fame, international recognition and opportunities hitherto unavailable to an obscure actor from the wilds of Hungary in the infancy of the twentieth century.

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Ironic then, that it also saddled him with his fair share of demons.

Boris Karloff, that kindly English gentleman, went from strength to strength, moving in and out of the horror genre in his later years, to take parts in well respected character roles, such as ‘Targets’ directed by Peter Bogdanovich, in which he played an ageing horror movie star who engages in a showdown with a lone gunman at a drive-in screening of one of Karloff’s movies, and ‘The Sorcerers’, directed by Michael Reeves, in which he played a professor who invents a machine that allows him to experience the physical sensations of another human being, harking back to his many mad scientist roles of the 1930’s.

However, in 1966, he appeared in an animated version of ‘How The Grinch Stole Christmas’ by Dr Seuss, for the CBS television network, a film that has continued to dominate television schedules ever since.

When the soundtrack was released as a record, Karloff found himself the recipient of a Grammy Award for ‘Best Recording For Children’.

Karloff’s superlative take on The Grinch has ensured that for fifty years, his voice has been a staple of Christmas celebrations the world over.

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Boris Karloff lived out his final years in his English cottage,

‘Roundabout’, in Bramshott, Hampshire, and died on the 2nd of February, 1969, at the age of 81. Ever the busy bee, it’s testament to his unending work ethic, that after he died, four films that he had made in 1968 were released, to the surprise of not only the public, but also to the Karloff estate.

The day after he died, the New York Times ran his obituary, featuring a picture of the Frankenstein Monster.

Unfortunately, they had printed a picture of Glenn Strange.

Even so, it’s entirely plausible to imagine that Boris Karloff, that perfect English gentleman, would have laughed and assured the editor that it was quite understandable.

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A Universe Of Horrors Carl Laemmle’s empire that began on a street corner, while he watched the patrons of a Nickelodeon Theatre go in and out, that survived a battle with Thomas Edison himself, and which gave birth to a sprawling cinematic legacy that has lasted for almost a hundred years, is now the oldest studio left in America, The Grand Old Man of Hollywood that survived economic woes, two World Wars and the egos of almost every star in Hollywood’s history.

While other studios may have as lasting a legacy as Universal when it comes to cinema in general, no other studio has so firmly and indelibly made its mark on the horror genre.

While the Universal Horror films may have lost their power to terrify over the decades, their power to enchant audiences only grows, as new generations discover these labours of love, these perfectly crafted windows into a more innocent time…

When monsters walked the Earth.

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A Universe Of Horrors Adam Roche is the host, narrator, writer and producer of ‘The Secret History Of Hollywood’ podcast, and the ‘Attaboy Clarence’ podcast.

www.thesecrethistoryofhollywood.com
www.attaboyclarence.com

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Table of Contents

- Chapter 1 - Laemmle
- Chapter 2 - A Silent Scream
- Chapter 5 - Horror Arrives
- Chapter 11 - A Last Hurrah
- Chapter 12 - Resurrection
- Chapter 14 - Creature Features
- Chapter 16 - Killing Your Darlings
- Chapter 19 - Houses