Shocktober: Hidden Horrors

At this festive time of year, it's customary to thumb through one's video collection and bring out the dead...er, the classics of the horror and sci-fi genres for one's viewing pleasure.

It's easy to lean toward the more popular titles--your Boris Karloff Frankenstein, your Bela Lugosi Dracula, your Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man or, if your tastes run more toward the modern than the monochromatic, your Freddys, Jasons, Michaels and Jigsaws.

But there are plenty of lesser-known (at least to average fans, if not aficianatos), yet eminently worthy, monster movies to make your run-up to All Hallow's Eve even more creepy. Here are a few suggestions now--I'll have a few more later.

The Old Dark House (1932). The least known of the horror films from Universal's golden age (1931-1936), even though it has a terrific cast--Melvyn Douglas, Ramond Massey, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, Ernest Thesiger and Boris Karloff (who gets top billing, even though he has only a small supporting role)--and James Whale as director. Not only is it the best representative of its subgenre, the "Creepy Old House Stalked by a Madman/Killer" movie, but in terms of mood created through simple yet detailed sets, artfully placed lighting and shadows (some painted on the set walls) and use of sound (no musical score, but plenty of creaks, groans and howling winds), this may well be Whale's best directing job--and the perfect movie for a dark and stormy night.

Fiend Without a Face (1958). Set on the Canada/U.S. border, this sci-fi flick about changing thoughts into matter gets off to a slow start, but be patient--once the monsters show up, you won't be able to forget them, no matter how hard you try. They're stop-motion animated brains! That fly across the room at their intended victims! And strangle them with dangling spinal cords! Then suck out the victim's brain! It's brain-on-brain crime! Aaaaaaah!

The Flesh and the Fiends (1959). Yet another excursion into Victorian-era body-snatching territory (after The Body Snatcher and Corridors of Blood), but with much period detail, great performances by Peter Cushing (as the doctor who receives the curiously fresh corpses) and Donald Pleasance (as one of the particularly nasty "ressurectionists"), surprising amounts of nudity and violence (for a film made in Britain in 1959, at least) and an alarming willingness to dispatch major characters well before the movie is anywhere near over, adding to the viewer's already substantial discomfort level.

Scream of Fear (1961). A young woman in a wheelchair (Susan Strasberg) visits her father's villa in France, where she meets her stepmother (Ann Todd), the family's hunky chauffer (Ronald Lewis) and the local doctor (Christopher Lee). But where's her father? "Away on business," she's told. So why does Dad--looking very, very dead--keep popping up all over the house? Is he really dead? Is the young lady going crazy? Will you figure out the multiple-twist ending? An unusual, monster-free black & white psychological thriller from Hammer, the studio that brought you Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula in blood-red color.

Count Dracula (1977). Bram Stoker's novel has been filmed numerous times, with varying degrees of fealty to the source material. While this version, shot for the BBC on film and videotape, tweaks the story as well--Mina and Lucy are now sisters, and Louis Jourdan doesn't look a thing like the vampire Stoker describes (he's more of a Bela Lugosi-type Dracula)--this is still the most accurate adaptation of the novel, incorporating characters (like Quincy Holmwood) and scenes (like Dracula feeding infants to his vampire brides) that most versions leave out. Plus, Jourdan makes a suave, imposing bloodsucker.

Dog Soldiers (2002). Good werewolf movies have been few and far between, but here's the best one in recent years. Writer/director Neil Marshall (whose next film, The Descent, was a huge hit, while his latest release, Doomsday, was not) sets his story in the Scottish wilderness, with a platoon of British soldiers (led by Sean Pertwee) comes face-to-furry-face with a pack of werewolves. The budget is low, but Marshall gets the most out of it, playing things for laughs and action as much as scares, and wisely chooses to avoid using digital effects for his lycanthropes, giving them a tactile believability that all too many modern movie monsters lack. It's a shame that Dog Soldiers got unceremoniously dumped onto the video market here in the U.S.--I bought my copy from the discount bin at my neighborhood Walgreens. This would have been a kick to see on the silver screen.

Review: Frankenstein (1931)

Sometimes, actors make stupid choices. Sometimes, studios make smart ones. Sometimes, these things happen at the same time. And sometimes, the results are legendary--either for the bad or the good.

Consider the case of Universal's Frankenstein. (Please note that I don't say "Universal's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein"--much like the silent 1910 version, the screenplay, itself a patchwork monster with at least five different writers involved, takes little from Shelley's novel save the title.) After the surprise smash success of Dracula earlier in 1931, the studio was eager to follow up with something even more elaborate--and even more frightening. The natural choice was Frankenstein, second only to Dracula among famous horror novels, and the natural choice for the role of the monster was the star of their previous scary success, Bela Lugosi, with Robert Florey set to direct.

But that's not how it worked out. Lugosi didn't want the role because the monster had no dialogue--an odd position for an actor who spoke little English and had to memorize his lines phonetically to take--and Florey was bumped from the project when James Whale, a hot new director from England who'd scored hits for the studio with Waterloo Bridge and Journey's End, was offered the opportunity to pick his next project from among upcoming productions and expressed interest in Frankenstein. (Or at least this is the most prevelant theory--no paperwork exists to show for certain why Florey was removed from the project.) Florey and Lugosi did work together the next year on a very loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, but if that film is any indication of what magic they would have worked with Frankenstein, the world is far better off that they didn't get the chance.

Whale chose Colin Clive (who had worked with Whale previously on stage and screen) for the title role--remember, the title refers to the man who made the Monster, not the Monster himself--and Clive gives a nerve-jangling performance as a man very much balanced on the ultrafine line between genius and madness. Henry Frankenstein steals body parts from graveyards with the help of sadistic hunchback Fritz (Dwight Frye) and assembles them in seclusion in his isolated laboratory. (The movie takes place in an indeterminant time period--much of it looks like it could be happening sometime in the mid-1800s, but the presence of electric lights and a modern operating theater are confusing, to say the least.) This is much to the dismay of his lovely fiancee, Elizabeth (Mae Clarke, another actor who'd worked with Whale before), who worries that on the rare occasions that she sees her beloved, he appears on the verge of a total breakdown over his secretive experiments.

And so he is. Even when he succeeds in breathing artificial life into the body he'd sewn together via electricity drawn from lightning (in one of the most exciting, evocative scenes in any horror movie), he starts to fly apart, crying "It's alive...IT'S ALIVE!" as fingers tentatively flex on the operating table. When he blasphemously declares, "For the love of God...now I know what it's like to be God" (a line cut from later reissues and restored many years later), he's restrained by his best friend, Victor (John Boles) and mentor, Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan), and ultimately collapses.

And this is all before we even meet the monster.

The story has become legend: Whale spotted 43-year-old character Boris Karloff in the commisary at Universal and thought his features interesting enough to cast him in the pivotal role of the Monster. Whale collaborated with makeup master Jack Pierce to accentuate and exaggerate Karloff's natural appearance, and the two created one of world cinema's most iconic images: the scarred, flattopped visage of the Frankenstein Monster.

But all the makeup in creation wouldn't have helped if the actor beneath it hadn't been up to the task, and Karloff was. His performance is one of the greatest in any movie ever. Considering that the Monster is a fearsome, lumbering behemoth with the brain of a homicidal maniac, Karloff and Whale make him remarkably sympathetic, with superb pantomime and facial expression (even through all those layers of makeup) conveying the Monster's confusion, sadness, anger and frustration. It wasn't his bright idea to be slapped together by a scientist going out of his mind, yet the Monster is reviled for even existing--tormented by Fritz and threatened with dissection by Waldman, both of whom get their attitudes adjusted rather crudely and permanently by the Monster's powerful, stitched-on hands. Henry pays a dear price as well in a spectacular climax set in a burning windmill.

Frankenstein was not only a huge hit, but a controversial one, what with its religious subtext and sympathetic portrayal of the most frightening creature put on American screens up to that juncture. Some scenes got cut or altered, like when the Monster accidentally drowns a little girl--the end of the scene was lopped off, unfortunately creating the impression that the Monster does far worse to here than mere drowning. And Universal had some issues as well, tacking on a spoken intoduction/warning delivered by Van Sloan and a happier ending than the burning windmill scene, which also allowed for an eventual sequel (in fact, a whole series). But Karloff's performance, combined with Pierce's amazing makeup and Whale's direction, much of it influenced by the German Expressionist movies of the silent era such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Golem, overruled any critical backlash, studio jitters or censor handwringing.

The Audiences of 1931 had never seen anything like it before. But they wanted more. And they got it in abundance, thanks to the success of Frankenstein, the movie that proved that monster movies were here to stay.

Review: The Old Dark House (1932)

As I write this review on a late October evening, showers flow down the length of the Lake Michigan shoreline, wind-driven droplets tapping irregularly, but frequently, against the northernmost windows and walls of La Casa del Terror.

A cold night. A raw night. An inhospitable night. A perfect night to watch James Whale's The Old Dark House.

Many films in the first few years after sound films became the standard suffer from the lack of a musical score. Tod Browning's Dracula, for example, seemed lethargic and much longer than it actually was until the late 1990s, when Universal added a score composed by Philip Glass and performed by the Kronos Quartet; the newly scored version plays much better (though, for the sake of purists, the version without the score was included on the DVD).

No such problem afflicts The Old Dark House. It doesn't have a musical score either, but Whale--perhaps as a consequence of having a theater background, rather having made the transition from silent pictures (like Browning and so many other directors working in Hollywood at the time)--fills in the audio gaps with ambient sounds to be found on nights such as this, when howling winds, pounding rain, creaking doors, rattling windows, banging shutters, and, of course, the occasional blood-freezing, soul-curdling scream, make their own kind of music.
It's on such a night that three travelers--husband Raymond Massey, wife Gloria Stuart and friend Melvyn Douglas--try to make their way across the Welsh countryside. After they come to the conclusion that not only are they lost, but the roads behind and before them are blocked by the storm, they pull up to the isolated, desolate abode of the title, only to find Morgan, a mute, disfigured butler (Boris Karloff, who received top billing even though he only has a supporting role here) and the exceedingly odd Femm family: Bitchy, fearful Horace (Ernest Thesiger); cranky, hard-of-hearing-when-it-suits-her Rebecca (Eva Moore); and 102-year-old patriarch Sir Roderick (John Dudgeon, whose real name was Elspeth--yep, "he" was a "she"). Two more travelers--blustery Charles Laughton and petite Lillian Bond--show up, soaked to the bone, and they all try to ride the night out as the lights blink off and on and off again, shadows grow long on the dreary walls and Morgan gets absolutely smashed, which causes him to turn loose the one family member Horace and Rebecca neglected to mention--their psychotic, homicidal brother, Saul (Brember Wills).

Even though the action is held off until the very end of the movie--which differs from the novel by J.B. Priestley on which it's based, but not to the detriment of the film--The Old Dark House isn't slow or dull by any means. It follows the basic blueprint of many a "haunted house" thriller--like The Bat (or its sound remake, The Bat Whispers), The Cat and the Canary or The Monster--but differs from those films in a number of ways. It carries the dry wit that you would expect from a Whale movie, but here it not only lampoons the material at hand, but also hides the genuine scares along the way that much better.

The cast is extraordinary, with early appearances by actors (Douglas, Massey, Laughton) who would go on to be stars for decades to come and character actors like Theiseger to add saltiness and vinegar to the mix, and the performances are uniformly good, with Douglas excelling as a disillusioned veteran of World War I and Wills matching him as a madman perfectly capable of killing without even a twitch of conscience.

The sets are wonderfully large and gothic, with shadows painted onto the walls, just like in German Expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Whale makes great use of the space he's given, moving his camera and characters about as he wishes for surprises both pleasant and frightening. And Whale may have been among the first directors to realize that "talkies" could be so much more than the voices of actors--that carefully orchestrated sound effects could do as much to establish and sustain mood as sets or actors ever could.

In fact, the only bad thing about The Old Dark House is its relative obscurity. Even with a prominent director and top-of-the-line cast, this movie vanished for decades--it was even thought to be a "lost" film (i.e., a film for which no print is known to exist) for a while. But it isn't lost. It exists. And it should be sought out and treasured by anyone who appreciates movies best viewed when the skies are foreboding, colorful leaves spin down from dark branches to the damp ground below, and there's an appropriate chill in the air.