Welcome to Episode #250 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of sci-fi horror relics inspired by the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man, starting with James Whale’s classic 1933 adaptation for Universal, starring Claude Rains.
33:22 The Invisible Man (1933) 47:31 Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) 1:01:15 The Invisible Man vs The Human Fly (1957) 1:15:43 The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962)
It may just be a marketing term coined by fans, but the existence of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” brand suggests that there must also be a Famous Monsters B-List. Every celebrity industry has its own power-rankings hierarchy, with public-figure colleagues competing amongst themselves for job opportunities and name recognition. Within Universal’s early horror successes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the C-List is easy to define, as it’s mostly made up of semi-literary characters who get excluded from the nostalgic posters and action figures celebrating the brand: Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, the bitchy little freaks Lugosi & Karloff play in The Black Cat, etc. Differentiating the B-List from the A-List is more of a case-by-case judgement call. To me, the official roster of Universal’s Famous Monsters can be cleanly split in half. The A-List celebrity monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. They’re the ones who most often cross-pollinate each other’s sequels, and they’re the ones whose likeness you’re most likely to see on generic Halloween decorations year after year. That leaves The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as B-List celebrity monsters, the ones whose numerous sequels and knockoff plastic masks collect dust on the shelf while the A-List monsters get to run wild in the streets every October into perpetuity.
The most curious case of B-List monster celebrity has got to be The Mummy, since his first appearance in the lineup immediately followed the success of Universal’s Frankenstein & Dracula, a decade before The Wolf Man. The problem is that the poor walking corpse spent his entire career following Frankenstein & Dracula’s heavy footsteps, never truly becoming his own thing. 1932’s The Mummy was penned by John L. Balderson, who is most famous for writing the 1924 stage play version of Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi and was eventually adapted to the screen by Tod Browning, kicking off the Universal Monsters brand. Balderson was seemingly going through the motions in his secondary contribution to the canon, writing yet another story of a foreign-born romantic ghoul who uses his evil powers of hypnosis to woo a young woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his one true love. Only, that archetype is instead played here by Lugosi’s career-long professional rival Boris Karloff, whose monstrous figure is most closely associated with Frankenstein’s monster, further minimizing The Mummy as a Famous Monsters footnote. Stuck between the lecherous behavior of one A-List Famous Monster and the walking-corpse physicality of another, The Mummy was destined to be relegated to the horror celebrity B-List, to the point where his initial onscreen outing is often confused for details from its various sequels & spoofs.
The Mummy pictured in the Universal Monsters branding never appears onscreen in 1932’s The Mummy; that’s a mummy of a different name. At the start of the picture, Karloff’s mummified Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep does appear wrinkled & bandaged as another monster creation from legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who also crafted the actor’s more famous look in Frankenstein. We just never see him moving outside the confines of his sarcophagus while wearing that get-up. After dismissing ancient curses warning against it as Egyptian “mumbo jumbo,” some naive archeologists invade Imhotep’s tomb to pilfer cultural artifacts for career-making museum exhibits, mistakenly activating the long-dormant loverboy’s corpse by reading the forbidden scrolls he was buried with aloud. Once awakened, Imhotep immediately leaves his tomb & rags behind to work on reclaiming his lost love through ancient magic spells, transforming from a dried up corpse to a mildly disconcerting gentleman with sun-damaged skin and glowing, hypnotic eyes. We never get to witness this bodily transformation, nor is there any shot of Karloff schlepping around in the famous mummy rags before putting on a more respectable fez-and-robe ensemble. The mummy’s walk out of his tomb is left mostly to the audience’s imagination, as the movie is more of a classy mood-setter than it is a proper creature feature. It leaves that cheap business to its many sequels, headlined by an entirely different mummy.
Although its many sequels frequently repurpose footage from the flashbacks to the undead Imhotep’s days as a living priest and self-proclaimed King of the Gods, they immediately swap him out for a new mummy named Kharis. Since the first of Universal’s Mummy films only has a couple shots of its titular monster in the iconic bandages, the sequels have to start over and dream up something more recognizable (i.e., more marketable) without relying on the familiarity of Boris Karloff’s mug. Weirdly, that leaves the 1940 follow-up The Mummy’s Hand both more archetypal and lesser seen than the original film it was tasked to rework. Getting ahead of the next decade’s trend of pairing Universal’s Famous Monsters with Abbott & Costello, The Mummy’s Hand already stars two over-their-heads Brooklyn goofballs who get into a scrape with the famous monster. The out-of-place American archeologists are desperate for a big score while shopping the markets of Egypt, where they again ignore locals’ warnings & curses and pry open the tomb of a long-dormant mummy, in this case Kharis. Again, that mummy is liberated from his sarcophagus and immediately seeks to reconnect with his supposedly reincarnated soul mate, but this time he never ditches the rags. This is where the image of The Mummy skulking around in full uniform is born, finally becoming his own thing (even if actor Tom Tyler plays him like Karloff’s Frankenstein with a bum leg).
Once Universal found a mummy they could market in Kharis, the rest of the sequels can only work to boost his stats to match the more formidable figures of Dracula, Frankenstein, and newcomer hotshot The Wolf Man. 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb further legitimizes The Mummy by dressing up Lon Chaney, Jr. in the make-up for an otherwise pointless sequel, which is essential to the brand (see also: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and the many appearances of Lawrence Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man). Then, it proceeds to delegitimize the Mummy by further developing him into a blurry photocopy of Frankenstein’s monster; Kharis giveth, Kharis taketh away. Not only does Kharis start to carry around his unconscious, reincarnated loves with the exact posture of Karloff’s Frankenstein, but he’s also brought to a fiery end by an angry mob at the film’s climax, directly alluding to James Whale’s visual iconography. 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost continues that work by finally giving Kharis an official Bride of Mummy counterpart, complete with the white streaks of hair at the temples in the unmistakable style of Elsa Lanchester. At this point in the series, the perils of reckless archeology are no longer a concern. Once Kharis reaches American soil in Tomb & Ghost, the series fixates on red-blooded American men protecting their women from the corrupting forces of seductive foreigners. The most impressive thing about Ghost is that it commits to the bit in a shocker ending, finally allowing The Mummy to successfully steal away his reincarnated love, sinking into the swamp with her dangling in his arms as her body rapidly ages to close their centuries-scale age gap in mere seconds.
There’s some incredibly shameless runtime padding in The Mummy’s Tomb, starting off an hour-long sequel with over ten minutes of “Previously on . . .” recapping before setting The Mummy loose on American soil. It’s an instructive reminder that these sequels were produced before the invention of home video and, subsequently, VHS rental stores. Since audiences couldn’t easily rewatch a classic movie on a whim, the studios would just remake that same movie again and again to scratch that itch, as a matter of routine. The later Mummy sequels have no interest in being their own thing; they just take the same old Mummy out for a walk. Even the choice to relocate Kharis to Cajun swamp country in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse affords the series little novelty outside the amusement of hearing Old Hollywood’s goofy misinterpretations of the Cajun-French accent. The Mummy started as Egyptian Dracula in his first outing. Then, he gradually, improbably became New England Frankenstein. For his last trick, he emerges as Cajun Swamp Thing. He’s a true international playboy, seducing a new woman at each stop along the way, including a choice to leave The Bride of Mummy behind here in favor of a new The Mummy’s Princess love interest (future Folgers Coffee spokeswoman Virginia Christie, who looks incredibly hip here with some Bettie Page bangs). Even the novelty of seeing The Mummy trudge along in a swampy locale isn’t especially distinct to this famous monster, though, considering that Lon Chaney, Jr. had already appeared there in the previous year’s Son of Dracula (under the hilarious pseudonym Count Alucard). That’s not even getting into the obvious concerns of what would happen if you dragged your dried-out mummy through a humid swamp. The whole enterprise is one big afterthought.
Of course, the final indignity for all of Universal’s Famous Monsters is to officially sanction Lou Costello’s buffoonery, which The Mummy was tasked to do in 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It’s here that the Mummy, forever following in Frankenstein & Dracula’s footsteps, has finally Made It. Even so, he’s way late to the party, taking his turn with the comedy duo after they already met Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde, and “The Killer, Boris Karloff” in similarly titled comedies. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the very last of the comedians’ onscreen run-ins with Universal’s Famous Monsters, as it also marked the end of their overall contract with Universal Pictures. There are a few stray laughs scattered throughout the picture—mostly catering to fans of “mummy”/”mommy” puns—but the bit had very obviously been exhausted before The Mummy’s number was called, and it feels like just as much of a tired exercise as proper Mummy sequels like The Mummy’s Curse. None of the later Mummy films are especially great, but they are all mercifully short, and by the time you meet up with anyone for the sixth or seventh time they start to become your friend, so it’s fun to see him goof around in this final outing. It’s just that The Mummy is more like your work friend, whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man are true buds you look forward to seeing on the weekend.
Like most horror franchises that stumble past their obvious expiration date, The Mummy’s initial outing is a great film in its own right, and its numerous, goofy follow-ups are only made endearing by their familiarity and nostalgic value. There’s nothing iconic about The Mummy’s lore, really. His tana-leaves medicine regimen, crime-scene contaminating mold, and smoky flashback pool have all been forgotten to time, as opposed to other Universal-specific details like Dracula’s hypnotic hand gestures or the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck. The Famous Monsters roster would feel thin & incomplete without him, but he’s mostly a background player. The biggest claim to modern fame for The Mummy is that its 1999 remake is by far the most success Universal has had in its attempts to revitalize its Famous Monsters brand for new generations. It succeeded where fellow studio titles like Renfield, Van Helsing, and Dracula Untold have failed. Even so, that accomplishment only further cements the original Mummy in a B-List status. When someone references the movie The Mummy in conversation, most people immediately picture Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff. The audience who remembers any of the Kharis titles in the series—Hand, Tomb, Ghost, Curse—is shrinking every year, despite that version of the monster being the one that appears on all of the throwback posters & Funko Pop boxes. Meanwhile, cinematic references to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man immediately conjure the likeness of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is what makes them official Famous Monster A-Listers. Everyone else is just lucky to be on the guest list.
The earliest press releases for the Universal Pictures horror Abigailreported it as a reimagining of the 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter, citing Leigh Whannell’s 2020 remake of The Invisible Man and last year’s Nic-Cage-as-Dracula comedy Renfield as similar examples of what the studio is currently doing with its Classic Monsters brand. Technically, Abigail does feature a vampire’s daughter in its main cast, but that titular, bloodsucking brat’s similarities to Countess Marya Zaleska end there. No matter what the original pitch for Abigail might have been in first draft, it’s clear that the final product was more directly inspired by last year’s killer-doll meme comedy M3GAN than anything related to the original Dracula series. Anytime its little-girl villain does a quirky, TikTok friendly dance in her cutesy ballerina outfit, you can practically hear echoes of some producer yelling “Get me another M3GAN!” in the background. The Radio Silence creative team kindly obliged, churning out another M3GAN with the same dutiful, clock-punching enthusiasm that they’ve been using to send another Scream sequel down the conveyor belt every year. The movie is less a reimagining of a 90-year-old classic than it is a rerun of a novelty that just arrived last January.
To juice the premise for as many TikTokable moments as possible, Abigail never changes out of her tutu. The seemingly innocent little girl (Alisha Weir) is kidnapped after ballet practice and held ransom in an old dark house to extort millions out of her mysterious, dangerous father. She naps for a bit while her captors bicker & banter downstairs, so that each of the likeable, sleepwalking stars (Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, the late Angus Cloud, etc.) can all get in their MCU-style quips before they’re ceremoniously slaughtered one at a time. Then Abigail wakes up, reveals her fangs, and throws in some pirouettes & jetés between ripping out throats with her mouth. The violence is bloody but predictable, especially if you’ve happened to see the movie’s trailers, which plainly spell out every single image & idea from the second hour while conveniently skipping over the tedious hangout portion of the first. There is no element of surprise or novelty here beyond your very first glimpse of an adolescent vampire in a tutu, which you already get just by walking past the poster in the lobby.
In short, Abigail is corporate slop. The best way to enjoy it is either chopped up into social media ads or screening on the back of an airplane seat headrest, wherever your attention is most often held hostage. I attended its world premiere at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, which likely should have heightened its fanfare through pomp & exclusivity but instead had the opposite effect. Screening in a festival environment among dozens of no-name productions with much smaller budgets and infinitely bigger ideas really highlighted how creatively bankrupt this kind of factory-line horror filmmaking can be. Using the legacy of something as substantial as Dracula’s Daughter to rush out a M3GAN follow-up before a proper M3GAN 2.0 sequel is ready for market conveys a depressingly limited scope of imagination in that context, especially since horror is the one guaranteed-profit genre where audiences are willing to go along with pretty much anything you throw at them. At the very least, Universal & Radio Silence could have better capitalized off the production’s one distinct, exciting idea by flooding the house with dozens, if not hundreds, of ballerina vampires instead of relying on just one. That way, it wouldn’t be so boring to wait for her to wrap up her nap.
Welcome to Episode #198 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Aaron Armstrong of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the eight classic Universal horrors that feature Frankenstein’s monster.
Like all corners of the creative arts, Universal Picture’s classic horror period was overrun with nepo babies. Carl Laemmle, Jr. kicked off the studio’s Famous Monsters brand by producing 1931’s Dracula after Carl Laemmle, Sr. passed down his studio-head executive position to his son instead of a more qualified protégée. Lon Chaney, Jr. changed his name from Creighton Chaney to cash in on the name recognition of his early-horror legend father, making him a more credible, marketable Wolf Man. Then, of course, there’s the case of Dracula’s children, who waltzed into power in Universal’s most prestigious sequels after their father’s untimely second death at the end of the first film in their franchise. While The Wolf Man fathered no cubs to take over his sequels, and Frankenstein’s Monster only made it thirty seconds into his own marriage before burning down the lab, Dracula’s progeny did a good job making the most of their family name. The Dracula kids don’t appear to have met or crossed paths, but their polygamous father did have multiple wives in the first film, so I suppose that doesn’t undermine the series’ narrative continuity.
Much like the goofier Frankensteinsequels from this early Universal period, 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter is an absurdly direct follow-up to the Tod Browning original. The film opens with Van Helsing being arrested for Dracula’s murder at the scene of the crime, and then spending the rest of the film convincing his jailers that actual, real-life vampires are afoot. Dracula’s immediate replacement is his angsty goth-girl daughter, who is reluctant to continue the family business of draining innocent civilians of their blood despite it being the only thing she’s trained to do. She’s rebelled by moving to the big city, where she stalks the streets as a bisexual vamp, picking up hungry artists’ models and lustful playboys to drain back at her spacious parlor. Foretelling a lot of the later Famous Monster sequels, she feels incredibly guilty about this blood-addiction vice and spends most of the film seeking a medical cure for the family legacy that has shunned her from polite society & daylight – ultimately to no avail. Inevitably, like all nepo babies, she ends up not being able to strike it out on her own after all and moves back to the family castle in Transylvania for some super traditional Dracula kills, meeting the same tragic end as her father.
Like the direct sequel to James Whale’s original Frankenstein movie, Dracula’s Daughter has earned more critical respect in recent decades than the film that precedes it. Its reputation has largely risen due to the sexual transgressions of its lesbian seduction scene, in which the titular vampire convinces a young woman to expose her bare neck for the sucking by telling her she’s going to pose for a nude portrait. Likewise, Bride of Frankenstein‘s gender politics have drawn a lot of attention with modern viewers for the concluding scene in which the titular monster takes one look at her assigned undead groom and decides she’d rather be dead (again) than mate with her “man.” Of the two films, Bride of Frankenstein is the better direct sequel overall, since Whale was given unprecedented creative freedom to play up the stranger, campier elements of his original text in an anything-goes horror comedy free-for-all that doesn’t even bother to deliver on its central premise until the final three minutes of runtime. By contrast, Dracula’s Daughter has the generosity of affording its titular villain plenty screentime & pathos, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters. Like the Monster’s bride, she effortlessly, tragically cool, so it’s nice that we actually get to spend time with her beyond a few quick frames of celluloid.
While Dracula’s Daughter exemplifies the Famous Monsters sequels’ penchant for direct, narrative continuations set seconds after their preceding films’ endings, 1943’s Son of Dracula exemplifies their penchant for wildly recasting the central villains from film to film. The most hilarious example I’ve seen is Bela Lugosi’s miscasting as the Monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, a performance so laughably unconvincing that studio executives decided to remove his heavily accented dialogue from the final cut, fearing audience mockery. Lon “Wolf Man” Chaney, Jr. made more visual sense as the Monster in the previous picture, Son of Frankenstein, but could not be tasked with sitting in the makeup chair for two separate monster performances in the same picture (not to mention the narrative contrivance of Lugosi/Igor’s brain being transplanted to the Monster’s body at the end of Son of Frankenstein). Appropriately enough, that film was made the same year Chaney got his own laughably bad Famous Monster miscasting as the mysterious “Count Aculard” in 1943’s Son of Dracula. The reason Chaney works so well in his tyepcast roles as The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Lennie from Of Mice and Men is that he looks like a sweet, lumbering oaf who doesn’t know his own strength. That image doesn’t translate especially well to playing a debonaire European vampire who seduces women to their doom.
Despite Count Aculard’s ridiculous appearance and name (which registers among the all-time goofiest horror pseudonyms, like Dr. Acula in Night of the Ghouls, Jack Rippner in Red Eye, and Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart), Son of Dracula is a surprisingly solid supernatural melodrama. Unlike his rebellious daughter, Dracula’s son has enthusiastically taken to the family business of seducing young women to death, moving to a Southern plantation to hypnotize & marry its recent heiress. Dracula’s daughter-in-law is a bit of a gloomy goth herself, and she attempts to manipulate the power of the Dracula dynasty for her own wicked profits, but the inevitable tragedy of the undead couple’s Southern Gothic surroundings makes a happy ending impossible. For his part, Count Aculard adjusts to the Southern atmosphere incredibly well, literally becoming a part of it by materializing as swamp gas in his nightly rises from the coffin. The movie carries over a lot of classic spooky set dressing of the original Dracula film despite this new locale, including a return to the flapping rubber bats that were missing from Dracula’s Daughter. Still, it’s visually accomplished in continually surprising ways, including an early version of the double-dolly shots from Spike Lee’s playbook as Count Aculard glides over the marshes to drain his victims.
Pumping out cheap-o sequels to Universal’s most successful horror films was obviously more about doing great business than it was about making great art. Through the tougher stretches of The Great Depression & WWII, the Famous Monsters that made Universal a major player in the first place were a near bottomless well for immediate cashflow. Frankenstein & The Wolf Man got stuck with the goofiest, trashiest end of that rushed-to-market schlock production, and by the time their many crossover sequels brought an off-brand version of Dracula into the fold (in John Carradine), the character was so far removed from Bela Lugosi’s performance in the original that it could do no real damage to the Dracula brand. Meanwhile, Dracula’s more direct sequels about his undead children are both very stately, handsome productions that hold up on their own among the best of Universal’s early horror run. Dracula’s Daughter is certainly the cooler of the pair and has rightfully been reappraised as a great work by modern critics. Son of Dracula would likely earn its own reappraisal too, if it weren’t for the goofy miscasting of Lon Chaney, Jr. as the titular vampire. Unsurprisingly, nepotism is a double-edged sword, one that can open opportunities you’re not always the best fit for.
There have been countless adaptations of Gaston Leroux’s Turn of the Century novel Le Fantome de l’Opera on stage and screen, but it’s hard to argue that any have been as influential as the 1920s silent film starring Lon Chaney. Along with Chaney’s turn in the silent horror adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the 1925 Phantom of the Opera was a massive hit for Universal Pictures, launching a decades-long moneymaker in the studio’s Famous Monster’s brand. Before Lugosi & Karloff would come to define the Universal Monsters look, Chaney was the (hideously disfigured) face of the production company’s horror division. The ripple effect of the silent Phantom of the Opera’s success achieved a far-ranging influence (from Lugosi & Karloff to, disastrously, Dario Argento), not even matched by the name-recognition commanding stage musical from Andrew Lloyd Weber. Not to shatter any illusions to the contrary, but shameless remakes & reissues of lucrative intellectual properties are far from new to Hollywood, so the Lon Chaney Phantom’s success meant it would be a well Universal returned to often – first in a 1933 reissue of the original film with a (since lost) soundtrack that mutated into a talkie, then as this 1943 Technicolor remake. Graduating to sound & color wasn’t the only cinematic adjustments Fantame de l’Opera had to make in those first couple of decades either. As much as the 1940s remake is obviously indebted to the Lon Chaney original, its aesthetic is so current to its time that it rarely shows its silent horror roots – or even resembles horror at all.
The basic plot of a standard Phantom of the Opera adaptation remains intact in this Technicolor remake, with Claude Rains taking over from Chaney as the titular Phantom. Here, the distantly admiring, disfigured creep who haunts the Paris Opera house and promotes the career of his favorite singer under threat of violence to those who might block her way to success starts the film as a violinist in the orchestra before being burned with acid & retreating to the shadows. Most of his subsequent kills in the periphery are lightly handled: off-screen stranglings, attempted poisonings, a recreation of the falling chandelier stunt from the previous version, etc. Even the reveal of the Phantom’s purplish acid burn scars feels delicately handled in comparison to Long Chaney’s genuinely horrific makeup in the original film. Some of the stark silent era horror influences of the original echo in this remake, especially evident in shots where the Phantom appears only as a menacing shadow on the wall. For the most part, however, this remake plays much more like a dramatic “women’s picture” of its era, focusing more on the opera singer’s choice between pursuing operatic career opportunities or a “normal” life as a housewife. It’s like The Red Shoes by way of Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor melodramas in that way, with the Phantom’s role being relegated to a side character in the female lead’s A-plot. This is more of a comedic drama about a woman at a professional crossroads than it is a shock-a-minute monster movie about a crazed, disfigured violinist.
In a 2010s update to this version of the Phantom tale, it’s likely the opera singer herself who would have been driven mad to the point of monstrous transformation, but actor Susanna Foster is never afforded her own proper freak-out in the style of a Red Shoes or a Black Swan or a Perfect Blue (so many colors!). That’s not to say that Claude Rains’s secret, murderous admirer of her work is entirely detached from the themes of her professional/romantic dilemma either. His menacing, pushy presence just out of eyesight in the opera singer’s professional life is in some ways a pitch-perfect representation of how all the men around her apply too plentiful & too intense romantic pressure she doesn’t ask for or need in the early days of her professional career. The Phantom is only one of three men in the singer’s life, joining the ranks of a police officer & a fellow musical performer, both of whom wish to court her into marriage. Just as the Phantom pressures the singer into making bold leaps in her still-early career at the opera house by threatening & murdering higher-ups on her behalf, the two suitors pressure her to choose romance over fame & art, giving up the stage for “a normal life.” The general mood of the film is light & flavored with comedy, especially as the suitors trip over each other in dual proclamations of love, but there’s also an underlying tragedy throughout in this poor woman being pressured to make choices between art & romance instead of being allowed to live as she pleases. It’s a very Sirkian conflict, one that’s handled with appropriate visual beauty & emotional melodrama.
Like with Sirk or The Red Shoes to follow, the Technicolor Phantom remake is at the very least worth seeing for its staging, especially for the intense use of rich, bold color in its costuming & lighting. Even if the trading in of silent era horrors for love triangle humor & one woman’s professional indecision is not what you’re looking for in a Phantom of the Opera adaptation, the film is still worthwhile for the visual pleasures & emotional payoffs therein. Even though it chooses to conclude on a comedic note, its adaption of the Phantom’s lingering, unwanted threats & pressures to its central narrative of a woman stuck between competing men’s designs on her life’s plan is also a new angle on the material that justifies the impulse for a remake in the first place, no matter how light on horror. There would be plenty of pointless Phantom of the Opera remakes to come in the decades following this big studio Technicolor melodrama as filmmakers grappled with the original film’s influence on horror at large. It’s doubtful there are many that are this purposeful in their modernity-minded updates to the source material, however. 1943’s Phantom of the Opera seamlessly incorporates the basic elements & structure of the original silent work into a genuine participation in the “women’s pictures” of its own day, to great artistic & thematic payoff. A brief glance at the disparity in terror between Lon Chaney & Claude Rains’s makeup as the unmasked Phantom is alone enough to indicate the differences in those film’s basic intent, but what the Rains version loses in horror it more than makes up for in another, unexpected genre.
One thing Universal Pictures definitely got right in their series of Boris Karloff & Bela Lugosi collaborations was allowing the two actors to stray from their legendary roles as the Frankenstein monster & Count Dracula. Unfortunately for Lugosi, the 1936 picture The Invisible Ray only allowed him to stray as far as the role of a mad scientist, something he had played almost as often as he portrayed the world’s most famous vampire. Fortunately for the audience, the film made enough room for two mad scientists, so Karloff & Lugosi could continue living their offscreen professional rivalry in meta, fictional contests. Karloff always gets top billing in these pictures, which I’m sure drove Lugosi mad, but in their first few movies together they typically traded the narrative spotlight back & forth. In The Black Cat they shared it. In The Raven Lugosi stole the show. In The Invisible Ray Karloff actually earns his top billing, playing the more interesting, omnipresent mad scientist of the pair.
The best The Invisible Ray has to offer is in the spooky mad scientist sci-fi horror in the the two segments that bookend the duller half of the film. The promise of this antiquated sci-fi horror glory is apparent as soon as the film’s “Forward”: “Every science fact accepted today once burned as a fantastic fire in the mind of someone called mad. Who are we on this youngest of planets to say that the INVISIBLE RAY is impossible to science? That which you are now to see is a theory whispered in the cloisters of science. Tomorrow these theories may startle the universe as a fact.” So what “science fact” are we to look forward to in the future? Apparently an alien element known as Radium X, delivered to Earth via a “few thousand millions of years” old asteroid crash has been discovered by Karloff’s maddest-of-all scientist. Karloff has a million & ten different uses for Radium X that range from curing blindness to the creation of a sort of death ray. Too bad exposure to the element causes his skin to glow in the dark & the gentlest of his touches to kill on contact. Lugosi’s less-mad scientist wants to use Radium X to help prove his vague theories about how “the Sun is the mother of us all,” and although the two men work together on the element’s discovery & procurement, they disagree on its practical applications, something that gives Lugosi’s dissenter the moral high ground once Karloff’s touch becomes luminous & deadly. In a lot of ways this reflects their real life professional rivalry, seeing how they both had a distaste for one another, but worked on eight feature films together anyway.
I’ve skipped over a lot of the film’s second act shenanigans, which involve a lengthy expedition to Africa in the quest to harvest Radium X from the asteroid crash site. This being a 1930’s film, there’s a lot of unseemly representation of black characters in these scenes as subservient, easily frightened native tribesmen, but if nothing else this is the first instance I’ve seen of a non-white character having a speaking role in any Karloff/Lugosi collaboration so far. There’s also some thought given to how women’s contributions to the scientific community, represented here in Karloff’s much-suffering wife & mother, are often attributed to men. Of course, these instances of non-white, non-male representation are a little thin & undercooked. At best, it’s a modest start & not much more. As I said before, the best The Invisible Ray has to offer is in its mad scientist spookiness. Early scenes featuring a Frankenstein-esque castle being repurposed as a planetarium provide some great, oldschool outer space weirdness, which combined with Karloff’s transformation into The Very Visible Man supplies The Invisible Ray with its most memorable elements. Karloff is particularly captivating in the film, whether he’s donning a stunning welding mask & cape combo (complete with rubber gloves), glowing like a nightlight, or dispensing of his enemies with the simple act of a genteel handshake. By comparison, Lugosi’s presence is far more understated, distinguished only by a goatee that makes him look like a mid-90s alt bro. The Invisible Ray was far from the pair’s best collaboration at the time of its release (that would be The Black Cat), but it’s also far from their nadir. In short, it’ll do.
Although it’s difficult to imagine a more perfect collaboration between between spooky superstars Bela Lugosi & Boris Karloff than their first film together, The Black Cat, their next tribute to the work of Edgar Allan Poe at least comes close to matching it. After making a brief appearance in the vaudevillian trifle of a romantic comedy Gift of Gab, Lugosi & Karloff returned to what they do best: being generally creepy & making meta references to their offscreen professional rivalry. The Raven doesn’t alter much of the pair’s The Black Cat dynamic. They merely switch roles as victim & villain, this time with Lugosi taking the reins as the film’s murderous creep with a spooky mansion & Karloff talking a backseat as the bitter, broken prey. Otherwise, it’s essentially just more of the same. When then “the same” is as great of a benchmark as The Black Cat, though, that’s not exactly a problem.
Much like with The Black Cat, The Raven starts with a car crash that leaves a young woman in Lugosi’s medical care. This time Lugosi plays a surgeon, Dr. Richard Vollin, instead of a psychiatrist, but the dynamic is still remarkably similar. In The Black Cat, Lugosi’s doctor falls for his patient because of her resemblance to his deceased wife. In The Raven, he falls for his patient because she portrays the (deceased wife) character Lenore in a staged performance of Poe’s “The Raven” (an especially beautiful one that looks like a sequined masquerade). Vollin is a Poe collector & enthusiast to an obsessive degree, something he calls “more than a hobby”, so the possibility of seducing a real life Lenore is too tempting to pass up. He lures his faux Lenore, along with her father & her beau, to his spooky mansion as part of a plan to not only live out the tragic love story of Poe’s “The Raven”, but also the torture chamber antics of the Poe story “The Pit & The Pendulum.” To help him with this dastardly plan, Vollin volunteers to perform plastic surgery on an escaped convict (played by Boris Karloff, of course) only to physically maim the poor lout & turn him into a monster. Lugosi intones to Karloff, “Monstrous ugliness brings monstrous hate. Good! I could use your hate,” and essentially turns the mangled convict into his own personal Igor (perhaps as a nod to Karloff’s long history of playing Frankenstein’s monster).
Although Karloff receives top billing for The Raven, something he was also awarded in The Black Cat, this is unmistakably Bela Lugosi’s show. Watching the horror legend recite Poe’s “The Raven” in front of an exaggerated raven’s shadow, don surgical gear to apply a knockout gas to the camera lens, gleefully give tours of his torture chamber, and recite lines like “Death is my talisman, Mr Chapman. The one indestructible force, the one certain thing in an uncertain universe. Death!” are all priceless moments for oldschool horror fans. I like to think that Vincent Price was a fan of this specific Lugosi performance & modeled his own effete murderers in Roger Corman’s Poe productions, particularly in The Pit & The Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death, after the horror icon.
As for the film itself, it didn’t do so well financially & seemed to ruffle a few feathers with its playfully morbid atmosphere, despite it being very much toned down from what was delivered in The Black Cat. This reception reportedly lead to a temporary ban on the horror genre in England & just a general slump in production of major studio horror films for a long time to come, much to the detriment of Lugosi’s & Karloff’s careers. This shift in attitude is even detectable in the film’s press kit which asks, “Was Edgar Allan Poe a mental derelict?” and goes on to suggest that Poe’s characters were “but a reflection of himself.” It’s a shame that the film mostly fell flat with audiences, since another success like The Black Cat could’ve lead to more work for Lugosi & Karloff where they didn’t have to play Count Dracula & the Frankenstein monster every damn film. The Raven is a pretty great alternative to that overwhelming portion of their work, one that continues the meta-rivalry of the chess game in The Black Cat in yet another great, loose tribute to Poe. I’d say that even though Karloff had the upper hand this round in receiving top billing, it was Lugosi who scored the victory. He’s just so much fun to watch here & all of the movie’s best moments are dependent upon his performance.
“Suggested by the immortal Edgar Allan Poe classic” (to borrow the title card’s language) that inspired later adaptations by none other than Roger Corman in the Tales of Terror anthology film & Dario Argento in his segment of Two Evil Eyes, 1934’s The Black Cat is about as loose as a literary adaptation can get. The only element the film shares in common with Poe’s short story is the appearance of a black cat that is murdered in a fearful rage, then reappears unharmed. If you’re looking for a (slightly) more faithful cinematic adaptation of the story, I’d suggest looking to Corman’s Tales of Terror (which also features versions of Poe’s “Morella” & “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”). 1934’s Unversial Pictures production of The Black Cat is fascinating not because it’s a loose, full-length adaptation of a Poe short story, but because it features the first of many onscreen collaborations between horror movie legends & professional rivals Bela Lugosi & Boris Karloff. Lugosi & Karloff are a match made in horror nerd heaven, especially in this gorgeous, alarmingly violent film that allows them to stray from their usual typecast roles as Count Dracula & the Frankenstein monster. Although there are eight Lugosi/Karloff collaborations in total, it’s difficult to imagine that any of them could possibly match the delicious old school horror aesthetic achieved in The Black Cat. It’s an incredible work.
The Black Cat begins with a young, couple meeting a recently imprisoned psychiatrist, Dr. Vitus Verdegast (Lugosi), while honeymooning in Hungary, In a scene typical to the film’s unnerving violence, the trio suddenly find their plans derailed in a gruesome bus crash. Lugosi’s Verdergast lays on the creep factor early, gently stroking the hair of the sleeping female passenger because she reminds him of his deceased wife. After the bus crash, he leads the unsuspecting couple to recover at the spooky mansion of his bitter rival, the mentally unhinged architect Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff). As the situation gradually sours, it becomes apparent that Poelzig is, in fact, the true villain of the story. He traps Vendergast & the newlyweds in his (gorgeous Art Deco) home, planning to include them in an elaborate Satanic ceremony at an celestial event dubbed “The Dark of the Moon”. Karloff’s Poelzig is an intense dude. Among other strange traits, he’s known to brood in a darkened dungeon stocked with the bodies of deceased women he keeps pristinely preserved in glass cases, all the while stroking his titular black cat (who curiously appears alive in the film even after Lugosi’s Verdergast kills it in a frightened rage). When Poelzig’s plans of a Satanic ritual finally come to fruition (after being thoroughly researched in a book helpfully titled The Rites of Lucifer), he brings to a head a decades old rivalry he’s enjoyed with Verdergast, ending it once & for all in an alarmingly dark, violent display that threatens the lives of all four parties involved.
Although, as I said, Lugosi & Karloff are allowed to stray from their infamous roles as Dracula & the Frankenstein monster here, there are of course slight nods to those hallmarks of their careers in the film. Lugosi’s psychiatrist is for the most part a sympathetic, broken man, but before this gentleness is revealed his early actions towards his wife’s young dead ringer recall Dracula’s modes of hypnosis & seduction. Karloff’s architect also shows shades of the Frankenstein monster in his earliest scenes, especially when he’s introduced as a gigantic, lumbering silhouette. Otherwise, they’re spooky in a way that’s divorced almost entirely from the “famous monsters” they were asked to play time & time again. One of the best aspects of the film is watching Karloff & Lugosi trade ominous spooky phrasings back & forth, like “Death is in the air,” “We shall play a little game, a little game of death,” and – in response to the accusation “Sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney to me” – “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.” Both their onscreen & offscreen rivalries are intensely palpable throughout the film, even represented in the heavily-acknowledged metaphor of a longterm game of chess, a rare meta treat for fans.
Perhaps what’s so surprisingly enjoyable about The Black Cat is that it has a lot more to offer beyond the obvious pleasures of Lugosi & Karloff spookiness & rivalry. The Art Deco set design is not quite Metropolis-sized in its opulence, but it is still a sight to behold. The way the camera glides throughout its crisp, cramped corridors reminded me of the simple visual effectiveness of this year’s Ex Machina. This is not a half-assed horror film Universal Pictures slapped together on a quick shooting schedule. It’s an elaborate production that proved to be the studio’s biggest box office hit of 1934, one that was boldly violent & sacrilegious for its time. The Black Cat is a short, simple film with only a few moving parts to work with, but it still makes room for stabbings, car crashes, torture, shootings, a murdered pet, a robed Satanic ceremony, a gigantic special effects explosion, and one of the two main players being skinned alive (!!!!!). All of this mayhem is set to a constant old school horror soundtrack that gets deeply satisfying once it devolves into relentless onslaught of heavy organs. To wrap it up at The Black Cat‘s conclusion, a character reads a movie review in the newspaper about how a (fictional) director should stay away from horror as a genre & stick to things that could actually happen, perhaps allowing the film to preemptively scoff at potential critics. It’s hard to imagine critics either now or 80 years ago brushing The Black Cat off so easily, anyway. Considering the time of its release as well as the strength & rarity of its Lugosi & Karloff performances, the film is near perfect,. faithfulness to Poe be damned.
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