Series Minded: some Universal horrors

 [Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop] 

Ok, this is a bit of a cheat for series minded, as it is in no way I'm going to do the entirety of Universal's classic horror run, which I believe begins with Dracula in 1931 and ends with The Creature of the Black Lagoon sequel in 1956, spanning roughly 40 films in between.   The Criterion Collection curated 10 of these features (all of their most prominent, save for Phantom of the Opera), which is what I watched. 

The early films were all prominently touted as productions of Carl Laemmle Jr., who had a taste for expensive productions, that eventually drove him (and his father) out of Universal after The Bride of Frankenstein.  I covered both the first Dracula and it's superior Spanish-language counterpart earlier this month, as well as Frankenstein and its first sequel, and all are watchable productions in their own way, but I find I'm more interested in them as artifacts than as actual entertainment which is probably why it's been decades since I've last watched them.

The remaining films in the Criterion Channel's curated viewing list are:

The Mummy (1932) dir. Karl Freund
The Invisible Man (1933) dir. James Whale
The Black Cat (1934) dir. Edgar G. Ulmer
The Raven (1935) dir. Lew Landers
The Wolf Man (1941) dir. George Waggner
Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954) dir. Jack Arnold

And although it's not a Universal film, after watching all these, it's absolutely clear that Marvel's delightful Werewolf By Night (2022) dir. Michael Giacchino is absolutely aping the classic Universal movie mold, so we'll talk about that here as well.

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The Mummy is, 90 years later, perhaps the biggest disappointment of all the original Universal Horror features, in that it only contains brief glimpses of the classic bandaged-wrapped Mummy, and that he's not some slow-ambling murderous undead horror.  What we do see, of KARLOFF in the makeup and wrappings, looks phenomenal (perhaps the best looking of all the UH creatures) but again, it's so goddamn brief, and so early in the production.  Some classic archaeologists/tomb raiders/colonials find the tomb of Imhotep, and a sacred scroll that, when read aloud, awakens him.  Imhotep murders a man and then disappears.

Ten years later, Imhotep looks almost fully human and goes by the name of Ardeth Bey, posing as an Egyptian historian, he enters the elite social circles of the graverobbers who found him.  Is this a revenge tale or a high society satire? No, because those would be interesting.

Instead Imhotep/Ardeth Bey becomes fixated on a woman he believes is the reincarnation of his lost love, and she should be the vessel for his old flame's immortal soul.  He looks into a pool of water, often, mind controlling people or just spying, and occasionally murdering, all because of his toxic, unhealthy obsessions with Helen. (His power set is really unclear).

There is a couple scenes where Ardeth Bey converses with Helen, and all the credit to KARLOFF for injecting some real sensuality into those moments.  He's not being creepy, he's genuinely enraptured by this woman, and Zita Johann plays those scenes as being somewhat receptive to his advances.  In a different age, this could have been a really sexy thriller.  Instead, it contains zero tension and is pretty direly boring.

Edward Van Sloane makes his third appearance in an early UH, who once again should have been Van Helsing and thus tying this somewhat dark universe together, but, alas is not. 

The Mummy also uses the same theme music as Dracula (which is actually just an excerpt from Swan Lake).

But is it horror?
Not even.

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Surprisingly, having never seen the film before, The Invisible Man begins not in a lab, but in an English countryside inn and tavern during a brisk winter's snowstorm.  A man in full bandages and dark goggles trudges through the snow, with thick leather cases.  Entering the tavern, extra dramatically, his boorish behaviour earns him a room, and a whole lot of speculation from the sots at the bar.  Burn victim? Just bundled up for winter?

Nope, dude's invisible.  But, even worse, he's also a raging asshole. Dr. Jack Griffin, for some reason that's not truly explained, needs a quiet place to conduct his experiment, to try and turn himself visible again.  But in the meantime, he's going to be an utter dick to the tavern keeper (the delightful Una O'Connor) and her beta hubbie... he's also not going to pay his rent.

There's a whole other set of characters who knew Jack before he literally disappeared, including the requisite dame who does nothing but pine for her man...despite the raging dickhead he's become.  Jack, it seems, in testing his experimental serum on himself, has driven himself mad, mad to the point of becoming a literal supervillain...sneaking around stark naked in the middle of winter to get revenge on the people who crossed him.  He's gone so stark-raving-looney he thinks he can enact a plan so malevolent that the entire world will buckle at his feet, completely not realizing that something as simple as a bag of flour or a bucket of paint or a sandy beach is all it would take to take him down.  He starts with simple tomfuckery -  sweeping glasses off bars, stealing bicycles, tipping baby carriages over, knocking over grandfather clocks - but then quickly escalates into murder, and then mass-murder by derailing a train.  By the third act he's killed over 120 people... and yet there's still a woman pining over him, because she has nothing better to do.

In the end, it just takes a cop with a bit of brains to stop the unseen menace.  But man, does Claude Rains ever have a lot of fun in both his verbal and physical performance.  It's a charmingly simple and silly movie that dares to make its protagonist just the most caustic asshat, bringing you on board in rooting for his downfall.  The more time you spend with him, the more you want him to get his come-uppence (but only after he does a few more absurdly petty murders, or naive acts of terrorism in his vain acts of world domination.

But is it horror?
Almost. It's too goofy to be truly horrifying. But he knocks over a baby carriage.  What a dick!

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The Black Cat is the first of the films in this Criterion collection I had no expectations for. It's not one of the iconic Universal Horrors, though it starts their two most famous leads in Karloff (he was really angling for that one-name moniker at this time) and Bela Legosi.

We open on a train cabin with David Manners' Peter, and Julie Bishop (curiously billed as Jacqueline Wells...I should, but won't, dig into that later) as are literally throwing F*me eyes at each other. They are a very convincing couple throughout the film. Later in the film Peter just hoists up a totally game Joan and tosses her on the bed, and then pounces. Was something happening with them off screen? Because it's definitely on screen. Too sexy for 1934, I tells ya.

Peter and Joan are deciding whether they're going to leave the cabin to get food, or, ahem "eat in" (and the way Joan's eyes light up, it's definitely a euphamism), when their romping time is interrupted by the porter who notes that the train was overbooked and this Dracula-looking M*F*er needs to share their cabin.

What really works, at least upon first viewing, is the expectations one has upon seeing Bela Legosi... I mean, he's the most infamous vampire, so there's gotta be something rotten about him, right? The film trades off this uncertainty for a lot of its run time, even as he tells his WWI horror story and heading back to Hungary face the monster of his past... we should have sympathy, but it's freaking Bela Legosi, so there's always just a hint of sinister, even when his eyes are softened and kind (plus is name is Dr. Vitus Werdergast, which is a red-flag name all over). Their time together in the cabin is deliciously awkward in a way we haven't seen in any other Universal Horror thus far, a real truthful moment of strangers pretending to be okay being around each other. At one point the lovebirds are sleeping, and Werdergast strokes Joan's hair, only to see Peter is awake, and the popped-eyes Manners throws at him are epic. He relates a story of the loss of his wife and child, which should further our sympathy, but this man is a total wild card.

The train arrives at station and it's just pissing rain and they all get into a wonderful-looking 1930's bus which has cute little roll-down flaps for doors to keep the rain out. The driver, somewhat gleefully, tells of the horrible history of the area from the War, only to hit a messy patch of road and they roll off the side of a cliff. The driver is killed, Joan is injured. They set off on foot and wind up at Werdergast's destination, the home of architect Hjalmar Poelzig. 

The house is a 30's modernist masterpiece on top of a hill (of death, and, apparently, a old munitions bunker) and the interiors are all clean and curvy with so many modern touches. I wanted this house to be so 30's futuristic, but I guess the set designers broke for lunch early and didn't get that far. It also could very well have been a very modern death trap of secret doors and panels and what not... alas.

The mood between Werdergast and Poelzig is wonderful. Full of animosity and tension, but also tremendous familiarity. The big surprise to me was to see that Karloff, known so famously as the giant Frankenstein monster, is actually a smaller man than Legosi, and later when Legosi has him on a torture rack and rips his top off we see Karloff is extremely lithe, not even close to the giant he can transform himself into.

Following this initial sequence in Poelzig's home, the film flounders as it tries to figure out what its angle is. To this point, the setting has been built extremely effectively and the possibility of danger looms. During the night in this home, there are some weird things, like Joan's sleepwalking that are never explained, and Werdergast's dramatic revulsion to a passing black cat (to the point that he grabs a knife and dead-aims it at the cat, killing it, to which no one really bats an eye) are ham-fisted set-ups that go nowhere. 

It's clear these men want to kill each other, and that Peter and Joan are sort of trapped in between, but their game of cat-and-mouse (where you're never quite sure who is the cat and who is the mouse) never really takes off with any stakes or tension. Poelzig shows Werdergast his trophy room of dead and preserved women in his bunker, which includes Poelzig's wife. It's pretty creepy, but not used effectively enough. LIkewise, we find out that Poelzig has since married Werdergast's daughter and the stakes it should raise also never come to fruition. 

In the end it turns out Poelzig is a Satanist and he's going to hold a sacrificial ceremony, with Joan as the sacrifice, but things don't go his - or really anyone's - way. It all seems like it's escalating in theory, but the stakes never actually rise. 

The film features an almost continuous score, full of classical music excerpts, many of which are more famous from other films, and many of which do feel sort of disconnected from the scene they're playing over, and I'm undecided whether I like this, or the dead space of no score as with the earlier Universal Horrors.

This is perhaps one of the least campy of the Universal Horror offerings (that I've seen...) and it does touch upon traumas experienced in World War I, which seems a rarity in film.

Tisit horror?
You know, it kinda is.

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The Raven is closer to what I was hoping The Black Cat would be... a deranged man invites guests over to his house only to subject them to his many Poe-inspired instruments of torture. It just takes a long, circuitous route to getting to what is one of the more popular contemporary horror genre structures.

Bela Legosi plays the mad Doctor Vollin who thinks himself a god, like Alec Baldwin in Malice (anyone else dropping Malice references in 2022? Ok, how about Dr. Christopher Duntsch from Dr. Death?) but really is just a murderous Poe fanboy with too much money.

The party is nearly a Ruben Östlund-like satire of rich people, and if would have been far more delightful had the intention been for Dr. Vollin to be just fucking with the upper crust, rather than, as is here, just kind of opportunity for his own nerdy bloodlust to present itself.

The Karloff stuff, a lowly street thug looking for a Face Off situation to escape prison, only for Vollin to disfigure him then blackmail him into manservantry - seems really shoehorned in, though, as good a performance as Karloff gives with that terrible wonky-eye makeup he's sporting (the prosthetic eye stretches when he over enunciates).

Oh, also, there's a theatrical interpretive dance (before a sold out crowd) set to a reading of Poe's the Raven in this, which is probably the most batshit insane part of the film.

Horror, maybe?
I think it's too campy to be horror. Perhaps if there were more murder.  But it's pretty fun.

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Humm.

On the one hand, The Wolf Man is quite a likeable production, with Lon Chaney Jr. spraying his Danny Huston-of-the-40's vibes all over the joint. But on the other hand, it's got red flags all over the play. Certainly a production of its time. 

Larry fucks around with his father's telescope, spying on a pretty girl in town through her bedroom window. He then approaches her at her place of work and uses his knowledge of the interior of her bedroom to try and woo her. Red flag! She says no, a number of times, and yet he persists. Red flag! He also, apparently, is the heir to the estate that pretty much runs the town and he can exude a lot of influence over anyone there (he doesn't, but he could...to his credit, I guess, he tries to hide the fact. Yellow flag). A large contingent of this film's plot revolves around "gypsies" (Red flags a flyin'). Larry takes Gwen on a non-date to the ... encampment in the woods to have fortunes read (Gwen, who's already engaged, agrees to go on the "date" (no flags, fair play) but brings along her friend Jenny, which I think was intended as both escort and perhaps a set-up. Jenny gets her fortune read by Bela Legosi who discovers she's his next victim, and promptly proceeds to victimize her. Red flag (if only for the dire lack of tension around all this). Jenny gets mauled by a wolf-man, Larry steps in to help and beats the living shit right out of the beast with his very distinctive silver-wolf-handled cane, but not before Jenny succumbs and Larry is bit himself. A wounded Larry is escorted home by Gwen and the Romani woman whose wolfmanson (that's a band name) he just killed, and the police go out into the woods to find both Jenny's mauled body and Bela's caved in skull, as well as the murder weapon, the aforementioned cane. The police the next morning confront Larry, suspicious that he committed murder in beating Bela to death (which he did) and that it was not a wolf, like Larry keeps saying (which is also true). They leave the murder weapon behind and Larry proceeds to carry said murder weapon around EVERYWHERE HE GOES! Everyone knows what it is Larry, and you're just throwing it in their faces, constantly. The rich guy, not only getting away with murder, but also just proudly twirling his preferred weapon of assault around all over town. Read the room, Larry, all of them! RED FLAG, Larry.

Anyway, Larry's a werewolf. He attacks and kills a few people. He gets hunted, and despite having killed her son, the Romani woman still helps him out more than once. But, he's too much of a wild beast and he gets put down in the end... or does he?

Am I the only one who thought Chaney and Claude Rains seemed much more like contemporaries than father-son? Only 17 years between them, so, still sorta plausible I guess?

Offensively enjoyable!

But can it be... is it... horror...!?
Close...very close

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The gill-man from The Creature of the Black Lagoon is arguably Universal's best-looking monster. The suit is an amazing piece of pre-Star Wars creature design, an elaborate, detailed suit that moves incredibly well, works practicably under water, and doesn't look like just a guy in a suit on camera.

It's all too bad then that the actual movie is so boring.  At 80 minutes, you feel every minute ticking past.  

It's a small production with a cast of a half-dozen or so, mainly set in said Amazonian Black Lagoon, where a group of scientists argue about whether to kill or capture the creature, or just leave it alone, while the creature picks off all the unimportant characters one by one.  But the "important" characters have no personality, and you don't care a lick about them or their personal objectives.

There's a lot of solid underwater photography, but underwater photography just isn't as spectacular in black-and-white.  There's also a LOT of scenes of the gill-man's arm and hand emerging from the water onto shore, or the boat, or through the porthole, with the same damn horn sting over, and over and over again.  There's also a lot of shrieking from the one female character whose sole purpose is to look pretty and shriek. 

It's just schlock, but not even enjoyable schlock.  All the money shots of gill-man aren't enough to keep this one from sinking.

But is it horror?
It tries to be.

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What I hadn't realized about Universal Horror is how tremendously short the films are.  With the exception of Spanish Dracula, they average around 70 minutes.  I also hadn't realized how uniformly thin the UH are on characterization, there's no stand out characters in any of these film beyond the main creature or villain, and even then it's less personality than it is just visualization or traits.  There's not even good mythology building in these films, as the writers don't really seem to have much sense of where these creatures or villains originate, what their power sets are, or what motivates them (except, in some cases, the very generic "madness").

The Disney+ original Marvel "Special" Werewolf By Night is fully inspired by Universal's Horror films of the past, and director/composer Michael Giacchino seems to just relish the opportunity to play in this terrain.  

The special, like classic UH, contains a small cast, limited (but elaborate) sets, and isn't terribly interested in developing characters so much as plowing through its story.  And yet, it can't help but do that Marvel thing of building mythology, creating a few attractive characters portrayed by charismatic actors, and of course using modern tools at its disposal to elevate the visual aspects of the story.

It starts with a gathering, a wake perhaps, of Ulysses Bloodstone, a fabled monster hunter.  A collective of other monster hunters assemble, with the promise of receiving Bloodstone's magic amulet should they win a competition.  The competition involves hunting a special creature released into Bloodstone's maze-like estate, and each other.  In the mix is Jack Russell -- posing as a more prestigious hunter, but actually there to rescue the creature, his friend Ted, the Man-Thing -- and Elsa Bloodstone, the estranged daughter who rejects her father's way, but no less wants his amulet as her birthright. 

Were this a feature-length film, we would have gotten biographies on each of the hunters, spent a lot more time setting up their individual characters and personalities, only to watch them die in so many different ways.  But it's better off this way.  We don't need to know more about them, and everything we really need is here in its 50-ish minutes.

Unlike Universal Horrors, this special is full of action, violence, and blood, things UH tended to shy away from.  It's also bloodier and more aggressive in its violence than Marvel typically is, but it's tempered by the shadows-heavy black-and-white (unfortunately digitally converted, rather than shot in) and the melodramatic tone it takes, doubled down by Giacchino's playful score (another thing unlike UH is the lack of repetitiveness in the soundtrack) and his playful use of light, shadow, colour (and lack thereof) and composition in his first directorial effort.

Gael Garcia Bernal as Jack, Laura Donnelly as Elsa, and Harriet Sansom Harris as the Widow Bloodstone all put in terrific performances that carry the film with ease, and I hope to see more of (those who survive). I enjoyed this tremendously...as a Marvel production, as a Universal Horror pastiche, and as its own thing which really does both stand out and exist independently from the MCU as we know it.

 [toastypost - we agree]

Be it horror?
It's more horror than any of the old Universal Horror, but still not quite straight up horror.

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Ranking:

1. The Invisible Man
2. The Black Cat
3. Frankenstein
4. Dracula (Spanish)
5. The Bride of Frankenstein
6. The Raven
7. The Wolfman
8. Dracula
9. The Creature from the Black Lagoon
10. The Mummy