THERE ARE SUCH THINGS
AS UNIVERSAL RELAUNCHES THE MONSTERVERSE, ALAN BARNES REVISITS THE TOMB-DEFYING MAGIC OF THE ORIGINAL MOVIES
Famously, Universal Pictures’ 1931 Frankenstein began with “just a word of friendly warning” from the actor Edward van Sloan, stepping out from behind a heavy theatre curtain in full dress suit to address the audience directly. “We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein… I think it will thrill you. It may even shock you. It might even…” – There followed the ghost of a pause – “… horrify you. So if any of you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now’s your chance to…” He trailed off – then concluded, mockingly: “Well, we’ve warned you!”
What’s often overlooked is that van Sloan’s Frankenstein prologue followed on from the epilogue he’d spoken at the end of the company’s Dracula, released earlier that year – an epilogue cut from re-release prints (and now thought lost). “Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen!” he’d said, staying the audience in their seats with “a word of reassurance. When you get home tonight and the lights have been turned out and you are afraid to look behind the curtains – and you dread to see a face appear at the window – why, just pull yourself together and remember that after all, there are such things as vampires…!”
There are such things. Imagine the reaction. Just imagine.
So that Frankenstein prologue wasn’t so friendly, after all; van Sloan had already established himself as a wildly unreliable narrator. What he was saying, in essence, was this: “If you thought the last one was bad… you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Or “you ain’t heard nothin’ yet”, perhaps – in the words that had caused a sensation just four years earlier, when uttered by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer; five simple words that entombed the silent film forever. Because something else often overlooked in discussions of Dracula and Frankenstein, the two films that breathed life into the so-called Universal Monsters sequence, is simply this: they had sound. Frankenstein begins with the tolling of a funeral bell, the mumbled liturgy of a priest, the keening of a widow and soil shovelled onto a wooden coffin; it reaches an early crescendo amid a howling thunderstorm, when Frankenstein’s inert Monster is chain-hauled through the skylight of the mad scientist’s lab while electrical generators bzzz! and fzzz! all around – overloading not just the scientist’s equipment, but the audience’s senses, too.
Likewise Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula, answering the howling of wolves outside his castle with that much-parodied line about the music of the children of the night. Lugosi’s heavily accented performance may seem risibly
theatrical now, but no-one had heard anything quite like it in a cinema before. Who now doesn’t read Stoker’s novel without Lugosi’s ghost enunciating the Count’s every utterance? Similarly, Mary Shelley never described a Frankenstein Monster with a flat-topped, stitched-up head, let alone a bolt through its neck – that all came from Jack Pierce’s make-up for Boris Karloff.
Universal didn’t merely remake mythologies; they invented new ones, too. The mad scientist’s hunchbacked assistant, for example: that’s Fritz (Dwight Frye) in the original
Frankenstein, then treacherous, broken-necked Ygor (Lugosi) in second sequel Son Of
Frankenstein (1939). There was no classic source for The Mummy (1932), in which Karloff played the bandaged cadaver of an ancient Egyptian priest; almost all of it came from the imagination of screenwriter John L Balderston, a journalist who’d reported on the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb ten years earlier. Likewise, Curt Siodmak’s screenplay for
The Wolf Man (1941) formalised the rules of “Werewolfism” – ever after a condition communicated by bites or scratches, resolved by the application of silver bullets.
BACK FROM THE DEAD
More significantly, werewolfism was a curse bestowed on an ordinary Joe named Larry Talbot – played by Lon Chaney Jr, his face the picture of “lugubrious”. Like Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, Chaney’s Wolf Man is a one-man walking tragedy. In the sequel,
Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943), Talbot is accidentally resurrected, but wants only to die – and that’s why he goes in search of notes supposedly left by the Monster’s creator, in the hope that they might help him end his life. His was a well-trodden path: Bride Of
Frankenstein (1935) had ended with the friendless, loveless Monster concluding that “We belong dead”. Their tragedy, of course, is that they’re condemned to return – most often in another deliriously unlikely team-up. Because if there’s one thing that the Universal Monsters have in common – be they the Frankenstein Monster or hunchbacked Ygor, the Mummies Imhotep and Kharis, or Wolf Man Talbot, Invisible Man Griffin or the Gill-Man (aka the Creature from the Black Lagoon) – it’s this: that they are the heroes, not the bloodless goodies hounding them with pitchforks or silver bullets or what-have-you. It wasn’t the goodies who came back again and again, after all. Belonging dead, but cursed to come back; that’s the essence of the Universal Monster. There are such things.