ALL KINDS OF MONSTERS
Hollywood has long loved scary movies
October has long been fright month — it’s just never been this scary. To take your mind off the plague, a walking-dead economy and real-life loonies, consider watching oldschool scary movies, or at least read about them.
Classic movie monsters are so much simpler than real-life. Their motives are obvious; the dangers easy to understand. And unlike our current problems, they’re easily stopped by a silver bullet or a stake. Sometimes, the heroine even lives to see a sequel.
David J. Skal’s book “Fright Favorites” offers a demon for each day of October, saluting vampires, werewolves and other creatures that go bump in the night.
It also comes with some pop culture history, and the reminder that sometimes, modern horror films have even scarier things hiding in their shadows.
The first fright film offered up for consideration is “Nosferatu,” a German silent movie from 1922. Directed by F.W. Murnau, it presented the skeletal Max Schreck as a thirsty nobleman in dire need of fresh blood. He’s only defeated when a female victim tricks him into spending the night. He dissolves with the dawn.
The film had plenty of onscreen shocks but also indulged in its own literary grave-robbing. The basic plot was stolen from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Stoker’s widow won a lawsuit, and a judge ordered the film destroyed. Only creaky, pirated prints kept it from joining the undead.
Schreck was scary, but he wasn’t sexy. The idea of the seductive bloodsucker began with 1931’s “Dracula,” billed as “the story of the strangest passion the world has ever known!” Strange indeed since stodgy, middle-aged Bela
Lugosi played the supposedly irresistible vampire.
Still, the movie connected with audiences, beginning a modern Hollywood horror cycle that’s still going. It also type-casted Lugosi forever. When he died in 1956, ill and largely forgotten, his family requested he be buried in his Dracula cape.
In 1958, the British added even more sex to vampire movies, and a good dose of gore.
“Uncouth, uneducated, gusting and vulgar,” was disthe
British Board of Film Censors’ verdict on “Horror of Dracula.” The villain’s midnight manners particularly offended them. “Why should vampires be messier feeders than anyone else?” they asked.
But this Dracula — played by tall, dark, and toothsome Christopher Lee — put the lust back in bloodlust, playing the count as a red-fanged Romeo. Lugosi’s portrayal remained iconic but the character, and every actor who played p him, was now erotic too.
The problems “Horror of Dracula” D faced with the censors weren’t w new. Horror films always faced f scrutiny. In the 1931 movie i “Frankenstein,” authorities ordered o one line to be removed: “Now I know what it feels like to be God.” They also cut a scene where the monster accidentally drowns a little girl. It took decades for scenes to be restored.
Other films were seriously diluted. When Hollywood made its first lycanthrope film, “The Werewolf of London,” in 1935, censors warned producers to stay away from “horrifying details,” including “the transvection from man to wolf.” The result? Actor Henry Hull sprouted hair offscreen and ended up looking like a crankier-than-average house cat.
Smart filmmakers, however, used censorship and low budgets to their advantage. Censors won’t let us show our monsters? Fine, you will hear them. We can’t afford decent special effects? We’ll stage everything in the shadows and let your imagination do the rest.
That was the philosophy of producer Val Lewton who spent the 1940s turning out a line of smart, spooky thrillers, from “Cat People” to “Bedlam.”
“We tossed away the horror formula right from the start,” Lewton explained later. “No mask-like faces hardly human, with gnashing teeth and hair standing on end.” Instead he advised other filmmakers, “take a sweet love story, or a story of sexual antagonisms, about people like the rest of us, not freaks. Cut your horror in here and there, by suggestion, and you’ve got something.”
If Lewton’s monster movies could be for truly mature audiences, then maybe the monsters themselves could be metaphors? As the worried 1950s dawned, scary movies offered several levels of fear.
Was the peril in “I Married a Monster From Outer Space” self-explanatory, or did that creepy spouse stand for all deceiving men? Had “Godzilla”
just been awakened by an atom bomb, or was he the nuclear age itself?
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” about giant peapods stealing their victims’ identities, had its share of scares — and its share of interpretations. Was it playing to our McCarthy-era fear of hidden subversives? Or our fear of McCarthy himself, and his thought police?
Whichever it was, the film offered no escape. Director Don Siegel said the story reflected his cynicism.
“The majority of people, unfortunately, are pods, existing without any intellectual pretensions and incapable of love,” he said. When the studio insisted, he shot a new and more hopeful ending for the film. But in Siegel’s view, there was no hope and no end.
As America grew more liberated in the 1960s, so did its horror films. When the ratings system replaced censorship in 1968, they became bloodier too. If British censors thought “Horror of Dracula” was a bloody mess, imagine what they would have thought of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
The new freedoms ushered in a modern approach and messages in their monsters. You could watch “Rosemary’s Baby” and see a film about modern-day Satanists. Or you could look harder and see a deeper story about marriage and misogyny.
“Rosemary’s reproductive choices are all being made for her, and mostly by men,” Skal observed. “As is the usual case with horror films, a devilish disguise allows us to process our worst apprehensions without having to look at them too directly.”
Which is scarier, a devil-worshiping cult or an entrenched patriarchy? That depended on the audience, but new horror movies gave them choices.
Was “Night of the Living Dead” about flesh-eating ghouls or race in America? Were “Halloween” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” terrifying slasher films or reflections of the nation’s recent anxieties over suburban crime, latchkey kids and stranger danger?
1973’s “The Exorcist” terrified moviegoers. Skal noted its “stark portrayals of good versus evil, routine depictions of demons and hell, and demonstrations of death and resurrection may fill an unmet craving for religious experience in an increasingly despiritualized world.”
The layered scares continue. On one level, Jordan Peele’s “Us” was a new kind of “Body Snatchers,” with a smiling Dr. Frankenstein messing with Black people’s brains — literally. On another level, the 2017 film was a bleak satire about fake liberals, cultural appropriation and people of color facing a million micro-aggressions every day.
Time magazine pronounced it “the movie we need today.” “Us” ended up turning its $4.5 million budget into $255.5 million in revenues, and garnered four Oscar nominations, winning Peele an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
The simple horror movie, once censored and censured, has come a long way in a century.
It still provides a fantastic escape from the terrors we face in real life, and the assurance that if we just had Dr. Van Helsing by our side, we could prevail. But there’s another lesson too now: Not every monster is on screen.
Some are in the audience.