Ghoul fest

Universal's sublime nightmares

by Steve Vineberg

UNIVERSAL HORROR! At the Brattle, January 1 through 7.

The series of horror pictures Universal Studios turned out in the '30s is so distinctive that it defines its own subgenre. Visually stunning, with marvelous production design and effects wrapped up like Christmas presents in that trademark Universal silvery veneer, they balance the fatuous and the sublime in a way no other studio's gothics, either in Hollywood or in England, have ever managed to do with such consistency. In the 10 movies the Brattle has imported -- in spanking new 35mm prints -- for its New Year's tribute, the same names crop up over and over. Four (Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, and Bride of Frankenstein) are the work of Universal's most talented and playful horror director, James Whale. Two (Dracula and Murders in the Rue Morgue) are shot by Karl Freund, the great German expressionist cinematographer who emigrated to Hollywood in the early talkie period. And one (The Mummy) Freund directed himself. On all of the Whales except The Bride of Frankenstein, Arthur Edeson is director of photography. Garrett Fort wrote or collaborated on several of the screenplays, and John Balderston is often listed among the writing credits. Moreover, Dracula is based on the extraordinarily popular stage play that Balderston and Hamilton Deane fashioned from the Bram Stoker novel.

And of course you see many of the same actors in picture after picture. Here's Edward Van Sloan, always cast as some sage professor of the occult (he's Van Helsing in both Dracula and Dracula's Daughter), rolling his r's and affecting some untraceable accent that sounds like a cross between a Scottish brogue and a Swedish lilt. And here's the utterly preposterous Dwight Frye, his eyes mad with bloodlust, whether he's racing out to kill some hapless passerby (in Bride of Frankenstein) so his master can have a fresh heart for his unholy experiments or just hunting for cockroaches and spiders to satisfy his craving (in Dracula). E.E. Clive often plays a police sergeant (if the setting is England) or a burgomaster (if it's central Europe), though his line readings don't vary from picture to picture.

These sturdy types and a crew of less memorable actors with too much elocutionary training slathered like margarine over thin, white-bread personalities provide the requisite support for the stars -- generally Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff.

Lugosi takes the lead in Dracula and Murders in the Rue Morgue and has a cameo, behind a mustache and a gold earring, as a gypsy fortune teller who turns out to be a werewolf in The Wolf Man. (Lugosi's career was clearly on the downswing by the time it was released, in 1940.) Karloff is featured in the two Frankenstein movies, of course, and he's the Egyptian high priest who emerges from his sarcophagus in the British Museum in The Mummy and -- almost unrecognizable -- the mute manservant Morgan, driven to insanity by alcohol, in Whale's hilarious The Old Dark House. The two stars get a single duet: 1934's The Black Cat, set in Hungary, where Lugosi's accent makes sense, though no one else's does. In this fascinating piece of silliness, Lugosi is Dr. Vitus Werdegast, returned from 15 years in prison hell to get revenge on Karloff's Hjalmar Poelzig, whose treachery sent him there. In the interim, Hjalmar (someone must have been reading Ibsen) has become a satanist sacrificing virgins in black sabbaths and -- as a kind of hobby -- injecting beautiful young women with embalming fluid and turning them into living statues.

Lugosi is by most standards a terrible actor. But everything he does sticks with you, especially the crippled musicality of his sinister line readings, which are peculiarly chopped up with pauses at the least likely places and which seem to be enslaved to that glutinous accent. He has a mesmeric gaze, and his face always seems to be frozen in one of a handful of expressions.

In Dracula, where he's most effective, his hair is lacquered, his ears are pointy (though not as proto-Vulcan as Karloff's in The Black Cat), and he has batwing lips. Tod Browning's movie has a much stronger reputation than it deserves: the pacing is lousy, and the ambiance of the English scenes is utterly unconvincing, in a way that it never is in James Whale's movies. (Whale, a British émigré, always made sure he got the feel of this fairy-tale England right. In casting his pictures, he tended to enlist the aid of several of his compatriots -- Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, and of course Karloff.) The Broadway revival of the Hamilton-Deane play in the late '70s, with Frank Langella in the title role, was in every way superior.

Yet Dracula is undeniably an essential horror picture of this era. In addition to Lugosi, Freund's cinematography and Charles Hall's production design make it worth looking at again. There are marvelous images -- the Count's ghostly horses pulling his coach through the misted darkness behind a bat, which skitters across the screen like the merest line drawing; horrid, fleshy creatures that look like a cross between cockroaches and armadillos crawling around the staircase of Dracula's Transylvanian castle; a high-angle shot of Dwight Frye's Renfield, glimpsed through an intricate network of spider webs; a trio of vampire women floating toward their victim, their gowns trailing behind them, like a Delvaux painting come to life. These early movie vamps have nothing like the cartoon energy of the ones Buffy the Vampire Slayer desiccates week after week. They really look like wraiths.

Karloff, by contrast with Lugosi, can act, though his range is severely limited. As the benighted monster in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, he's truly expressive. Everyone remembers the scene in the earlier film where he drops the little girl who befriends him into the lake because he associates her with the daisies she's taught him to toss onto the water, and then rushes away in horror when he realizes he's destroyed her. There's nothing quite like this episode, or like the one in the second film where he's entranced by the plaintive music emerging from the violin of the blind hermit (O.P. Heggie) who turns out to be his first -- and only -- friend. In Whale's hands, the scenes between the monster and the blind man become an unexpected blend of the romantic (pathos with a gothic tinge) and the comic. The recluse sends up a prayer of thanks to God for sending him a friend, and the monster responds to his tears with a tender clap on the shoulder; the hermit teaches him to drink wine, to smoke cigars, and to grunt the word for bread before he tears into it.

In Frankenstein, Karloff has druggy eyes in that square-shaped, squared-off skull. They flutter delicately when he moves in and out of consciousness. He walks at nearly a 45-degree angle, his head and torso tipped forward so it looks as if he's going to fall over. And he has enormous hands -- wonderful hands with long, sculpted fingers, like Rodin hands. He's an amazing camera subject, especially as the resurrected priest Imhotep in The Mummy, where his hands look as old as papyrus (when he first steps out of his coffin, he leaves a silvery handprint on a table) and where Zita Johann is the object of his centuries-old devotion -- having lost her in ancient Egypt, he emerges in the 20th century to find her modern counterpart. Johann is a far more exotic presence than the women of the post-silent era normally are, but the movie, made in 1932, has the sensibility of a silent picture anyway. The dumb dialogue just falls away, since it's in the service of a plot of such complicated idiocy that you simply stop trying to follow it and concentrate on the eerily beautiful images -- like one of Karloff, his papery face vivid in the flame of a candle as he repeats his beloved's name.

After the Whale movies, The Mummy is the best bet in the series, though I retain some affection for The Wolf Man, even if the match of strapping Lon Chaney Jr. and diminutive Claude Rains as son and father does look almost as silly as Chaney's werewolf outfit. Unlike his real-life father, Chaney had no gift for physical acting, so the shots of him loping through the woods after his prey don't have anything like the desired effect. But when he isn't weighed down with all that fur and make-up -- i.e., in the scenes where he's Larry Talbot, heir to an English castle estate, struggling with the dawning realization that under the full moon he becomes something violent and horrible -- Chaney can be quite touching, just as he was the year before as Lenny in Lewis Milestone's film of Of Mice and Men. And the story is certainly compelling -- one of the best of the horror fables. It isn't about the timelessness of evil (like Dracula) or about the scientist, maddened by his own audacity, who commits hubris when he tampers with the sacred act of creation (Frankenstein). In The Wolf Man, the hero is torn between his impulse to do good (in the daytime) and the irresistible pull of his evil alter ego (in the darkness) -- and in case you're slow to get the metaphor, Curt Siodmak's screenplay dutifully lays it out for you.

All of Whale's entries are worth the trip. The Invisible Man, his adaptation of an H.G. Wells novel, is the slightest of the four, but I love its fubsy Englishness, the tossed-off style of John Fulton's terrific special effects, and Claude Rains, who gives what is essentially a virtuoso radio performance as Jack Griffin, the title character. Frankenstein has its ridiculous side, and it trashes Mary Shelley's majestic novel, but it's affecting nonetheless, and when it's over you may not be able to get Karloff's anguished cries as the monster is consumed by fire out of your head. As for Bride of Frankenstein and The Old Dark House, they are unmitigated joys.

Bride of Frankenstein begins in Charles Hall's gorgeous notion of a Queen Anne drawing room, where a fire rages within, a thunderstorm without, and Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester, with penciled eyebrows like tiny half-moons over her bright eyes) relates the tale of what happened after the monster -- allegedly -- perished in that fire. What follows is fantasy and lunacy of the highest order, with Dr. Pretorius (the peerless Ernest Thesiger, with a wild nest of hair and his face scrunched up in a prissy sneer) blackmailing Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, repeating his role from the earlier movie) into constructing a mate for the still-hovering monster.

Thesiger also lends his wit to The Old Dark House, based on a diverting J.B. Priestly novel that Whale turned into the prize of all horror-movie burlesques. In this one, Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, and a cheerful Melvyn Douglas, fugitives from a dreadful rainstorm, take shelter with a family of fruitcakes in a fabulous old mansion where the firelit shadows dance crazily on the walls. Thesiger, Karloff, Eva Moore, Brember Wells, and Elspeth Dudgeon (in drag as a 102-year-old, and listed in the credits as "John Dudgeon") compete to see who can give the most flamboyantly entertaining performance. I'd declare it a tie between Thesiger and Eva Moore, who plays his sister, a Christian of the most vindictive hellfire-and-brimstone persuasion. These are unreasonably enjoyable movies -- and, by the way, Bride of Frankenstein is a treat for children, who will adore the scene where Elsa Lanchester reappears as the monster's bride with an electric current of white zigzagged through her steel-wool Nefertiti crown. In fact, I can't think of a better way to spend a holiday than deep in the silvery fog of Universal horror.