When The Autumn Moon is Bright: Why Horror is Universal

The older I get the more I like Halloween. I like the parties and fancy dress clothes, carving pumpkins is definitely more fun than putting up the Christmas tree, and there's a delightfully knowing tackiness to the whole affair. And so in that spirit I have decided that this fortnight's post will be about the horror films that Universal Studios produced throughout the 1930s and 40s. While Warner Bros. were busy with gangster films like The Public Enemy and The Roaring Twenties, Universal Pictures was creating its signature genre with a spate of horror films based on nineteenth century gothic fiction and folklore, with early examples including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and The Man Who Laughs (1928). Influenced by the menacing shadows and distorted angles of the German Expressionist films of the silent era, the Universal horror films in turn influenced horror iconography throughout the twentieth century, and are largely responsible for our modern perceptions of the classic Halloween monsters. Universal Pictures is a major studio nowadays, but in the early days it was best known for producing B movies. They were made quickly and cheaply, often with the same roster of character actors and stars appearing in each new film. However, with talent on board like director James Whale or the intense Boris Karloff, many of Universal's B-horrors rose above their roots as exploitation pictures. The Universal horrors have become so iconic that we are familiar with their imagery without necessarily being familiar with the films, or even from where that imagery originates. When we think of the Frankenstein monster and of Dracula, we invariably think of the Universal versions of those monsters, and it is largely the Universal Frankenstein series that is to blame for the modern confusion between Dr. Frankenstein and his monstrous creation. This post is a beginner's guide to four of the most popular and enduring films of the Universal monster canon, and the three that I personally find the most fascinating and compelling. Incidentally, all of these little summaries contain SPOILERS.

The Wolfman

Lon Chaney Jr. is having a very bad hair day.

Lon Chaney Jr. plays Larry Talbot, the unfortunate man who is cursed with the sign of the werewolf, in George Waggner's 1941 film that draws inspiration from European myths and folklore about lycanthropy and supernatural animal transformations. Although the wolf make-up looks primitive by today's standards, and the scenes with Larry as a werewolf are only mildly violent, Chaney Jr. cultivates a wonderful sense of pathos and frustration as the tortured but decent Larry Talbot, and is supported by a wonderful cast that includes Claude Rains (who also starred as the eponymous Invisible Man) and Bela Lugosi, who most famously played the evil Count Dracula. The pacing of the film is superb, developing Larry as an everyman before finally condemning him to his fate as the wolfman. The relationship between Larry and his father, played by Rains, is well developed, with his father convinced that Larry is merely suffering from a schizophrenic delusion that he is a werewolf. The 'no-one believes the hero' horror cliche is played remarkably well here, and what is particularly great about it is there is genuine ambiguity over whether Larry really is a werewolf, or merely insane. When, as a wolf, Larry attacks his victims, it is usually by strangulation, or other decidedly non-wolfish means, and when he is killed (by his own father, no less) after a final rampage, his body 'returns' to normal before anyone has a chance to see him as a wolf. Even his father remains suspiciously quiet, allowing the villagers to believe that a real wolf attacked Larry before he had a chance to intervene. Although the sequels dispensed with the ambiguity by having Larry resurrected by moonlight, I think the alternative reading of the original Wolfman stands up, and makes for a much more interesting film.

Dracula

Strange, powerful and iconic: Lugosi as Dracula

Adapted from Bram Stoker's classic novel, the 1931 Dracula, directed by Tod Browning is part of the first wave of Universal sound pictures. Browning's film simplified Stoker's film by keeping the action in England and reducing the number of characters, but succeeds in adapting the eerie, uncanny atmosphere of its source. Compared to the other two films I'm discussing, Dracula feels a little wooden and stagey, with most of the scenes consisting of characters talking to each other in rooms. However, this is counterbalanced by Bela Lugosi's unnerving performance as the eponymous vampire, some incredible sets depicting Dracula's castle, and a great supporting cast including Dwight Frye as the lunatic Renfield. The film is loosely faithful the novel, but its brevity and less ambitious globe-trotting streamline Stoker's novel into a pacy and tense picture. Lugosi's Dracula is the iconic screen incarnation, with the widow's peak, east-European accent and sweeping cloak all a product of this film, and now indelibly associated with the character. Fascinatingly, there exists an alternative, Spanish-language version of Dracula that was filmed simultaneously on the same sets with a Spanish cast. In the days before dubbing was perfected, English-language films were sometimes re-filmed in different languages for the foreign market. The Spanish-language version of Dracula has become famous because, incredibly, it is superior to the original version. When they were filming, the Spanish crew would come in after the Americans, watch the day's footage and actively try to better it. As a result, the direction is far more fluid and less stage-bound, the sexuality of the female characters is less restrained, and it has a longer running time. Carlos Villarias plays Dracula in this version, and although good, he is no match for Lugosi. Despite the technical superiority of the Spanish version, Lugosi's Dracula will forever remain the iconic vampire of cinema and pop culture.

Frankenstein

It's alive! Boris Karloff gives life to Frankenstein's creation.

Perhaps the only other monster to rival Dracula in terms of recognisability is the Frankenstein monster, and again, it is the Universal studio interpretation of the character that has lodged itself firmly in the popular cultural zeitgeist. The flat top of the monster's head, exaggerated brow, and electrodes through his neck are all products of the Universal film, but are now as inseperable from the character as the widow's peak is from Dracula. Frankenstein, masterfully directed by James Whale and released the same year as Dracula, is often criticised for reducing the intelligent, articulate character of Mary Shelley's superlative novel to a lumbering, dumb brute, and for only loosely following the novel's events. But Boris Karloff, under layers of make-up, invests the monster with surprising and disarming pathos, sensitivity and subtlety. Besides, we all know that criticising adaptations on the basis of their faithfulness is a rocky position. Incidentally, that Frankenstein the novel has a tradition of adaptation, borrowing from and referring to previous works of literature, makes, I think, the film one of the most interesting of the Universal horror stable. In many ways, the film pays tribute to the experimental nature of the novel, playing with and reinterprating the characters and their relationships. The transgressive nature of the relationship between Henry Frankenstein and his creation is subtly hinted at in the first film, only to be expanded on in the sequel, Bride of Frankenstein.

Bride of Frankenstein

To a new world of gods and monsters: the eerie Bride.

Bride is one of the few sequels in the Universal canon that not only matches its predecessor, but actually betters it. The audacious opening positions the film directly as an adaptation, but is only slightly more faithful to the novel than the original film. It also introduces the new character of Dr. Pretrorius, who has created life through alchemy, in contrast to Frankenstein's scientific approach. Pretrorius convinces Frankenstein to create a bride for the monster, and while Pretrorius does not exist in the novel, his presences allows the film explores the conflict between the natural and the unnatural suggested in Shelley's work. More importantly, the strange, slightly predatory and very homoerotic relationship between Drs. Frankenstein and Pretorious is made all the more interesting and poignant given that Whale himself was both homosexual and working within the restrictive and homophobic strictures of the Hays Film Code. The final scene of the film, not present in the novel, is a brilliantly executed, and is by turns a tense and tender sequence, the impact of which is visible in Danny Boyle's recent, otherwise faithful, stage version of Shelley's novel which refers explicitly to Whale's film in a sequence that mirrors the final scene in Bride.

These summaries are by no means an exhaustive account of the horror films produced by Universal Pictures in the 1930s and 40s (I'm still working through the library myself), but I hope they give a sense not just of the series itself, but from where we draw much of the iconography of this season. The films that Universal produced during this period have given us imagery that remains popular and recognisable, but if we return to their source, also give us some incredibly rich, nuanced and, yes, frightening cinematic experiences.

I Preferred The Book: What Makes for a Good Adaptation?

Can an adaptation ever match the original?

Right, so on Sunday night I saw the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier and directed by William Wyler. I saw it at the Star and Shadow cinema in Byker as part of their Great British Romance season, which you should definitely check out here. The immediate murmurs amongst I and my companions was that it was very good, but lacked the intensity of the novel and watered down Heathcliff and Cathy's overall nastiness. However, I wonder if this necessarily makes the film a poor adaptation. Sure, the movie lacks the thematic complexity of the novel, but does that make it a bad film? Similarly, should we demand that adaptations remain doggedly faithful to their source material? Can we judge adaptations simply as standalone films in their own right, or should they always be evaluated against the shadow of their literary source material?


These are tricky questions, but in short, I think the answers are ‘no’, ‘of course not’, and ‘it depends’. Plenty of great films are relatively simple in theme, and the nature of the medium demands a narrative economy and efficiency not usually necessary in literature. David Lean’s epic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, for all its near four-hour running time, and grand, sweeping visuals, has a remarkably single-minded and linear plot. Because of their relative brevity, the stories that films tell usually need to be clear, short, and to the point. Even mainstream films that challenge linear storytelling, such as Pulp Fiction or Memento, or that baffle us with interminable plot twists, like Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep, still follow relatively basic stories. Literary novels have the advantage of being able to be as long as they need to be, as opposed to the lengths of feature films, which are determined by convention, the expectations of audiences, and the economic demands of cinemas. Where authors can fully explore their characters over dozens or even hundreds of pages of description and development, directors must point to character motivation and depth in just a few key scenes. The best directors do this throughout the entirety of a film, but even the longest films are restrictive in comparison to the resources of time available to authors. This inevitably creates conflict when long novels are re-formatted into the relative constraints of filmed story-telling. A simple story, however, is not necessarily a poor one. For the record, the novel Wuthering Heights is definitely better than the film. The novel, I think, has more cultural value as a vital component in the Victorian Gothic tradition, and as a moment in the history of women’s writing, than the film does as a very respectable Hollywood romance. But, crucially, the novel isn’t better because it has a more complicated story.

This leads me on to faithfulness. Almost without exception, how faithful a film is to its source material is the benchmark by which adaptations are uniformly judged. Given the rather glaring differences between film and literature, this doesn’t make a great deal of sense, yet people will crow at the slightest deviation from the original material. My favourite example of this is in the transposition of High Fidelity’s setting from London to Chicago, which elicits howls of derision from the novel’s (invariably British) admirers. Why this is such a betrayal of the novel’s central theme of commitment and neuroses continues to elude me. I want to know why audiences frequently demand that the exact same story be re-told in a different medium, when some of the least successful adaptations in cinema are the most faithful to their sources. 

The Golden Disappointment

Chris Weitz’s severely disappointing  2007 The Golden Compass, remains doggedly close to the plot of its source, the lauded children’s novel Northern Lights. Practically every scene in the book found its way to the screen, the special effects did justice to Pullman’s descriptions of daemons and warrior-Polar bears (yes, that is as awesome as it sounds. If you haven’t read Northern Lights and its sequels yet, crawl out from under your rock and get them read, they’re fucking class), and yet somehow, the heart and soul of the novel was utterly and completely absent from the film. There is an impatience to The Golden Compass’ narrative, hurriedly rushing towards each scene in a vain attempt to keep up with every plot point in the novel, instead of focussing on a few of its central themes and relationships. In contrast, Thomas Alfredson’s dark, disturbing and heart-breakingly excellent Let the Right One In excises not one, but two very substantial sub-plots from its source, allowing the film to focus squarely on the central romance between Eli and Oskar. In contrast to the novel, the film is intentionally ambiguous about the origins and motivations of two of its characters, which further complicates the future of a third, and all because it tells us less, not more, of the story. This is an example of an adaptation bettering its original through narrative economy. Where The Golden Compass simply tries to retell the same story that Philip Pullman already had, Let the Right One takes the novel as a starting point to tell its own story. There are numerous examples of this approach to adaptation. Ghost World does a fine job of taking a very minor character from the graphic novel and uses him as the basis for an entirely new story. Furthermore, Dune, whilst clearly an unmitigated failure, fails as a bad film and not as a bad adaptation; no one could accuse David Lynch of a lack of original vision.

So should we judge films based on other works as standalone movies or as adaptations? As with the above example, it’s certainly difficult not to view the American remake Let Me In as a poor man’s (or idiot’s) Let the Right One In. Moreover, it’s impossible not to watch film adaptations of Hamlet as part of a tradition of adaptation, rather than a singular work in its own right. These, however, I believe are the exceptions that prove the rule. The film Wuthering Heights does not reflect either the thematic complexity of the novel, and it does not explore the historical and social context in which the novel was written, but nor should we expect it to. We watch, for example, James Whale’s 1931 version of Frankenstein as part of a series of horror pictures that Universal Studios produced in the 1930s and 40s, and so should we watch Wuthering Heights not as an adaptation of a gothic Victorian novel, but as an example of Golden Age Hollywood romance. It is only on their own terms, and in their own contexts, that adaptations can be very successful, important and beautiful films.

Organise! The Story of One Man's Obsessive Journey through Film

The organisation of one's media collection of choice is a tricky business, particularly for the obsessive individual. After one's film collection reaches a certain size, the organisation of DVDs (or Blu-rays) seems necessary in order to keep track of all the delightful goodies that have accumulated over the years. This also applies to a music collection, an obsession no better commented on than in Stephen Frears' High Fidelity (currently occupying space number 213 on my DVD shelf), in which Rob, the owner of a record store, rearranges his music collection in autobiographical order as a way of recovering from a nasty break up. I can personally recommend re-ordering your stuff in this way as a glorious tonic for all sorts of crises. Curiously, I have never encountered anyone who organises their book collection as obsessively as Rob does with his records, or I do with my films. Perhaps it has something to do with the relative newness of the medium of film, or the primacy of film and pop music over literature as the dominant cultural outputs in modern society.

As High Fidelity's Rob would certainly attest, at one point or another the obvious and frankly amateurish alphabetical method of DVD organisation will simply no longer cut the mustard for the obsessive collector, and a more obscure method of organisation must be adopted. For example, one associate of mine  asserts that organising films by studio is the way to go. Certainly, not only is it aesthetically pleasing to see all the little 'Warner Bros.' and '20th Century Fox' logos all lined up together, but also, you get a sense of the kinds of films that those studios produce. For the film obsessive, this is a fine way to organise your movies. However, it is not quite sufficient. Nor is organising by director, actor, or other single creative entity, as the titular alphabetic pandemonium ensuing from placing Raising Arizona (written and directed by the Coen brothers) before The Birds (directed by Alfred Hitchcock), is simply not an acceptable aesthetic proposition. Even worse, the logical conclusion of such a filing system would mean splitting up film series that were not always made by the same people, for example, Alien (directed by Ridley Scott) and Aliens, (directed by James Cameron) or Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner) and Superman II (Richard Lester). No, no, no, this aesthetic violence will not stand.

My solution, therefore, is to return to the classic alphabetical system (by title), but cross-referenced by director, cross-referenced by franchise, cross-referenced by studio, and if I'm feeling particularly sexy, cross-referenced by producer. Or, to put it less like a madman, my DVDs are allowed to sit in eye-pleasing alphabetical order but only on the strict condition that they take into account the main creative force or forces behind the film. No, wait, that still sounds mad. Right, listen: we start with letter 'A', so The African Queen might come first. But then we look at the director, which in this case is John Huston, so he gets to have his films The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre next. They still nestle happily under 'A', like disc-shaped cuckoos fooling their surrogate mother alphabet, whilst simultaneously satisfying their own urge to cluster with their directorial kin. So now we've put Huston together, we can move on to the next film in alphabetical order, let's say Alien. This is followed by Aliens, even though they were made by different directors, because splitting up a franchise would be fucking mental. When the franchise is complete, then, and only then, do we return to the director, so we now get Blade Runner (Scott), and then The Terminator (Cameron). Are you following me? Excellent, then I'll continue.

Usually, a director is the main creative force behind a film, directing, as you might expect, most of the major decisions that are made during the film-making process. However, sometimes other entities, like writers, producers or even studios are as, if not more important. A good example of this would be the Disney studio. Films made by Disney are one of the most recognisable, and iconic, types of movie in the world, transcending the usual distinctions of genre, director or actor to become, simply a 'Disney Film'. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single director or writer from any of the myriad Disney films I've seen, but we all have a clear understanding of what a Disney film is. In my catalogue de films triomphante, it makes far more sense to group Disney films together and more or less disregard their directors. This leads to other, lovely little crossroads where creative auteurship is not so clean-cut, like the spate of gangster films that Warner Bros. produced in the 1930s, or the classic Universal horror pictures such as Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, and Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff and directed by the legendary James Whale. These groups are fascinating (no honestly, they really are) because, while they belong to the horror and gangster canons that Universal and Warner Bros. studios fostered, they also belong to the separate, but contiguous, canons of their directors, writers and stars, not to mention the stylistic canons of their historical periods. It's good to be a bit obsessive about how you organise your movies (and music and books, for that matter) because when you are all these little connections are forced to surface. They pull at each other and fight for dominance. They all demand attention like two interminable, simultaneous itches, and it's essentially impossible to satisfy the demands of each. What is particularly fascinating about films is that the creative process is such a collaborative effort, perhaps more so than in any other artistic medium. Organising your films properly is a way of revealing that lovely big, aesthetically pleasing, cacophony of order. The process exhumes the collaborative, thematic and historical links that tie films together in a great big, interconnected spiderweb of cinema. Plus, it's an evening, ain't it?