Hats off, shoes off, and feet up to Matthew "Bishop" Woodcock for alerting me to this... The youtube channel Fear: The Home of Horror has been granted permission to share a generous clutch of beautifully restored Universal horror classics until January the 23rd! First up is the original, quite boring Dracula, which I wrote a little about HERE before I learnt to love Lugosi. I ecommmend it though, particularly for Dwight Frye's extraordinary Renfield, which I still like to think Tolkein might have seen before inventing Gollum.
Next on Fear's playlist is, surprisingly, not Frankenstein, but The Mummy, a film I remember being quite sexy. Edward Van Sloane is back, as is "The Dying Swan". The plot – in which is an undead snack courts the spitting image of an old flame – is now a firmly established vampire trope, Karloff's never looked more gorgeous, and the opening five minutes are genuinely chilling. (Fun twitter fact: apparently there were once laods of mummies, but we ate them.)
Next up is director James Whale's original, phenomenal Frankenstein, which I raved about almost exactly a year ago HERE, and stand by every single superlative.
The first time I saw James Whale's The Invisible Man, in my late teens, I felt like I was watching a film from another dimension. I adored it. In my Bride of Frankenstein piece (see below), I write "The villain's anatagonists are hilarious. Their
performances are shrill and dull... but enormous and precise
and musically human. To Rains' mad scientist everyone else in the world
is an expendable idiot, but thanks to the strengths of its comic relief The Invisible Man is a celebration of us expendable idiots."
And those antagonists, Una O'Connor and E. E. Clive, return in The Bride of Frankenstein, thought by many to be one of the greatest horror films ever made. I think... well, I write about it HERE.
Both Claude Rains and Bela Lugosi then return for The Wolf Man, Universal's second attempt at a werewolf picture. I break down the plot in my Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman piece thus (spoilers ahead): 'When Univeral returned to the idea in 1941, they chose for their hero... Lon Chaney Junior as a
visiting American, and man of the people, "Larry Talbot", who sits on
the wrong bit of the armchair in a fancy castle, or in the front with his
chauffeur, like John McClane. Talbot tries it on with locally engaged Gwen
Conliffe, whom he takes to a "gypsy carnival". There he is bitten by a dog
he then beats to death, only to have it turn into Bela Lugosi. Bela's
mother, the gypsy Maleva, is the only one who can explain this mystery, the keeper of the lore - a potentially problematic depiction, unless one
considers how much the Catholic church would literally kill to be
considered this powerful an authority on the supernatural. Talbot is
finally despatched in his wolfman form (not that of a dog, like Bela –
never explained) when his skull is smashed in with a silver cane by his
father, and Maleva repeats a beautiful elegy over his body, previously spoken for her
own son: "The way you walk was thorny, through no fault of your own, but
as the
rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a
predestined end." She is played by Maria Ouspenskaya, who studied under
Stanislavsky, and every time she reaches "... to a predestined end" the
mixture of grief and relief broadcast will leave you feeling naked.'
Finally, fast-forwarding through all the bad times and the shoddier sequels, we come to the superb and hugely influential horror/adventure/comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstien, which I write about all over the place... 'Han Solo's screaming flight from the Stormtroopers, Bugs Bunny's toying with Elmer Fudd, The Goonies, Young Sherlock Holmes, nearly all of Spielberg's output, even Dangermouse and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
All shared that tone of "Horror Comedy" - so much so it seemed the
only tone going - and all may have learnt a thing or two from A and C Meet F.'
They're up for a week. Get stuck in. Enjoy!
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