Chapter Five
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance.
—EDWARD THOMAS, “Roads” (1916)
“I give you, the Monster!”
Ernest Thesiger wrote a memoir in 1927. The book dwells far more on his experience as the child of a well-to-do family and his early life on the stage than on his experience of combat. He mostly wanted to entertain his readers with stories about his life in the theater, meeting the world-famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt (“queen of the pose and princess of the gesture”) just as he’d hoped to do since he was a boy, and generally giving a sprightly account of the Edwardian era, when an older version of England died forever. However, the future star of some of James Whale’s most significant horror films could not, despite some morbid attempts at levity, escape the effect the Great War had on his psyche, even in his writing.
When the war came, Thesiger attempted to join a Scottish Highlander regiment. In a sly suggestion of his later interest in what the era called “female impersonation” he wrote, “I thought a kilt would suit me.” He could not convince the recruiter with his feigned Scottish accent, and the officer sent him to another regimental headquarters, where he “came away a few hours later a private in His Majesty’s army.”1 He specifically tells the reader that he has no wish to describe the weeks that followed his arrival in France in November 1914. He notes little fighting at first, only “wading through seas of mud” and how “the rain never stopped.” A brief respite around Christmas had Thesiger the consummate actor convincing French matrons to cook his meals, for “tomorrow I go to the trenches and will be killed.” He repeated this day after day, calling it “the trump card I always produced when I couldn’t get my food cooked for me.”
Thesiger did find himself in the trenches by New Year’s Eve, only to discover that all the earthworks had flooded. His regiment had to build a new line in the bottomless mud, a common experience on the western front. A deserted if nearly shell-ruined barn offered a place to rest nearby. Waking up from what sounds like a comfortable night sleeping in straw after a day of dredging mud, Thesiger recalled that he had some Christmas candy, a gift from across the Channel. Sitting in the unusual quiet of the morning, he had just shared a piece with a companion when “we heard the noise like that of an approaching express train.” A shell crashed into the barn, splintering what remained of the erstwhile shelter. Yet another “ominous crashing sound” signaled another direct strike.
Thesiger remembers briefly wondering if he had, in fact, died. The moaning of his comrades brought him out of a semiconscious state, and he realized that he had somehow survived the bombardment. He also quickly discovered that he lay splattered in blood with his hand “swollen to the size of plum-puddings” and all his “fingers hanging at impossible angles.”
In his dazed state, he looked to his friend (whom he does not name in the memoir) and began to wonder why the man had left his boots. No soldier in the Great War ever abandoned his boots, even if fleeing for his life. A confused Thesiger attempted to pick them up with his broken hands now hanging limp. He took a closer look and realized that his friend’s boots were not empty at all: “In each boot a few inches of leg remained. That was all that was left of him with whom a few moments before I had been sharing chocolate.” He fled the scene. “I had seen enough—I made my way out of that charnel house,” leaving behind “the bodies of twelve of my friends.”2
Nearly two decades later, American audiences of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein watched Thesiger raise a glass in a charnel house to toast the empty sockets of a skull. “I give you, the Monster!”
Brutalized Bodies
The turn toward horror in continental European film, the arts, and the fiction of Britain and America emerged even as the consequences of the Great War continued to shamble across the landscape of the world. Fascism had already struggled, and won, against a liberal democratic version of modernity in significant parts of Europe by the 1930s and became a live option in the political culture of nations throughout the Western world. Unrelenting violence had been endemic in Europe since the alleged end of the war, but an even greater conflict loomed in the wake of fascism’s meteoric rise. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union had begun to take the measure of each other like fighters edging out of their corners for the first round.
By 1935–1936, Mussolini’s Italy had invaded and laid claim to Ethiopia despite weak protestations from the crumbling League of Nations. Mussolini then joined Hitler in providing war matériel for General Francisco Franco’s fascist forces seeking to overthrow Spain’s newly elected, left-leaning republic. Stalin, a few months late to the game, provided the forces of the republic with arms, while volunteers raised by Communist Parties around the world went to fight in Spain, most famously the “Abraham Lincoln” and the “George Washington” brigades from the United States.
The slaughter in Spain very quickly became some of the worst seen in continental Europe since the early 1920s. Hitler hoped to use the struggle as a testing ground for the Reich’s new Luftwaffe (air force). On April 26, 1937, the German Condor Legion under the command of Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, joined by a small number of Italian warplanes, thunderously broke the quiet over the town of Guernica, a Basque village in the province of Biscay. Richthofen wrote in his journal, four days after the bombing, that the attack resulted in the village’s “complete annihilation” while also insisting that most of the town had been away on holiday. In fact, it had been a market day, with most of the inhabitants at ground zero of the bombers’ attack. Hundreds of civilians died, the exact number likely never to be known. We do know, however, due to research by the historian Xabier Irujo, that the German air force commander Hermann Göring had planned the attack as a birthday present for the Führer. Logistics delayed the assault slightly, and Göring had to make a belated gift of the carnage.3
Pablo Picasso’s mural Guernica (1937) famously displayed the outrage, its frightening imagery of an obscured death’s head, suffering innocence, and suppurating wounds. Dora Maar photographed the progression of Picasso’s work and, in later conversations with her, art historian John Richardson realized that her photography—a craft about which Maar had already taught Picasso a great deal—contributed much to the confrontational rendering of the horror. Guernica’s ultra-matte palette gives the painting the spectral immediacy of one Maar’s photographs.4
The phrase “interwar period” makes it sound as if the world took a deep breath between 1918 and 1939. In truth, the Italian incursions into Africa, Japan’s invasion of China, and Hitler’s seizures and annexation of territory in central Europe are only part of the story. We have seen that between 1918 and 1924 civil wars and revolutions raged across the continent, including a little-known conflict in Finland that killed 1 percent of the entire population. The United States, flexing its muscles after almost two decades of seizing territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific and entering the Great War at a strategic moment, continued to intervene in Latin America. In fact, American forces began an occupation of Haiti that lasted from 1915 to 1934. The destruction of the old Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman Empires transformed their former territories into violent frontier regions. In the bloodletting that ensued, the distinction between combatants and civilian populations remained as meaningless as it had been during World War I.
How exactly did the Great War produce these conflicts? One answer, much debated among historians, goes by the evocative name of “the brutalization thesis.” In this understanding of what happened after 1918, the savagery of global murder left behind such severe psychic wounds that violence on a massive and heretofore unknown scale became part of the muscle memory of political and cultural life.
Although historians continue to argue whether or not such an interpretation explains all the political catastrophes of the years after 1918, artists, authors, and filmmakers took no time for debate and sought to brutalize audiences with images of death that made the world confront what it had done and what had happened to it. Sometimes these images came with implicit political content. Just as often, the art of horror offered no message but the dead body itself. The corpse became unruly, raged at its fate, hid inside doubles and mirrors, reanimated or rose again, and rampaged around a world suddenly more violent and deadly than it had ever been before.
Haunted Houses
Director Paul Leni refused to go to the dentist despite entreaties from friends and the head-splitting pain of his toothache. Eventually, he claimed the pain had subsided, and perhaps it had as the nerves in his gums became necrotic. He contracted sepsis and died at his Los Angeles home on September 2, 1929, at age forty-four.
The director had not come to America primarily because of his fear of Germany’s far right. Leni had been born in Stuttgart but had spent much of his career in and around Berlin, first as a student and artist of avant-garde painting, then as a set designer in the film industry. His macabre taste on display in Waxworks, and the younger Carl Laemmle’s belief in the profitability of such films, prompted Carl Laemmle Sr. to invite Leni to Hollywood and place him under contract with Universal Studios.
The two made an odd pair. Both were German, Laemmle coming to the United States long before the Great War. He opened a successful haberdashery in Chicago and then an even more successful theater in 1906. Although he loved movies, he also tended to think of them as consumer products rather than art, once famously saying that both Hollywood and Mr. Woolworth’s department stores had identical business plans. Had he ever talked with the scholars of the Frankfurt School, they would have found him bafflingly agreeable to their theories about American popular culture.
If films represented just another kind of big business, then the success of his Phantom of the Opera impressed the former retail salesman enormously. Laemmle constantly worried about a public backlash against horror films, but he knew, or at least his son and namesake convinced him, that Germany’s haunted screen had been churning out some of the most successful of these sorts of pictures—thus his invitation to Leni to come to America in 1927.
Experimental efforts like taking on Leni and creating the American horror film probably would not have happened without Carl Laemmle Jr., known to everyone affectionately simply as “Junior.” Stories abound about Junior’s playboy reputation, with an entire subgenre of anecdotes from screenwriters who found him easily distracted by phone calls with his bookies and girlfriends. His reputation aside, it’s unlikely that Universal could have had the success it did without Junior. The younger Laemmle encouraged his father to produce the international hit All Quiet on the Western Front.5
The prosperity of the United States certainly shocked Leni after what he had experienced in postwar Germany. He did not know, of course, that what looked like a muscular system of industrial production had the shakiest of foundations, with U.S. banks (as they do today) investing their customers’ funds in stocks likely to reap huge profits for captains of industry.
The year 1927 gave few hints that the house of cards would collapse a few months after Leni’s death. The studio he had come to work for had become something of a director’s dream since the elder Laemmle had purchased a ranch north of Los Angeles in 1913 that would become what he called, with little exaggeration, “Universal City.” The enormous back lots could draw on warehouses brimming with every conceivable film prop while filmmakers worked on editing in eight projection rooms. Many of the actors and camera crews actually lived at Universal, and Universal City had its own hospital, school, fire department, and police station. When Laemmle Sr. first invested in the studio, workers broke ground thirteen miles outside of downtown L.A. The grounds remained so rural that a working farm existed on the site. The tradition of giving tours began immediately: for five cents, the public got a walk around the back lot, a box chicken lunch, and the chance to buy produce from the farm.6
Leni’s first project for his new employer tapped a vein of horror that Hollywood simply had not explored in any meaningful way. The Cat and the Canary (1927) brought very continental terrors to American audiences in a film that marked the beginning of a revolutionary change in how the silver screen imagined haunted places. The film told a tale, soon to become a Hollywood standard, of an elderly spendthrift harassed by his relatives, all of whom gather at the estate like carrion birds after his death for the reading of the will. Frightening goings-on occur in a scenario that would replay itself in remakes of Leni’s original and in later classics like William Castle’s The House on Haunted Hill (1959) and 13 Ghosts (1960). These imitations of Leni’s idea themselves would receive remakes (in 1999 and 2001, respectively) that employed more contemporary technology without departing from the basic plot.
The Cat and the Canary departed in some ways from what had already become the silent era’s tradition of rationalizing the supernatural, a sort of Scooby-Doo approach to metaphysical phenomenon in which the ghost turns out to have been a greedy cousin after the heir’s fortune. Leni mixed and matched elements of this scenario. There is indeed an evil cousin pretending to be a deranged lunatic on the loose, but the possibility of a ghost, a spirit more than a bit vengeful, looms threateningly in the shadows.
Leni’s establishing shot shows what the title card calls “the grotesque mansion” of Cyrus West on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. This shot, one that the director returns to several times throughout the film, almost seems a joke tied into the origins of horror on the wasted landscape of Europe. The West house looks nothing like the Hudson Valley mansions built by the financiers of the Gilded Age. It’s Dracula’s castle and the looming tower from Nosferatu, teleported to America.
Shadows leak from every corner of Leni’s moody set, engulfing the rooms in nearly every scene. Even the sympathetic characters we hope will live through the ordeal cast malevolent shades wherever they walk, and Leni’s off-kilter camera angles make them appear even more menacing. The audience never gets their balance throughout the film, which moves at breakneck speed from the death of the patriarch to the gathering of the cousinage to the persistent threat of the house, in the form of madness, melancholy, and the possibility that, as the house’s caretaker persistently warns the guests, the living may not be the only inhabitants.
American audiences saw something definitively new in Leni’s work, and the cinematography of The Cat and the Canary remains genuinely disturbing even today. A long, steady shot down the length of a hallway features the curtained coverings of the old house billowing with unnatural life, while a white mass against the wall could be a chair with a dust cloth or a shrouded corpse. Leni superimposed images that created, for an American film of that era, startling spectral effects, including the ticking mechanism of a clock that shimmers over the group gathering for the reading of the will. Only in part because of the technically complex photography, it looks more like the participants are settling in for a séance than for a legal proceeding.
Inexplicably, some film historians and silent film fans see in The Cat and the Canary Hollywood’s tendency to mix scares and giggles in the 1920s. There are certainly some Rosencrantz and Guildenstern moments in the film, though that much can be said for most horror films from Frankenstein to Halloween. But The Cat and the Canary never laughs off the possibility of the supernatural or provides us with a full explanation of all that goes on in the West mansion. We never learn, for example, why the clock strikes midnight for the first time in twenty years when the reading of the will begins or why the glowering picture of Cyrus West falls of its own accord from the wall.
Ultimately, The Cat and the Canary has little to do with Harold Lloyd’s Haunted Spooks (1920) or Buster Keaton’s The Haunted House (1921), both the earlier films having some spectral laughs while making use of their headliner’s gift for physical humor. Leni’s film leaves open the possibility of some supernatural events hanging in the fetid air. He also confronted American audiences with monstrous twins born of the Great War: bodily disfigurement and mental breakdown. A “dangerous lunatic” has escaped a local asylum. Several times throughout the film, we see a curled, grasping claw reaching from secret panels and from behind beds, with one scene in which the abnormally distended hand reaches over the bed of female lead Annabelle in a sequence that will remind modern horror audiences of Freddy Krueger’s deadly hand in Nightmare on Elm Street. Some 1927 audiences would have remembered the shadowed claw of Nosferatu and his monstrous and misshapen, though uncomfortably human, form.
When at last we see the murderer’s disguise, it’s distinctly silly. One eye pops wide, oversized and seemingly lidless, and the teeth look like the tusks of a miniature boar. However unconvincing this might be today (and even in its silliness it’s a little unsettling given our contemporary obsession with clown horror), the age of the prosthetic limb would have been affected by it much more strongly.
Leni’s frightening evocation of ghosts and his at least partially indeterminate explanation for some of the events at the West’s mansion fit well into the era’s renewed interest in the paranormal and the possibility that the human body represented more than what the Great War had made it seem. Could the body perhaps be more than an empty puppet, easily shredded by Maxim guns?
But here the fear of the dead took an unlikely turn. The terror of the corpse as the husk of a human being, a dead doll, made the idea of the ghost rather comforting by comparison. Dread of the corpse helps explains the refusal of some of the more well-known funerary and memorial art of the Great War to represent the human figure. The cemetery and the abstract obelisk take up much of the memorial space along western Europe. At the Ypres salient, touring paths thread for miles through cemeteries dotted with white headstones reading “A Soldier of the Great War: Known Only to God.”
More common than representations of the body, and the terror that sits on its haunches waiting behind such representations, are so-called utilitarian memorials. The Menin Gate on the eastern side of the town of Ypres stands as a giant arch, not so much an arc de triomphe as an arch of death imbued with the language of sacrifice for monarch and empire. The names of 54,389 British and commonwealth soldiers are engraved on the giant monument, though not a single sculpted human figure can be found. Several miles eastward, near the front lines of the Battle of Passchendaele, the famous cemetery of Tyne Cot contains a monument to Australian troops molded in concrete around the actual pillbox they lost their lives defending.
Commemorative art such as this, the fruit of a desire to transform the landscape of the war into a memorial of an event rather than represent the individual soldier, carried over into a lack of interest in recovering the remains of the beloved dead. The rapid disappearance of this impulse seems especially astonishing, given the now exotic-seeming efflorescence of Victorian-era death rituals. In the half century before the Great War, much of western Europe had engaged in morbid sentimentality to such a degree that the funeral had come close to acting as a form of popular entertainment. Photographs of the dead, open displays of the corpse, and highly sentimentalized mourning rituals (including the collection of the hair of the dead frequently twined into a macabre kind of jewelry) had all become commonplace.
Most of this culture of mourning collapsed overnight during World War I. Although there are notable examples of some who sought to challenge the British government’s ban on returning the dead for “proper” burial, most of the British public readily acquiesced. Perhaps even more interesting, neither the French nor the Germans made a significant effort to find and bury the remains of their individual beloved dead, even though the effort, while difficult, would have been more practical than for the British. The British dead remained “known only to God,” while thousands of French headstones that dot the landscape from Verdun to the Channel starkly assert “Unknown.” No one wanted the return of the repressed, the return of a million dead, the corpses at the door. J’accuse.7
Dreaming of the friendly ghost certainly offered a comforting alternative. In the year after the armistice, Sigmund Freud noted with some shock that the primal horror of the dead communicating with us had become a fascination. He wrote with despair, “In our great cities, placards announce lectures and undertake to tell us how to get in touch with the souls of the departed.” He seemed both saddened and at something of a loss to explain this, particularly since the trend had shown itself among even “the most able and penetrating minds of our men of substance.”8
Spiritualism, a phenomenon most associated with the Victorian era, certainly experienced a resurgence during and after the war. The sudden popularity of the séance appeared with such force that the Vatican felt the need to issue a decree against it in 1917. Numerous Protestant pastors and their synods issued similar warnings.9
Theological critiques had little effect on the many figures from art and politics who took part in the movement in the postwar period. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose son Kinglsey; brother, Innes; and brother-in-law E. W. Hornung had all died in the final, pointless months or shortly thereafter, became the most famous enthusiast of the séance. Doyle eventually became as well-known to contemporaries for international lecture tours promoting spiritualism as for creating the world’s most famous detective.
The undoubted popularity of séances, mediums, and books about spiritualism during and following the war cannot fail to impress and, to some degree, surprise us as it did Freud. Why relinquish so many of the funerary rites of the last century but maintain the interest in contact with the souls of the departed in a movement that had its roots in the 1840s?
The answer seems to be that the fascination with the dead took on a very different meaning than it had in the nineteenth century. The assurance that the dead had moved on to their next abode rather than a desire for continued interaction with them marked the new fascination with spiritualism. In a perhaps counterintuitive way, then, the interest in hearing from dead loved ones offered assurance to the middle- and upper-class patrons of the séance that their loved dead would not return. Their bodies remained across the English Channel, unidentified in a mass grave; their souls remained on the other side of the Great Beyond.
Evidence for this new, safe way to imagine the dead appears in an incredibly popular English book by Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond, or Life and Death, which appeared in a dozen editions between 1916 and 1919 alone. After presenting the war record of his son Raymond, Lodge provided readers with a series of supernatural messages from the beyond. These messages asserted that the war dead resided “in a better place” and, importantly, that they were kept safely in that other place and would not impinge on the world. Communication with the beloved dead, Lodge asserted, did not mean communion with them, as spiritualism had so often promised in the past.
After all, what might the dead really say to the living in the aftermath of the useless conflict? What horrors did they have to communicate? Might they not come to accuse? The Ouija board had been patented in the United States in 1891 as a parlor amusement, but it was during the Great War that it first acquired its reputation as an occult object whose use could bring about dangerous consequences. Chicago’s Pearl Lenore Curran became a celebrity during the war years for her use of a Ouija board and the claim that she could contact a seventeenth-century woman named Patience Worth. The Ouija board, of course, became a frequent prop in later horror films, beginning with The Exorcist in 1973, an association that would only increase its reputation as diabolical instrument rather than board game.
In the era of the Great War, thinking of the dead as emanations of light and love in a happier place provided much more comfort than the realities of what had become of the bodies of the dead—or in many cases the living. Paul Leni became, along with Lon Chaney, one of the figures who brought the fear of the disfigured body to the American screen. In 1928, he directed Conrad Veidt (Cesare from Caligari) in The Man Who Laughs. Given its setting in the seventeenth century, The Man Who Laughs might seem far removed from the mud and steel of the Great War. Based, like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, on a novel by Victor Hugo, Leni’s film asked Americans to ponder the same questions about the relationship of bodily disfigurement and violence that Chaney’s films posed.
The film tells the harrowing story of Gwynplaine, a child of a noble family kidnapped by a foreign criminal underworld that carves children into human oddities and sells them to the traveling circus. Gwynplaine, portrayed by Veidt, has a permanently grinning rictus sliced into his face, the eerie perpetual smile becoming ever more unnerving as the film becomes darker. (The creators of the Batman villain the Joker used Veidt’s character and look as a direct inspiration.) The subject matter of the film did not prevent it from being a hit with audiences. Universal quickly had Leni working on a companion piece to The Cat and the Canary that would become his final film, bearing the ominous title The Last Warning.
Jack Pierce, soon to work his dark magic with the makeup of James Whale’s Monster in Frankenstein, transformed Veidt into the face of the modern world. The facio-dental disfigurement of Veidt’s character alluded to the most startling of injuries caused by the war. Gwynplaine begins the film as both a sympathetic character and the film’s monster, not unlike the gueules cassées (broken mugs) in the French media. Although the setting in seventeenth-century France might appear to dilute any thoughts the audience might have of the Great War, the costume drama spends enough time visiting torture chambers, showing various kinds of refugees, and exploring how camera angles can make a disfigured human visage generate both horror and empathy to remind even the most insouciant of American moviegoers about the recent horrors visited on much of the world.
Had Leni sought treatment for his infected tooth and lived past the age of forty-four, he might have made the Universal lot even more interesting in the coming golden age of monsters. He did have an admirer in James Whale, who shared Leni’s fascination with set design and the arts. In fact, Whale sometimes called The Man Who Laughs not only his favorite film but also, in an even greater compliment to Leni, the film he most wished he had directed.10
“It’s alive!”
The Monster hurls his maker from the top of the windmill as a howling lynch mob screams for his blood. Dr. Henry Frankenstein falls and hits one of the blades of the windmill like a ragdoll before flopping to the ground. The Monster, made from parts of corpses and brought to life via lightning and a “ray of life,” grunts with inarticulate horror as the mill burns around him, set aflame by the mob. The camera pulls back with no accompanying score as the mill collapses in on itself. The credits roll.
This scene, soundless but for the crackling of fire and despairing screams of the Monster slowly dissipating on the wind, ended James Whale’s Frankenstein. At least that’s what the audience at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara, California, saw when the film premiered on October 29, 1931, just in time for Halloween. Whale and his romantic partner David Lewis attended this first showing, along with Carl Laemmle Jr. Neither Colin Clive (Henry Frankenstein) nor Mae Clarke (Elizabeth) appeared, as both had already started work on other films. No one actually invited Boris Karloff. Nobody at Universal, Whale included, thought the public would much care about the man who grunted and groaned behind the monster makeup.
During the screening, viewers got up and left and then returned for more. At the film’s sudden, quiet conclusion, the audience sat for a moment in stunned silence. David Lewis later commented that “it was an alarming thing” and “pretty strong stuff” in 1931. No applause followed the test screening, and no one said much to either Laemmle or the director as they quietly filtered out of the theater.11
Junior seems to have utterly misunderstood the response of that first audience. “Jesus God!” David Lewis reports him exclaiming. “We’ve got to do something! This thing’s a disaster!” Though assured by some that he had “the hit of the year,” he kept talking about how people had walked out. A likely irritated James Whale had a better read on the audience reaction and knew that the story of a murderous patchwork of corpses had hit the viewers where they lived. Whale had perfectly captured the age’s corpse-terror and given it back to them, many times squared.
The studio remained unconvinced and wanted changes before the film’s national release in six weeks. The holiday season in the 1930s, unlike today, tended to be box office poison. This, combined with Laemmle’s doubts, meant Whale had to fight to keep the film he had made. He lost part of that fight. The studio demanded that a new, soporific ending replace the bleak image of the mill collapsing in silence. In the quickly filmed epilogue, we learn that Dr. Frankenstein has inexplicably lived and will marry Elizabeth. The final scene has stage actor Frederick Kerr, who played Dr. Frankenstein’s father, raising a glass to toast “the house of Frankenstein,” an unintentionally chilling bit of dialogue given the subsequent history of the Monster in the modern imagination.
Whale later made a comment that suggested he thought the studio’s offer to make a version of Frankenstein must be a joke. But there’s no real evidence that this meant he disdained the idea or saw it, and his other important horror films, as a distraction from his real work. In fact, in at least one version of the story, after Junior gave him “carte blanche with respect to the sundry projects on Universal’s slate,” Whale chose Frankenstein from the pile of possible projects. Whatever the case, he certainly threw himself fully into the making of the film, having a number of discussions with David Lewis about the nature of the novel. According to Lewis, out of these discussions came the idea of creating a monster that might elicit the audience’s sympathy. Whether or not the film succeeded in that on its original release remains an open question.12
Like Dr. Frankenstein himself, Whale developed an obsessive concern over the creation of the Monster and his setting. He became something of his own art director. He wanted very much to give the film the shadowy look and mise-en-scène of Caligari, a film he screened repeatedly during the making of Frankenstein. One of the film’s editors noted that various versions of the script had sketches drawn by Whale. They contained details as specific as how the arches and drapes should look in Castle Frankenstein and in the mad scientist’s Nosferatu-influenced tower, lab, and lair.
Whale also passed along a number of conceptual images of what the monster could look like, though we’ll likely never know the proportion of Whale’s influence on the visage of Frankenstein’s Monster in relation to that of effects artist Jack Pierce. Pierce has become legendary among fans of Universal’s golden age of monster films, and many partisans argue for his undoubtedly enormous influence. I don’t think we can say for sure whether Pierce, as he later claimed, actually pored over anatomical texts to help him shape Boris Karloff’s makeup, but he certainly had experience crafting a sympathetic physiological horror after working on Conrad Veidt’s face in Whale’s beloved The Man Who Laughs.
Although we cannot know exactly how much Whale contributed to the physical look of the Monster, it’s an image that, along with the mushroom cloud, became one of the most recognizable and layered icons of the twentieth century. But we do know that he, in a very essential way, made the monster out of his direct confrontation with death in the Great War and his years of trying to bring variant versions of that experience to stage and screen.
Since the story has been told over and over again, modern viewers are likely to forget, in a way that 1931 audiences would not have been able to get out of their minds, that we are watching a field of corpses stumble about the stage. We are seeing a thing of unimaginable horror, a kind of living graveyard that became the ultimate death doll, the most memorable cemetery automaton, in an era that produced so many for screens in Europe, America, and around the world.
Frankenstein’s monster can still provoke the chills that every audience and reviewer discovered during its original screenings with some clarity about what we are watching. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula echoed religious horrors, curses, and taboos from the distant past so strongly that the vampire has remained a creature lurking in the shadowy parts of our consciousness for the last century. Frankenstein and his Monster became much more. Boris Karloff’s monstrosity stumbles across the imagined European landscape like a moving mountain of the dead. An industrial process created the thing. Dr. Frankenstein’s lab seems as much factory as lab, just as the war had been a mechanism that made corpses by the millions.
Whale achieved his macabre intent in at least two ways. First, the use of light and shadow throughout the film followed what he had absorbed from German and German-American directors like Leni. Whale shot much of the film in darkness, making near-perfect lighting absolutely necessary. He succeeded in creating an ominous-looking world of stark shadows against high walls. His success with this came in part from Leni’s influence and what one employee of Universal’s screening rooms remembered as his frequent viewings of Lang’s Metropolis, Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and other essential films of Germany’s haunted screen. The final film used Weimar cinema’s tendency to bring together the clashing elements of harsh lights, thick darkness, and ominously moving shadows that appear uncannily detached from the characters who throw them.
Whale combined his use of shadow with the image of the death skull, another version of Otto Dix’s “Skull,” appearing in varying forms throughout the film. In the opening scene, one that left many audiences unnerved, a statue of a hooded skeleton holding a sword presides over the burial of a corpse, along with a much more traditional crucifix. This image, accompanied by the sickening thud of dirt on the coffin and then Dr. Frankenstein and his assistant, Karl, digging up the body, proved stomach-churning.
We’re at the gibbet in the following scene, the corpse dangling like a broken doll as Dr. Frankenstein has his assistant cut it down. In a later scene at the Goldstadt Medical College, a specimen of a human skeleton hangs, casting a giant shadow on the wall as Fritz steals the brain that will bring the crazy quilt of dead bodies to life. Skulls decorate the desk and shelves of the office of Dr. Waldman, Frankenstein’s mentor. Dr. Frankenstein keeps a skull on the desk beside his bed. Our first look at the Monster, the way Whale shoots the scene from fragmented angles with jump cuts, suggests that we are looking at pieces of bodies. The director has taken us to the trenches, where Whale had learned that bodies are transformed rather quickly into disassembled and mismatched parts.
Unlike Mary Shelley’s loquacious Monster, who recites long passages of Milton and wonders aloud about the nature of revolution based on his reading of eighteenth-century radical texts, Whale’s Monster grunts and growls, generally menacingly, during the hour-and-ten-minute running time. Whale’s direction accounts for Karloff’s ability to communicate, without speaking, a language of dread, confusion, or anger. A number of witnesses on the set recall the director working with Karloff and making the gestures he believed the Monster would make. Whale wanted to bring his mound of corpses to life, or perhaps more appropriately, living death.
Almost seven decades after audiences first saw the Monster, it’s nearly impossible for Whale’s design, Jack Pierce’s makeup, and Karloff’s angry melancholy to have the same effect. Show almost anyone the battered-looking square head with two electrodes protruding from the neck, and “Frankenstein” will automatically register, the Monster and the maker’s name forever mixed in the chaos of creation and destruction. He’s been remade for a number of films, and he walks again every October as one of the most popular Halloween costumes of all time. He’s been placed on cereal boxes and used to sell hamburgers. We’ll never have the 1931 audience’s experiences when Whale used a series of quick cuts and angled shots to show us his puppet made of corpses. But we can begin to understand the moment’s eerie chill when we consider a period in which nothing else produced as much horror as the dead body in all its implied threat.
Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein played almost as much of a role in reactions to the film as the Monster did. Whale apparently saw the doctor as the central character, far more important than Karloff. Although his manic scream “It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!” justly remains one of the most famous moments in film history, contemporary viewers are perhaps too familiar with overacted mad scientists to feel the anxious, strained edge that Clive gives to the entirety of the film.
Before Frankenstein, most American audiences knew Clive as Captain Stanhope from James Whale’s film version of R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End (1930). The film garnered close to the same interest in Britain and the United States as did All Quiet on the Western Front, made the same year. In that era, the two films had a relationship perhaps a bit like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket for post-Vietnam American audiences.
Clive proved absolutely wrenching in his portrayal of Stanhope. In the original play and film, he incarnates the British soldier teetering on the edge of a complete nervous collapse. Stanhope attempts to hide this by drinking heavily to steady himself and insisting that his men, often against better sense, do their duty. In one particularly powerful scene, he breaks down and cries with another soldier just after accusing him of shirking and suggesting that the soldier’s alleged illness can’t be worse than “being shot for desertion.” Film historian James Curtis sees the characters of Stanhope and Frankenstein connected in that both are “on a collision course with fate, tortured by personal demons and powerless to prevent [their] own destruction.”13
In other words, Stanhope as played by Clive appears as the ghost at the feast of war commemoration. He embodies the horrifying truths about the conflict that all the sentimental doggerel about the British Tommy and his sacrifice tries to hide from us; the “poppy porn” that still infests the remembrance of the war dead.
Noël Coward called Whale’s production “a nasty little vilification of the war” that he believed offered a much-needed antidote to sentimentalism and inspired his own play Post Mortem. The tragedy of Raleigh, a young officer led by Stanhope, capped the film’s message and joined it firmly to some of Whale’s decisions in Frankenstein. Stanhope and Raleigh have a troubled and complex relationship, set off in part by Raleigh’s grief over the loss of his friend Osborne, whose dead body lies somewhere twisted in the barbed wire of no-man’s-land. Stanhope, having known Osborne far longer and doing his best not to feel anything, finds Raleigh’s grief grating. The film ends, however, with news that Raleigh has received a spine injury and has to be moved into the officers’ dugout, where much of the claustrophobic film occurs. Stanhope comforts him as he dies, though in the final scene the tortured captain rushes forth to take part in an assault just as a shell collapses the dugout and buries Raleigh in the rubble.
The catastrophic entombment of Raleigh appears again in the flaming collapse of the windmill that buries Frankenstein’s Monster, a scene Whale chose as the most appropriate end for his film. Indeed, the Monster dies entombed again, this time with his Bride, in the explosive collapse of Dr.Frankenstein’s tower in the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. Whale never fully let go of the image, played out again and again on almost all fronts of the Great War, of bodies being buried beneath the carnage of trenches, the living and the dead sealed beneath the collapse of thousands of pounds of dirt and concrete from shells and sap mines.
Clive captured the unsettling energy of Stanhope nearly perfectly, perhaps in part because of his own demons. The actor likely would be diagnosed today with some form of anxiety disorder. During the 1930s, he became infamous for self-medicating with heavy drinking, often on set. This may have actually aided his portrayal of Stanhope, who also appears terrified, angry, and drunk. Audiences who, about a year later, then saw Clive as the deeply tormented Dr. Frankenstein, sweating, eyes darting fearfully, seemingly running in terror even as he leads a mob to destroy his dangerous creation, could not help but remember the tragic, broken Captain Stanhope.
Earning some ill will from critics at first, Frankenstein proved a huge success with the American public. A film exhibitors’ paper described it as “a thriller,” adding, “Women come out trembling, men come out exhausted. I don’t know what it might do to children but I know I wouldn’t let my own go to see it.” The reviewer said he would not forgive the Laemmles or James Whale for showing little Maria’s drowning: “It carries gruesomeness and cruelty a little beyond reason or necessity.” Whale had reversed Wegener’s tale of the Golem by having the Monster kill the little girl rather than accept salvation from her. However, before we decide we prefer Wegener’s sentimental ending, we’d do well to note that the man who made it also made Nazi propaganda films in the 1930s, even if he seems to have been personally ambivalent about the regime.14
Comments about the “weird” subject matter of Frankenstein did not keep box office receipts from being enormous almost from the day the film opened nationally. Whale had a peculiar hit, and, from the Laemmles’ perspective, the money might continue to roll in from even more monster films. The film did well in Germany, where theaters screened it on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power. It quickly became branded as degenerate art soon after. Fascist Italy banned it, while in England the censors appear to have edited it into meaninglessness.
The Old Dark House
Whale continued to explore the macabre even as he churned out films on a number of different subjects. His once forgotten film The Old Dark House, produced in 1932 but considered essentially a lost film until the late 1960s, showed the influence of Leni’s The Cat and the Canary while somehow managing to include both more campy humor and more terror of the empty-eyed corpse all at once.15 For The Old Dark House, Ernest Thesiger worked with Whale as the aristocratic and self-admitted criminal Horace Femm, one of two siblings who actively despise each other while keeping their ill father and maniacally murderous brother locked away in various upper-story rooms. Boris Karloff appeared in the form of the frightening, lumbering, inarticulate butler Morgan. The character, threatening throughout and any audience’s early pick for the most dangerous character in the house, very much resembles Frankenstein’s Monster. Karloff arguably manages to appear even more menacing despite the absence of electrodes protruding from his neck.
Whale’s film has a group of young people seek refuge at Femm’s tormented old dark house in the middle of a deadly storm with rain coming down “in buckets,” a phrase the characters keep repeating until it becomes a running joke. Serving the young guests gin (“I like gin,” Horace Femm preens suggestively), the Thesiger character’s signature cattiness and sarcasm leads him to toast “illusions,” which, he adds, probably seems a foreign idea to his young guests. No one responds to Thesiger’s comment except for the character of Penderel (Melvyn Douglas). He’s well aware of the nature, and the dangers, of illusion and says so. Femm responds, “Of course, you are of that generation battered by the war.” Later, in perhaps a parody of his own and other veterans’ tentative feeling about discussing the war, Whale opens a scene with Penderel talking to his love interest with the lines “Well, and then the war ended, so that was that.” Whale leaves it to our imagination what sort of horror Douglas’s character has just related.
Death of all kinds occupies the center of the film, from visual imagery to off-handed references. Other times, Whale makes the point more plainly. In one of the most memorable scenes Whale directed, Gloria Stuart (who later worked with him as the female lead in The Invisible Man), who plays the character Margaret, dresses for dinner in a shimmeringly beautiful gauzy gown. The mirror doubles her sex-drenched youthfulness for the audience to admire. Horace’s unloved sister, Rebecca (played by Eva Moore), meanwhile, delivers a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon to the young woman, saying that her unblemished flesh will rot down to its bones. She grabs Margaret’s gown in her bent and clawed hand and wheezes, “That’s fine stuff, but it’ll rot.” Pointing her finger and then laying her hand on the exposed skin between Margaret’s throat and breasts, Rebecca adds, “That’s finer stuff still, but it’ll rot, too, in time!”
One of the oddest decisions made by Whale, and it’s perhaps due to the uncredited work that R. C. Sherriff did on the script, concerns how the film splits the image of the World War I veteran between the heroic Penderel and the monstrous Morgan. Penderel embodied what patriotic poetry had chosen to see as the flower of British manhood, the sentimentalized veteran, handsome and brave. Yet even he admits that the war has taken away his sense of purpose, his belief that there’s any real meaning to things. Morgan displays a darker version of the man who has seen too much. He’s psychically and physically mutilated, his scarred face matched by his inability to speak except in a gibbering stammer not unlike Karloff’s more famous Monster. Like Captain Stanhope in Journey’s End, Morgan drinks heavily (notably, so does Penderel) and becomes violent; indeed he’s clearly shown trying to rape Margaret. It’s as if Whale and Sherriff took the character of Captain Stanhope and divided his disturbing characteristics between Morgan and Penderel, a split image of the same horrors.
We unfortunately have really nothing from the director himself regarding how the war shaped his vision of horror. Whale never spoke openly about the relationship of his experience of the war to his horror films, but this should surprise exactly no one. He seldom spoke about the war at all. Whale never gave interviews about his experiences on the western front or as a prisoner of war even in relation to his three major World War I films. Moreover, the concept of a director’s “vision” for a film had little meaning in Hollywood in the 1930s. This would have been particularly true at a studio such as Universal, whose chief executive viewed filmmaking as something akin to Henry Ford’s assembly line.
There’s little reason to argue over what Whale’s monster films are “really” about, given his silence on the matter. I certainly wish he’d been as loquacious about the meaning of his work as Fritz Lang, even taking into account Lang’s tendency to tell different stories about his career at different times. Whale may have proved as mute as his Monster on the subject but his choice of themes spoke volumes. His horror films dwelled on the twin terrors of mental illness and physical disfigurement, blending them in a way terrifyingly recognizable to audiences who had seen, and often tried to forget, the maimed and mutilated returning veteran. The creature, seen first wrapped in the bandages that suggest the zombie soldiers of Gance’s J’accuse, seemed like the dreaded return of the war corpse. Frankenstein’s Monster was no ghost, no friendly spirit, no departed beloved soul returned to tell its loved ones that all was well in the great beyond. He was a whole world of corpses, sewn together by madness, another automaton that confronted audiences with the ultimate fear of the empty nothingness of death, the body as a “broken doll.”
The thing created by Dr. Frankenstein—sad, violent, angry—moved like a surrealist collective of body parts. The Monster became a reminder of the torn and shredded dead that lived in the nightmares of the soldiers who had, for example, been at Gallipoli and watched while a field of corpses bloated in the hot sun of the Dardanelles. They had sickened at the smell until a one-day truce had to be called in May 1915, a brief respite in which soldiers buried bits and pieces of their comrades so that they could resume the slaughter the next day without the unbearable stench.
Whale created his monsters at a time when the mutilated dead and the bandaged, shattered face had become an icon of the age. Gance had of course recognized this with J’accuse, while Leni in The Man Who Laughs and most of Lon Chaney and Tod Browning’s collaborations of the 1920s had further explored the ugly spectacle the war had made of the human body. Erik the Phantom had been in 1925 the ultimate “broken mug,” complete with a mask that resembled the prosthetics that covered the era’s grotesque wounds.
Whale’s monsters, and a number of related films made by Universal, took the horror of the bandages even further. In 1934, Whale created another of the era’s horror masterpieces, The Invisible Man, which made a monster of a bandaged man who also suffered delusions and complete derangement. Numerous attempts had been made to bring the story to the screen, but all had failed, in part because H. G. Wells, author of the novel adapted for the film, had disapproved of them. By the time Whale made the final version, no fewer than five treatments and six screenplays had been proposed. One had made a direct connection between the Great War and the events in the original novel by setting the tale amid the Russian Revolution of 1917. This version featured an invisible monster created as an act of vengeance by a scientist whose family had been killed by Bolsheviks.
Whale’s own treatment dealt obliquely with the themes of the war, imagining a disfigured scientist who seeks invisibility to hide his mutilated face. His experiments drive him to become a mentally unstable murderer. The idea of mental instability remained and made Whale one of the first Hollywood directors to combine horror with the concept. The Great War stumbled, ranted, murdered, and raved on the back lots of Universal.
Whale became only one of the directors producing stories of corpses moving across the wasteland. Karl Freund, who had worked on principal photography with Wegener in The Golem and Lang on Metropolis, joined the growing number of central European exiles in Hollywood. His 1932 production of it makes of Karloff a shambling icon of death once again. This time Karloff appeared in an even more mordant atmosphere, croaking out dialogue as a long-dead Egyptian priest returned to the twilight regions of the living.
This film made no direct allusion to the Great War, but the creature became one of the era’s numerous death dolls, its movements replicating the behavior of the shell-shocked. Its success encouraged Universal to use both of its monster stars, Karloff and Dracula’s Bela Lugosi, in one of the more shocking films of the 1930s. The Mummy did make direct reference to the Great War, along with other themes it’s almost too incredible to believe made it into a film of that era.
The Black Cat (1934) borrowed the title of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s better-known stories, although, with the exception of an actual black cat that occasionally wanders through a scene and frightens Lugosi’s character, it’s hard to find any connection to Poe’s original tale. The film’s director was Edgar G. Ulmer, an enigmatic figure who spent his boyhood in Vienna and worked in some capacity with F. W. Murnau. What exactly Ulmer did during his apprenticeship under Murnau, and in the Weimar film industry more generally, remains hazy. He frequently made now-disputed claims that he had been an uncredited set designer for The Golem, M, and Metropolis. Whatever his precise background in film, Ulmer certainly brought the moody and surreal look of the films he claimed to have worked on in Europe to his first major Hollywood venture.
Karloff, fresh from The Lost Patrol, in which he played a Great War sergeant driven to madness, became a different kind of psychological victim of the war in Ulmer’s film. Karloff plays Hjalmar Poelzig, a brilliant, deranged, and shell-shocked architect who lives in a bizarre Bauhaus version of the old dark house he built on an unnamed Great War battlefield where he suffered an unexplained trauma. In this castle, a set heavily influenced by Wegener’s haunted vision of Prague, he conducts cultic rituals with his followers. Ulmer became one of the many fascinated with Aleister Crowley’s “magick” during the 1920s and ’30s and modeled Karloff’s character partially on him.
Dracula’s Bela Lugosi appears as Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a psychiatrist and veteran visiting his former battlefield comrade. We learn rather quickly that the two have an infinite depth of hatred for one another born from the Great War. Werdegast has come to visit the surreal house of horrors because Poelzig abandoned him to die of his wounds in the very wasteland where his house now stands. He has arrived, as was not uncommon in old dark house films, to exact revenge. In a nod to another common trope of such stories, a young (in this case newlywed) couple has arrived for a night’s stay in Poelzig’s castle and ends up being forced to take part in the gruesome proceedings.
The similarity between the old dark house genre and The Black Cat ended there, and the script, especially the original one, took a vicious turn. The film became the first of five that Karloff and Bela Lugosi worked on together, and it’s the strangest by far. We learn that not only did Poelzig leave Werdegast to die on the battlefield; he also murdered the psychiatrist’s wife and then married his daughter, eventually killing her as well. Seduction of both mother and daughter and a subtext of necrophilia appeared in Ulmer and screenwriter Peter Ruric’s early drafts of the film.
The young honeymooners serve as pawns in the game the two demented veterans play against one another. The new bride becomes an object of desire for Poelzig, with the suggestion that he and his followers will use her in a cultic ritual. The theatrical release, which went through so many cuts that it runs only about an hour, makes Werdegast into at least an antihero who seeks to save the young woman. But, again in Ulmer’s first draft, he seeks to rescue her from Karloff’s clutches only so that he can possess her first. While the film that made it to theaters may have dropped this idea, it still ends with Poelzig being flayed alive while the avant-garde confection of his house tumbles to the ground after being dynamited by Werdegast, sap-mined like hundreds of points along the trenches of every battlefield of the war. Yet another collapsed earthwork in the wasteland.
Lugosi’s own experience in the war had an uncanny similarity to that of the unlucky Dr. Werdegast. Lugosi’s service in the Austro-Hungarian army always receives the briefest of mentions in discussions of his life and career. The possibility that these experiences served as the defining element in the various vampires, mad scientists, and murderers he played onscreen has seldom been explored. Even his son, Bela Lugosi Jr., in a 2006 essay for a celebration of the Universal Studio’s famous monsters, simply writes his father “volunteered for service when patriotism called” and “received the equivalent of a purple heart.” After the war, he left Hungary because he “took an active role in an actors union” and “found himself on the wrong side of the ruling party.” All of this is technically accurate, but the story of Lugosi’s war experience is both more interesting and more gruesome.16
Lugosi had served as an infantry captain and for a time in the imperial army’s elite ski patrol corps on the eastern front. He suffered three wounds, though war neurosis apparently gave him his discharge and possibly saved his life. Reports as to what happened to him vary. There has been some unsympathetic speculation that he pretended mental instability. There’s no evidence that he did not suffer like millions of others. Lugosi seldom spoke at all in specific terms about the Great War, but he did tell Anna Bakacs, an actress and a romantic interest in the 1920s, that he once burrowed underneath a large pile of corpses to save himself after the Russian army overran the Hapsburg trenches.17
The themes of The Black Cat seemed to make Lugosi a bit more loquacious than usual about the war, even though Edward Ulmer’s widow has described the actor as generally “unapproachable.” Perhaps she referred to the odd story that has circulated about Lugosi, known for his reserve on set, occasionally telling the cast that he had been “a hangman” for the Austro-Hungarian army and that the experience had left him feeling thrilled and guilty. He seemed to perhaps be joking, but no one could be sure of that or even what the joke might be.18
Watching The Black Cat today, and knowing about the strict censorship that James Whale’s films faced, it’s something of a wonder that even the highly expurgated versions of Ulmer’s strange film ever made it into theaters. In fact, it did receive plenty of attention from the Motion Picture Production Code office, which in 1930 had established guidelines for acceptable versus unacceptable content in movies. In discussing the film with Ulmer, Joseph Breen, who administered the code’s restrictions for the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, insisted that the film use “shadow and silhouette” to prevent the scene of Poelzig being skinned alive from appearing “too gruesome or revolting.” Following the Weimar-era masters he admired, Ulmer certainly drowned the film in shadow, though whether this kept the “gruesome” and “revolting” nature of the film to a minimum remains debatable. The American public certainly took to the truly bizarre film either way, making it Universal’s most profitable film of 1934.
“The air itself is filled with monsters”
It’s utterly true, if something of an understatement, for the dean of American horror historians, David J. Skal, to note that “a central point of The Black Cat is that the First World War has not yet been resolved.” Universal released the film as Hitler tightened his grip on Germany, and within months his regime instituted the Nuremberg Laws. Fascism, fueled by the savagery and sense of shame engendered by the war, competed with renewed efforts by the United States and its allies to secure a neocolonial global order.19 “The air itself is filled with monsters.” When Elsa Lanchester spoke this famous line in Bride of Frankenstein, the greatest horror film of the era, she said more than she or the screenwriter knew.
Universal Studios held no monopoly over the making of horror films in the 1930s and early ’40s, especially after producers came to regard them as quick and easy moneymakers. Many of these low-budget affairs, written by screenwriters and shot by directors who had received only limited influence from the great talents of the Weimar years, nevertheless picked up on the themes of mental illness and bodily disfigurement that stalked American and European culture.
Warner Brothers, for example, produced The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), a film that echoed the themes of the Universal monsters and reached back to Leni’s Waxworks of the postwar era in Germany. The theme of the human body as the death doll proved as troubling in this film as in Universal’s The Black Cat. In the gruesome tale of a murdering maniac who seeks to transform his female obsession into a puppet, Wax Museum contains a fairly obvious suggestion of necrophilia. Lionel Atwill’s disturbing character wore makeup that suggested severe burns, as if he’d nearly been immolated in a trench set ablaze by a flamethrower. Censors, ignoring recent human history, called it “the most nauseating” portrayal of the human face they had ever seen.20
Not all of the rival monster films came from small studios with equally tiny budgets. Merian C. Cooper made perhaps the most iconic monster of the 1930s (other than Frankenstein) for RKO Studios: King Kong. Appearing in 1933, King Kong followed predecessors such as the 1925 classic The Lost World by imagining a prehistoric monstrosity threatening modernity. Both films play in a peculiar fashion with Fritz Lang’s themes in Metropolis and imagine the modern city under threat, in fact the city as steel-and-concrete superego thrusting its pretensions skyward with little thought to the forces that make it work and could destroy it. King Kong places an embodiment of the primordial age on the urban landscape, as if Lang’s Moloch had broken loose and left Metropolis in ruins. In Kong, explosive violence replaced the heart that bound together “the head and the hand,” the city’s capitalist class and proletariat in Lang’s confusing political parable. In place of comity between oppressed and oppressor in modern city, there’s only the destructive power of the monster and the effort to destroy him.
The urban terrorscape had, of course, been of concern to numerous writers and artists shadowed by the war. The idea of the city as necropolis appeared again and again in poem, film, and fiction. This tendency seems an eerie presage of the ruined cities of the 1940s that the destruction of World War I had hinted at.
Kong’s famous ascent to, and equally famous fall from, the top of the Empire State Building drew rather directly on the director’s experience of the Great War. Cooper, an aviator during the conflict, still suffered from severe burns he had received after being shot down over the Argonne. He created the sequence of biplanes battling the monster with fellow Great War veteran Ernest B. Schoedsack, who had worked with the Signal Corps and had his eyesight badly damaged.
Dracula himself began to show up in a number of horror pictures produced by companies other than Universal. Bela Lugosi, perpetually unhappy with the often unfair billings he received at Universal, starred (or at least made an appearance) in numerous horror and mystery flicks in the 1930s and ’40s, most of them forgotten now. He just as frequently returned to Universal but, in an unfortunate irony, his efforts to show the studio that he had not tied his career to the Laemmles had the effect of causing him to be seen as disloyal, resulting in fewer and fewer meaningful parts.
In 1932, Lugosi appeared in perhaps the most interesting role, and the most intriguingly horrifying film, of his career outside of The Black Cat. Paramount Pictures’ Island of Lost Souls retold the disturbing tale of H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) in a fashion that circled back to the surrealist horrors of Max Ernst in response to the Great War.
Surrealism had responded to the ferocity of the Great War by blending men and machines, or the human and the animal, in disconcerting fashion. Ernst certainly excelled at this, exposing naked and desperately vulnerable human flesh, and conjoining it with fur and feathers. Island of Lost Souls did much the same, with Charles Laughton playing the cold, insane technician of science. His demeanor contrasted enormously with Colin Clive’s frenzied interpretation of Dr. Frankenstein, while still achieving the inhuman effect that audiences had come to expect from such figures. Although Wells wrote the original as a kind of Swiftian satire of Victorian England, the motion picture played on the terrors of technology that made the line between the human and the animal disappear in the fog of war and violence. The men who crafted poison gas and built the Maxim gun to shatter the body would be willing to do anything.
Laughton’s heartless Dr. Moreau relentlessly pursues the possibilities of gene splicing in his “house of pain,” the place of surgery where animals endure all the possible horrors of scalpel and suture. It stands as a symbol of human willingness to inflict “vile horror” as Edward Parker, the unlucky castaway who finds himself on the island, describes what he sees there. Parker learns that Dr. Moreau has taken all conceivable animals and made them into miserable hybrids burdened with human desire and consciousness. But, it’s made clear, they have not transcended their previous state. In a bleak estimation of human values, this has made them less than what they had been before.
Lugosi has a rather small role in the film, but it’s utterly pivotal to the story’s direction. He’s covered in fur and unrecognizable under makeup, but he stands upright in his role of Sayer of the Law. In ritualistic fashion, he leads the village of Dr. Moreau’s malformed monstrosities in a kind of ritual utterance of “the Law” by which they live—they will not eat meat, they will not shed blood—all proclamations followed by a kind of antiphonal response, “Are we not men?”
The paradox inherent in “the Law” on Dr. Moreau’s hellish island is that this generation knew that human beings certainly did shed blood and, unlike the animal world, did so driven by ideology, nationalism, and their own fears rather than out of an evolutionary imperative to eat flesh for food. The film uses this obvious fact, and the Sayer of the Law recognizes that Dr. Moreau violates his own precepts. The creatures stitched together from the corpses of human and animal, an army of Frankensteins, rise against Moreau in an orgy of violence. These tormented hybrids, the film darkly suggests, truly become human when they acquire the taste for murder.
Lugosi worked with a number of studios in roles that called for dangerous and often deluded men of mystery. So-called poverty row studios, small production companies in size and budget that produced B pictures, churned out these movies, often in imitation of the more successful genre films of the Big Six (Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, and MGM).
The 1943 film The Return of the Vampire sadly encapsulates Lugosi’s trajectory from master of horror to prop piece in monster pageants. It also speaks unwittingly about the Great War’s shadow continuing to hover behind the haunted screen. Although campy and absurd, the Columbia Pictures production makes the subtext of horror films for most of the interwar period into a blindingly obvious allegory of the times. Lugosi plays a vampire who sucks the blood of London for much of the Great War. Armand Tesla, as he’s called, receives the requisite stake through the heart just as the conflict comes to an end in the autumn of 1918. The Luftwaffe strafes the city during the Blitz of World War II and reawakens the monster. Crawling from the wreckage, the vampire and the war begin its killing spree anew until yet another bomb buries him alive. Awakened by the first Great War of the century, the corpse had waited for a humanity to outrage itself again to rise and do his nightly wet work.
The silliness of the plot—some of Lugosi’s most dramatic lines in the film elicit giggles today—doesn’t mask the real-world horrors that gibber in the shadows. In this film, the last time the former infantry commander played a vampire except for the pure comedic value, Albin Grau’s vision of the “cosmic vampire” who “sucks the blood of millions” remained even if in attenuated form. The vampire lived amid war and slept while it awaited war to again ravage the world.
Unlike the Great War, which had stunned humanity with its ability to turn human beings into corpses, the century’s major conflict that opened in 1939 did not create the same level of reflective horror in art, cinema, or literature, even though it caused a number of deaths incalculable in comparison to 1914–1918 and to any major conflict since. Many in western Europe and America felt themselves so dumbfounded by the second great slaughter of the century that they numbly watched adventurous reenactments of its great battles instead. The horror film, once almost painfully allegorical in its efforts to biopsy the meaning of massive violence, became a playground of escapism and even humor. The new horror would be shaped by what the century began to call the Second World War, a century that in America at least frequently displayed a bizarre optimism with seemingly no relation to what had actually occurred.
The era before World War II had, however, given birth to one last great masterpiece that told a story that no one wanted to hear. Millions willingly watched in terror anyway.
The Bride
James Whale loved the idea of the knock that comes in the middle of the night, a portent to everyone warm and safe inside. He used it in his Frankenstein films, in The Invisible Man, and in transmogrified form in Journey’s End, the greatest of his war films. The quiet of the trenches in the latter film—and all accounts suggest that they sometimes did have an exhausted silence about them—would suddenly explode in a hard rain of shells or machine gun fire, shattering nerves and leaving men in a state that suggested both drowsy abstraction and nervous fidgety horror.
In Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the knock at the door pulls Dr. Frankenstein from his bed, on his wedding night no less, to meet fellow mad scientist Dr. Pretorius, played to the hilt by Ernest Thesiger. Together they will do more than manufacture undead automata from the fragments of corpses. They will, as Dr. Pretorius exclaims, inaugurate “a new world of gods and monsters.”
The greatest of Universal Studios’ horror films of the 1930s ended the cycle of reflections on the Great War that began in 1919–1922 with J’accuse, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Nosferatu. James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein offered a final meditation on the trenches. Whale had debated producing a sequel to Frankenstein not because he disdained the horror genre, as its sometimes suggested, but simply because he had killed the Monster and, had the studio let him have his way, he would have killed the maker as well.
However, he began to see some possibilities in making what became his masterpiece. He suggested to David Lewis and other friends that he would make the film “a hoot”—that is, a satire, a comedy of horror. Novelist Christopher Bram describes Bride as a comedy about death. This phrase captures much of what Whale hoped to put on screen. Death stalks everyone, embodied in the Monster who has become much more murderous in the interim between the two films. In fact, he shows himself capable of both random acts of violence and even what we might even call domestic terrorism. He retains our sympathy when we watch the film today, as Whale seems to have wanted, although, as with the original Frankenstein, it’s unlikely 1935 audiences felt anything but terror when watching the Monster.
The era’s bone-deep obsession with physical abnormality and disfigurement appears throughout the film. The Monster has emerged out of his experience with the burning windmill with more scars than we saw at his creation, filled with rage at his unasked-for plight. He kills in his first appearance in the film, savagely murdering the parents of Maria, the child drowned in Frankenstein. Whale has an owl watch somnolently as they die. Una O’Connor, a frequent player in Whale’s work, screams her way through the story, first in a scene in which the Monster, the blood of Maria’s parents still on his hands, looms above her.
Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius appears in the film completely mad and utterly gay and fully in love with death while obsessing over its ambiguous boundaries. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Thesiger tells the body snatchers, who have just rifled the corpse of a young woman that will provide the raw material for the female Monster, to leave him be so that he can take his dinner in the crypt. “I rather like it here,” says the actor who had once watched as his fellow soldiers’ body parts exploded around him.
The scene becomes one of the strangest, and most meaningful, moments in all the lore of Frankenstein that has appeared since 1818. Dr. Pretorius enjoys a veritable feast in the crypt of roasted chicken, bread, and a bottle of wine. We hear him before we see him as Whale’s camera peeks through the shadows. He’s laughing uproariously at the fleshless skull that sits on the tomb he has made a table. Raising a glass he toasts the skull, “I give you, the Monster!” he cries out, laughing until he cries. The Monster is not what Dr. Frankenstein made on his table; death is the only real monster, and it’s a hoot.
The Monster, Frankenstein’s pile of corpses, appears to Dr. Pretorius for the first time after this peculiar moment. Pretorius receives the scarred and mutilated image of death with all the nonchalance of a person receiving a pizza delivery. In their exchange, the tipsy mad doctor shares a cigar with the shambling horror and talks of life and death. “Love dead. Hate living,” says the Monster in yet another of the film’s infamous lines. “You are wise in your generation,” replies the world-weary Pretorius. Is this the mad scientist or is it Ernest Thesiger remembering the shell exploding in the barn? Whale lets him be both in this scene and lets the Monster embody, in his loneliness and death-longing, the horror of the twentieth century.
Colin Clive also returns as Dr. Frankenstein. Whale ordered that cast and crew watch Clive closely to make sure that no flasks or bottles went with him back to his dressing room. It’s not clear Whale succeeded. Clive once again acts out Captain Stanhope raving as mad scientist, careening wildly between the manic and the frighteningly subdued.
Whale planned to blow them all up at the end of his joke on the world. The lonely murderous Monster continues to kill for the sake of killing. He had murdered the parents of little Maria out of blind rage and hurled the mad doctor’s assistant (still not bearing the name Ygor) off parapets for no clear reason. Overall, the Monster in Bride racks up a body count higher than Freddy Krueger in the original Nightmare on Elm Street.
The doctors are by now fully out of their minds when Elsa Lanchester appears at last, a kind of art deco masterwork of elegantly placed scar tissue. We don’t meet her until the final moments of the film. She comes into the world chirping and screeching like an angry bird, refusing to play Bride to the Monster. Whale had originally hoped to have Brigitte Helm in the role, the young woman who portrayed the android Maria in Lang’s Metropolis. As interesting a connection as this would have made, today it’s impossible to imagine anyone but Lanchester, with her daimonic, elven features, taking the role of the Bride.21
The Monster in Whale’s original shooting script, now rejected by the only creature from which he could possibly find love, utters another of the film’s most famous lines to his makers and his presumptive mate. “We belong dead,” he sighs with the generation of the Great War, a generation appearing shocked to have made it out of the trenches while inwardly so shattered that they never left them. The Monster pulls a lever, and of course it seems a design flaw that the lab contains a single switch that destroys the entire tower when activated. The whole kit and caboodle blows sky-high like a bunker in the Ypres salient undermined by sappers.
The studio didn’t care for this, wanting both a Hollywood ending and the possibility of more sequels from the profitable franchise of monsters. Pretorius, the Monster, and the Bride all seem to die in the explosion, but Dr. Frankenstein and Elizabeth live, the romantic strains of the marvelously composed soundtrack rising as they embrace. Apparently Elizabeth has forgiven her new husband his penchant for gravedigging and monster-making, and the couple disappear into the happily-ever-after.
You have to have a heart of stone to love the ending of this otherwise brilliant cinematic feat. Whale had pulled off a hoot, to be sure, but he had not been able to fulfill his ambition to create a real comedy of death by successfully killing off all the characters. Much like the 1931 Frankenstein, the studio opted for a more hopeful conclusion than a burning cataclysm. Studio executives worked under the impression that the audience needed to leave the theater happy; just as significantly, they believed, rightly, that the Monster’s tortured existence could make them more money in the future.
It seems entirely appropriate that the studio responsible for All Quiet on the Western Front also produced Bride of Frankenstein. Much has been made of the homoerotic subtext of Bride, but, truthfully, it’s so glaring to most audiences today that it’s now part of the formal presentation of the film rather than its subtext. If there’s an underlying message, not openly discussed but the assumption behind every scene, it’s the Great War. In some respects, it’s Whale’s greatest World War I epic.
Colin Clive, just thirty-seven, died two years after the successful opening of Bride of Frankenstein. His drinking had brought on catastrophic kidney failure. On the set of his last film, The Woman I Love, all his scenes had to be filmed by noon. Otherwise he would already be too inebriated to continue. In some scenes of that last film, he’s being physically held so the director could make a few over-the-shoulder shots.
James Whale thought much of Clive but did not attend his funeral service or burial. He didn’t care for funerals or cemeteries. When David Lewis needed to attend a service at Forest Lawn, Whale supposedly said, “Oh stop it! Keep away from that place!”22
Mountains of Madness
H. P. Lovecraft would have none of it. He may have thrilled to Phantom of the Opera and longed to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but the golden age of Universal Studios monsters left him cold.
Lovecraft wrote his great, and final, masterpieces during Universal Studios’ classic run of horror films. In 1931, he completed a draft of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the tale that today creates almost as many new Lovecraft readers as “The Call of Cthulhu.” It’s a story of a town full of monsters and a sea teeming with creatures that rise to threaten human frailty, its depths like the cosmic depths that, in his best stories, echo back human pleas for meaning and create the purest chill of horror. Of course, many readers just find in it a story of a desperate struggle to escape from some fish people that has a bit of a surprise ending, and that’s okay, too.
The year 1931 also saw At the Mountains of Madness seep out of Lovecraft’s pen, the closest he ever came to writing a novel. He used the long form to slowly unwind the tale of an expedition of Miskatonic University geologists and archaeologists to the Antarctic. There they find, preserved in limestone and ice, “huge specimens” of barrel-shaped creatures with star-shaped heads. The scientists quickly proceed to vivisect the creatures, but their dispatches to base camp soon stop and the remainder of the expedition quickly discovers that something has left their comrades mangled into unrecognizable shapes, many of them looking as if they had been carefully “incised” in a way that suggested the removal of whole masses of tissues. It looked, in other words, like a battlefield.
The narrator explains to the reader that the expedition had told the world little of what happened next and blamed the deaths of their fellows on the effects of the violent Antarctic winds. But he writes that now there are new exploratory parties planning to make their way to the frozen wastes. He fears that “if not dissuaded, they will get to innermost nucleus of the Antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know.” So the narrator begins the longer explanation of the city built into vast mountain ranges at the bottom of the earth, a “cavernous aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry” and “a monstrous lair of elder secrets.” It’s a story more frightening in its implications than the 1930s wanted to hear, even as the nations of the earth seemed determined on their own apocalypse.23
At the Mountains of Madness, like much of Lovecraft’s other work, reads as if it could only have been produced after 1918. The mysteries that lie beyond mountains of ice are dead cities that tell of a history in which humans played no meaningful role. Human beings had been born after the creatures from the vast darkness embarked on “elaborate experiments after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies.”
Lovecraft’s vast mythology concerns a war that long ago ravaged the world, a war beyond human comprehension in its destruction and even its implications—in so many ways like the way most people looked uncomprehendingly at what had happened between 1914 and 1918, or the horrors that had emerged since.
As he had been able to achieve in the skin-crawling scenes from “Herbert West—Reanimator” and “The Dunwich Horror,” Lovecraft wrote a nearly perfect scene of physical horror. Still unknown to most of the world at the time, he created a dysmorphic summation of the body horror the mangled corpses of the Great War placed in the minds of artists and filmmakers. The moment that drives at least one member of the Miskatonic expedition insane, the appearance of a creature known as a Shoggoth, puts even masters of modern body horror to shame. The chilling epiphany begins with a malodorous whiff of something not quite like gasoline, a fetor emerging out of the abyss. In their descent into the darkness, they encounter the blackness of a “slime-spewing protoplasm” that seems part virus moving upright and part every nauseating encounter with gore ever imagined. Running to escape, one of the surviving party loses his sanity, shell-shocked into insensibility by the sounds and smells and sights of violence older than imagined time.24
At the Mountains of Madness has become the inspiration for a whole subgenre of horror in frozen wastelands (John Carpenter’s The Thing owes much to it) and has come close, several times, to being adapted into a film by Guillermo del Toro. Lovecraft did not see it published for almost five years, though it came out in truncated and serialized form as a trilogy in the science fiction pulp magazine Astounding Stories between February and April 1936. S. T. Joshi’s research into the original publication suggests that, along with other alterations, perhaps a thousand words had been cut from the story, leaving it something of a confused mess.25
By the time Lovecraft saw the slapdash publication of the tale, he had become very ill, indeed much more so than he let on to his small but hardy band of correspondents and admirers. Beginning in 1936 until his death in March 1937, he suffered irremediably from intestinal cancer, apparently long untreated. He was forty-six.
Although he had given up on literary fame in the early 1930s (a rejection of At the Mountains of Madness by Weird Tales represented an especially severe blow), he had not stopped writing. His final years saw the production of his most disturbing and imaginative tales—including the time-travel epic Shadow Out of Time—which leaves us wondering what he would have produced given time.
He could not see that film had, in any way, crossed into the nightmare lands he knew so well. A much more devoted moviegoer than he ever admitted in his letters, he did let it slip now and again how much he often enjoyed movies, voicing special admiration for Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Unfortunately, he never had the chance to experience the work of Murnau, Wiene, or Lang, and may not have even seen the American work of Leni.
He did see, at some point in the 1920s, Wegener’s Golem, and his pedestrian reaction makes us wonder what he would have made of the other horror classics that came out of the Great War. He loved Gustav Meyrink’s novel, and his criticism of the film version seems utterly adolescent; he liked the book better. Whale’s work he called “the alleged Frankenstein,” and he grumbled that other than making him drowsy, it simply evoked sympathy for the harm done to “Mrs. Shelley’s” work. He saw Dracula one night in Miami, Florida, and couldn’t bear to sit through its spare running time. He chose instead to walk out into the “fragrant tropic moonlight” rather than see Lugosi’s performance come to what he called “its full term of dreariness.” The Invisible Man may have been the only film of Universal’s golden age he enjoyed, describing it as “genuinely sinister.” Given Lovecraft’s feelings on the matter, it’s almost a relief that he apparently never saw Bride of Frankenstein, or at least left no record of his impressions of it.
Lovecraft, with his great disdain of communism, would have been horrified to learn that his attitude toward film mimicked that of the Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School. When Lovecraft grouched in 1934 about “the utter and unrelieved hokum of the moving picture,” he sounded rather like these scholars who worried that the “culture industry” had made revolutionary fervor all but impossible.
T. S. Eliot would have shared Lovecraft’s (and the Frankfurt School’s) general sense of junk culture, but not because he feared it would desensitize the masses to revolutionary possibilities. Eliot, on some level, thought that passing entertainments were just fine for the proletariat, who should remain proletarian.
Eliot produced very little poetry from the 1930s until his death in 1965. His early reflections on the Great War the world caused some, with reason, to see him as a prophet of the wasteland. His oracular status has continued while his anti-Semitic, and at the very least crypto-fascist sympathies, have largely been forgiven.
The same cannot be said for his mentor Ezra Pound. Pound’s hearty embrace of Mussolini and fascism, a position that may have come as much from increasing mental illness as reactionary politics, completely unraveled the poet’s tenuous hold on reality. Unlike Eliot, who sought to soften (and to hide) his anti-Semitic ideas when Great Britain and then the United States edged toward war with the Axis Powers, Pound crossed from sympathy and admiration into unadulterated treason after the war began. He, in fact, betrayed humanity as well as the Western democracies.
Not only did the deeply cultured poet continue to write nasty little essays for fascist journals that appeared in Britain up to 1939, but he also made radio broadcasts for Mussolini’s government both before and during the war. Once the United States entered the war, his broadcasts on Rome Radio became unhinged; he insisted that the conflict had all been a conspiracy started by FDR, whom Pound, undoubtedly thinking it clever, called “Jewsevelt.” American courts eventually indicted the poet for treason, and he went on the run after Allied forces began the invasion of Italy in 1943.26
Marx’s famous comment about history first playing itself out as tragedy and then as farce could serve as the motto for the fate of Ezra Pound. On the lam from advancing American and British forces, he was captured by Italian partisans, who let him go after two days. They were apparently some combination of deeply annoyed with him and unconvinced of his importance. He eventually turned himself in to American authorities and faced trial. A Washington, D.C., court decided that he belonged in a mental institution and placed him in two different asylums over the course of twelve years. Released in 1958, he returned to Italy, gave the Fascist Party salute to the small crowd that greeted him, and proceeded to live rather well off family money. He suffered bouts of depression until his death in 1972.
Eliot remained a supporter of his mentor and indeed arranged to have him win the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry while in prison. Both poets of horror had their politics, and their sensibilities, violently wrenched toward the fantasies of the right. Eliot created images of horror that haunt us while, perhaps sensing the drift of things, stayed (mostly) out of politics. Pound’s literary and personal life appear, in contrast, as one long, sustained attempt at cleverness. He didn’t succeed, and rather than becoming a barometer of the world of horrors, he became a horror himself. Whatever one thinks of his poetry, and the experts (of which I am not one) seem divided as to whether he was genius or a fraud, he certainly became a impresario of fascism’s Gothic pornography.
Of all the authors we’ve examined who lived through the war years, Arthur Machen continued to maintain the most uneventful life. He gave his solid support to the British war effort, and his own brand of Celtic Christian mysticism immunized him against the racial mysticism of the far right. He had given up the writing of horror tales however and, in fact, did little writing between the late 1920s and his death in 1947. His family fell on financial hard times when the interest in his work waned at the end of the Great War. The literary community continued to hold him in high regard, and, in 1943, a group that included Bernard Shaw, fellow writer of supernatural tales Algernon Blackwood, and T. S. Eliot himself raised a financial subscription for him.
He died in genteel poverty after the defeat of Nazi Germany. He regretted that “The Bowmen” had helped fuel the legend of the Angel of Mons his whole life, but, for a long time at least, his reputation remained wedded to the tale and the legend. Today he’s not much read and primarily known as a chief inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft. Hopefully the growing appreciation of Lovecraft over the last few decades and Stephen King’s frequent mention of Machen’s work will bring his terrifying vision to the wide audience it deserves.
Director Richard Stanley, known for some of the landmark films of the weird produced over the last twenty years (Hardware, Island of Dr. Moreau, Dust Devil) developed a special interest in Machen. In 2004, he wrote a review essay on the author that related how locals at the Kings Arms pub in Amersham still remember him and his “inexhaustible supply of baffling anecdotes.”27
Escape
We like to tell tales of decline and fall whether we are talking about historical change, art forms, or our own lives and the lives of others. This has certainly been true of the golden age of horror. After the first cycle of classics—Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Mummy, and above all Bride of Frankenstein—along came the allegedly derivative sequels Son of Frankenstein (1939) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936). Universal gave us The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), which didn’t include a ghost at all, and then Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), the first of what have been called “the monster mash” movies. The studio followed with House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), both promising that the favorite monsters of the 1930s would be “ALL TOGETHER!” Sadly, audiences seldom received the payoff. The directors of both films seemed unable to keep Dracula (played now by John Carradine) alive after about the thirty-minute mark.
There’s certainly no real comparison between these films and what Universal succeeded in doing, mostly with James Whale’s guidance, in the 1930s. But it’s a much more mixed bag than critics have sometimes perceived. Son of Frankenstein perhaps deserves a second look. In the last picture in which Karloff appears as the monster, the absurd geometry, dreamlike atmosphere, and staircases that seem to float without support place us back in the fever dream of Caligari. A world on the brink of another, greater war calls back to the moment when horror film made its first, halting attempt at suggesting the world had become all madness.
Covered oddly in furs, Karloff’s Monster stamps around, seeming to have lost the scars that had further mangled him in Bride and made him even more an icon of this age of disfigurement. The film sometimes seems a rather clever joke about itself, an attempt at what today we would call metanarrative. Basil Rathbone, who plays the eponymous son of the late Dr. Frankenstein, complains that the name of the maker and of the Monster have become confused—people call the shambling horror by the name of Frankenstein. It’s true then and true today—a meaningful confusion that asks us to think about what we mean when we label something a monster. In the 1930s, as the authoritarian right used the language of horror to talk about entire ethnicities, the question became more important than ever.
Karloff brought in the audiences, and Universal Studios, now no longer under the control of the Laemmle family after severe financial difficulties in the mid-1930s, pressed on with more sequels. Along the way, they managed, with the help of German émigré Curt Siodmak, to make at least one horror classic. Released in 1941, in fact the week after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, The Wolf Man provides an example of how war and horror culture became desperate to separate themselves from one another.
The Wolf Man is a near-perfect film on its own terms. A compact story that nevertheless makes us care about the characters very quickly, it starred the son of the late Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr., as the titular lycanthrope. It feels like one of the films of Universal’s golden age in part because it introduced a new monster to American entertainment—almost all the alleged werewolf lore assumed by filmgoers since 1941 comes from this picture. Indeed, Siodmak publicized the film by insisting he had done research into folklore related to European werewolves in order to make the movie. In fact, he made it all up out of thin air: the werewolf transforming under a full moon, the pentagram, and even the notion of silver causing death. In this film it’s the top of a cane, and later it becomes the much more practical silver bullet, although future directors would complicate things again by sometimes making it “a silver bullet to the heart.”
Siodmak had developed a successful career as a novelist in Weimar Germany, with ties to the film industry through his more famous brother, the director Robert Siodmak. Both had left Germany after Hitler’s rise to power; Curt made the decision to move to America almost immediately after listening to one of Goebbels’s radio rants. Robert became one of the great noir directors of the 1940s, The Killers and Criss Cross being the best and best-known of his films, although he would direct one of his brother’s horror fantasies, Son of Dracula (1943), which today seems a bit like a noir mystery with a vampire tossed in for fun.
Curt Siodmak became known for fantasy and horror, and he was an early adopter of the idea of science fiction, which he rightly sensed would become the next big thing. The Wolf Man and its success came at a peculiar turning point in American history and launched a career that included successful genre novels and screenplays. Siodmak would always chuckle over how he had utterly convinced a generation (and some in the generation of the “monster kids” to come) that the most famous lines of his film were presented as a verse that came directly from “Gypsy” folklore:
Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.
“Everyone knows about werewolves!” gave the audience an intentional joke in a line from the film’s female lead Evelyn Ankers. In fact, absolutely no one knew about werewolves, so Siodmak could make up his fantasy as he went. (Audiences and critics skipped the 1935 film Werewolf of London, now seen as a classic.) To paraphrase David J. Skal’s clever point about the popular film, it takes place in a 1940s England where everyone seems to have a wealth of knowledge about lycanthropy but not a single person knows (or talks) about the catastrophic war with Germany.28
Indeed, the world that Siodmak constructs feels more like a fairy tale out of time and place. It seems far from the realities of Hitler’s triumph over France, England itself bracing for an amphibious assault and enduring the fury of the Luftwaffe, Japan overrunning much of the Pacific, and the United States going, against most Americans’ wishes, into the war. The world of The Wolf Man is all gnarled, ancient trees and fog combined with a fantasy castle and a quaint village that could be Anywhere, Europe, pre-1939 or perhaps pre-1914, a train of fortune-telling Gypsies riding into town (one of them played by Bela Lugosi) to add the exotic and picturesque. It is, Siodmak once admitted, his dream of a lost world, destroyed by the First World War and its consequences. A child’s memory.
A few attempts have been made to link the sudden interest in wolf men to either the earlier tendency of surrealists to combine the animal and the human or even the Nazi fascination with the wolf, indeed the werewolf, as a symbol. Truthfully, there’s more whimsy than world war in this film, a movie that is, to use the term too many horror films are often charged with, truly escapist. Americans poured into theaters to see the flick. They could briefly forget that their Pacific fleet had been crippled, permanently for all they knew, while Japan threatened Hawaii and the entire West Coast.
This tendency toward escapism grew in American filmmaking. Unlike the oblique horror that touched the raw nerves of a generation that experienced the Somme, Ypres, Gallipoli, or Verdun, the horror films of this era turned the very places the war raged into the kind of make-believe worlds that Walt Disney would soon make of American history itself in Disneyland, founded in 1955.
When Hollywood did want to make a film about World War II, the industry created simple stories with films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) telling tales of unmitigated heroism amid simple morality plays. Another fantasy slipped into films like Sands. It’s one of the movies that left many Americans with the “memory” that John Wayne actually served in the military, a peculiar effect that’s a version of Ronald Reagan becoming convinced that he personally witnessed the liberation of the Buchenwald death camp because he had edited footage of it from his stateside post. Today a similar phenomenon exists, with Clint Eastwood, whom many believe to have served in either the Korean or Vietnam War because of his tough-guy roles and military fantasy films. In fact, Eastwood tried to keep out of Korea by entering Seattle University in 1951. He ended up drafted into the U.S. Army anyway, but he spent the war in America as a swimming instructor and lifeguard in the Seattle area.
While the world witnessed horrors on a scale not even imagined between 1914 and 1918, Hollywood’s fantasy horror became an almost paint-by-numbers effort, mixing in the expected atmosphere, actors, and even outcomes. House of Frankenstein (1944) might have been a particular low point in this period. It promised much and failed to deliver while giving a rather depressing role to Boris Karloff. Karloff returned, not as the Monster, but as yet another one of the era’s mad scientists hoping to continue the work of Dr. Frankenstein. He escapes imprisonment for his gruesome crimes and becomes the impresario of a traveling carnival’s “Spook Show” (a term for a popular type of entertainment in the 1940s that gave audiences an experience somewhere between a live performance and a haunted house) in which “the bones of Dracula” are the main display. Dracula has become a literal sideshow, and in the course of the film he briefly animates only to be dispatched by the sun in a spectacularly silly fashion.
The very next year—timing that gives some sense of how quickly Universal churned out these moneymakers—House of Dracula not only signaled an end to the monster-mash sequels to the classics but also indicated that the new horror film would move in a new direction. The 1950s in America have been called “the age of anxiety,” though of course that could be said of most any age, including our own. The dawn of the atomic age—when Americans lived, in the words of Paul Boyer, “by the bomb’s early light”—should be remembered as the time when people both contemplated the end of human history as a daily possibility and, after some slight dithering, accepted the U.S. government’s promises that it would never happen.
House of Dracula actually foreshadows some elements of most 1950s science fiction/horror, in which the formerly mad scientists worked to bring good to humanity, sometimes using their skill to exterminate creatures, generally radioactive, they themselves helped create. The film features a similar motif, a scientist laboring to solve Count Dracula’s centuries-old “disease of the blood.” He also works on some unnamed cure that will heal his nurse. In an interesting turnabout from the hunchback assistants of the rest of Universal’s horror catalog, a female actor took the hunchback role. Other than a not-very-convincing hitched arm and shoulder, she fits the heteronormative standards of beauty for the era.
What’s most notable about these films in 1939, 1944, and 1945 is that while the world exploded in a war whose body count stunned even the veterans of World War I, there was not a J’accuse produced, or even a Nosferatu. The best historical and cultural explanation for this concerns the idea we have examined previously of unending war rather than of what sometimes, from this distance, is called the interwar period. The historian Robert Gerwarth has most closely examined this idea, pointing out that civil wars, revolutions, and mercenary armies of the defeated stalked the landscapes of Europe and the Middle East, setting off “cycles of conflict” that boiled over into Africa, Asia, and the Pacific world long before September 1, 1939. Seen in such a light, the Second World War represents a continuation of a “Great War” that opened in August 1914 and, as I will suggest in the conclusion, did not reach resolution in August 1945. In fact, the consequences of the conflict continue to unfold even as I write these words, almost a hundred years after the guns fell silent on the day of the armistice.
So it’s not that World War I had been met with great seriousness by artists and filmmakers producing the world of horror while World War II produced either cartoonish war fantasies or serious realist efforts to come to grips with the meaning of what had happened (Roberto Rossellini’s “War Trilogy” for example). It’s rather that Europe, in particular, had been stunned to silence or to mumbled gestures toward making sense of the horror of several decades. The horror movie as art form did revive in the European context, but it took years of reflection and recovery for it to do so; it did not erupt out of the immediate and blinding shock of war in the way such movies had in 1918.
The Gothic monsters of the early 1930s did not walk the American landscape after World War II. Horror took something of a breather while the country boomed with a degree of economic prosperity it, and global history, had never before experienced.
In 1948, Universal Studios produced Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. In quick succession, comedy flicks had the duo meet the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These encounters, exercises in pure slapstick without the hint of real danger or death, today feel as eerie as J’accuse or Nosferatu, if for very different reasons. The pratfalls and pretended terror are completely removed from the death camps, the slaughter in China, the bloody Pacific campaigns, the tens of millions dead in the Soviet Union. All forgotten as audiences laughed out loud at Bud and Lou facing off against childhood terrors.
Mad Science
Josef Mengele finished medical school in 1931, the same year that Universal Studios released Frankenstein. In 1937, the young physician joined the Nazi Party and the SS after he began work at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, Germany. Mengele’s lab stood near the former home of the Frankfurt Institute and the headquarters of the firm IG Farben, which produced Zyklon B, the insecticide used to murder the Jewish people in the gas chambers. In Frankfurt, Mengele began his infamous experiments on twins, although before the war he apparently followed generally established research protocols. Auschwitz gave him an unlimited number of victims of Jewish and Roma heritage to vivisect in his mad-scientist lab. He tore the eyes from his victims. He gave them a form of gangrene that affects the face and mouth, and he observed their death. He joined other doctors in selecting victims for the gas chamber as the train cars emptied (though he actually did not take the role of leading SS medical authority, as is commonly supposed). Survivors of the camp remembered him more than the others because of his particularly icy demeanor, the rumors about the sadistic experiments, and his tendency to wait near the train depot even during off-duty hours, restlessly scanning the crowds for twins.
This image, the mad scientist at work in a dark place more charnel house than laboratory, had been the ingredient necessary for almost every horror film of the 1930s and ’40s. Fritz Lang’s Rotwang and James Whale’s Dr. Frankenstein certainly account for much of the figure’s popularity, even if the madness of Henry Frankenstein reads more like war trauma than a simple moral tale of science overreaching its limits.
But something more worried at the edges of the sometimes silly trope. Dr. Moreau and Dr. Mengele had too much in common when it came to the “house of pain.” The horror film, even the horror fantasies of the late 1930s and ’40s, somehow understood that the age of mustard gas and the Maxim gun had unleashed something new in human experience, that the desire to annihilate rather than simply force the enemy’s surrender had created a dark human future. It had perhaps ended the possibility of a human future.
On July 16, 1945, the New Mexico desert’s unearthly silence shattered with a sudden, deafening roar. A mushroom cloud of inconceivably blinding light ascended forty thousand feet in the air. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of Project Y, also called the Manhattan Project, later became one of the world’s greatest critics of the weapon he’d made possible. “It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass,” he said, “and beyond it there is a different country.” Oppenheimer came to believe he’d been a kind of mad scientist. An avid reader and proponent of Asian philosophy, he often quoted the god Vishnu in the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Josef Mengele escaped the Allies in 1945 and lived out his life as a free man. Inherited family wealth enabled him to move from Argentina to Paraguay and then to Brazil. He died of a stroke while swimming at a São Palo resort in 1979.