Chapter 32
Before the advent of Atomic Age cinema, those twin icons of terror, the werewolf and vampire, were portrayed, quite correctly, as the evil manifestations of traditional folklore, talked about in hushed tones by superstitious villagers who made the sign of the cross at the very mention of those unholy beings. Garlic, running water, decapitation, stakes through the heart, the crucifix, fire, sunlight, silver bullets and wolfsbane were the things these creatures of legend feared most. However, from 1950 onward, science, for a time, replaced folklore, and although the long-established representations of these two demonic figures went on to survive in movies such as Hammer’s Dracula and the various Mexican werewolf farragoes, a few filmmakers plumped for a more unorthodox approach, choosing the cold rationality of medical science to explain lycanthropy and vampirism rather than Gypsies sitting around fires spinning folk stories. A sub-genre was born — Gothic science. Two such movies to emerge from this decade were Columbia’s The Werewolf (1956) and United Artists’ The Vampire (1957); the protagonists in both were the end result of scientific research, not age-old Eastern European myth. Each production was given the film noir treatment and remain, to this day, criminally underrated. During the early 1960s, they tended to crop up as second features on the U.K. horror circuit, but never as the main attraction. The Werewolf’s main cinematic partner was Creature with the Atom Brain, while The Vampire often shared the bill with The Monster That Challenged the World. Made on low-budgets, The Werewolf and The Vampire typify the American-made but British X-rated ’50s B horror movie: atmospheric photography, well-paced direction, fairly brief running time, good horror effects/make-up, terse script and a beginning, a middle and an end.
King of the Quickies Sam Katzman and director Fred F. Sears may well have hit all-time personal highs with The Werewolf, starring Steven Ritch, who was last seen in the Jungle Jim potboiler Valley of Head Hunters. (Sears died tragically at the age of 44 in 1957 while working on his next Columbia feature.) Injured in an automobile accident, Ritch is taken into care by two scientists, S. John Launer and George Lynn. The duo have concocted an experimental serum formulated from wolf’s blood contaminated by radioactivity; the hope is to find a cure for radiation sickness as atomic warfare might create a new kind of world where humans revert to primitive animals. Ritch is injected with a dose to determine what effect it will have, but all that the serum succeeds in doing is unleashing the beast hidden within him. When provoked, Ritch morphs into a wolf man, killing a barbum who tries to rob him of 20 bucks and then going on the run in the snowbound woods bordering Mountain Crest. There police officer Don Megowan and the local residents pursue him. (“It came out of the alley,” screams an elderly lady to a startled Megowan after stumbling across the ravaged corpse.)
“The tales that say wolf men roam the Earth” intones the director over the opening scene of a haunted Ritch wandering down a darkened street, wringing his hands in despair, a look of anguish distorting his features, instantly setting the proper mood by giving a nod in the direction of the legends of antiquity. His camera then enters Chad’s Bar, switching to noir mode: shaded interiors, faces in full-frame, pithy dialogue and a blonde dame. Quickly ratifying that there’s a werewolf on the prowl (a splendid rear shot of the monster backing out of an alley; shoe tracks changing to wolf prints in the snow; a man’s throat ripped out), the agonized Ritch, 20 minutes into the action, calls on Doctor Ken Christy and niece Joyce Holden (Megowan’s fiancée), admitting to the murder (“I killed him. What’s happened to me?”) but not comprehending why he committed the crime. “I was dreaming. I know I was dreaming,” he moans to Christy, pleading loss of memory. “I want to know who I am. I want to know what I am.” Later, Holden drily says, “What a night this is going to be. Dead man in the other room and a werewolf roaming around loose.” Expert horror buffs might detect at this point a few bars of music from The Return of the Vampire (composer: Mario C. Tedesco), cunningly inserted by musical director Mischa Bakaleinikoff, and this isn’t the only connection with Columbia’s classic vampire yarn from 1943. Clay Campbell designed Matt Willis’ werewolf make-up in that movie, and Ritch’s in this one. He was also responsible for the wolf man in Jungle Jim in the Forbidden Land, the reason why all three lycanthropes bear a marked similarity.
Audiences have to wait 35 minutes before being treated to the full transformation job, but it’s well worth sticking around for. Cornered in a mine tunnel by Launer, Ritch, by means of time-lapse photography, becomes a drooling, snarling werewolf, leaping at the terrified scientist before running off; he stays that way until caught in a bear trap. After a tearful reunion with his wife and son, the hapless family man gives himself up and is put behind bars, leading to the film’s best sequence. The two doctors worm their way into Ritch’s cell, intent on sedating him so that they can study his behavior, but they catch him in werewolf state. Waking up, Ritch slaughters the pair of them, Sears focusing his camera on the silhouette outline of cell bars thrown against bare walls. We hear, rather than witness, this violent act of savagery. In the final reel, the townsfolk are like the villagers of yore, hunting the unfortunate wolf man through the woods at night with torches and rifles. Come daybreak, he’s chased onto a road spanning a river; clambering along a dam wall, the monster is gunned down as he reaches a huge boulder, changing back into human form after he expires.
The Werewolf combined new wave science fiction with standard horror and in its own small way provides a turning point in the meeting of the two genres. With Hammer about to unveil The Curse of Frankenstein, horror, from 1956/1957 onward, took precedence over sci-fi and we were back where we had started, albeit in a more graphic form, before the bomb had changed filmmakers’ conceptions on how to shock an audience with a difference. Sears, in commendable Expressionistic style, made excellent use of the wintry Big Bear Lake locations in and around California’s San Bernardino National Forest, bringing a sense of immediacy to the scenario. He also elicited strong performances from his cast, especially Ritch as the ordinary guy, minding his own business, tortured by an affliction not of his own making. He’s as believable in this performance as Chaney and Oliver Reed were in their parts, conveying an emotional depth rarely seen in films of this nature. Spare moviemaking at its finest, The Werewolf ranks as one of the ’50s most neglected low-key horror flicks. Science, in this instance, triumphed over folklore and successfully revamped the old fables to suit a new audience, fabricating one of the screen’s more arresting wolf men in the process.
Jobbing actor John Beal’s somewhat sad countenance suited his role to perfection in The Vampire; suburban Gothic replaced The Werewolf’s scientific Gothic, the vampire more of a Jekyll and Hyde monster than a traditional bloodsucker. Beal, like Steven Ritch before him, was also the unknowing (and innocent) recipient of an agent created by science, in this case pills. Calling on a sick elderly doctor who has been experimenting with animals’ primitive instincts and brain regression, local medic Beal is given a bottle of tablets by the doc who then suddenly expires. Back at the office and laid low by a migraine, Beal’s ballet-mad daughter, played with oodles of charm by child actress Lydia Reed, accidentally gives her father one of the experimental pills. Beal is unaware that these regression tablets have been prepared from the blood of vampire bats; at 11 o’clock every night, he turns into a wrinkly skinned, shaggy-haired maniac, loping through the dark streets in search of victims. Those caught in Beal’s clutches die from heart attacks and a rare blood disease caused by a virus that leads to cellular destruction.
Director Paul Landres succeeds in conjuring up a cozy picture of small-town Americana at the mercy of a monster within its midst: the delivery boy on his bike who discovers the dying doctor; Reed, as cute as apple pie, the blossoming young girl loving her afflicted father to bits; steel-jawed cop Kenneth Tobey, eying up all the available talent, especially Beal’s receptionist, Coleen Gray; the old lady taking her dog for a walk, unaware of Beal lurking in the bushes and a patient who says to Beal, “We’re awfully lucky, doctor, to have you around taking care of us,” entirely ignorant of what the man has become. No flashy camerawork here, just straightforward storytelling, Landres relying on Beal’s skill to carry the succession of events — suspense, dread, the lot.
This the actor does with aplomb. As his craving for the pills increases, single parent Beal becomes irritable and confused, even losing patience with his delightful daughter. He looks ragged, ill and tired. When he realizes that he might be the killer after three corpses have been found in as many days, he orders Reed to go and stay with her aunt for her own safety (“Dad, Are you mad at me or something?”) and arranges to meet fellow doctor and ex-college buddy Dabbs Greer, to confess all. “I killed her. Those pills turned me into a horrible thing. A beast!” cries Beal. Greer later tries to put Beal’s mind at rest: “Exactly, but Paul, that doesn’t make you another Dracula.” This is The Vampire’s most telling sequence. Up until then, we have only seen partial glimpses of the monster; as the clock ticks past the hour of 11, Greer, who has forbidden Beal to take a tablet, sees the doc’s hand change into a misshapen claw. Then Beal turns to face his friend, his grotesque features in full view. Killing Greer, he shoves the corpse into a furnace to cover up the crime, but an audio tape left running reveals everything to Tobey. The final transformation scene takes place in Beal’s house after he has written his last will and testament, intending to commit suicide. Attacking his terrified receptionist who tries to talk him out of the act, Tobey and his partner burst in and chase the monster out into the woods. Beal grabs Tobey but is shot dead by the other officer (not, however, with a silver bullet!), falling backward into a muddy pool and changing back to the caring physician.
Mention must be made of Gerald Fried’s insidious soundtrack, similar to the music he composed for I Bury the Living. It’s slightly unorthodox but works well enough, pushing the action along nicely. No crucifixes, angry villagers, garlic or hiding from the sun; a skeletal corpse and bite marks on the neck are the only nods in the direction of the old–styled values inherent in most cinematic tales of the undead. Like The Werewolf, The Vampire is noir-ish in parts and reflected, at the time it was made, new attitudes toward much used themes. It didn’t last long — Landres directed The Fantastic Disappearing Man a year later which was far more a conventional vampire outing than this turned out to be. But in that short space of time, when science overruled folklore, American fantasy cinema came up with two understated classics of the horror genre whereby scientists created the werewolf and the vampire, not mythical legend. Steven Ritch and John Beal represent twin victims of scientific meddling in things best left alone; they did nothing better in their movie careers. Both pictures unreservedly warrant a higher place in the order of horror film merit.