Universal Horror

Horror and cinema are a match made in heaven. It is said you can tell a good filmmaker if he's able to pull off a good horror film. In horror you have the basic elements of a dark atmospheric look, people screaming, and probably some blood and gore thrown into the mix.

Horror is almost as old as cinema, it's usually credited at the beginning with German expressionism. "The Cabinet a Dr. Caligari" was a benchmark of that era, which is commonly referred to as the first horror film. Then there is F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" in 1922, which is still the greatest realization of the "Dracula" legend.

Today, horror movies remains popular with new types of horror monsters invading the multiplexes. Some of these monsters are inspired, others are not. I usually tend to avoid new horror movies today, I sometimes feel like I respond to a different time, I don't like what people refer to as "torture porn", I couldn't sit through the first "Saw" movie, and I've avoided movies like "Hostel" or the remake of "These Hills Have Eyes". Maybe there is artistic merit to these movies, but I know I will live a happy life without seeing either of them.

Halloween is of course upon us , and this is usually the time to reflect on some the greatest horror films of all time, and this is something I'm always interested in, mostly because I love lists. Most movies that make these lists mostly stem from the late 60s-70s era like "The Exorcist", "Rosemary's Baby", "Jaws", or "Alien".

I admire those horror movies very much, but for me, the most fun horror movies come from the early Universal days most prominently the early 30s. These were the films directed by Todd Browning, James Whale, and Karl Freud, and starring people like Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff.

Movies like "Dracula" starring Lugosi, and "Frankenstein" starring Karloff remain special to me, I don't really find them scary, like most people of today who have perhaps seen too much, but I love them just the same. Like most early sound pictures, "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" suffer from a creaky and wooden type of look and acting style, yet that's part of their charm. The films themselves remain quite imaginative, and are also exercises in the art of camp.

"Frankenstein" was the first of these films I saw as a kid, I watched it as a double bill in my basement along with another great monster movie "King Kong". I was probably around ten or eleven at the time. I loved the film even back then, I've always had an affinity for classic black and white movies, and these types of films spoke to my imagination as a child.

A few years later I would watch "Dracula", a film I still have my troubles with, it's probably due to the fact that the film was based on the stage play of Bram Stoker's novel and suffers from not being very cinematic, which is why today I still prefer "Nosferatu" as well as the remake by Werner Herzog. Still I am charmed by Lugosi's Dracula, he rises the film above its staged trappings.

There are two films I think are vastly underrated in the Universal monster cannon, which I think are both superior to "Dracula", the first is "The Mummy" from 1932 directed by Karl Freud and starring Boris Karloff. "The Mummy" has a lot in common with "Dracula" story wise, but I found it to be far more interesting, and Karloff relishes in the role as the dead Egyptian Mummy brought back to life.

The second film is "The Invisible Man", directed by "Frankenstein's" James Whale and starring Claude Rains. This film is based on the novel by H.G. Welles, and actually did frighten me as a child, Rains plays a mad scientist who finds the formula to make himself invisible, yet he of course goes mad in the process. I found the story quite chilling, and despite many remakes or rip offs, the original is still the most effective.

Perhaps my least favorite has to be "The Wolf Man", which I find to be overrated, the film stars Lon Chaney Jr. who is fine in the role as a man who is bitten by a werewolf, and the supporting cast is superb as well with the likes of Claude Rains and Ralph Bellamy. However I wasn't impressed by the presence of the Wolf Man, it appears only a handful of times in the original film and he doesn't do much but snarl at the camera. The make up effects are quite astonishing, but his appearance just didn't seem as epic to me as that of Frankenstein or Dracula, or The Mummy.

I often wonder had the Wolf Man not come so late, his first film was ten years after the first appearances of Frankenstein and Dracula. He was limited to the laws of movies after the pre-code era, meaning, you couldn't do anything that was deemed that gruesome or dangerous.

Of course the greatest of all these horror films is the sequel to "Frankenstein", "Bride of Frankenstein" which stands as a masterpiece, and pretty much sums up why I think all these films endure. "Bride" is a gorgeous movie to look at, it's one of those films that belong in the world of black and white, it also is aware of itself like the others weren't before. Director James Whale made a horror comedy, which was obsessed with dark humour regarding life and death. It's wickedly funny, and epically put together. The climactic scene where the Bride becomes alive is probably the greatest of all scenes of its kind, it blends both horror, comedy, and pathos in its shots. I still chuckle with delight whenever I hear the musical score from "Bride of Frankenstein", or hearing Elsa Lanchester shriek when she first touches Karloff's monster, and of course her snake like hisp before she is about to be destroyed. The look and the tone of the film become so perfect, and to me it represents what all of these films strived to be, and almost were.

The Universal films remain fun films for me to revisit, I recognize their weaknesses, yet I still have great pleasure in watching them, they remind me of that first piece of horror I felt as a child watching my first horror film, I love them because they represent a time when film was still new, and still inventing itself, they may be primitive today, but still I'd choose them over torture any day.