Secret doors, captive beasts, pulsating heads: Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive

Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive collects five of the studio’s genre pieces spanning the years 1941-43. It’s an interesting transitional period if you consider that Universal’s golden years of monster movies climaxed a decade earlier—Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein all debuted between 1931 and 1935—while what would arguably be the most distinctive horror films of the new decade were emerging from a B-unit at RKO helmed by producer Val Lewton, whose approach to the genre—subtle, neurotic, contemporary, rife with ambiguity, akin to noir—was essentially a complete reversal of the Universal model. The title of this box set is as misleading as it is awkward. There are no classics here, but most are at least pretty fun, while some are genuinely interesting, inventive and pleasingly strange.

The Black Cat (1941) and Horror Island (41) are both pretty slight whodunits in which characters assemble in a single location housing an unidentified killer motivated by some looming treasure. Both are big on broad comedy, the former enlisting an aging Lou Costello type, the latter a lusty sailor with a wooden leg who resembles a rather discreet drag queen. Concerning a family eagerly awaiting the death of its ancient, very wealthy matriarch, The Black Cat claims to be “suggested by” Edgar Allen Poe, though I can only imagine he would have suggested aborting production. However, the film’s atmosphere, with its smoky moonlight outlining a dense garden of trees, benefits tremendously from the work of cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who would go on to shoot The Magnificent Ambersons (42), The Night of the Hunter (55) and The Naked Kiss (64).


Man Made Monster (41), directed by George Waggner, who would also direct The Wolf Man that same year, is more interesting. Like The Wolf Man, it features Lon Chaney Jr. as a protagonist who’s at once victim and monster. You could say the film is secretly about the curse of survival, and traces of its premise can be found in Unbreakable (2000). A bus is hurled into a high power line. Everyone dies—save Chaney’s Dan McCormick, a sideshow performer who does tricks with electricity. Rather than feel wracked with guilt, Dan walks away from the accident cheerful as ever. A sadistic genius electro-biologist lures Dan into his laboratory, intrigued by Dan’s apparent immunity to electricity. He starts pumping Dan with larger and larger doses of electricity until Dan develops a dependency—there’s a pretty chilling addiction subtext here—and finally transforms into an automaton whose flesh pulsates with white heat. Supporting characters tend toward the bland, but there are beguiling montages involving note-taking and lab work, a curious current of mistrust toward psychiatry, and above all a tragic, soulful yet totally weird performance from Chaney. We feel bad for him, but do we ever really know what’s going on inside this guy?

On the surface Night Monster (42) seems of the same lineage as The Black Cat and Horror Island, replete with an old dark house, abundant secret passages and Bela Lugosi as a servant. Yet this is a creepier, more sinister, more absorbing, set in some swampy Southern town where the nights are draped in fog and local authorities don’t sweat much over the series of strangulation killings occurring near the mansion of a reclusive, quadriplegic millionaire who surrounds himself with his mentally ill sister, Lugosi’s butler, some mystic in a turban, and a chauffer who doubles as a salivating rapist. A trio of doctors converge at the millionaire’s house with their hands out for donations but instead find they’re treated to demonstrations of how matter can be altered by telekinetically adjusting its vibrations. They’re also here to pay penance for their collective failure to save the millionaire from his present condition. I loved the expressionistic fog excess, there’s a really good-looking lady shrink, a haunting night walk sequence where a spunky young woman is sadly killed, and Lugosi is forced to act normal in certain scenes, reminding you what an interesting actor he could be when not always hamming it up.

A sort of girly cousin to Fox’s Dr. Renault’s Secret (42), the puzzlingly titled Captive Wild Woman (43) was directed by Edward Dmytryk, who’d soon be helming some essential noirs, such as Murder My Sweet (44) and Crossfire (47). It features two prominent male figures, one ostensibly heroic, the other the obvious villain, aligned by their compulsion to throw wild animals into unnatural situations and tame these animals until they do their bidding. The first man is a circus performer, the second a mad scientist obsessed with “racial improvement” who inserts human glands into a gorilla, the result being the beautiful and bizarre Acquanetta, “the Venezuelan Volcano.” (The actress was actually from Wyoming.) Sounds like a successful experiment in forcing the evolution of beasts into hot babes, but of course confusion and disaster await. The wildly improbably story is quite fascinating, the mise en scène an elegant mélange of slow-motion, creeping traveling shots and sudden close-ups, and the scenes in which the circus guy tangles with real tigers and lions are more genuinely nerve-wracking than anything else in the entire box set. See it. And be nice to animals.

What the Dead Know

Imagine you’re unjustly locked up for second-degree murder. You were just protecting your wife. You don’t know your own strength. It was a freak thing. You’re a musician, an aesthete, soft-spoken, demure by nature, a gentle soul with a shuffling walk and the slight lunge of those ready to topple into the grave. You get out of the pen, you’re womanless, hard-up, turned away from some big shot you were promised would give you a little work. You walk the streets in a beat-up hat and too-short baggy trousers when you meet this guy, friendly as can be. He recognizes you from the papers, remembers your case, knows you got a raw deal. He buys you a coffee, says he’s a PI, offers some work, kid stuff, just watch a house for a while, track the gentleman’s movements. The catch is the gentleman in question is the very judge that sent you up. Seems a little queer, but you can’t be picky. You’re too trusting, or fatalistic, to know when you’re being set up.


That’s the lowdown for John Ellman, the hero of The Walking Dead (1936), and if I’m trying to put you in his raggedy shoes it’s only because he’s embodied by Boris Karloff with such texture and compassion that you can’t help but sympathize—even if you never get the full story about that earlier killing. Ellman takes the fall for a mafia hit and gets the chair—a novelty of the period and much in the press. But somewhere a pair of young lovers who witnessed the crime lose sleep over the fact that they never came to Ellman’s defense. They finally confess, but it’s too late. The news gets to the prison just as Ellman gets the juice. But wait, the lovers are scientists, working for a visionary experimenting with reviving the dead. So Ellman corpse is sent directly to the lab, hooked up to electrodes, and Karloff’s given a major dose of déjà vu, five years after Frankenstein (31). He’s alive, again, remote, as though swallowed by completely by the melancholy that hounded him in his previous life. He doesn’t talk much, so the question lingers: what does he remember of death?

Directed by Michael Curtiz, still far from Casablanca (42) but in excellent form in a flurry of prestige Bs, The Walking Dead is a haunting picture. It’s riddled with artifice and coincidence as our Lazarus begins to quietly enact his wrath, yet it’s endowed with spectral beauty and a deep emotional current thanks mainly to Karloff, as well as an inspired feeling for musical accompaniment—Ellman’s final request is to have a cello player score his death march—and a spare lighting and production design that looks back to German Expressionism and forward to noir. The story also looks forward to The Dead Zone (83), David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about the loneliness that grips those back from the void and carrying secret knowledge.

The Walking Dead is by far the best thing in Warner’s Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics box, though Zombies on Broadway (45) is also very worthwhile. A horror-comedy that’s mostly comedy, it finds Wally Brown and Alan Carney’s New York talent agents coerced by a showbiz mobster into going down to a Caribbean isle to fetch a genuine zombie. Lured by a leggy American showgirl, they eventually find Bela Lugosi secretly cooking up a zombie formula. He fools them into digging their own graves and spending the night in his castle and, you know, hilarity ensues. It’s actually a fairly entertaining bit of hysterical hokum if you can stomach the crude racial gags, but more importantly for classic horror fans it represents a very weird effort to capitalize on a previous hit. Just like Lugosi’s zombies, my eyes popped out of my head when I recognized not only Sir Lancelot, once again playing a calypso singer serenading newcomers with sweetly forbidding ballads, but also Darby Jones, once again playing a shirtless giant zombie. Both were pivotal to the unforgettable spell of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (42), the second film to emerge from producer Val Lewton’s legendary low-budget horror unit at RKO. Their reprisals here are far less distinguished, though at least Jones gets his comeuppance this time around.

Frankenstein 1970 (58) features Karloff as the original mad scientist’s great-great grumpy grandson. In need of funds to buy an atomic reactor so he can make more monsters, he allows a Hollywood film crew to use his castle. The industry satire is all stale cliché, the story is limpid and limited, the monster’s head in wrapped up in so many bandages he looks like Gumby post-surgery. It’s genuinely curious that director Howard Koch chooses to cover most of the scenes in long, unbroken takes and wide shots, though they only make things drag even more. Though it’s got Lugosi, Karloff and Peter Lorre on board, You’ll Find Out (40) seems mainly a showcase for radio personality Kay Kyser and his College of Musical Knowledge. It’s not much of a horror movie, though it did seem really horrible. I had to shut off the TV and run screaming.

The hazy frontiers of genre and genetics: the unforgettable faces of Lugosi, Price and J. Carroll Naish illuminate three new Fox classics on DVD

If the movies sometimes closely resemble our dreams, its partly because the actors, who appear and disappear in different guises, are somehow analogous to our own internal catalogue of faces, limited by the sway of memory and the mysterious dictates of unconscious imagination. The result can be a mixture of disorientation, comfortable familiarity and outright rejection when we can’t accept the grafting of a face we associate with one persona onto another, like how our bodies might reject a the introduction of a foreign organ.

An amusing case study can be found in a pair of roles played by Bela Lugosi. In Chandu the Magician (1932) he played Roxor, a villain bent on acquiring a death ray that can destroy the world. In The Return of Chandu (34), Lugosi, who dies at the end of the previous film, played… Chandu, the hero, and Roxor’s nemesis. Were the invisible forces of studio casting deliberately messing with the minds of filmgoers? Were the filmmakers trying to subliminally impart a sense of the Borgesian infinite in which good and evil alternate endlessly? I haven’t seen the latter film, but I suspect that the reasoning behind Lugosi’s audacious role reversal was simply that the first Chandu, Edmond Lowe, was so irredeemably bland next to Lugosi’s deliciously over-the-top villain, that they opted to keep the more appealing box office draw in the franchise by whatever means. Such is the sometimes banal logic of dreams.

Chandu the Magician is newly available in the three-disc Fox Horror Classics Vol. 2 box, a terrific package, if extremely misleading in its generic designation. Chandu isn’t horror at all but an adventure yarn as jam-packed with spectacular sets (one of the film’s directors was master production designer William Cameron Menzies), daring escapes, laughable implausibilities and casual racism as the Indiana Jones series that revived the tradition 50 years later. Chandu, an American who journeys east, acquires “the secrets of the yogi” and accompanying turban, has to stop Roxor’s scheme with his powers of suggestion. There are some terrific set-pieces, especially Chandu’s escape from a watery grave, but I don’t think Lowe’s mascara-lined eyes could persuade anyone to check for stains on their tie much less run in terror believing their rifle’s become a snake. Anyone who thinks this guy could be a master of mentalism is just plain mental.

Dragonwyck (46), an adaptation of Anya Seton’s novel and the directorial debut of Joseph Mankiewicz, arguably isn’t really horror either, despite the many claims of Steve Haberman to the contrary on the disc’s hugely informative audio commentary, but more fittingly labeled a Gothic romance. It’s also a much more deeply satisfying film, telling the story of a bucolic innocent (Gene Tierney) swept off to a forbidding old mansion lorded over by her cousin, a charismatic landowner (Vincent Price). Set in 1844 amidst the Anti-Rent Wars, it’s also a rather scathing indictment of the aristocracy, here characterized as alternately ignorant, gluttonous or sliding into a dementia founded in zealous faith in their own entitlement, implied inbreeding and perhaps a familial curse, which manifests in some of the film’s most haunting moments, highlighted by Alfred Newman’s ghostly music. Tierney’s lovely, of course, but also wonderfully nuanced in her journey from naïveté to bleak wisdom, while Price makes his first steps into the sort of role that would come to define his persona in the dream world of movies: articulate, haunted, elegant and slipping into darkness.

Good as Dragonwyck is however, the movie I really want to tell you about, the only bona-fide horror movie in this collection, is Dr. Renault’s Secret (42), which, at least by the standards of this lover of 40s B-movies, is one well-kept secret indeed. There are reasons for this, such as the absence of stars or acclaimed filmmakers, yet the script is based on a novel by Gaston Leroux, who once wrote a little something you might have heard of called The Phantom of the Opera, and the sensationalistic story circles around such juicy themes as genetic predisposition and Darwinism, which, let’s face it, is as controversial a topic in American discourse these days as it was 65 years ago.

Dr. Larry Forbes (John Sheppard, a likable enough type with a Kevin McCarthy overbite) turns up in rural France on the eve of Bastille Day to wed Madelon (Lynne Roberts), the daughter of the titular scientist (George Zucco). Forbes meets Renault’s chauffer Noel (J. Carroll Naish), a strange, melancholy Javanese who seems deeply attached to Forbes’ kind and fetching fiancée, and Renault’s gardener, the gruff ex-con Rogell (the terrific character actor and former wrestler Mike Mazurki, who marvelously played the brokenhearted brute Moose Malloy in 1944’s Murder, My Sweet). As France celebrates the anniversary of its first claims toward modern nationhood—and a string of murders terrorize the community—this pair will come to represent man at his most primitive, with Noel, who we discover is the recipient of Renault’s most ambitious experiments, struggling to overcome his basest urges, while Rogell’s content to surrender to the aberrant dictates of his gene pool—he comes from a long line of criminals.

Surprisingly beautifully photographed, brilliantly paced, thematically layered and clocking in at just under an hour (!), Dr. Renault’s Secret is a real diamond in the rough, with a truly weird love triangle and the even weirder surprise that the hero of the movie is actually Noel, embodied so sympathetically and with an absolute minimum of make-up by Naish, whose face I’d like to see populate my movie/dream-world a lot more often—even if those dreams are nightmares.