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.

Young lust, blood lust, trust: Let the Right One In

It’s 1982, and in some anonymous Stockholm housing complex 12-year-old Oskar stands knife in hand before the window in his ginch, rehearsing revenge, or, more accurately, assuming the role of his oppressor. His reflection in the glass is doubled, rendering him ghostly in our first glimpse of him. Oskar is ash-blonde, elfin, soft-spoken, inward, and mercilessly bullied at school by a bunch of boys who look like girls. His parents are divorced. He’s an only child and seems virtually alone in the world. But on this night he sees a strange car pull up. A middle-aged man and a little girl are moving in to the apartment next door. The man immediately sets about covering up their windows with cardboard. For Oskar, who keeps a private scrapbook of news clippings on murder and death, the weirdness and secrecy that surrounds his new neighbours appeals instantly. Soon, this curiosity will turn into heartsickness. Oskar is going to fall in love for the first time.


Preadolescent romance isn’t something typically located in the comfort zone of most movies, but Let the Right One In isn’t most movies. Oskar and Eli will connect the same way a lot of kids connect, through a sense of mutual alienation. Yet Eli’s particular sense of exclusion is more acute, and more permanent. When Oskar asks how old she is she tells him 12… though she’s been 12 for a long time. When he tells her he likes her, she asks him if he’d like her even if she weren’t a girl. He’s puzzled, but that’s just part of love’s delirium. It takes Oskar a while to accept what we’ve by now figured out. Eli is a vampire. This creates complications. But it also places Eli, who recognizes the genuine fascination with blood in Oskar’s murderous fantasies, in the role of his protector.

Let the Right One In, directed by Tomas Alfredson and freely adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel, is something special. It offers a highly original spin on the weary corpse that is the vampire film, yet rather than clutter itself with irony or obvious metaphors, it completely respects the rules of vampire mythology, something evidenced in the title itself. It is hushed, it’s pace methodical. It dazzles even while it draws you in like a hot bath. The sense of isolation felt by Oskar and Eli, so perfectly embodied with childish awkwardness by Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, is heightened by the use of very shallow depth of field—it’s rare that more than a single character is in focus at any time. The pervasive snow and night conjure an atmosphere of crisp wintry dreamscape in which colours stand out, vivid and handsome. Close-ups or medium shots are starkly contrasted by static wide shots in scenes of violence, so that the violence plays out before our eyes as though on a stage.

This stylization is woven into the look and sound and story itself. Eli’s guardian –perhaps slave?—gases a teenager in the woods—a more awkward form of abduction is hard to imagine. When he strings up his victim from the ankles are prepares to drain his blood it’s hard not to notice how the woods are lit up like a football field. But Let the Right One In never tries to pass itself off as gritty realism. Many of the special effects are lovingly old school. There’s perverse pleasure in the spectacle of a woman rolling down a flight of stairs covered in rabid cats. It’s the child of Val Lewton, IKEA and Sally Mann,  and it's all somehow closer to fairytale, albeit a nightmarish one riddled with ambiguities surrounding death, child autonomy, sexuality and gender—something dealt with explicitly in the novel but wisely only hinted at in this far more subjective treatment. Screw Twilight. 

A thousand points of flickering light: David Thomson's Have You Seen...? is another colossal homage to that corrupting labyrinth of cinema

There is a threshold that divides the perfectly sound criticism of movies from another literary pursuit, foolishly ambitious, irredeemably obsessive, inevitably laced with something like memoir, a writing that makes pleas for its existence completely apart from the work, if not the whole labyrinthine medium, it addresses. I understand, you may or may not want to take on what’s delivered from the far side of that threshold, though I’ve always found that it’s precisely where things start to get genuinely interesting. There’ve been several writers who’ve blazed a trail through this thorny terrain, but I have a special admiration for the British-born David Thomson, whose one-man encyclopedia, The Biographical Dictionary of Film, remains a mind-boggling text, among the most compulsively perused books I own, full of aphoristic flights, brilliant observations, towering bullshit and enraging dismissals, not to mention ordinary old movie lust. (Enter Nicole Kidman.)

Have You Seen…?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films (Knopf, $45) is a sort of companion to The Biographical Dictionary, another sprawling tome of filmic considerations that scale the medium’s century-plus trajectory—not Thomson’s thousand best, mind you, but perhaps his thousand most worth discussing? Honestly, my impression is that he’s not completely sure what these selections collectively constitute, but the number itself seems important: “going for a thousand is a gesture toward history… like wondering whether Beowulf can talk to Lolita.” It should be stressed that Have You Seen…? is not a compendium of previous published reviews, or even, most impressively, previously aired opinions, but a wholly realized project all its own. Every title here, from Paris, Texas (“I’m not sure that many films are as moving and as incoherent”) to Persona (“We are in performance: it is a religious condition”), from 2001 (“a lavish travesty”) to Stalker (“I am in awe of the power—yet I have an itch to see Bob Hope playing the Stalker”), and every artist, from Mickey Rourke (“a poet, if someone could lay down the length of his lines”) to Ingmar Bergman (“the saint of lives that may think they are settled”), from Catherine Denueve (“she seemed dipped in liquid cocaine”) to James Spader (“a cul-de-sac of oddity”), is newly surveyed.

Thomson once wrote that there’s no effect more special than an actor changing his or her mind, and for those familiar with Thomson’s arguments, there’s pleasure to found in seeing how the writer, too, changes his mind. As evident in the irreverent compliment to Stalker above, it appears Thomson’s finally come around in a big way to Andrei Tarkovsky, who has no less than four films in the thousand, and he’s learned to love the morbid lyricism that underlies the films of Val Lewton, once derided for his “B-movie philosophy.” Thomson still has an annoying habit of pooh-poohing Akira Kurosawa however, largely because he wasn’t Kenji Mizoguchi—sometimes you wonder how much Japanese cinema Thomson’s actually seen. There are other filmmakers whose work Thomson seems to have appraised only recently and is still catching up with—how else to explain the inclusion of both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises but nothing else from David Cronenberg? At one point Thomson congratulates Poltergeist for giving us “TV as the threshold for the other world” but, bafflingly, makes no mention of Videodrome.

Weirder still, we get Thomson’s praise for To Die For and Happy Together, the former the book’s sole selection from Gus Van Sant, the latter it’s only Wong Kar-Wai. At least Van Sant and Wong get mentions—there isn’t a single film from Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Shohei Imamura or Jim Jarmusch entered in this book that nevertheless makes room for Mary Reilly, the original Thomas Crown Affair and Yentl. And it kind of disgusts me that we get an entry on the recent, widely celebrated rediscovery of Army of Shadows, a product of the French cinematic establishment, while no whisper of the equally celebrated rediscovery of Killer of Sheep, a product of South Central Los Angeles that hauntingly reveals the Third World alive and well in prosperous America.

Flamboyant subjectivity, incompleteness and even contrarianism is, of course, part of the point of Have You Seen…?, which is always, stridently, personal in approach, a look at movies, and perhaps even more so the experience of movies, through the prism of a single articulate obsessive. Thomson knows that opinion and analysis both need to be fluid and flexed to stay alive. He’s taken it upon himself, sometimes, mind you, to absurd and unpersuasive degrees (see his review of My Darling Clementine), to hold every classic up to the highest standard, deliberately sniffing out flaws in masterpieces, while he pounds his fists on a few occasions to make cases for the overlooked and under-loved. And when Thomson returns to work he’s examined previously and thoroughly, he often delivers his finest prose of all, breathtaking, penetrating the very heart of something, wrestling with reflections on the real life outside the frame, making you want to rush out and re-see the film in question. On The Mother and the Whore: “It is long because people will talk themselves into silence over sex and love, and the uncertain hope that they can be kept separate… they catch youth at that tyrannical moment when it can believe it will never have to yield.”

Something that really irks some readers—or, at least, many fellow critics—is Thomson’s perpetual mistrust of cinema as a genuine art. He does indeed have a niggling knee-jerk toward high and low artistic designations that can corrupt otherwise sound arguments, but I actually consider this aspect of the work on the whole enjoyable, intriguing and revealing, especially when you catch onto the fact that it’s the cinema’s very slipperiness that so obviously seduces Thomson, who uses Have You Seen…? to constantly weave film history, business and biography into his one-page reviews, a way of accounting for exactly that multi-tired phenomenon that gave its title to Thomson’s history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation. “I came to a fork in the path and followed movies rather than Henry James,” he confesses near the book’s end—though, I suppose, such a reference book has no end—and we know exactly what he’s getting at, a choice to simply adore and revere literature, music and painting while aiming his critical faculties at a force more unruly, more corrupted, more ghostly, more exploited, more mysterious, more collaborative, seemingly infinite and in all it accumulates from the world and spits back into it. If that last part sounds a little too abstract and sweeping, well, spend a few hours with Have You Seen…? and you might just get swept up in the whirlwind yourself, a state of being in which the immensity of movies surrounds you and becomes at once slight, fractured, and dangerously endless in meaning.

Looking for lineage on The Orphanage

The marketing for The Orphanage (El Orfanato) is, unsurprisingly, making much of Guillermo Del Toro's role as executive producer, a fact that no doubt prompted whichever dunderheaded critic it was who declared it "This year's Pan's Labyrinth!" Irksome hyperbole aside, I still enjoyed the film when I caught it on a whim at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, and I went back to see it again this afternoon at a downtown multiplex. It takes little reflection to realize that the story, crammed with innuendo, is of course full of holes, yet none of them seem to actually burrow into the morbidly romantic heart of the material, or take anything away from Belén Rueda's engagingly desperate, sympathetically neurotic performance as Laura, the mother haunted by her missing child long after everyone else has resigned themselves to his almost certain death. Laura and her son Simón share the determining attribute of having both been orphans, and the fidelity and solidarity this imposes on their bond is probably of a nature most of us who've grown up with the security of knowing our birth parents can't truly comprehend. It's this aspect of The Orphanage that I immediately found strangely moving in spite of the film being a bit overcooked by its young director Juan Carlos Bayona.

What drew Del Toro to the film however only became obvious to me after my second viewing. In the largely pedestrian documentary that accompanies Warner's wonderful Val Lewton box set, Del Toro articulates his deep admiration for Lewton, and in The Orphanage we can detect a number of traits that connect directly to Lewton's themes (and in discussing them, there will follow MAJOR SPOILERS). In particular, the film is fundamentally controlled by a very relatable tragedy grounded in reality, while its potentially supernatural elements are finally left ambiguous. As well, the film basically imparts upon the viewer the idea that suicide is a good thing, at the very least a way to resolve an insurmountable emotional wound and make amends with a troubled past. The film's ending is unfathomably gloomy, yet it does imply that the heroine reunites with her son and finds a peace that was otherwise obscure to her. 

But as much as the film benefits from its evocation of Lewton's enduringly seductive horror classics, it also works away at the same creeping psychological schisms found at the heart of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, perhaps my favourite horror story ever, one that found its finest cinematic adaptation in 1961's The Innocents. Frustrated maternal urges, isolation and obsession, the veneration if not fetishization of children: all of these factors figure into the mental landscape of The Orphanage (not to mention Guy Maddin's  Brand Upon the Brain! to which The Orphanage bears several curious resemblances). Perhaps this calls for the delineation of a subgenre: manic surrogate mother and child chillers? ...Let me work on that one.