LY #44: Universal Monsters: They Will Survive

New from Jib-Jab

Jib-Jab came out with a salute to the classic Universal monsters.  It stars Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy, Dracula and a sexy witch.  Tonight I put together a little show with some friends, my spouse and my dog and posted it to Facebook.  (Tomorrow night I'll share an old Halloween picture of one of these friends.)


I call these monsters Universal because, of course, four of them were the creations of the masters of horror at Universal Studios.  The "I Will Survive" theme is appropriate because I think these classic films will survive, in spite of the trash talk sometimes thrown against them by people like Brianna Brey of The Source Weekly.  Last week, in the article "The Horror, the Horror!" she wrote that "Universal Studios produced a "monster series" (1923-1960), which only reinforced the pop-trash perception" of horror stories.  While I may agree with her about many of the sequels (certainly, as much as I may love it, Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein is not a deeply meaningful flic), I must protest her pop-trash label of the original movies.

Director James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) (and its witty (and tres tres gay) sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), are beautifully filmed and ask serious questions about the mixed duty men of science owe to their society and their calling.  Tod Browning's Dracula, while stagey and slow in that early-talkies way, is still notable for it's psychological insight into the liebestod nature of romantic obsession.  It also, according to Boston University professor Leland Monk, contains one of the first if not the first example of female orgasm in a legitimate, big screen movie.  The Mummy (1932) is troubling now because of its Orientalism and yet well worth watching for director Karl Freund's visually stunning cinematography and Boris Karloff's Im Hotep, a character both sinister and sympathetic in his quest to reconnect with his true love.

My favorite character, however, is The Wolfman (which is why, in my Jib-Jab disco number, I cast myself in his hairy ears).  Starring Lon Chaney Jr., the not-as-talented son of the brilliant silent actor, it's not as good a film as the other three.  Chaney is miscast as an ordinary man But this story of a man who becomes, through accident, something that is out of control and harmful to those he loves spoke to me as a child who always believed she was responsible for all the tension in her household and later as an adult who felt, who feels, different and out of place.  After the first time I saw the film as a child, I began drawing pentagrams on my palm and imagining that I turned into a wolf at night.  I often recited the poem:

Even a man who's pure of heart
and says his prayers by night
may turn to a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
and the moon shines full and bright.

(Wikipedia, by the way, tells me that this quote is incorrect and that the last line is, "When the autumn moon is bright.")

It's probably not surprising to anyone familiar with academic stereotypes that someone like myself - a self-proclaimed outcast - wound up as a college teacher.  Our business is filled with weirdos and eccentrics.   And as someone labeled as both, someone who has spent much of the past 40 odd years getting therapeutic assistance for various psychological botherations, I've always appreciated the other poem from The Wolfman, spoken by the great Polish character actress, Maria Ouspenskaya:

"The way you walked was thorny
through no fault of your own,
but as the rain enters the soil,
the river enters the sea,
so tears run to a predestined end.
Now you will have peace."

For more about the great film monsters, try to catch Universal Horror, a 1998 documentary by the great film historian Kevin Brownlow, the next time it's on TCM.