It’s that time of year again, and with the leaves starting to turn into reds, golds, and browns, it’s hard not to feel the festive Halloween spirit sweep over you like a brisk October wind. So, with the spooky season in full swing, I figured it might be fun to go over some classic movie monsters–many of whom are so cemented into the horror canon that children as young as 5 know their names, despite the movies they were introduced in being nearly a century old, and the books that initially created them being even older than that.
First canonized by Universal Pictures in the 30s, 40s, and into the 50s–though that would be excluding the earlier Universal movies, we’ll get to that–the major movie monsters that grace Halloween-related ads like the infamous Pepsi and Doritos commercials of the 90s to the sides of trick or treat totes emblazoned with werewolves, vampires, and Frankenstein’s Monster, among others, the American monster canon is ubiquitous this time of year. And though most of us are aware of their usage in classic Universal Monster Movies, and the literature that birthed them, these early works have been, in many ways, obscured by the now centuries worth of media that made them a part of the wider collective consciousness.
The first films in the classic era began in the early teens of the 20th century, with “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” all silent-era films based on works of classic literature by Robert Louis Stevenson, Victor Hugo, and Gaston Leroux respectively–the latter two of which starring Lon Chaney Sr., father of the eventual Wolfman actor Lon Chaney Jr.
The series didn’t really create the iconic monsters that stand as inspiration for half of the stuff at your local Spirit Halloween until the release of “Dracula” (1931), the first official adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, the film inspired by a successful 1924 stage adaptation of Stoker’s novel.
The irony here is that the original character that Dracula was based on was the famous British stage actor Henry Irving, whom Stoker served as a manager, even after the publishing of “Dracula” in 1897. The book was far from a hit at the outset, with several of Stoker’s obituaries even omitting the work. It didn’t become popular until the aforementioned Broadway production in the 1920s, which led to the film being made.
Of the original Universal films, there are five that feature the character as a major presence within the film, with 1945’s “House of Dracula” being the last in the series before being revived over and over again over the years, including famously by Christopher Lee in the British-led Hammer Film Productions of the late 50s, 60s, and early 70s.
The next big hit in the Universal Monster’s library would be released later in 1931. Frankenstein’s Monster was introduced in Mary Shelley’s gothic novel in 1818. Shelley was 18 when she started writing the book and it was published when she was 20, though original printings of the novel didn’t bear her name, as publishers feared people wouldn’t buy a book written by women. It wast until second editions were published a year later that her name appeared on the book’s cover.
Often called the first science-fiction novel, and perhaps one of the first pieces of horror fiction, the novel’s genesis came in the form of a competition between herself and a group of poets and writers–her husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori–tasked with creating a ghost story in 1816, a year after the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia which caused three years of climate change that severely affected weather patterns, causing crop failures and cooler weather across the globe over. Often called the Year Without a Summer, over 100,000 died due to the eruption and many more died due to the aftereffects.
The original film and its sequel “Bride of Frankenstein,” directed by openly gay filmmaker James Whale at a time when such things were unheard of, are often heralded as some of the best films in the Universal Monster series, with scenes that hauntingly recreate the novel’s biblical loss of innocence in a world that hates and fears the titular character’s monster. Whales’s movies have been seen by some as a comment on his struggles in real life, and the prejudices he certainly lived with throughout his life, being a gay man in a time when such things were illegal in many European countries–Whale himself being born in England, which didn’t legalize homosexuality until 1967, with Scotland and Wales not legalizing it until 1980, long after his death by suicide in 1957.
We obviously still have some more characters and films to cover, namely the werewolf/wolfman, and the mummy, among others, but for now, we’ll leave those and their origins for next time. In the next column, we’ll cover the origins of several other monsters from the Universal Monsters films that are a part of the American monster canon, many of which have their origins in history and myth, rather than literature–though at least one has some origin in Western literature. Until then, enjoy some classic movie monster movies.
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