Movie Monsters
Edited by Peter Haining
FOR
my brother, Robert,
who appreciates a good horror story
and writes them, too.
INTRODUCTION
The idea that I should select my twelve favourite monster films for this collection was suggested to me some years back by my friend Peter Cushing, surely the most popular actor in this kind of picture in the modern cinema. In his career, now spanning almost half a century (the first movie in which he appeared was The Man In The Iron Mask, made in Hollywood in 1939), Peter has featured with virtually every kind of terror- creature you care to name, including man-made monsters, vampires, werewolves, mummies, ghouls, gorgons, even the Abominable Snowman, The Hound of the Baskervilles and the infamous Daleks!
There is not much, therefore, that you can tell Peter about movie monsters, though, off-screen, he is a quiet and retiring man who prefers biographies and novels of rural life to horror literature. Yet his championing of the horror story, both in print and on the screen, is in stark contrast to some other actors who have made their livelihood in the genre and then sought to denigrate it. To belittle this category of entertainment is to ignore the fact that a good many horror or terror films – call them what you will – have earned the very highest critical accolades. And not a few have originated from classic works of fiction which continue to be read and enjoyed many years after their creation.
Another great admirer of this kind of movie is the top American fantasy author and Hollywood scriptwriter Ray Bradbury, also a friend, much of whose own formative years in Los Angeles were spent revelling in the best that the local film studios had to offer. He long ago realised the importance and influence of horror films on his work and, indeed, has made his own valuable contributions to the genre. He pays a special tribute to the durability of the pictures in the prologue, “Inviting Frankenstein Into The Parlour”.
Like Peter and Ray, I have never made a secret of my love of these films, and it is a pleasure to have the opportunity of recording my thanks for many hours of cinematic enjoyment with these dozen favourites. It has been great fun choosing from a considerably larger number of stories and film stills the final selection of items to feature in this book. Many of them have stirred old memories of cinema nights and library days, as well as inducing more than the odd frisson of terror! I hope that they may now do the same for you.
Peter Haining
Boxford, Suffolk
January 1988
PROLOGUE
INVITING FRANKENSTEIN INTO THE
PARLOUR
by Ray Bradbury
What was I doing at the Count Dracula Society’s dinner? I January 1988. was giving an award to Elsa Lanchester for her vivid performance as the bride of Frankenstein.
Elsa hurried to the stage, accepted the award, turned to the audience, thought for a moment about something to say, and then reared back and let loose the most terrible scream I have ever heard.
It was, of course, the scream she had sent round the world in that same film, Bride Of Frankenstein, in 1935.
It was a perfect acceptance speech. A fine way to end a banquet. A fine way to start an article.
That scream we have all heard coming out of our throats since we were children attending our first horror film. It is 49 percent terror, 51 percent sheer delight.
For we do love the lusciousness of being frightened; we want so very much the deliciousness of being afraid.
Some of us admit it. Some deny the whole thing. Pro or con, then, let’s have a fight. Are horror films worthwhile? Which horror films, if any, are true and right, creative, and best? Why bother with them at all?
Death, in America, because of certain misguided though bright parents, never comes to call. I would like, creatively, to help it arrive.
Why should I care?
I am interested in horror films, because I fell in love with the subject when I was in my crib and saw the sunshine and then the sun go down and gave one heck of a yell at the darkness and the moonlight.
So, since they were fairly young, I have raised my daughters to be the hunch on the back of that bell-ringer of Notre Dame, the mushroom grown in Lon Chaney’s cellar, the tour guides through the vaults where Dracula hides from the light.
I grew up in a world that denied the blueprints of rockets to the moon; they would never happen, we would never go. It was also a world that thronged with intellectuals whose disdain for Poe and Chaney, for Boris and Bela, was as fang- proof as chainmail armour.
I soon sensed, however, that these giants walking around hurling thunderbolts of criticism were pygmies so immense they simply couldn’t face the myths and legends that I revelled in at the library or the Panharmonium Elite Cinema Theater.
So I lived a life from the age of three until 33 believing I was wrong about everything and discovering, later on, in my creativity, I had been absolutely correct. We had landed on the moon, and, at last, Dracula and Frankenstein were being invited into the parlour. Maybe not by Freud and his cousins, but by a new generation interested in opening Pandora’s Box to see what popped out.
Not that the fight is over. By no means is this so. There are still plenty of ‘modern’ parents who refuse to let Nervous Willie or Jumpy Alice shake hands with Vincent Price or even encounter so much as the witch in Snow White.
Why have I carried the fight on? Because, in my love for the form at its best, I feel I am right and they are wrong.
Before we proceed further, let me list my favourite all-time horror films, not necessarily in order of love.
King Kong
The Mummy
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (with Fredric March)
The Haunting
The Exorcist
The Phantom of the Opera
Dracula
Frankenstein
The Cat and the Canary
Horror of Dracula
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Man Who Laughs
Skeleton Dance
Night on Bald Mountain
The Old Mill
Now if that isn’t a diversified list, for all ages, I’ve never seen one. The last three films are, of course, short cartoons, all by Walt Disney. I recommend them for your offspring as wonderful ways to start down the poisoned garden path to death and all its delectable frights.
To which I might add Vertigo and Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, but then, if I continue, this essay will run forever.
Vertigo? you ask, a horror film? Yes, for we are going to consider all kinds of sadness verging over into horror. If you consider the plots of many of the films listed above you will find ‘love lost after being found’ as part and parcel of many of them.
The good love that Dr Jekyll knows in his life is destroyed by the love that is impure, thrust forth by Mr Hyde. Kong finds and then loses Fay Wray and dies for her in the end. The Hunchback of Notre Dame wastes away for Esmeralda. The Phantom of the Opera risks his life, and loses it finally, for the love of an opera singer. Vertigo, finally, moves into horror because it is the story of a woman brought back from the dead through the need of a man who transforms a strange girl into the image of his lost love. At the end his reconstituted love, by accident, falls from a church tower, leaving him face-to-face with madness, catatonia, and nightmare forever after. If that isn’t horror, I fail to know my categories.
The Phantom of the Opera is a romance that ends in terror only when the opera singer, drawn by the romantic image of the phantom, dares to rip off his mask. If the mask had stayed on, the romance, the love, could have continued. In one way the novel and the film say: better mystery, better some touch of the unknown. He who tears the veil away must be prepared for the abyss. Reality is most unkind. Beware h
ow you touch it.
In The Mummy Karloff, 4,000 years old, wants to kill his beloved so as to resurrect her into a love for all eternity. Out of this sombre mixture, comes immense sadness which touches the heart before it destroys. But love, as you see, is the main ingredient, turned askew by time, circumstances, burial, rebirth and burial again.
The shocks of love found and lost are one thing, the shocks of time and age quite another. Horror often comes like a lightning flash when we realise that life, time, and death mean
The battle over the merits of fear in film rages back and forth through binfuls of truly dreadful horror films, yes, but then again up through the high ground where Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) knits and Bram Stoker (Dracula) purls.
Why do we continue to be fascinated? Because . . .
There are variations and variations on variations of horror. It is these elements of paradox, these boxfuls of dreadful stuff out of our genetic past and our masking present, that make many people turn away from horror films. They refuse to recognise that Buchenwald is a country within the hearts of every man of every colour in every country upon earth. This is a dire notion and a dread truth, better not spoken of.
Fool, said my Muse, look in thy heart, and write!
Fool, say I, look at the screen, look at the Phantom, and know.
For only by knowing, acknowledging, feeling these terrible truths, can we grow, and grow, hopefully, toward some balance of goodness.
Some horror films, of course, exorcise death not by driving a stake in its heart, as we do with Count Dracula, but by laughing at it, as in The Cat And The Canary. People do die in the film, but we do not stay with them; we run, we jump; we laugh and run again, always one step ahead of destruction.
But for every old horror film that once touched us or moved us because it was marrowed through with love, or caused us to laugh because it did not look long at death, we begin to have films today so firmly based in reality that they could have been written by the Manson family or their dire offspring.
Psycho partakes of that horror which does not purge. Audrey Hepburn’s Wait Until Dark, similarly, goes against the old Greek purgative traditions. Murderers will indeed come and get us. There is no escape. Reality lies waiting outside the cinemas. Nothing we do on film can help us ever.
We can, then, enjoy, if that is the word I am looking for, Psycho and Wait Until Dark, but they increase our tensions rather than erase them. The world suddenly fills with Roman Polanskis who pop up and rip our left nostril with a knife. All heroes are suddenly Jack Nicholson wandering about for half a lifetime with his nose bandaged.
Your pure horror film, in the old days anyway, helped us magic away the death which threatened us with a spell, a gesture, or a very real act of destruction. We nailed Dracula in his coffin, we burned Frankenstein’s monster in an old mill, even though he was the sad Promethean son, outcast of an old dream of controlling life. But better dead than imperfect like us all.
J. Bronowski, the brilliant scientist-author, in his “The Face of Violence” speaks of the Sphinx that prowls within the walls of cities. That Sphinx is violence and, Bronowski says, it sits by the hearth and it has a human face. We share that fireside with the Sphinx which is not only violence but the surprise of birth, the trauma of life passing, the shock of old age, the terror of dark and sickness, and the final despair of death. All these we pack into our myths and tales and films as symbols, hoping to see dimly, comprehend blindly, understand remotely, and so survive.
The horror film then is an extension of the beast which inhabits not only our cities, homes and hearths, but will live in our hearts as long as men are born to die and feel the need to vent twin cries of celebration and warnings: ‘Look at me, I destroy!’ is the whisper behind the smile. ‘Look at me!’ says Dr Jekyll. ‘No, me!’ says Mr Hyde.
The horror film is a school for all of us then, it seems. We simply must attend. Without them we graduate into a world that will be worse than the nightmares we see in films that could, if we allowed, instruct our dreams.
BALAOO - THE DEMON BABOON
by Gaston Leroux
It was that great French pioneer film maker Georges Méliès (1861–1938) who made the very earliest fantasy films and also introduced the first movie monster to the cinema screen. For this reason, it seems most appropriate that the first in my selection should be a French picture.Méliès, the former conjuror and illusionist who was irresistibly drawn to the embryo film industry, produced the earliest screen ‘monster’ in his 1896 short, silent picture, Tom Old Boot, the story of a grotesque dwarf who terrorises his enemies. Méliès employed a real dwarf in the title role, made up rather like Quasimodo in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. That same year he also gave his audiences their first encounter with that now perennial star of horror movies, the Devil, in Le Manoir Du Diable, which was shown in Britain and America as The Devil’s Castle. However, it was one of Méliès proteges, Eclair, who made the first full-length monster movie when he brought the serial story, Balaoo Ou Des Pas Au Plafond, to the screen in 1913. When shown later in the USA, this picture became known by its now-famous title, Balaoo – The Demon Baboon.
Gaston Leroux (1868–1927), a one-time globe-trotting journalist turned serial story writer and novelist, wrote much of his fiction in a sensational style ideally suited for the rapidly-developing cinema industry, and many of his works were later to be filmed, including The Mystery Of The Yellow Room (1907) and the even more famous Phantom Of The Opera (1911). The story of Balaoo, the baboon transformed into a half-humanised monster by Professor Coriolis, the first of a long line of cinema ‘mad scientists’, was the earliest of his tales to be filmed, following a hugely successful newspaper serialisation. It was directed by Victorin Jasset, with a nimble circus artist called Lucien Bataille in the title role, and Henri Gouget as the scientist. The picture was shown on some occasions as a three-part serial, advertised as featuring ‘The Weirdest Animal Ever Created’ in a horrific story that ‘will jam any theatre’. The success of this pioneer film has to date inspired two sequels: Fox’s The Wizard (1927), directed by Richard Rosson, with George Kotsonaros as the fiend-faced ape’ and Gustav von Seyffertit as Professor Coriolis; and the same company’s re-make entitled Dr Renault’s Secret (1942), directed by Henry Lachman, with J Carol Naish as a rather pathetic and exploited ape man in the evil clutches of the mad scientist played by George Zucco.
Leroux’s serial on which Balaoo – The Demon Baboon was based is very episodic in style, and it was the episode which follows here that formed the basis of all the films. As a former journalist, it is perhaps not surprising that he should have adopted the technique of using a series of dramatic newspaper stories to recount the ape man’s reign of terror in Paris. And as a former journalist myself, the reader might well understand why this story remains a favourite of mine both on the screen and in print.
* * *
I am now going to reveal the memorable circumstances in which the private misfortunes of the Saint-Aubin family in Paris assumed the proportions of a public calamity a short while ago.
Let me first quote two paragraphs which appeared in the Patrie En Danger and the Observateur Impartial respectively and which passed unnoticed at the time. It was not until later that people thought of connecting them with the extraordinary incidents that upset the whole existence of the capital. The Patrie En Danger wrote, in its ‘Paris Notes’:
‘The impudence of foreigners knows no bounds. They treat Paris like a conquered city. This is a fact which we have all observed for ourselves. They expect the best seats at the theatres; and the tables outside the cafés are theirs as though by right. Yesterday evening, two Roumanian students stopped in front of the Brasserie Amédée in the Rue des Ecoles and, finding a little dog in their way as they were going to sit down, calmly fired a revolver at it and killed it. They were pursued by the indignant crowd and only just had time to climb a gutterpipe of the Musée de Cluny and thus escape the punishment that awaited them. M Haracourt, t
he genial keeper of our national museum, in vain interrupted his work to look for the offenders, who were able to make good their flight by means of a gargoyle from which any respectable man would, nine times out often, have fallen and broken his neck.’
On the same day, the Observateur Impartial contained the following, under the heading:
NOT EVERYBODY CARES FOR PEANUTS
‘If the long-suffering ratepayers who constitute the Paris public would occasionally take the law into their own hands when tired of the multitudinous annoyances thrust upon them, life in our much overrated metropolis would perhaps become endurable. A few years ago, a man could still sit outside a café without being pestered by peripatetic street-vendors, hawkers of every kind, newspaper-boys and dealers in picture-postcards and transparencies; he could take his cocktail without having his table invaded by the latest thing in toys or by a keg of olives. Things, unfortunately, have changed; and we can well understand that people suddenly lose their tempers in the face of the obstinacy of a peanut vendor whose wares they have already respectfully refused. Yesterday evening, at the Café Sara Bernhardt, two young attaches of the Japanese Legation, weary of a torment to which they had doubtless never been subjected in the streets of Nagasaki, sent a too-enterprising dealer in peanuts flying into the gutter. The incident occurred during the interval betweeen the acts and caused some little commotion; and the representatives of the prefect of police were preparing to draw up a report, when the young Japanese were clever enough to vanish with the agility of monkeys, clinging to a passing tramcar and scrambling to the top by sheer force of muscle, without using the steps, no doubt so as to show the passengers on the Montrouge-Gare de l’Est tram that people are pretty resourceful in the Empire of the Rising Sun.’
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