With the benefit of hindsight and the tendency of time periods to compress as we get further from them, it’s not uncommon to think of Universal Studios initial wave of monster movies as comprising a boom that stretched from 1931 to 1945, but it was nothing of the sort. There was an initial flurry of […]
The rise of horror as a real thing in American cinema was not an uncontroversial process; concerns over propriety and morality kept the genre from ever taking hold in the States during the silent era the way it so vitally did in Germany. When the dam finally broke in the early sound days, with Universal’s […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: it’s the nature of vampires, being that they are creatures of evil, that they must be hunted by warriors […]
For all the advances made in special effects in the last ten years, werewolves have had a really tough go of it. We’ve had any number of tremendously convincing screen zombies, and marvelous vampires of both the sparkly and non-sparkly varieties, but for some reason, representations of lycanthropes have been miserably wanting. Neil Marshall’s otherwise […]
And so we come to the death rattle of Universal horror. For some reason that will only ever be known to those involved, the studio suits determined that the best way to retire their classic monsters was to mix traditional horror cinema with the comedy duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The first of […]
After the miserable artistic failure of House of Frankenstein, there wasn’t much that the next Universal horror movie had to do besides show up to be an improvement. But House of Dracula does more than just show up. Perhaps because the filmmakers realised on some level that this was to be the final hurrah for […]
I have not been able to determine much information about the box office fortunes of the Universal monster films in the 1940s, so I cannot say if Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Son of Dracula, the studio’s two franchise entries from 1943, made any particular sum of money worth mentioning. I suspect they must […]
Given how sequel-mad Universal studios was in the wake of 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, cranking out two Frankensteins, one of which was also a Wolf Man, a whole carload of mummy pictures, and hell, even a few Invisible Man follow-ups, it seems almost absurd that it took until 1943 to finally produce a second sequel […]
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what desperation looks like. By 1943, the steam was mostly out of the second phase of Universal horror movies, even in their new cheaper, B-picture incarnation, and if the cycle was going to keep on going, something bold and splashy had to be done, for then as now movies made […]
Along comes World War II, and all of a sudden you can’t sink too much time and effort and especially money into making a movie anymore; certainly not an epic-scale monster movie. And thus it was was that 1941’s The Wolf Man, though itself a film riddled with small signs of cheapness, would be the […]
The second phase of Universal horror films that began with 1939’s Son of Frankenstein was even more prolific and successful than the first, although this did not come at a small price. For while the bulk of the horror films produced under the watchful eye of the two Carl Laemmles were high-budget affairs with the […]
One of the immediate effects of the takeover of Universal in 1936 was that the horror films which had become such an important part of the studio’s brand name were very abruptly cut off (no doubt, the cost and middling performance of Dracula’s Daughter aided in this decision somewhat). This bold executive decision lasted for […]
