|
CORRIDOR OF HORROR |
DARK CORRIDORS A CLASSIC REVISITED |
|
THEY'RE STILL DEBATING THE HORROR MOVIE MARKET CRASH of 1946 |
 Lois Collier screams her pretty lungs out in "The Cat Creeps" |
Why did the horror movie factories
shut down after World War II?
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
THE YEAR 1946 was one of the most profitable box office periods
in the history of the movie business. World War II had just ended
and America was still flush with victory and wartime prosperity.
People wanted to go out and celebrate--and tens of millions did
it by going to the movies--just about any kind of movies.
Except for horror movies, that is.
Ever since Lon Chaney's 1925 box office smash, "The Phantom of the Opera," the horror film had been a reliably popular Hollywood film genre. But for reasons that still provoke debate among movie buffs, a black hole began to open under the horror movie market in 1946--and nearly ate it up.
For instance, halfway through 1946, Universal studios stopped making horror movies. This was the studio that gave the world Chaney's "Phantom" and survived the Great Depression on the box office popularity of "Dracula," "Frankenstein," "The Mummy" and "The Invisible Man." Sequels to those classics sustained Universal through the war years, along with a little help from Deanna Durbin, Abbott & Costello and a few new monsters like "The Wolf Man" with Lon Chaney, Jr.
That wasn't all the grim
news from Universal for horror fans. That year the studio literally
dumped one of its new horror films--"The Brute Man"
with grotesque Rondo Hatton, Universal's latest horror star--and
turned it over to a "poverty row" studio called Producers
Releasing Corp. (PRC) to distribute. It almost seemed Universal
was ashamed of the pictures that had kept it alive through the
lean years.
 |
|
Then, in 1948, Universal even seemed to blow a giant raspberry at its own famous horror movie tradition by turning loose its low-comedy box office champs, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, for a brutal parody on Universal's most famous monsters called "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948).
Over at RKO, the 1946 grosses for "Bedlam," horror king Boris Karloff's latest film, were so lousy that it finished off producer Val Lewton and his low-budget horror film unit. RKO closed Lewton down, ending a glorious era that had turned out such atmospheric horror classics as "The Cat People" (1942), "I Walked with A Zombie" (1943), "The Seventh Victim" (1943), "The Curse of the Cat People" (1944) and "Isle of the Dead" (1945). Lewton never made another horror film.
Among the other major studios--MGM, 20th Century-Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Columbia--only a handful of genuine horror films were released between 1947 and 1951, most notably Warners' "The Beast with Five Fingers," Fox's "The Creeper" and RKO's "Mighty Joe Young," which was really a Disneyesque version of "King Kong."
Only the minor studios continued to dabble with horror pictures, but just barely. At Monogram, the low budget emporium of countless Bela Lugosi, and East Side Kids horror cheapies, the horror genre withered after 1946. Monogram curtailed production of horror films and, in 1947, launched Allied Artists, a new subsidiary that ultimately would replace Monogram. Allied Artists made no horror films until 1953 when it released a 3-D shocker called "The Maze."
In 1946, PRC, the aforementioned "poverty row" studio, also made its final horror film: "Devil Bat's Daughter," a sequel to the studio's first horror film, "The Devil Bat" (1941). In fact, the genre had fallen upon such hard times at PRC that its next-to-last horror picture, "The Flying Serpent," was little more than a remake of "The Devil Bat" with low-rent star George Zucco replacing the original Bela Lugosi.
In 1946, another blow came:
Two familiar horror "names" died.
One was Lionel Atwill, the sinister star of "Doctor X"
(1932), "The Sphinx" (1933), "The Mystery of the
Wax Museum" (1933) and "The Son of Frankenstein"
(1939), who died while filming the Universal serial "Lost
City of the Jungle." (A double had to finish the picture
for him.) Fans still quote his most famous line from "Son
of Frankenstein," spoken as the one-armed policeman, maimed
in childhood by Frankenstein's Monster: "One never forgets,
Herr Baron, an arm torn out by the roots!"
That same year, Rondo Hatton, whose features were distorted by
the disease acromegaly, died just as Universal began to promote
him as their newest monster, "The Creeper," in films
like "House of Horrors" and "The Spider Woman
Strikes Back." (Fox's 1948 film, "The Creeper,"
despite the title, wasn't about Hatton's Universal character.)
|
|
 |
Meanwhile, the careers of all the major star names in the horror genre went into a long recession that would last deep into the 1950s:
Bela Lugosi, the screen's immortal Count Dracula, spent the rest of his career playing the foil of comics like Bud Abbott and Lou Costello or Arthur "Mother Riley" Lucan. He was the central character in only one other film--the execrable "Bride of the Monster," made by Hollywood schlock merchant Ed Wood--before his death in 1956.
Boris Karloff segued into non-horror roles in big budget color films like Paramount's "Unconquered" (1947) and Universal's "Tap Roots" (1948), then played comic villains or supporting roles in minor horror pictures until the horror movie famine finally waned in the late 1950s.
Lon Chaney, Jr., had run his course as a leading man in horror films by 1946. Earier, he'd been given a huge push at Universal, which tried to build him into a major box office figure like his famous father. He played all the studio's great monsters in films like "The Ghost of Frankenstein" (1942), "The Son of Dracula" (1943), "The Mummy's Curse" (1945) and created his own classic monster, "The Wolf Man," in 1941. Though his name appeared on countless horror films in the 1950s and 1960s, he almost always played minor characters.
Glenn Strange, who played Frankenstein's Monster in "House of Frankenstein" (1944) and "House of Dracula" (1945), the final two entries in Universal's long series that began in 1931, was at the end of his horror career by 1946. He made only one final screen appearance as a horror star after that--he played The Monster in "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" in 1948, then disappeared into small character parts. Today he's best remembered as the bartender in Kitty's Long Branch saloon in the long-running TV series "Gunsmoke."
George Zucco, a dark presence in scores of horror films like "The Mummy's Hand" (1940), "Dead Men Walk" (1943) and "The Voodoo Man" (1944), played his last leading role in an authentic horror film in 1946's "The Flying Serpent." He played key roles in two more "comic" horror films--the dismal "Scared to Death" (1947) and "Who Killed 'Doc' Robbin?" (1948)--then did small roles in mainstream movies until he retired in 1951.
John Carradine, Universal's last Dracula before it gave up horror movies in 1946, appeared in Monogram's "The Face of Marble" in 1946 and didn't make another horror film for 10 years.
 |
|
WHAT CAUSED an entire movie genre to come skidding to a halt in 1946? A widely-accepted theory is that World War II left us all so stunned by the real-life horrors of heavy combat casualties, the Holocaust, and the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Hollywood horror movies now seemed like harmless fairy tales.
It's certainly true that the comeback of horror movies was driven by the stepped-up terror levels of films like "The Thing From Another World" (1951) and "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" (1953) as well as the deeper paranoia of films like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956). They capitalized on our latest worldwide sources of fear: Invasion from outer space and nuclear mutation. Such fears seemed palpably real at a time when flying saucer reports routinely made headlines and radiation victims from Japan were being paraded before the world's eyes.
But that now seems only a side effect of what probably was the real reason horror films fell on hard times: They had become too familiar and routine to moviegoers because the studios kept trying to squeeze more bucks out of the same tired old formulas.
In fact, Universal's decision to drop horror movies wasn't based on a survey of moviegoer likes and dislikes. It was done because the studio decided to overhaul itself in 1946, opening itself up to the new postwar worldwide market for American movies that was sure to follow the reopening of markets in Europe and the Far East.
Universal renamed itself Universal-International and allied with the J. Arthur Rank organization in England, importing most of the best new films from the reborn British film industry, including the 1948 Oscar winner for best film, Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet." (Ironically, "Hamlet" featured two future horror stars in small parts: Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee) For the new studio, horror movies didn't make economic sense, even though its series of "Abbott & Costello Meet…" parodies were major money-makers.
RKO shut down Val Lewton and veered away from horror films, too, but that mostly was pure coincidence. Lewton made most of his horror films on the sets of big budget RKO films, working quickly before stagehands took them down and packed them away. But RKO stopped making those big budget films, too, because it went into a series of fierce management and ownership struggles in the late 1940s that literally tore the studio apart. All genres suffered at RKO.
Monogram dropped horror films because it had grown tired of being a third-rate studio and longed for respect. It knew respect wouldn't come if it kept grinding out mad doctor movies with Bela Lugosi, so it pinned all its future hopes on its new subsidiary, Allied Artists.
Though Monogram eventually died and Allied Artists never really became a major studio, it did have a few great flashes of glory with films like "Friendly Persuasion" (1956) with Gary Cooper and "Cabaret" (1972) with Liza Minnelli, both nominated for Oscars as best picture. It won two Oscars for importing the best foreign films of 1966 and 1976: "A Man and A Woman" and "Black and White in Color." It also gave us John Huston's "The Man Who Would Be King" (1975), De Sica's "A Brief Vacation" (1975), "Papillon" with Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen (1973), Bunuel's "Belle de Jour" (1968) and Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" (1967), to name a few.
PRC's flight from horror films also meant little to the genre. The studio itself faded away soon afterward.
Though the veteran horror stars had a bad time from 1946-1950, most enjoyed financial boom times after that five-year famine. Karloff, Chaney and Peter Lorre worked busily in the new medium of television from the start, but the re-release of all the old horror films for television replays in "creature features" formats reached a new generation of young fans and suddenly they were hot commodities all over again. Producers like Roger Corman brought them all back to star in new horror movies, mostly filmed in widescreen and color.
|
"The Beast with Five Fingers." |
 |
Those who believed the old monsters were dead meat as America entered the sci-fi age also were proved wrong when England's Hammer films began to remake the old classics and they reached our shores in the late 1950s with much bigger budgets and much gorier contents. The first was Warner's "The Curse of Frankenstein" (1957), followed quickly by Universal's "Horror of Dracula" (1958). Both films featured Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, who became the Karloff and Lugosi of the New Age of Horror as all-new "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" series started up.
Ironically, the biggest new star of horror films also had prior credits at Universal, the original home of the American horror genre: Vincent Price.
Price had major roles in Universal's "Tower of London" (1939), "The Invisible Man Returns" (1940) and "The House of Seven Gables" (1940) before becoming a genuiine horror star in Warner's 3-D classic "House of Wax" in 1953, a remake of Lionel Atwill's "Mystery of the Wax Museum."
Was the five-year horror movie famine of 1946-50 a total disaster for fans of the genre? Well, not entirely, though they did have to savor the precious few worthwhile films that came along during those lean years, trying to keep the taste alive.
At first glance, it looks as if the "creature features" devotees of the 1940s were forced to go on a starvation diet as studio after studio dropped horror films from their lineups and Hollywood titans of terror like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr. suddenly had to scramble for work.
Yet they say lab rats placed on lean rationing actually live longer than well-fed rats, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise for all the 1940s horror buffs who lived long enough to see the horror comeback of the late 1950s. How skimpy was the horror film diet during the famine years of 1946-51? Here's an overview:
Universal gave out a last gasp of its horror tradition in 1946 with a few low-class items, including "The Cat Creeps," in which starlet Lois Collier fretted over the possibility that a cat might have taken possession of a dead girl's soul, and "She-Wolf of London," in which starlet June Lockhart, long before her "Lassie" TV series days, feared she might be turning into a werewolf.
How low Universal had sunk probably was best demonstrated by yet another 1946 release: "The Spider Woman Strikes Back." In a burst of creative recycling, the studio took the villainess from one Sherlock Holmes movie ("Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman," 1944), gave her a deformed sidekick (Rondo Hatton) from another Sherlock flick ("The Pearl of Death," 1944) and plunked them down in the American hinterlands where they planned to drain the blood from starlet Brenda Joyce and feed it to a carnivorous plant they were growing, clearly without approval from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.
Gale Sondergaard, a distinguished actress who won the first supporting actress Oscar for "Anthony Adverse" (1936), played The Spider Woman as if she were Lady Macbeth in an "A-budget" Hollywood production. It must have been humiliating, but at least she didn't have to take her clothes off.
For the next five years, Universal made no horror films that didn't have Bud Abbott and Lou Costello involved. It wasn't until "The Strange Door" in 1951 that anything resembling a Universal horror film emerged from the great studio that started it all with Lon Chaney's original "The Phantom of the Opera" in 1925.
|
|
 |
The famine that began in 1946 even affected the "poverty row" studios that used to grind out westerns and horror movies by the scores. PRC grunted out its last horror film in 1946, featuring former Miss America Rosemary LaPlanche, who had fallen on really hard times, in "Devil Bat's Daughter," a lame sequel to the studio's first big Bela Lugosi hit, "The Devil Bat" (1941). Republic had given the fans a genuine classic in "The Lady and the Monster" (1944), the first version of Curt Siodmak's popular novel, "Donovan's Brain," but by 1946 had nothing to offer but "Valley of the Zombies," a film so cheap that they didn't have enough money to hire any zombies, and "The Catman of Paris," which posed the notion of a were-cat without scaring anybody over age six.
Yet the truth is there were a few gems of the horror genre that somehow made their way into theaters during the famine years, mostly from unexpected sources. A few were recognized as classics right away, but some of the others are long forgotten, even though fright freaks of the late 1940s must have gone into severe delirium as soon as the posters went up on the "coming soon" displays at their local theaters.
Here's my highly personal list, augmented by comments from our own resident expert at TheColumnists.com--John "Creature Features" Stanley:
1. "DEAD OF NIGHT"
(1945-46)
Actually released in 1945 in the United Kingdom, where it was
made, this universally acclaimed classic was imported by the
overhauled Universal studio, renamed Universal-International
in 1946, but released in a severely-trimmed 77-minute version
that eliminated one of its five ghost stories. Best of them:
Michael Redgrave as a wigged-out ventriloquist whose dummy takes
over.
John Stanley: "Superlative British ghost story
anthology - possibly the most influential horror film of the
'40s."
2. "THE BEAST WITH
FIVE FINGERS" (1946)
Peter Lorre spent most of the war years in foreign intrigue,
teamed most often with Sidney Greenstreet in pictures like "Casablanca."
But in this creepy film by director Robert Florey, he reverted
to the grotesque sort of role he played in "Mad Love"
(1935) and in an earlier Florey film, "The Face Behind the
Mask" (1941). The "beast" of the title is a severed,
but remarkably active human hand--and Lorre's maniacal struggle
with it at the film's climax is really something to behold.
John Stanley: "…a superior piece of psychological
horror."
3. "THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE"
(1946)
German immigrant Curt Siodmak wrote the screenplay for Lorre's
"Beast with Five Fingers" and Siodmak's brother, Robert,
directed this other 1946 classic. It was adapted from the novel
"Some Must Watch" by Ethel Lina White, who also wrote
the book that became Alfred Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes."
Dorothy McGuire is a mute servant girl in a spooky house that
may harbor a killer who preys on the disabled. Will she be able
to utter a sound when the killer comes for her? Director Siodmak
was one of the founding fathers of noir--and this dark, atmospheric
thriller is one of his masterpieces.
John Stanley: "There are tense sequences directed
by Robert Siodmak and Mel Dinelli's script emphasizes subtle
psychological motivations."
4. "THE FACE OF MARBLE"
(1946)
John Carradine already had played Dracula at Universal, Bluebeard
at PRC and the zombie master in Monogram's "Revenge of the
Zombies" by 1946, but his upward climb as a horror star
was temporarily sidetracked by the market crash. However, this
offbeat little Monogram chiller turned out to be the studio's
last really potent horror movie--and Carradine even got to play
a sympathetic guy, even though he's involved in bringing back
the dead. You'll love the creepy old mansion overlooking the
sea, where Carradine and his fellow mad doctor, Robert Shayne,
conduct their experiments - and Brutus, the giant ghost dog who
walks through walls, nearly steals the picture.
John Stanley: "…there's an attraction
in watching the female leads, Maris Wrixon and Claudia Drake,
run around the castle in nightgowns that emphasize their heaving
bosoms."
5. "BEDLAM" (1946)
Though the box office failure of this elaborate thriller, directed
by a young Mark Robson, caused RKO to shut down producer Val
Lewton's low-budget horror unit, that doesn't mean it's a bad
picture. In fact, it's a gorgeous film, rich with in-jokes about
the arts, and has an extremely lively cast, including Anna Lee
as plucky Nell Bowen, a good-hearted reformer who wants to help
the lunatics locked up in the notorious St. Mary of Bethlehem
Asylum in London, circa 1791. She winds up an inmate there herself
when she steps on the wrong toes, especially those connected
to Master Sims (Boris Karloff), the sadistic major domo of the
asylum people called "bedlam." Karloff is deliciously
nasty--and the "Freaks"-style ending should have you
rooting for the lunatics when he finally gets his comeuppance.
John Stanley: "The costuming and mood of the
period are expertly evoked and the cast is superb."
6. THE RED HOUSE (1947)
After the horror films made in 1945-46 all were released, the
real famine began. Only a small handful of conventional "monster"
pictures were made until "The Man From Planet X" and
"The Thing" ushered in the sci-fi era in 1951. But
the late 1940s were a boom period for psychological horror pictures--and
this one from writer-director Delmer Daves was an unexpected
sensation. Daves could do virtually any kind of movie, but had
never done anything remotely like a horror film until 1947 when
he did both the noir thriller "Dark Passage" with Bogart
and Bacall and this haunting film about an unspeakable crime
committed in the house of the title. Edward G. Robinson gave
one of his best performances as the rural farmer whose nightmares
drive him to the verge of madness. It also has a stellar supporting
cast, including Judith Anderson, Lon McAllister, Rory Calhoun
and Julie London--and a truly terrifying ending, aided and abetted
by the spellbinding musical score by Miklos Rozsa.
John Stanley: "…this ranks as a super-entertaining
horror mystery. True, there are no ghosts or goblins, but the
film reeks with a cursed atmosphere…"
7. THE AMAZING MR. X (1948)
First released by ultra-minor studio Eagle-Lion as "The
Spiritualist," this low budget thriller is about a medium,
played by Turhan Bey from Universal's many "sex and sand"
desert pictures. He offers to help widow Lynn Bari contact her
dead husband. He's not really in contact with the spirit world--but
is the spirit world in contact with him? This is a perfect example
of the terrifying little thriller that doesn't hit you over the
head with ghastly images, but plucks your nerves so deftly that
you want to hide under your chair at the sight of a flapping
curtain or a white gown hanging on the back of the closet door.
John Stanley: "Undeservedly forgotten miniclassic."
8. ABBOTT & COSTELLO
MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)
The brain trust at Universal-International decided to parody
all the classic monsters from the studio's golden days by rolling
them into the path of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, the nation's
most popular comedy team. Amazingly, though, it turned out to
be a laugh riot and did such huge box office that it created
a wave of follow-ups by Bud, Lou and lots of other comedy teams.
The comics stumble into a plot to revive Frankenstein's Monster
(Glenn Strange) and the bad guys get the brilliant idea of putting
Costello's brain in the monster's body. Obviously, they didn't
have the results of his I.Q. test. Helping the mad scientists
is Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi), but Bud and Lou have a monster
on their side, too--Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.), who keeps
turning into The Wolf Man at extremely inconvenient times.
John Stanley: "Beloved spoof designed for
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, their bid to kid the cinema's most
adored monsters."
9. INNER SANCTUM (1948)
Except for the title, neither this low-budget independent film
nor the earlier "Inner Sanctum" series at Universal
with Lon Chaney, Jr., had any real creative connection with the
famous "creaking door" radio series. In this one, fortune
teller Fritz Leiber warns a young woman he meets on a train that
something awful is going to happen to her: She's going to be
murdered by her husband. What follows is an understated film
noir directed by veteran potboiler captain Lew Landers. We follow
the benign-looking, but dark-hearted husband as his escape is
thwarted by floods that block all the roads and he winds up taking
refuge in a boarding house where the only witness to his crime--a
freckle-faced kid who wears a propeller beanie cap--happens to
live. In the murder sequence, Landers obscures the killer's face
so much that you wonder if he's some kind of demon. He's not,
it turns out. He's just one of us.
John Stanley: "Uninspired poverty plot ploddingly
directed by Lew
Landers."
10. MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949)
The makers of "King Kong," "Son of Kong"
and "Dr. Cyclops" reunited at RKO in the late 1940s
to make their final "monster" film together. This time
the "monster" was a baby gorilla raised in Africa by
a little girl who called him "Joe Young." He doesn't
attract any real notice until he grows to about 15 feet in height
and starts scaring the devil out of strangers. Actor Robert Armstrong,
who played Carl Denham, the explorer/showman who brought Kong
to Manhattan in 1933, hires some wranglers to round up Joe, then
carts him off to America and puts him on display in a horrendously
expensive new night club with a jungle motif. Naturally, something
goes wrong on opening night and Joe breaks loose to wreak all
kinds of major havoc. Silly, campy, but still enormous fun--a
lot more of it than in the recent Disney remake. You'll enjoy
watching the little girl grow up to be comely Terry Moore, who
keeps her big ape calm by playing "Beautiful Dreamer"
for him on the piano. That apparently didn't work on RKO studio
boss Howard Hughes, who required other calming methods during
Moore's subsequent love affair with him. One of the best sequences
is still the cowboy round-up of Joe, featuring stunt man-turned-romantic
lead Ben Johnson, the future Oscar-winner for "The Last
Picture Show." Pay close attention and you'll also see another
future Oscar nominee, Richard Farnsworth, then a stuntman, trying
to get a rope on the big gorilla. Willis O'Brien won an Oscar
for his stop-motion gorilla creation.
John Stanley: "Remarkably well-made if old-fashioned
picture."
© 2000 by Ron Miller.
John Stanley quotes © 1981, 1984, 1988, 1994 by John Stanley
HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT THIS COLUMN. SEND US AN E-MAIL AT talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |