I love multi-monster mash-ups like the one pictured above, and what better time to celebrate them than Halloween? With this post, I kick off a series I've wanted to tackle for a long time, Groovy Agers. At last, here it is--no trick, my treat to you!
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!The human imagination has always teemed with monsters. As the "traditional Scottish prayer" suggests, though, our conceptions of them haven't always been terribly precise. Some variants of
folkloric vampire, for example, weren't even distinguished very sharply from witches or werewolves.
As monsters emerged first from lore into literature, and then from the margins of the gothic novel to its heart, they acquired both specificity and stature. They evolved from amorphous figures of dread who haunted the outer darkness, into touchstones of popular culture who inhabited an increasingly conventionalized gothic imaginative universe. The notion that they might share and co-inhabit that universe began to emerge as well, even as their identities continued to congeal through
repetition and particularly through
stage adaptations of the novels:
Another link between "The Vampyre" and Frankenstein is that Peter Thomas Cooke, who played the title role in The Vampyre at the Theatre Royale in 1820, was also the first actor to play the Frankenstein Monster in the London staging of Presumption [or, The Fate of Frankenstein]. In fact, in 1826 a theatre-goer in London could take in a double bill and be treated to both monsters. It was only a matter of time before both fiends appeared in the same production. The Devil Among the Players (1826), which was based on the story of Frankenstein, included a vampire. By the time the monsters co-starred in Frankenstein; or The Vampire’s Victim in 1849, the link between them had been inexorably forged.
What we see here is a broad trend of ad hoc development and convergence.
Enter Universal Studios. Between their one-two punch of
Dracula and
Frankenstein in 1931, and their first official monster rally with the 1943 release of
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, a dozen years would pass, but in the meantime, they laid the foundation for every monster rally to follow by establishing for mass consumption, under the uniform brand of a single studio, a
canon of monsters in
definitively iconic forms. One after another, they plucked inchoate creatures from the primordial soup of "ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties," styled and baked and polished them into distinct and instantly recognizable characters, and, under the studio banner, assembled them more closely together than ever before in our collective imagination
By the time the idea for
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was explicitly proposed, Universal's corpus of horror could fairly be described as a
virtual monster rally--an actual monster rally just waiting to happen. We can be sure that schoolboys were already hotly debating who would beat down whom if this monster crossed paths with that one. This is why it seems so natural that the mummy be included in the Hartman picture at the top of this post, though the mummy never appeared in any of the original monster rallies. Whether or not a particular monster appeared alongside others in any movie, and despite differences in setting and continuity, they all essentially belong to the same world of horror.
Of course, Universal never
set out to lay this groundwork for a meeting of the monsters--that's just how things worked out--and they didn't get around to staging one until it was the blindingly obvious next step. Unfortunately, that point was reached only as the monster franchises were slipping into decline. Consequently, the monster rallies tend to be seen as symptomatic of that decline, if not partly responsible for it. The decision to combine the monsters looks like a cynical gimmick, and the execution is as indifferent as one would expect under such conditions.
Here's how Curt Siodmak describes the genesis for the idea of
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man:
Never make a joke in the studio. I was sitting down at the Universal commissary having lunch with George Waggner and I said, "George, why don't we make a picture Frankenstein Wolfs the Meat Man--er, Meets the Wolf Man?" He didn't laugh. This was during wartime; I wanted to buy an automobile and I needed a new writing job so I would be able to afford it. George would see me every day and ask me if I had bought the car yet. I said, "George, can I get a job?" He said, "Sure, you'll get a job, buy the car." Well, the day finally came when I had to pay for the car. George asked me that day, "Did you buy the car?" and I said, "Yes, I bought it." George said, "Good! Your new assignment is Frankenstein Wolf the Meat Man--er, Meets the Wolf Man! I'll give you two hours to accept!"
Whether this anecdote is strictly accurate or not, it certainly has a ring of sad truth about Universal's whole approach to the monster rallies.
There are plenty of reviews around the internets for
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,
House of Frankenstein,
House of Dracula, and
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, so I won't rehash synopses or the usual evaluative points. What I find most unforgivable is the failure of these movies to deliver on their fundamental promise
as monster rallies.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man fares best in this regard--though tedious until the
grand finale, it does ultimately deliver a scuffle between the Monster and the Wolf Man. In
House of Frankenstein, the Dracula and Wolf Man stories are split into separate episodes, while in
House of Dracula, they run on separate tracks, and in both movies the Frankenstein Monster is reduced to an inanimate prop until the very final moments. As long as the various monsters could be crammed together on the posters, Universal didn't seem to care whether the stories brought them together in anything like the way audiences surely hoped and expected. Ironically,
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein probably features the most monster interaction, but it is, after all, a comedy. I know a lot of fans claim it plays the horror straight, but that isn't quite right--the monsters are indeed played for laughs, it's just that they aren't the butt of the jokes. In sum, these movies fall short in any number of general ways, but they fail most miserably as the kind of movie they promise to be.
I don't think the Universal monster rallies were necessarily doomed to such ignominy. As I've tried to outline above, horror had been steadily evolving toward the monster rally over the long term, even before Universal. From this perspective, perhaps we can detach the monster rallies from their association with the decline of Universal's monster franchises, and see them more as a natural and inevitable development that happened to emerge during particularly unfortunate circumstances. Universal might very well have continued to produce excellent monster movies, or may even have proceeded to improve on them; I'm confident that in either case, it would have combined monsters in a movie sooner or later. Under those circumstances, the decision would seem far less cynical or gimmicky, and would be motivated to a much greater extent by artistic (i.e. as opposed to financial) considerations. More care would undoubtedly have gone into the writing and execution. Rather than representing the nadir of Universal's classic horror cycle, such movies might have represented the fullest culmination of its golden age.
That's just speculation, of course--there's no way to know what Universal could have done differently, or how it might have been received. What we do know is that the idea of the monster rally was just too good to die, no matter how badly Universal botched it. As we'll see, the idea proved quite popular and influential, and has taken some interesting turns.
Looks awesome, doesn't it? Well, some things about it are pretty sweet, but overall I found it kind of disappointing.
