In the beginning, there was nothing. Nothing, that is, as far as the American Horror Film was concerned. Despite a few German films (most significantly NOSFERATU and THE GOLEM) which subsequently proved influential, the genres of American film consisted of the western, the comedy, romance and mystery. The horror film didn’t exist. (Yes, its true that Edison’s company had made a short of FRANKENSTEIN in 1910, but that was one among thousands of nickelodeon attractions that quickly sank into obscurity.)  Until Universal made DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN, neither the supernatural nor the scientifically based horror film as we know it today didn’t exist.  In celebration of Halloween, The Doomed Farmer looks again at the two films that gave birth to the American horror film.


DRACULA (1931)
Written by Garrett Fort, from the play by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston

A coach travels swiftly on a mountain road.  One of its passengers is a dapper young American (Dwight Frye) who is on his way to Borgo Pass, where he will be met — at midnight — by a carriage sent from Count Dracula.  The local innkeeper warns him off going there, telling him that the Count and his wives are vampires who feed on the blood of the living.  At exactly six minutes into the film, Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and his three vampire brides are seen slowly emerging from their coffins, and the film begins its best, most cinematic sequence, in which the young American is met by Dracula’s coach, driven by the thinly disguised Count, on the fog shrouded Borgo Pass. Once inside the cavernous castle, the Count slowly descends the huge staircase and introduces himself: “I am… Dracula.” With these immortal words, Bela Lugosi forever fixed his image in the minds of moviegoers around the world.  Tod Browning’s approach to his material seems to take its cue from the slow, deliberate cadence of Lugosi’s careful delivery, exactly the opposite of the manner in which James Whale would film Universal’s follow-up feature FRANKENSTEIN.  The pace is so slow that when Mr. Renfield cuts his finger on a paper clip and the camera suddenly dollies into a medium shot of the Count, the speed is startlingly effective.  Unfortunately, nothing in the film will ever move that fast again, and once we arrive at Dr. Seward’s London sanitarium, after the brief but effective sequence on board the Vesta where Renfield’s madness is revealed, and the equally effective scene in the symphony hall, the film’s theatrical origins alter it’s slow rhythm from atmospheric and mysterious to merely ponderous.  Mina (Helen Chandler) is a silly ingenue with a callow beau, Jonathan Harker (David Manners), both early 20th Century theatrical stereotypes, neither of them capable of engaging our interest, and Dr. Seward is a blind fool slow to grasp whats going on around him.  Browning shoots far too many scenes in static long shot as if we were observing a play from orchestra seats.  The script itself is oddly elliptical, with Dracula given no reason for making the trip from his native land to London, so that his attacks on Lucy and Mina seem to happen merely because they are now conveniently his neighbors, and Dr. Seward appears to have no knowledge that his fly-eating patient had recently visited Transylvania where he arranged for the sale of nearby Carfax Abbey to the Count.  In fact, madman Renfield is totally disconnected from the dapper young man we first met, probably because the opening scenes in Transylvania were created for the film, Renfield being already mad when he is introduced in the play.  Far too many events that would have made dramatic moments occur off screen, described in dialog as they were required to be when the play was performed on stage, such as Lucy Westin’s re-emergence as the “Bloofer Lady”, whom Van Helsing promises to lay to rest, a situation that is briefly brought up then quickly dropped.  Yet, the vigorous madness of Dwight Frye’s Renfield and Edward Van Sloan’s stolid, capable Van Helsing manage to carry the film through the moments when Lugosi is absent, and the two meetings between Van Helsing and Dracula, though indifferently shot, are strongly played by the two stage veterans.  Unlike in the novel, Van Helsing never devises a deliberate campaign to combat Dracula, and the film saunters toward its conclusion when it should race, with the Count’s staking by Van Helsing occurring, as so many other important events before it, off camera.  Its Lugosi’s strange, arresting charisma and his complete identification with his role that anchors the film, that makes it worth watching and re-watching.  Though the film in which he appears is far from perfect, Bela Lugosi is, and always will be, Dracula.  (Viewed on Universal’s Legacy Collection DVD, whose print is scratchy, with ancient, unrestored audio, and is missing the coda in which Van Sloan appears before a theatrical curtain to warn us to beware of vampires on our way home from the theatre.)


FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
Based on the novel by Mary Shelley and the play by Peggy Webling, adapted by John Balderston  Screenplay by Garrett Fort and Francis Edwards Farragoh
Directed by James Whale

Following Edward Van Sloan’s friendly warning and the brief opening credits, we go to a sound stage cemetery to witness the conclusion of burial services. Our first glimpse of Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) affords an instant snapshot of Frankenstein’s intense focus on the task at hand: retrieving the newly buried corpse from its grave, after which the two travel by cart to a roadside gallows to cut down a second corpse, whose brain is, much to Frankenstein’s chagrin, damaged and therefore useless.  Fritz immediately goes to Goldstadt Medical College where he clumsily steals an abnormal brain from its study hall.  A mere eight minutes after its beginning, FRANKENSTEIN has set up the parameters of its drama: Frankenstein’s zeal combined with Fritz’s incompetence will produce the tragic figure of the Monster.  When that Monster haltingly backs into view for the first time 30 minutes into the film and turns around to face us, it still sends a chill down my spine.  Nearly 80 years after its release, its impossible to imagine a world in which the now classic elements of this film didn’t exist, but somebody had to create them: Mary Shelley’s novel and a subsequent play by Peggy Webling provided the basic framework upon which Robert Florey, John Balderston, Garrett Fort and others built a script that James Whale brought to vibrant life, with the able assistance of set designer Charles Hall, cinematographer Arthur Edeson and the brilliant, perfectly cast Colin Clive and Boris Karloff.  The figure of the Monster is now familiar and degraded, but with each viewing I am struck anew by how other-worldly Karloff is.  His now familiar visage still looks today as it must have to audiences of 1931: like a re-animated corpse, simultaneously inhuman and pitiable.  No other actor has ever come close to matching Karloff’s balance of innocence and brute force, as no other actor has ever matched Clive’s focus, drive and intensity. When we first see Clive in the cemetery, no back story is needed: we know that Henry is imbalanced, driven and unstoppable. His delivery of “Crazy? We’ll see whether I’m crazy or not” reveals a man whose ego poses a danger to himself and the world.  Whale and his editor Clarence Kolster keep the story moving at a fast, modern pace, Whale having a particular genius for eliminating all but the most essential scenes and shots; there are no longueurs in his FRANKENSTEIN, the film that gave birth to the modern horror film.  Nearly 80 years later, no one — not Hammer and Cushing, not Kenneth Brannagh and Deniro — has significantly improved upon anything Whale, Balderston, Clive and Karloff created in this movie that justly deserves its status as a classic, and continues to reward the modern audience.  (Viewed on Universal’s fine looking Legacy Collection DVD.)
—Robert Deveau
The Doomed Farmer