The Pre-Code Horror Canon

American horror had a window of about three and a half years in which it could say what it liked, and it used them. The Motion Picture Production Code was written in 1930 by a Jesuit priest, Daniel Lord, and a trade publisher, Martin Quigley, and the studios adopted it that March with every appearance of sincerity and no mechanism whatsoever for making anyone obey it. Compliance was voluntary. Enforcement arrived on 1 July 1934, when Joseph Breen’s Production Code Administration acquired the power to withhold a seal — and without a seal, no member studio’s cinema would show your film.

Between those two dates, Hollywood made vivisection, cannibalism, blasphemy, necrophilia and a wedding feast full of sideshow performers, and released the results to family audiences. Horror was the genre the Code would hit hardest, because horror’s subject matter is precisely the list of things a Jesuit and a trade publisher had sat down to prohibit. What follows is the window’s twelve essential films, and the story of the door closing on them.

The European inheritance behind all of it is in the German Expressionist shadow over horror — Universal’s monsters were lit by men who had learned the trade in Berlin.

Universal opens the shop

Dracula (1931). Tod Browning directed it and Karl Freund shot it, and the received wisdom that Freund did the real work has enough truth in it to be worth repeating: the film is stagebound and slow whenever it stops looking at Bela Lugosi, and mesmerising whenever Freund’s camera finds him. Lugosi had played the part on Broadway for three years, and his performance — deliberate, formal, unhurried, with English learned phonetically — created a monster the culture has never put down. Universal shot a Spanish-language version at night on the same sets, and it is the better-directed film of the two.

Frankenstein (1931). James Whale’s picture is the one the whole cycle rests on, and its pre-Code status is verifiable frame by frame. Two things were cut for the 1937 reissue and restored decades later: the moment Karloff’s creature throws the child Maria into the lake, and Colin Clive’s line about now knowing what it feels like to be God, which the censors buried under a thunderclap. Both are back. Jack Pierce’s makeup, four hours a day, is the most recognisable design in cinema, and Karloff plays the thing as a bewildered infant with a stolen brain.

The Old Dark House (1932). Whale again, in his true register — a stranded party takes shelter with the Femm family, and the film is a straight-faced comedy about English repression with a horror plot bolted to it. Ernest Thesiger’s Horace is one of the great screen performances. The film was thought lost for years until Curtis Harrington found a print in Universal’s vaults in the late 1960s. More here.

The Mummy (1932). Karl Freund directing this time, and the man who lit Metropolis makes the slowest monster movie in the cycle and gets away with it. Karloff’s Imhotep spends most of the film as a courteous, desiccated Egyptian gentleman with a plan, and the horror is romantic obsession across three millennia. The full read.

The Invisible Man (1933). Whale’s third entry here, with Claude Rains — a stage actor nobody had seen — playing a man audiences would only hear. John P. Fulton’s effects were achieved by shooting Rains in black velvet against black velvet and matting him in, which is why the bandage-removal scene still works. Rains’s giggling, escalating megalomania is the most pre-Code performance on this list: the character is a murderer who finds it funny, and the film agrees with him for a good hour.

The ones that went too far

Freaks (1932). MGM let Browning cast real sideshow performers and then lost its nerve. Thirty minutes were cut and are gone for good; the studio pulled it, several territories rejected it, and the BBFC banned it in Britain for thirty years. The picture’s argument is that its performers are the only decent people in it, and the famous wedding-feast chant is a moment of welcome that the film’s villains find horrifying. It destroyed Browning’s career. The whole sorry history.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931). Rouben Mamoulian’s version is the finest film in this list and contains the best special effect of the decade, achieved with no effect at all. Mamoulian had Fredric March made up in layers of coloured greasepaint, then shot him through matching coloured filters: under a red filter the red makeup is invisible, and as the filter is slowly changed on the lens, layer after layer swims into view. The transformation therefore happens in one unbroken take, on March’s live face, with the camera running — and Mamoulian refused to explain the method for years afterwards, letting people assume it was a dissolve. The film opens with a lengthy first-person sequence in which the camera is Jekyll, playing the organ, walking to a lecture, seeing himself only when he passes a mirror. March won the Academy Award for it.

The pre-Code content is Ivy. Miriam Hopkins plays a music-hall prostitute with no euphemism applied — she undresses, sits on the bed, and swings her bare leg at the departing Jekyll in a superimposition that hangs over the next scene — and Hyde’s subsequent treatment of her is straightforwardly sexual sadism. The 1936 reissue cut her heavily, and MGM later bought the film and suppressed it to protect its own 1941 remake, which is why a generation only knew the Spencer Tracy version.

Island of Lost Souls (1932). Paramount’s H.G. Wells adaptation, with Charles Laughton as Moreau — plump, soft-voiced, holding a whip — running vivisection on animals to make them men. The BBFC rejected it three times and it stayed banned in Britain until 1958. Wells hated it for the very reason it works: the film is interested in Moreau’s appetite rather than his philosophy, and it stages a human-animal seduction plot the Code would have refused on the first page. More.

White Zombie (1932). Made independently by the Halperin brothers for around $50,000, shot in eleven days on standing sets borrowed from Universal, and released before any studio had a zombie. Lugosi’s Murder Legendre runs a Haitian sugar mill on corpse labour, and the film’s one great sequence — the mill wheel turning, the dead men grinding cane, one of them falling into the machinery while the others take no notice — is a piece of economic horror no major would have financed. The first zombie film.

Warner and RKO, in colour and on the sly

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Michael Curtiz shot it in two-strip Technicolor, a process that renders flesh in greens and pinks and makes everyone look slightly embalmed — which is, for once, the correct choice. Fay Wray, a wisecracking newspaper plot, and a climax in which a face comes off. Lost for decades, found in Jack Warner’s personal vault after his death, and remade as House of Wax (1953).

King Kong (1933). Willis O’Brien’s animation, Cooper and Schoedsack’s showmanship, and Max Steiner’s score inventing what a film score does. Its pre-Code credentials are in the cuts: the 1938 reissue removed Kong peeling away Ann’s clothes and several killings, and those went back in only in the 1970s. The lost spider-pit sequence, cut by Cooper himself for pacing, remains the most-wanted missing footage in cinema.

The Black Cat (1934). Released two months before the seal became compulsory, and the last film in the window. Edgar G. Ulmer put Karloff and Lugosi in a Bauhaus house built on a war grave, and wrote in Satanism, a chess game for a woman’s life, a flaying, and a hint of necrophilia in a glass case. It was Universal’s biggest hit of the year and it has almost nothing to do with Poe. The full account.

What closed the window, and what it cost

The Code got teeth for commercial reasons. The Catholic Legion of Decency organised in 1933 and threatened a boycott of every cinema in the country; the studios, still bleeding from the Depression, folded within months and handed Breen a veto. From July 1934 a script went to the PCA before it went to the floor.

Horror lost more than gore. It lost motive. Breen’s office objected to cruelty, to the mockery of religion, to sexual suggestion and to any suggestion that a transgressor might enjoy himself — which removes Moreau’s appetite, Rains’s giggle, Legendre’s economics and the whole of Freaks. Compare Bride of Frankenstein (1935), made under the new regime and better than anything on this list: Whale got his masterpiece past Breen by turning the transgression into camp, so the outrage arrives as a joke the censor cannot quite locate. That is a magnificent solution and it is also a workaround. The gangster picture faced the same wall — Hawks’s Scarface (1932) had to add a moralising subtitle and shoot an alternative ending to get released at all.

Then Britain finished the job. The BBFC had begun applying an advisory “H” for horrific in 1932 and made it a formal certificate in 1937, barring under-sixteens entirely — and with the British market shut, the American cycle’s economics collapsed. Universal, under new ownership after the Laemmles were forced out in 1936, closed the horror department outright. It reopened only because a Los Angeles cinema ran Dracula and Frankenstein as a double bill in 1938 and had to call the police to manage the queue. The genre was restarted by a repertory booking.

How to watch them

Take Island of Lost Souls first if you want the shock of how far this went — it is the film that most obviously could not have been made two years later. Take Frankenstein for the craft, in the restored cut, with the lake scene intact. Take The Black Cat for the window slamming shut on screen. Criterion has Island of Lost Souls; Universal’s Legacy and Classic Monsters sets cover the studio’s run cheaply and in decent transfers; Freaks and Wax Museum are both on Warner Archive.

The best of these films are as blunt about human nastiness as anything Hammer managed twenty-five years later with The Curse of Frankenstein, and they were playing to matinee audiences. Everything after them for the next three decades was made by people negotiating with an office. What that negotiation did to the films is the subject of the censor’s scissors.