Universal Monsters - vo.rs

The Old Dark House: Whale's Storm-Bound Black Comedy

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

For decades you could not see this film at all. The Old Dark House slipped out of circulation, the negative decayed, and by the 1960s it was widely presumed lost, one of those titles horror historians mentioned with a sigh. That it exists today is down to the director Curtis Harrington, a Whale devotee who badgered Universal into hunting for a surviving print and oversaw its rescue. The recovered film turned out to be one of the wittiest horror pictures ever made, and the missing link between the earnest scares of early sound horror and the arch, self-aware mode that took another forty years to become fashionable.

Bride of Frankenstein: The Sequel That Bettered the Original

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Sequels that outrun their originals are rare enough to name on one hand, and most of them are thrillers. Bride of Frankenstein is the horror entry, and it may be the strangest of the lot, because James Whale made it by treating his own smash hit as raw material to be teased, expanded and quietly overturned. The 1931 Frankenstein is a great grim slab of a film. The 1935 sequel is a firework — funnier, sadder, weirder, and finally more moving than the picture it grew from.

The Wolf Man (1941): The Werewolf Myth Hollywood Invented

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Before the fog and the yak hair and Lon Chaney Jr’s wet, frightened eyes, one fact reorganises the whole picture: almost everything you think you know about werewolves was written by a single man for this film. That is the strange achievement of The Wolf Man. It plays like folklore dredged up from some mouldering European grimoire, and most of it was typed onto studio paper in 1941.

The folklore a screenwriter made up

The man was Curt Siodmak, a German-Jewish émigré who had fled the Reich a few years before and washed up at Universal writing monster pictures in a second language. The little rhyme the film keeps reciting — the one about the man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, who may still become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright — sounds copied from something ancient. Siodmak wrote it himself. So did he write the pentagram that appears in the palm of the werewolf’s next victim, and the notion that only silver can kill the beast, and the idea that the curse passes by a bite like an infection.

The Universal Monsters Canon

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Every monster you have ever loved carries a Universal serial number somewhere in its DNA. When Carl Laemmle Jr took over production at his father’s studio in 1929 and started chasing the horror trade, he did something the genre had never managed before: he turned the monster into a franchise property, a recurring character with a look, a walk, a grief. The makeup man Jack Pierce built faces you can still draw from memory. The directors, chiefly the Englishman James Whale, worked out how to make a sound-era horror film move. The result is a house style so complete that the entire genre has spent ninety years either obeying it or rebelling against it.