“Oh, no! It’s in gray!
That was the first reaction. I had talked up what would be their introduction to Universal Horror, my movie night pick, and now they were freaked out good. They had begged me not to, had insisted that they hated horror and were terrified by it. But they already knew the characters, I said, which they did from countless references to Dracula and Frankenstein in books, movies, and cartoons, and this would be like that, a horror-comedy. So as the Universal International globe spun in black and white (the cover image had misled them) just ahead of the title sequence of 1948’s Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, they were in a heightened state of panic, and entirely irked at me. But it was time.
Around forty years ago in a house in New Orleans just a few blocks from where we sat, my father had introduced me to Universal Horror by borrowing a projector and a two-reel copy from the library and showing The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) on the living-room wall. I wasn’t more than seven. I can’t say I didn’t have to hide my eyes at some parts, but other parts, when the monster roams the countryside and meets people, were enthralling. That is among my earliest recollections of film. Another would be when he screened King Kong (1933) on that same wall. Suffice to say that monsters were a significant portion of my early movie life. With this I gauged that my own kids’ level of disturbance would be endurable, if perhaps uncomfortable. What could it be, I thought, that’s worse than the ends of Harry Potter movies that they watched all of the time.
I was wrong. The younger went into a state of hysteria, making wild contorted faces, yelping and shrieking, covering his face with his blanket, which resulted in the older yelling for him to shut up. The younger leaped out of his seat and ran around the room, covering his face and screaming in fright. This is during the opening scene, in which Lon Cheney Jr. transforms into the Werewolf. The older said how stupid it looks. He’s more in tune. Later he’d tell me that he was terrified the whole time. The younger calmed down, some. He couldn’t stop watching. When Dracula appears, finally popping out of his coffin after a little stop-start bit with Lou Costello seeing it and Bud Abbot just missing it, the younger mimics his cape over the face, going around the room and popping up behind us on the couch. At one point I offered to stop the movie, but he declined. He couldn’t stop watching. They couldn’t stop watching.
Bela Lugosi still has the power to transfix us, even in the modern digital media world in which we live. There’s something essential, our original filmic understanding of terror, of fear, of horror, when Lugosi appears onscreen, the eyes, the hands, the music and atmosphere. The films wove their way into my life in remarkable ways from that living room wall on. Despite my early introduction, as a kid I didn’t want any part of current horror movies. A kid’s mother had taken a small group of us to the theater for his birthday party. We watched Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Why she did that to us I’ll never understand. A few friends somehow managed to get in to see Friday the 13th, Part III, in 3-D! (1982). I heard that an eyeball flew right at you from the screen. By the time Friday the 13th, Part IV: The Final Chapter came out in 1984, kids were regularly getting into R movies at the downtown single-screen in the small town where I lived. The idea of going terrified me, and I may have had to put up an excuse to avoid the trip. My fear must have been rooted in what I perceived to be the gore of those movies, though, because the one that got me hooked on horror was 1983’s Psycho 2. A friend’s dad took us to the mall theater to see it. (What was it with parents showing us those movies? I mean, I showed my kids Abbott and Costello, but it wasn’t like I was taking them to the theater to see It (2017).) Psycho 2 had the suspense, and the crazy plot of the first film as backstory. It had the thrills without a lot of gore, and that was the key. Same for Halloween (1978) which instantly became an all-time favorite when I first saw it on cable a few years later. The early sequences in Halloween, like the one when Michael Myers appears between billowing sheets hanging on the clothesline, with Jamie Lee Curtis seeing him, then not seeing him, remain great fun.
Slasher flicks and gore flicks have some dark comedic undertones, but nothing compared to the black comedy in the original Psycho (1960). The Universal monsters of course begat the world of B-horror, monster, gore, and slasher movies, but at their core they worked on a sense of suspense, created by creepy sets, lighting, and music, playing on our edginess at not quite being able to see what’s moving in the dark. The monsters are always scariest before they’re seen in full. In this way they also gave us the idea of psychological horror, the terror of the unknown, a glimpse of madness. That’s where the line to Psycho is. The monster in Psycho is a crazy man, which makes his insanity, and the terror he unleashes, a mirror of our own relative sanity, and that’s where the dark, morose comedy of Tony Perkins and Hitchcock’s creation comes from. That’s the good stuff. The twisted playfulness. The straight-but-awful line played for uncomfortable laughs. The deft camerawork, and integration of the score, used like a sound effect. From the black comedy of Psycho is another line, straight to the films of the Coen Brothers, some of my absolute favorites, as well as great stuff from people like Aronofsky and many others. I’d even say you’d have to look to Hitchcock, as much as to Universal, for influence behind classics like The Shining (1980), The Omen (1976), The Exorcist (1973). A world of cinematic joy awaited my boys. They needed to start somewhere.
But I wasn’t going to show them The Shining.
“I’ll tell you the scariest monsters in the order of their scariness,” the older tells me. “And I’ll give you ratings of their scariness, from 1-5 with one being the least scary.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“Zombies are a one, they’re not smart. Werewolves and Frankensteins are a two. They’re scary, but easy to get away from. Vampires are like a three. They’re pretty scary. Mummies are a zero. They’re not scary at all, and it’s insulting that they’re even considered monsters.”
The boy was heavily into ancient Egypt.
“What are the scariest monsters?”
“The scariest ones are ones you can’t really see, like demons.”
Dang, he sure figured something out with that one.
“So this movie isn’t really scary for you?”
“Oh, no, it’s terrifying.”
“Terrifying? Really?”
“Yes, every moment.”
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is one of the last films Lugosi made. Within five years he’d be appearing in Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953), and within eight years he was dead. The film was actually a late high point of sorts for him, after years of clinging to the very bottom rungs of showbiz, taking any part he was offered, in any cheap-o flick, and often being too sick and morphine-addled to do much acting in them. There’s many angles to Lugosi’s story, some sad and some fascinating. I loved Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994) with Martin Landau’s superb performance as Lugosi, but at the time of Ed Wood I hadn’t seen many Lugosi films, not even Dracula (1931). I basically knew that the original Dracula was the inspiration of The Count on Sesame Street, and that was about it. Since then my appreciation for Lugosi has only grown. Watching White Zombie and The Black Cat, while listening to the Bela-and-Boris season of the excellent podcast You Must Remember This, has given me new understanding of the man and his weirdly outsized film legacy. If you’ve ever enjoyed the experience of watching Ed Wood followed immediately by Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) (or vice versa, works pretty well either way), then you’ll definitely enjoy listening to that podcast and re-watching all of it!
In Meet Frankenstein, Lugosi does his thing with the coffins and the hands and eyes, which apparently still packs a punch upon seeing it for the first time, as evidenced by my younger son simultaneously hiding his eyes and watching. But if the film is a success, it’s because of the comedic acting of one Lou Costello. This guy is a great physical comedian. He skips, prances, pirouettes, bats his eyelashes at the beautiful women who pretend to adore him, but are secretly plotting to either steal his brain or to uncover the plot. He’s the foolish pawn in the ridiculous plot, the type of role that people like Peter Sellers or, later, Jim Carey would excel in.
There are a few disturbing scenes. The evil woman gets thrown through a window by Frankenstein’s monster, after which she is presumed dead. I kind of wish they hadn’t seen that. Even in Harry Potter movies, there’s nothing quite as raw as that. Later Frankenstein’s monster is killed by being consumed in flames, and that was disturbing to watch as well.
Afterward the boys were pretty disappointed with me and with the whole experience. Maybe they’ll be talking about that night from a shrink’s couch years later, but I don’t think so. They got to see Lugosi rise out of a coffin and got a thrill from it. I’ve got to believe that the magic of that will stick with them long after the fear subsides.
“It wasn’t that bad, was it?” I hesitantly asked at bedtime. I wasn’t going to bring it up again, but they were still talking about it.
“Not at the age of seven,” the younger said.
Maybe not, I thought, but on the other hand, he was old enough to use the phrase “at the age of seven.”
PostScript.
A few more angles on the film: Martin Landau deserves additional mention in the line that runs from Dracula to Ed Wood for his appearances in The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, two key small-screen pieces in the evolution of psychological terror and suspense. Landau stars in several classic episodes, but his turn in The Outer Limits S1E6, “The Man Who Was Never Born” is a must see.
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was a favorite film of Jerry Garcia’s. He gave an interview about it for an AMC show called The Movie that Changed My life. It and The Bride of Frankenstein feature prominently in the Grateful Dead documentary series called Long Strange Trip. Garcia identified with the freakishness of the monsters and the way they were cast out of mainstream society. And how in their grotesque destruction they maintained some piece of humanity. And while the Dead doc mentions and even expands on those films as influences on Garcia, that Dead doc is the only rock doc I’ve ever seen that doesn’t mention any blues, rhythm and blues, or rock and roll artists as influences. I mean none! No Robert Johnson, no T-Bone or Lightning, no Howling Wolf, no Leadbelly, no Jimmy Reed, no Chuck, Fats, or Bo, or even Elvis. And that, folks, is my problem with the Dead in a nutshell.
Lou Costello was a friend of Dean Martin’s from their pre-stardom days and actually helped get Martin into showbiz. Lugosi made one other film after Meet Frankenstein and before he met Ed Wood, called Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952). To give you an idea of where Lugosi was in his career, and what kind of high point Meet Frankenstein was, Brooklyn Gorilla also starred Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, who were Martin and Lewis impersonators. And that, my friends, is what we call a full circle.
XulaDad 