Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Raven,’ As Poe’s Creature Offers an Unexpected Answer)

Dr. Craven [played by Vincent Price, center] [to The Raven]: “Who sent you to me?”

[The Raven stares at him silently]

Dr. Craven: “Are you some dark-winged messenger from beyond?”

[Still no answer]

Dr. Craven:” Answer me, monster, tell me truly!”

[sadly]

Dr. Craven: “Shall I ever hold again that radiant maiden whom the angels call Lenore?”

Dr. Bedloe [played by Peter Lorre, left] [as The Raven] “How the hell should I know? What am I, a fortune teller?”—The Raven (1963), screenplay by Richard Matheson, very, very loosely suggested by the Edgar Allan Poe poem, directed by Roger Corman

As soon as I heard this exchange, I burst out laughing, at the sheer surprise over Edgar Allan Poe being sent up. That line from The Raven was ad libbed by Peter Lorre during production of the film.

The actor’s penchant for improvisation deeply annoyed co-star Boris Karloff (right). In a post-film question-and-answer session at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ last week, Sara Karloff and Victoria Price, daughters of the two horror icons, related this and other anecdotes about their fathers, holding forth in as entertaining a fashion as what the audience had just witnessed on screen.

Accustomed to English theatrical tradition of learning his lines cold, Karloff was constantly made uncomfortable by Lorre, who was more used to improvisation from his time with continental European troupes. It fell to Vincent Price, who had trained in both styles in London and American stages, to become the go-between for his two co-stars. (This was the fifth and last film together for Price and Lorre, who died a year after its release.)

Among the other anecdotes shared by Ms. Karloff and Ms. Price:

*Karloff, still under contract for a couple of days for producer-director Roger Corman, found himself acting in a hastily created film for rookie director Peter Bogdanovich, Targets.

*Jack Nicholson, in one of his earliest roles, did not turn in one of the more impressive performances of his career.

*The beautiful cinematography for the movie was created by Floyd Crosby, father of rock ‘n’ roller David Crosby.

*Karloff made 80 films after coming to Hollywood in the silent era, but people forgot all of them until his 81st, Frankenstein, he told his daughter.

*Price came to London in the mid-Thirties to study art history, but he enjoyed the theater so much that he eventually tried out for a play, and began his acting career there. Nevertheless, Ms. Price observed, he never lost his love for art--not only being an avid collector himself and serving on the board of museums, but even staying at cheaper hotels and buying lower-price tickets to spend on paintings.

*Price credited his first notable horror success, House of Wax (1953), for keeping his name before the public, at a time when Hollywood had "graylisted" him for past political activity--i.e., not subjecting him to the full ban that blacklisting represented, but ensuring he would only get lesser roles.

This Day in Film History (‘Exorcist’ Scares the Devil Out of Audiences)

Dec. 26, 1973— The Exorcist, released on this day in the United States, capped Hollywood’s five-year search since the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby for another box-office success that would tap into audiences’ fears about the existence of evil.

The Mephisto Waltz and Season of the Witch, among other, more low-budget ripoffs, had come and gone in the supernatural horror genre, leaving little in their wake.

But The Exorcist—with hot, Oscar-winning director William Friedkin in charge, featuring Oscar-nominated actress Ellen Burstyn, and based on a bestselling novel by William Peter Blatty—capitalized on more visible assets than those earlier cheap imitations, becoming the highest-grossing horror movie of all time ($223 million in domestic box office, or $1.5 billion adjusted for inflation in 2023), and the first horror film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

These cold facts, though, don’t begin to convey how audiences experienced The Exorcist, though. So, let me try this analogy:

In one of my college American literature classes, my professor described the effect of Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: Even as the minister enumerated the torments of Hell in the quietest of tones, listeners wept, screamed, fainted. “In other words," my professor concluded ironically, “it was a roaring success.”

So it proved with The Exorcist, in which, in the supposedly science-based late 20^th century, thousands took fright over the struggle with a demon for the soul of a young girl waged by her mother and two Roman Catholic priests. 

In the months after its release, the media featured all kinds of stories about viewers’ reactions, including:

* Paramedics called to treat people who fainted and others who went into hysterics;

* Burstyn herself went to the aid of a woman who fainted in one theater—then, realizing the lady might have an even worse reaction when she saw who was helping her, called on someone else in the theater to assist;

* In a case eventually settled out of court, one filmgoer who fainted and broke her jaw on the seat in front of her sued Warner Bros. and the filmmakers, claiming that the film’s subliminal imagery caused the incident;

*A plumber was kept on constant call in a Canadian cinema, because, as one theater manager informed The Toronto Star, "The smell in the bathroom is awful. People are rushing in and they're missing the toilet seat by inches."

*The film did not play in Iran, Burstyn related in her memoir Lessons in Becoming Myself, because “each of the three times they [Tehran Film Festival officials] tried to dub it, the dubbing cast got too frightened and couldn't complete;

* None other than the Rev. Billy Graham claimed, “The Devil is in every frame of this film.”

In the past 50 years, multiple cultural commentators have sought to explain The Exorcist’s impact, or even what it meant to them specifically (see, for instance, these New York Times analyses in late October, with one calling it “Essentially a Women’s Picture” and the other “A Subversively Queer Movie”).

I prefer wider perspectives, the better to demonstrate the film’s broad-based appeal. As far as I’m concerned, the best summary of this kind comes from Dublin-based pop culture critic Darren Mooney’s October article in The Escapist Magazine, which identified aspects of the plot directly relevant to its time, including:

*The generation gap. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, the postwar concern with issues such as juvenile delinquency now encompassed drugs, political dissent, and questioning of religion and the economic system. Many parents were finding their kids unrecognizable as they matured—mirroring Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil trying to make sense of Linda Blair’s Regan. For many parents of the time, even the best scientific professionals (psychiatrists and doctors) seemed powerless to cure what ailed their children.

*The sexual revolution. One of the movie’s most notorious scenes involves what the possessed Regan does with a crucifix. Yet she also assaults a psychiatrist and spews sexual obscenities at her mother and the two priests called on to save her, Fr. Lankester Merrin and Fr. Damien Karras. She is not yet interested in boys, but by raising Regan's age by a year, to twelve, the film places her on the cusp of adolescence, with all the sexual problems that may come with that. At the same time, some viewers have speculated whether Fr. Karras and his confidante Fr. Dyer were gay, and whether Burke Dennings—the film director that Chris used to babysit Regan—might have violated the child before his murder, or, alternatively, if the girl suspected that her mother might marry him.

*The breakdown of the family. It has been frequently remarked upon that Regan is the child of a broken home, with Chris an actress called on to leave the girl alone for considerable time when shooting a film. The separation anxiety that many children experience in such situations leads Chris and the male authority figures she consults to initially believe that only psychiatric treatment (rather than spiritual intervention) is called for to deal with the girl's problems. At the same time, failed obligations towards family members in the last stage of life provide a perhaps even more potent avenue for the demon to exploit, as Fr. Karras can’t stop blaming himself for his aged mother dying alone.

*The Mideast as a breeding ground for unrest. The film’s prologue occurs on an archaeological dig in Iraq, where Fr. Merrin comes across an amulet of a demon (left unnamed in the film, but called Pazuzu in Blatty’s novel)—setting up the confrontation between the cleric and the demon in the last half-hour. Many viewers at the time of the film's release would have seen the disorders emanating from the Mideast in the last several years (two wars aimed at Israel, Palestinian terrorism, and—only two months before the movie's premiere—the Arab oil embargo) as natural sources for disturbances and strife.

*Washington, DC as a symbolic nest of deceit and corruption—and as the site of a real-life exorcism. Much of the film was shot on location in the Georgetown neighborhood of DC. While a student at the school in 1949, Blatty read about this ancient Catholic ritual performed on a teenaged boy in the area. Years later, the writer changed the sex and lowered the age of the victim, and, while updating the period to the present, kept the setting and other details of the exorcism intact. In Friedkin’s vision, the Washington of this time is a symbol of urban decay, rife with homelessness and crime—and many Americans ardently believed that the White House was a focus of government-sponsored crime in the Vietnam and Watergate eras.

Two other aspects of the characters’ environment, I would argue, play a part in what is about to unfold:

*Hollywood. Blatty, a longtime screenwriter and producer, based Chris and Regan MacNeil on Shirley MacLaine (another globe-trotting redhead actress) and her only daughter, Sachi Parker, and Dennings on the English director J. Lee Thompson. While Chris is a caring mother, her active lifestyle and the secular outlook of her friends make it inevitable that she will have no strong set of religious beliefs that might help her cope with this crisis.

*The contrast between traditional Roman Catholicism and a more modern, rational mode. This is represented by, respectively, Fr. Merrin and Fr. Karras (played by the omnipresent character actor Max von Sydow and the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jason Miller). Karras, a psychiatrist, now doubts the beliefs that drew him towards the priesthood. It is Merrin who spearheads the charge against the demon, even telling the younger priest to leave the room when he senses him wavering in their struggle against radical evil.

The film’s visceral impact derived primarily from two men: Blatty, a practicing, even conservative, Catholic, and Friedkin, an agnostic Jew. The pair quarreled over the film’s ending but reconciled a quarter century later (and Friedkin even agreed to include the ending Blatty wanted on the anniversary DVD).

It is to Blatty’s novel and the Oscar-winning screenplay that we have the characters, setting and themes. But it is to Friedkin that we owe the firm hand on the acting and atmosphere that elevated this from B-movie schlock to a tense drama of faith pushed to the breaking point.

Friedkin—brilliant and exacting, but also arrogant and imperious—drove cast, crew, and himself to dangerous lengths to secure his desired hyper-realism, pushing the film’s production schedule from 85 days to 224.

Today, Friedkin—who died four months ago— might be seriously embarrassed by, maybe even “canceled”for, his bullying tactics and unsafe work environments.

But at this point in the early 1970s, European-style “auteurs” of the New Hollywood such as Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and Friedkin were at their commercial and critical zeniths, enjoying perhaps even more deference than past giants like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock had been accorded in the past.

At the time of his death, Burstyn issued this graceful and, so far as it went, truthful, tribute to the director: “My friend Bill Friedkin was an original; smart, cultured, fearless and wildly talented. On the set, he knew what he wanted, would go to any length to get it and was able to let it go if he saw something better happening. He was undoubtedly a genius.”

Nevertheless, in that drive to get “what he wanted,” Friedkin abused personnel and endangered the health of Burstyn and others:

*He slapped a real-life priest, cast for reasons of verisimilitude, when he didn’t get the reaction he wanted. Technical consultant Fr. William O’Malley, also acting, in the subsidiary role of Fr. Dyer, wasn’t conveying the sense of shock that Friedkin wanted in the movie's conclusion. Suddenly the director struck the face of the cleric, then immediately ordered the cameras to roll.

*Burstyn hurt her back badly, even after telling Friedkin that he was risking injuring her. In the scene where Regan pushes Chris to the floor, the harness jerked Burstyn back too hard, resulting in a fractured coccyx and pain that continues to this day for the actress. Friedkin's reaction at the time? Instructing the cameraman to continue shooting Burstyn in pain, footage that ended up in the film.

*Linda Blair also suffered an injury resulting in lifelong pain. For a scene in which Regan convulses, a harness (again) led to Blair fracturing her lower back, leading to long-term scoliosis.

*In separate scenes, Friedkin fired guns near Miller and Rudolf Schündler (who played Karl) to startle them. Schundler blew his lines and almost fell down the stairs; Miller got into a heated argument with the director, telling him that, as an actor, he didn’t require such inducements to a better performance.

*Friedkin delayed filming by firing the first production designer. What led to the decision: Friedkin's desire to change the wallpaper in Regan's room and to widen all the door frames to allow for more camera accessibility.

*Friedkin fired famed film composer Bernard Herrmann. This may have been the most justifiable decision the driven director made in running roughshod over someone who didn't meet his creative standard. For all his brilliant work on Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and Hitchcock's Psycho, Herrmann was also famously crusty. This time, the composer loudly derided the footage he would set to music, and said that the Iraq prologue especially had to go. Friedkin sacked him, and instead used Mike Oldfield's eerie and evocative "Tubular Bells," which became an instrumental hit. 

Friedkin's despotic attitude, often heedless about safety, was of a piece with his behavior the year before in filming the classic chase scene in The French Connection. "I was like Captain Ahab pursuing the whale," he told The New York Post two years ago, on the 50th anniversary of that film's release. "I had a supreme confidence, a sleepwalker's assurance. As successful as the film was, I wouldn't do that now. I had put people's lives in danger." 

With filming methods like these and those used in The Exorcist, Friedkin could easily have become embroiled in the kind of legal mess besetting director John Landis after the accident that killed actor Vic Morrow during production of The Twilight Zone: The Movie. 

Instead, he was lucky to have helmed one of the great, gritty police procedurals ever put on screen, as well as The Exorcist, which, 50 years later, is still on the short list of the scariest movies of all time.

Quote of the Day (Nigel Andrews, on ‘Nosferatu,’ ‘The Masterpiece of Broad-Daylight Horror’)

“It's a masterpiece, the masterpiece of broad-daylight horror….The film’s poetry of terror comes from real locations, mainly shot in daytime.

“Cityscapes: the unforgettable hollow-eyed tenement building (filmed in Lübeck) in which the vampire finds his last-act townhouse. Nature: dark mountains and bristling forests. Castles: the stone arches and beetling walls of Nosferatu’s Carpathian home. Those arches become a master-touch. In shot after shot, Max Schreck’s hideous Count, dressed to kill and made up likewise, emerges from the inverted U of dark tunnels or from frame-fitting gothic doorways, like a creature serially birthed or rebirthed from vertical coffin-wombs.”—Nigel Andrews, “‘Nosferatu’ at 100: Why the Vampire MovieMasterpiece Still Has Bite,” The Financial Times, Apr. 5, 2022

Much like the monster it depicts, the German silent film Nosferatu has managed to live on despite a sustained effort to kill it. It represented such a naked case of plagiarizing Dracula that the widow of novelist Bram Stoker won a copyright infringement lawsuit, and almost succeeded in destroying all known prints of it.

But one print made it out—to the United States, where it was already in the public domain and, thus, beyond the ability of any court to destroy. Copies were subsequently made from that single print, and it has since been studied in film school—and appreciated by horror fans—the world over.

(For a useful short history of this lawsuit and its aftermath, see Jonathan Bailey’s 2011 post from the “Plagiarism Today” blog.)

In 1979, Klaus Kinski, spending four hours a day in makeup, played “Count Orlok” in Werner Herzog’s sound/color version of the film. But it can’t exceed in influence F.W. Murnau’s silent classic, whose use of shadows and stark black and white became synonymous with German Expressionism.

Even this remake wasn’t the end of the rat-like Count Orlok. Screenwriter Daniel Waters and director Tim Burton alluded to the old masterpiece by bestowing the name “Max Schreck” on the ruthless business mogul who aids the Penguin in Batman Returns.

In 2000, Willem Defoe played Schreck in an Oscar-nominated performance in Shadow of the Vampire. Written by Steven Katz and directed by E. Elias Merhige, the film offers a different kind of alternative history: what would have happened if the silent version’s director, F.W. Murnau, in an attempt at utmost realism, had cast a real vampire, Schreck, as the Count, then had to race to complete the movie before the actor consumed the entire cast and crew.

Films of the original will not only appreciate the recreation of iconic moments, but also many droll bits of dialogue, as when Murnau, introducing Schreck to everyone on the set, speaks of his “somewhat…unconventional” method of acting, or when the director, objecting to his star’s feasting on another actor, asks why he couldn’t have gone after the script girl. “I’ll eat her later,” Schreck responds.

Quote of the Day (Jordan Peele, on the ‘Jump Scare’ vs. ‘Slow-Building, Unnerving’ Terror)

“At one end of the spectrum, there’s the jump scare, and at the other end, there's slow-building, unnerving anticipation—the terror. For my money, terror is the best type of scare, because it’s the promise of horror to come. When the audience is in that state, you don’t have to do much. Their imagination is more powerful than any piece of imagery or any timing or misdirection you could do.”— African-American screenwriter-director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us), quoted in Jonah Weiner, “The New Master of Suspense,” WSJ. Magazine, March 2019 (registration required for viewing)

(The image accompanying this post comes from Peele’s Get Out, with perhaps the most famous scene from that 2017 thriller: Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris as he descends into the “Sunken Place.” During these weeks leading up to Halloween, it’s well worth seeing how this Oscar-winning screenplay—with nods towards The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby—anticipated America’s unfolding real-life racial nightmare.)

This Day in Film History (Cult Horror Fave ‘The Hunger’ Opens)

Apr. 29, 1983—The Hunger may not have drawn blood at the box office—or even garnered much critical appreciation—upon its release in U.S. theaters. But the erotic horror movie opened a vein for Hollywood to tap into the emerging energies of two transatlantic cultural forces: New York’s downtown scene and London’s advertising directors.

Over time, the film became a special cult favorite for two different audiences: those transfixed by its scenes of the “goth” club life, and a gay/lesbian community that  welcomed one of the first –and certainly one of the most explicit—depictions by a major Hollywood studio of a same-sex love scene, in this case involving Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.

The film was based on a novel by Whitley Strieber, but you would never know it originated from this source material just by looking at what was onscreen. (Thirty years later, Sarandon had no idea the movie was based on a novel, let alone that the latter spawned two sequels in the early 2000s.) Its characters are largely ciphers, and the plot—an 6,000-year-old (give or take a few years) Egyptian vampire having to replace her rapidly aging 300-year-old mate—is reed-thin.

Forget about selling such a story to an audience. How do you even interest studio execs in giving it the green light? Hollywood is addicted to “The Pitch,” a one-minute-tops description of a plot that can take the form of a formula (“fish out of water,” such as Beverly Hills Cop) or an improbable mash-up (going further back for inspiration, “Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolfman”).

I suspect that the pitch that might have worked for producer Richard Shepherd was “MTV vampire movie.” The same phrase could also apply to Grace Jones’ Vamp, or The Lost Boys, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jamie Gertz. But The Hunger got there first, so it deserves the credit—such as it is—for the style.

Such movies depend less on plot and character than on atmosphere. In the case of The Hunger, it struck me as similar to MTV (still only two years old at the time) because its director, Tony Scott, was part of a generation of British filmmakers who got their start making videos and commercials. (Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson and brothers Ridley and Tony Scott made a big splash in Hollywood in the 1980s with work that set a premium on rapid cutting and moody music that often substituted for dialogue.)

Tony Scott (tapped to direct after Parker turned down the assignment) was certainly fascinated by the musical element. After discovering the group Bauhaus in a London nightclub, he ended up using their song "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in the opening credits of The Hunger. 

Even Scott’s casting was designed to appeal to viewers with avant-garde musical tastes. Ann Magnuson, a performance artist and nightclub proprietor, ended up playing a victim of the male vampire John. And John himself, the cellist mate of Miriam Blaylock, was played by David Bowie. 

Even Bowie, an artist as captivated by image as by sound, wondered about Scott’s preoccupation with the visual, which the rock ‘n’ roller felt was “nearly all of what he [Scott] was doing. He did not have great ideas about the through-line of the story. It was about moving one interesting visual against another.”

In one sense, Scott, in his rookie effort, was a throwback to another filmmaker of the Thirties. Let’s see: an émigré director with a fixation on light and frank lack of interest in narrative coherence, with cinema centered on a cool continental “Blonde Venus” with as much appeal to women and men—is that Scott with Deneuve, or Josef von Sternberg with Marlene Dietrich?

Starting with the two novels often considered central to the vampire fiction, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the genre has featured a strong undercurrent of the sexual. The Hunger amplified that theme, not only through the greater freedom that filmmakers were increasingly enjoying in depicting sex and violence but also by appearing in a time when the notion of contaminated blood could not only be viewed as symbolizing transgressive intercourse but as actual fact.

Dracula was published in 1897, at a time when medicine had still devised no effective means of fighting syphilis. In 1981, the first headlines had started to appear discussing a deadly new disease mysteriously striking the gay community, and two months after the release of The Hunger, nearly 1,300 AIDS cases had been identified in New York alone, with 483 deaths. 

One Canadian academic, American studies specialist Priscilla L. Walton, in Our Cannibals, Ourselves, sees The Hunger as “one of the first post-AIDS movies.” That identification grows stronger when thinking about the milieu of the early scenes of the movie: the kind of underground nightclub where drugs and unprotected sex flourished and destroyed lives. 

Indeed, Sarandon’s character, Dr. Sarah Roberts, is a gerentologist whose ground-breaking scientific research involves monkeys and blood work. When Deneuve’s Miriam decides that the good doctor would make an ideal mate to replace Bowie’s John, the icily beautiful piano-playing blonde in the mansion effects a transfusion of blood in which Roberts, instead of curing the mysterious disease she’s investigating, finds herself experiencing similar: loss of appetite, dizziness, vomiting, and loss of color. 

Critics greeted The Hunger as coldly as the touch of Miriam’s hands. Roger Ebert, for instance, assigning it only a star and a half, called it “an agonizingly bad vampire movie.” Yet, in the very next clause, he pinpointed why its fans would embrace it, referring to its “exquisitely effective sex scene.”

Same-sex erotic scenes, in which the partners were unapologetic about their orientation, were rare at this time in Hollywood, and even in genre films. (The Vampire Lovers, an adaptation of Carmilla, had been released in 1970, but that came from Hammer Film Productions, a British studio that specialized in shock and schlock.) So, when a mainstream studio like MGM released a film with this content—and did so not with unknown actresses, but the likes of Deneuve and Sarandon—it marked a departure in how the LGBT community was depicted onscreen.

Scott would survive his critical roasting and go on to make one of the greatest—and, in its way, deeply emblematic—hits of the 1980s: Top Gun. His path to sleek, sexy, stylish cinema began, if inauspiciously, with The Hunger.

This Day in Film History (‘Frankenstein’ Scares Up Great Box Office)

Dec. 4, 1931—Universal Studios consolidated its growing fame as a creator and marketer of a new film genre with Frankenstein. Though its grand opening had taken place in Santa Barbara, Calif., in late November, its New York premiere on this date presaged an enthusiastic embrace of its hideous monster by a public living through a different kind of horror: the Great Depression. More than 76,000 watched the show at the Mayfair Theatre that first week before it opened to wider release.

Most interesting to the studio, of course, was the film’s profit margin. Universal couldn’t compete with major studios such as MGM in lavish spectacle, but it hoped to keep going with movies produced cheaply but distinctively. Frankenstein represented the triumph of that strategy: made for only $250,000, the film returned $12 million upon its release.

Frankenstein took even more liberties with its source material than the Universal release that opened up the talking-picture horror film in earnest earlier that year, Dracula. Unlike the monster in the 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the unloved creature onscreen compounded his ugliness with a pathetic inability to communicate, a virtually nonstop series of grunts and growls.

That vision of the character did not please the actor who had just achieved a career-making triumph with Dracula and who now stood to play another fearsome creature: Bela Lugosi. The former European matinee idol appeared in a 20-minute test reel for the part while still on the set of Dracula, but he was not happy about playing a non-talking role, complaining that he did not come to America to “play a scarecrow.” 

He much preferred the real Frankenstein—not the product of reanimated life, but the obsessed (and verbose) scientist who created him. It didn’t help that his proposed makeup design for the monster was rejected by Universal.

Universal, then, decided to look elsewhere for an actor to play the monster. It didn’t have to look far—a 44-year-old Briton spotted in the studio commissary by director James Whale, and offered a screen test on the spot. 

The actor, Boris Karloff, already in Hollywood for a decade, with roughly 80 films to his credit, still hadn’t made his mark with the wider public, so he jumped at the role. It only made his career, so much so that he called his character “My Dear Friend.”

That’s not to say, though, that it was easy to play. To start with, there were heavy boots (13 pounds each) he had to clomp around in, attached to steel struts that gave the movie monster his distinct lurch (as opposed to Shelley’s creature, whose frightening speed allows him to effortlessly elude captors). His dark, poorly-fitting suit was a nightmare to wear in the August heat. 

And Whale demanded take after take of Karloff lugging Colin Clive’s Dr. Henry Frankenstein up the hill toward the windmill for the movie’s climax, leaving Karloff with back problems so severe for the rest of his life that he would require three major operations.

Above all, there was all that make-up—3½ hours to put on, an equivalent time to take off.  The makeup Lugosi wanted for the role—a mass of dark hair, clay-like skin—would have been simpler to endure by comparison. 

Most of what is seen onscreen—the template for the popular image for the monster since then—came from Jack P. Pierce, the Universal makeup whiz who later came up with similarly indelible designs for the title characters in The Mummy and The Wolf Man. Even before working on Karloff, Pierce researched anatomy, surgery, medicine, criminal history, criminology, burial customs and electrodynamics. 

From that point on, he used grayish-green greasepaint on the skin, contrasting with the gray tones of the normal characters; electrodes protruding from the neck; and for the forehead, cotton and collodion (a foul-smelling liquid plastic). (See this post from nine years ago from the blog "Frankensteinia" on the marvels this makeup magician came up with.)

While often insistent on getting his way, Pierce accepted two suggestions by Karloff. First, the actor took out his dental bridge, giving one cheek a sunken look; second, upon Karloff’s remark that wide-open eyes created a stronger (erroneous) suggestion of human life, Pierce crafted droopy eyelids to underscore the impression of reanimated flesh. 

The second innovation made all the more remarkable Karloff’s performance, as he had to suggest the monster’s alternating pathos and malevolence without wide-open eyes that could express his feelings.

But the movie’s impact may have owed as much to its scenic and sound design as its extraordinary makeup. Frankenstein could only have been made several years into the talkie era, when Hollywood not only had enough time to absorb the style of German Expressionist films but also to experiment with sound.

The shadows and unusual angularity characteristic of directors Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu) figure prominently in Frankenstein’s graveyard and castle scenes—environments that became commonplace in later horror cinema. These scenes also form a huge part of the movie's vertical orientation, climaxed by the monster reaching for the sun.

To heighten the ghoulish proceedings, a microphone in the coffin amplified the sound of the grave dirt hitting the lid; the “Castle Thunder” sound effect was used here for the first time; and the reanimated monster was introduced in full earnest to the audience when they could hear his heavy footsteps but not see his body.

Quote of the Day (Mary Shelley, on the Shock of ‘Sudden Change’)

"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change."―Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

I just thought I’d get you in the mood for Halloween with this quote from the novel Frankenstein and this image from the classic 1931 film—with Boris Karloff, of course, as the monster who makes a “great and sudden change” and brings terror to his creator.

Also on my mind these days, chiefly because I’ve finally gotten around to reading it, seven years after publication: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, by the astonishingly prolific British man of letters Peter Ackroyd.