THE MUMMY (1932)

Ever on the look-out for more material for their horror mill after Dracula and Frankenstein’s runaway success, Universal found an ideal subject in the real-life discovery in 1922 of the tomb of the ancient pharaoh Tutankhamun by Howard Carter and George Herbert. It sparked a world-wide fever of publicity, renewing public interest in Egyptology. The studio also noticed the bewitching effect of the stories detailing a curse allegedly befalling anyone who violates an ancient Egyptian burial site. Ultimately, this scare-mongering only had small scientific merit as a health warning concerning the very real danger caused by releasing aged bacteria - but it didn’t stop the tales that found far-fetched ways of attaching the curse to the fatalities of anyone remotely connected with Tutankhamen’s excavation. Conan-Doyle believed the first ‘victim’, Lord Carnavon, who funded the dig and was present at the opening, died due to elemental forces conjured up by the Pharoah’s royal priests. His venerable reputation did much to fuel the fanciful notions of supernatural vengeance. In fact, only 8 out of the 58 people who witnessed the tomb opening died within twelve years of the event. Even Carter himself remained alive at least until 1939. Nevertheless, such notions are a goldmine to the purveyors of horror entertainment.

What became The Mummy actually began as a script by Nina Wilcox-Putnam called Cagliostro about an 18^th century historical figure who posed as a centuries-old alchemist and paranormal practitioner. John Balderston, who’d worked on Dracula and Frankenstein, was brought in to do substantial rewrites out of a personal interest stemming from being assigned to the Tutankhamen excavation when he was a journalist for the New York World. He renamed the central character Imhotep after arguably history’s first architect designer of a pyramid - for the Pharoah Djoser. (This name became the working title for the film as well as King of the Dead). Watching The Mummy, one can see elements of his plotting from Dracula, such as the hypnotic central nemesis and his yearning obsession focused alarmingly upon one particular modern-day female. The most direct comparison is obvious - we see Edward Van Sloan as another Doctor (Muller here, Van Helsing before), defending the innocent with threatening oaths once more against attempted supernatural mesmerism by an evil protagonist in a drawing room!

Meanwhile, a re-branding of another name was taking shape as Boris Karloff was being positioned by Universal as a new horror star, to be proudly billed as ‘Karloff the Uncanny’. Although it has connotations of an illusionist, the reductive label was one that Karloff felt was an accolade, placing him among the rare pantheon of actors such as Garbo and Barrymore whose last name alone was enough for star recognition. His two decades in the business had suddenly landed him among the screen immortals in just two years of playing horror film roles. No wonder he never regretted his association with the genre.

Direction of this new project was given to Karl Freund who’d proved consistently that he was one of the greatest cinematographers in the world - for Fritz Lang on Metropolis, and already in Hollywood on Murders in the Rue Morgue and Dracula. We’ve already discussed how in the latter he often replaced Tod Browning in directing full scenes so it was entirely natural that he moved to fully directing his own films. 

The casting recruited notable actors linked to the earlier horror hits. Aside from Edward Van Sloan, David Manners from Dracula was recruited as the young hero Frank Whemple.  Arthur Byron as Sir Joseph Whemple and his assistant Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher) uncover with Dr Muller the tomb of Imhotep, (Karloff), a mummified courtier buried alive for the sacrifice of trying to resurrect his forbidden love the Princess Ankh-es-en-amon. There is a warning to potential desecrators read out by Whemple: “Eternal punishment for anyone who opens this casket”. He gives a similar verbal one to Ralph not to read from the Scroll of Thoth, but like his employer, the young man disregards it – at a cost.

This is the cue for the famous revival of Karloff’s long-dead creature. Impressively swathed in bandages, his is an extremely delicate awakening, portrayed with the subtlest fractional eye-opening and slow minor movement of an arm down his body. Freund wisely chose to minimise the mummy’s screen exposure by limiting it to just his initial activation, a hand reaching for the Scroll and then a couple of bandages trailing along the floor as he exits (leaving a freaked-out Ralph to cackle: “He-he-he went for a little walk”).

The make-up work is another tribute both to Jack Pierce’s artistry and Karloff’s phenomenal patience as this hugely elaborate process for only a few seconds of screen time took eight hours to apply, twice as long as the arduous make-up for the monster of Frankenstein. Pierce drew inspiration from a photo of Pharoah Seti II. Karloff’s face and hands were treated separately to the bodily bandaging, being wrapped in Egyptian (high quality) cotton and collodion and electrically dried. His hair was coated in beauty clay so cracks could be carved into it. Then 150 yards of heat-aged linen were used to wrap his entire body, even though on camera he would ultimately not be filmed below the waist. With detailed make-up applied to the hands and face, and Fuller’s Earth dusted over the corpse as a final touch. He was finally ready except for one small but crucial detail: “You’ve done a wonderful job, but you’ve forgotten give me a fly”, Karloff told Pierce. Such was the complexity and brittleness of the mummification, that Karloff was afraid to breathe out fully in case he broke the carefully-wrapped bandaging.

Karloff is marvellous not only in his revivification as the mummy, but in his more extensive dual-role as the modern-day reincarnation, Ardath Bey. Here he radiates a sinister deep self-control, a quiet introspective solemnity of tone and manner. This may partly be a practical solution Karloff found in negotiating this characters’ own make-up. To achieve a visual echo of the mummified Imhotep, Bey’s skin was aged with cotton and collodion solution which as well as still taking four hours to apply, dried to a constricting surface that made speaking dialogue very uncomfortable. Karloff suffered for his art again, yet manfully never complained. He and Pierce had by now become a close and mutually respectful pairing.

Wearing a fez and a long straight, spectral white gown to emphasise his tall, slim physique, Bey glides along guiding Frank Whemple and Prof. Pearson (Leonard Mudie) to the tomb of Princess Ankh-es-en-amon. After the treasures are donated to the Cairo Museum, Bey meet Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann) and is helplessly love-struck as, to him, she is the exact modern-day reincarnation of the Princess. This adds a welcome extra dimension to Karloff’s performance – Bey’s adoration of her is tender and unexpectedly moving, especially when he tells her: “My love has lasted longer than the temples of our gods. No man ever suffered as I did for you”. It’s a line of rare romanticism that almost blends the genre with that of a love story (as in The Terminator when Kyle Reece tells the mother of humanity's future saviour: “I came across time for you, Sarah”).

This poetic aspect does not detract from the overtly unnerving presence Karloff exudes at other important points in the film. When required to hypnotise his subjects, the direct penetrating glow of his deep dark eyes is greatly intimidating even on a relatively large TV screen. To cinema audiences it must have been overwhelming and must have served to burn his ‘brand’ upon their nightmares in more ways than one.

Johann greatly admired Karloff in their working together. She felt though that within him there was: “A hidden sorrow that I sensed and respected – a deep, deep thing”. True or not, on screen that quality does indeed tinge Bey’s desperate, soulful longing for Grosvenor, a macabre obsession with killing her so that he can mummify her, then resurrect her body as his reincarnated beloved.

Johann most definitely perceived misery of a different kind for herself in dealing with her director. Although Freund seemed to generally get along with his creative team, their relationship was an extended nightmare. She came from the New York theatre and took her commitment to performance extremely seriously, what she called the ‘theatre of the spirit’, submerging herself in the role in her dressing room with an almost religious respect. In The Mummy, her ethereal voice and haunted quality beamed through her large eyes is very apt for a character who is believed the incarnation of a venerated Queen of ancient times. (Moreover, Johann’s spiritual connection to the material extended to a real-life belief in reincarnation). She made no secret of her equally passionate disdain for the world of movies however. In Rudy Behlmer’s documentary Mummy Dearest, film historian Gregory Mank recalled her telling him:  “I had more respect for the whores on 42^nd street than I did for the stars in Hollywood”.

Fierce condemnation of the new medium was by no means uncommon amongst stage actors who were still dismissive of the ‘flicks’ as vulgar, lower-class entertainment. This may have fed into a very turbulent and demoralising experience for her in making this film, which she felt was entirely a one-sided victimisation exhibited by Karl Freund upon her. Her phenomenal salary of $7500 a week was hard to resist, yet no compensation for the cruel treatment she endured on-set. Examples included Freund refusing her a chair off-camera, unlike the others actors, for two days of her filming – with the excuse that he didn’t want a single crease in her dress - and allegedly contriving to have her heaviest filming days deliberately coinciding with her menstrual cycle (avoidance of which was an established courtesy).

Johann was the kind of individual, headstrong actress that Hollywood is still intimidated by to this day, which can create animosity with those who expect a chauvinistic obedience from women. Her similarity of character and determination to Katharine Hepburn is more than coincidence. Hepburn was considered for Grosvenor before Johann, but opted to work on the east coast. Whether Freund was entirely to blame or not for their professional conflict, meeting Johann in 1979 Mank observed an hauteur in how she received him, grandly preparing her lighting before settling down to be interviewed – even though she was not being filmed. Perhaps her own approach didn’t exactly help endear her to the Hollywood director either.

Back to the plot, and in the most famous scene of the film Helen’s gradual slip-back into her ancestral identity is intensified by Bey showing her a vision of her past life in a pool, telling the chilling story of his doomed love for her and the horrific live mummification he is punished with for daring her occult revival. This sequence of terrifying ancient retribution has stayed with me for decades. Maybe I’m not alone in forever associating Egyptian mythology with a kind of claustrophobic horror. Ultimately however, the old world gods come to the rescue, proving Bey’s lugubrious wooing has not outlasted them at all. The statue of the underworld god Anubis raises an arm brandishing the Ankh (ironically a symbol of life) to fatally blast him with a fossilising death-beam, and the dangerous Scroll of Thoth is burned.

Sadly, there were some more intriguing flashback scenes filmed that didn’t make the final cut – such as Helen recalling past memories after being shown a large bronze mirror at the museum. That location is also where she relives former lives in 18^th century French aristocracy, an 8^th century Saxon princess at the time of the Viking invasions and even as a Christian fed to the lions in ancient Rome. In Stephen Jacobs’ Karloff biography, he provides what might be a clue as to why, instead of the usual accepted explanation of running time concerns.  Johann may have unwittingly helped cause their deletion as a studio riposte to an unguarded remark she made to Carl Laemmle when he telephoned during an interview that she found unengaging. He was very enthused about the final print of The Mummy, to which she responded: “Do me a favour. I had a lousy rotten time at your studio. Don’t pick up my option for another picture”. She regretted her rudeness later. By so refusing to play ball in Universal’s pre-planned ambitions for her (The Invisible Man and possibly The Bride of Frankenstein) she assuredly scuppered her chances of Laemmle’s proposed top billing of her alongside Karloff in the publicity for The Mummy. According to IMDB, after three more films, two for Fox, she retired from cinema for over 50 years, emerging in 1986 as a librarian in another less renowned grave-robber, Raiders of the living Dead.

Although it was successful as a lucrative new horror premise for Universal, The Mummy was not reincarnated, so to speak, until almost a decade later in 1940, with western actor Tom Tyler inheriting the bandages but not the name as the mummy Kharis. This stand-alone film spawned three sequels, each increasing in improbability as to how he could be revived after decisively dying at the close of each one. Eventually, the series was wrapped when he suffered that most sinister of all Universal monster fates – a team-up with Abbott and Costello in 1955. Happily, The Mummy has been rejuvenated and refreshed more successfully since, most notably by Hammer in 1959 starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and the Stephen Sommers post-millennial franchise starring Brendan Fraser.

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932)

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932)

Following his striking turn in The Old Dark House, Charles Laughton made the film The Devil and the Deep, which was shot before but contractually released after James Whale’s movie. He endured a miserable experience catering to Talluh Bankhead’s diva behaviour on-set. After this was Payment Deferred, a filmed version of the play that originally got him noticed by Hollywood and then a memorable role as Nero for Cecil B Demille in Sign of the Cross.

Then came the controversial Island of Lost Souls, the second film based on H.G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr Moreau. There had previously been a French silent version - Ile d'Epouvante (aka The Island of Terror) released in 1913. Writers Philip Wylie and Waldemar Young fashioned a screenplay retaining much of Wells’ story for director Erle C Kenton. Wells himself was reportedly unsatisfied with the movie, feeling it sacrificed the philosophical arguments of his novel for horror effects. One can certainly see traces on-screen of what might have been deeper elements explored, particularly those expressed by Laughton as Dr Moreau.

To begin with, the film is something of an explorer adventure picture, detailing a young shipwrecked man, Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) who is picked up by a vessel transporting caged animals to a mysterious unnamed island in the South Seas. The Captain (Stanley Fields) is a bitter drunk who questions his cargo’s necessity and the secrecy, taking out his frustration on an even more odd human/animal servant M’Ling (Tetsu Komai) belonging to Arthur Hohl’s Montgomery, a sombre chap who is evasive about his shady past as a doctor: “At least I was…once upon a time”. For punching the bullying Captain, Parker is turfed overboard in revenge onto a ship bound for the aforementioned island instead of being returning to Apia and his concerned fiancé Ruth (Leila Hyams).

On the island. Parker is introduced to Dr Moreau, a white-suited, pompous man of science, given cut-glass English tones by Laughton, an airily grand manner befitting a colonial ruler and with a thin moustache and a precise, close-cut beard adding a certain primness. Laughton is in full command in the role; despite the territory being populated with more half-human, half-animal bipeds, he blithely lashes them with his whip to keep them in line whilst taking Parker breezily on a tour. His guest is intrigued by Lota, the exotic scantily-clad human female who is locked up for some reason. Moreau dominates her too, warning her when speaking to Parker to say: “Nothing about me, nothing about The Law and nothing about the House of Pain”. This marvellously engages our minds with the juicy possibilities those clues contain.

Lota is billed as ‘The Panther Woman’ in the film’s poster, a hang-over from the publicity stunt to cast her earthy charms – revealed as the more prosaic Kathleen Burke in the actual credits. She fastens herself with a desperate passion to Parker, hinting at the murky fear-inducing truth of what the Dr is up to. He stumbles upon it soon enough when cries from the House of Pain reveal themselves to come from the operating theatre where Moreau is performing surgery on an unnervingly ape-like human. He screams at Parker to get out. Only later will we find out the horrific reasoning behind his sadistic intentions.

We are then introduced to the oppressed faction of humanoid-animal hybrids of the land, led by the Sayer of the Law. This is Bela Lugosi, which you may be grateful to have pointed out to you as he is only identifiable by his Hungarian accent under a bushy werewolf face-fuzz. There’s a macabre frisson when the gathering recites the components of the Law they have learned to recite out of fear of punishment: “Not to run on all fours…Not to eat meat…Not to spill blood” each delivered as a call with a servile response of “Are we not men?”. (1970’s era music fans may recognise this reply as the title of Devo’s album inspired by the work: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!).

Moreau attempts to gently bring Parker onside and up-to-speed, recounting how he began modestly enough with bio-anthropological studies of orchids leading him to genetically modify them. As his confidence grew, so did his vision, exponentially increasing his field of experimentation through to live animals, an insanely arrogant God complex believing that they are merely unevolved humans - and that only he has the skill and daring to accelerate their evolution. His island’s bestial creatures are the failed victims of his grotesque meddling. This is a dense, fertile jungle of ethics to be sure, but is machete’d for pace in a 70-minute commercial horror film.

Nevertheless, these scenes not only demonstrate Laughton’s craft as an actor in presenting his ghastly case, they also afford us one of two specific examples of the brilliance of Karl Struss’s use of shadow in his cinematography. Struss famously worked with F.W. Murnau, shot the original silent Ben Hur (1925) the 1931 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and filmed Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Limelight. He shrouds Laughton’s face in shadow as the Dr muses on how to awaken Lota’s fully human lust, before allowing his lit match to trigger a full light on his face just at his revelation of using Parker to do it. The other wonderfully effective shot masks Montgomery’s expression in shadowy strips when he resolves not to lose his moral compass and assist Moreau any more. They are beautiful moments where lighting adds to character, concealing and revealing interior life.

While Parker temporarily loses himself in a smouldering kiss with the Panther Woman, his fiancé Ruth on Apia gets the American Consul to force the Captain into coughing up the co-ordinates for where he dumped her man. She is assigned another Captain, who is also a heavy drinker, to take her to the location. (What is it about the nautical life that leaves sobriety out-to-sea?). She is happily reunited with Parker.

Meanwhile Lugosi’s Sayer is energised to fulfill his destiny as the lycanthropic shop steward, leading the masses to revolution like a manic young Goon-era Spike Milligan. “Law…no more!” he decrees to Moreau. With affecting passion, Lugosi lays down their new terms before tearing down the whip-brandishing Moreau in his bravura last stand.

Island of Lost Souls was a flop in America but was to prove a controversial film in Britain for its operation scene, perceived cruelty to animals and the line "Do you know what it means to feel like God?", a sentiment similarly problematic when expressed by Colin Clive in Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. The British censors only passed the film in 1958 with cuts after three failed submissions since 1933. In today’s climate it is only worthy of a PG, uncut.

Future iterations of the story would appear in 1977 (starring Burt Lancaster) and infamously in 1996, a version bedevilled by off-screen ego dramas involving leads Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer far more entertaining than the finished film, during which original director Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) was fired and then snuck back on set in disguise to record what happened without him. Watch the fine documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau to understand demented ideas that make the doctor’s delusions seem sane.

THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932)

SAX APPEAL

Dr Fu Manchu has been a byword for the grand super-villain since he first appeared in serialised novels by Sax Rohmer in 1912. It’s easy to see why he captured the British public’s imagination - his Asian inscrutability and genocidal hostility toward whites played perfectly into the Edwardian era’s fear of the foreigner in all forms heading into World War One. All manner of untrustworthy qualities and intentions could be attached to a figure who is ‘not British’. Not being ‘one of us’ implies his morality is already suspect. What would such a man be capable of if not gifted by birth to become a well-bred gentleman in the most civilised country on earth?  A land of sportsmanship and ‘playing the white man’ with all the imaginary associations that entails? Would he not compensate for his unfortunate cultural upbringing by embracing evil, particularly in a far-off land whose practises we don’t know and are therefore presumed unspeakably barbaric until we educate them correctly by colonisation? There’s gratitude. Good lord, one could work oneself up into an imperial lather at the thought of such lurking malevolence.

But seriously, Fu Manchu in his many forms such as cinema, TV and comic books taps into just the same irresistible fictional demonization as the Germans in historic war comics do even today, thrilling the schoolboy and adult alike, but with added far eastern exoticism. Rohmer knew he was on to a good thing when he created the character. Born as the very English Arthur Henry Ward, he began his working life as a civil servant in Birmingham till he could make a living as a writer, initially as a sketch-writer and biographer for music-hall artists such as Little Tich. Eventually, he become a full-time fiction author under the mystical pseudonym of Sax Rohmer. His main inspirations were the fantastical Edgar Allen Poe and more notably Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom he had much in common when it came to shaping and responding to the success of his most famous literary creation.

The Fu Manchu plot formula centred around the clashes between this Asiatic megalomaniac and the fine men of the British establishment, namely Dr Petrie who narrated the stories a’ la Dr Watson and Denis Nayland-Smith of the Secret Service, who rose to influence by way of Scotland Yard. As Conan Doyle found with Sherlock Holmes, the association with such a singular creation can be a grinding limitation and instead of similarly killing off his hero, Rohmer simply stopped producing the series after three novels. After a gap of some fourteen years, from 1917-1931, he revived the characters (with a knighted Nayland-Smith) when the novels became lucrative movie translations starring Warner Oland as the titular tyrant in the late 1920s.

The Mask of Fu Manchu was filmed in 1932 by William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures studio, a smart example of business synergy as he produced films that had mainly pre-existed as serialisations in his own magazines (such as Cosmopolitan). This allowed him to publicise his released movies in his magazines and gave studios with whom he had distribution deals prized access to his vast fund of story properties - in the case of this film it was M-G-M.

We are briskly walked into the plot of The Mask of Fu Manchu by an urgent meeting between Sir Denis (Lewis Stone) and Egyptologist Sir Lionel Barton, played by Lawrence Grant, in which the explorer is warned of the critical urgency of his bid to find the relics of Genghis Khan. It seems the power-crazed Fu Manchu wants to get his hands on the sword and mask as well, through which he will become the occult reincarnation of the ancient warrior - and the white man will be slaughtered by a blood-bath emanating from the East.  This simply isn’t cricket for the Foreign Office so whitey must get there first.

Stone would find lasting fame in Mickey Rooney’s long-running Andy Hardy film series playing his father Judge James. Lawrence Grant went on to appear in the horror films Werewolf of London (1935), as the Burgomaster in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and in Spencer Tracy’s 1942 remake of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Barton’s mission is soon derailed though when he is chloroformed by masked Chinese kidnappers and presented to Fu himself - Boris Karloff. The Frankenstein star was on loan to M-G-M whilst Universal were still awaiting a suitable in-house horror role for him. However, this new film for their rival didn’t have a finished one either. Karloff recalled: “It was a shambles…For about a week before we got started I kept asking for a script. I was met with roars of laughter at the idea that there was a script”. On the first shooting day he sat patiently while make-up artist Cecil Holland made him up as Fu, transforming him via a long thin moustache, reshaping his eyes and ears, adding Asian eyepieces and long fingernails. It was an elaborate process taking two and a half hours, and even after that the text problems still hadn’t been resolved. He was landed with a dense four-page speech with no time to prepare just before being made up, which I can vouch for as being hideously unfair especially on your first day. After that had been percolating in his mind, upon Holland finishing, he was then given a replacement script now written in offensively pidgin English. This unsatisfactory treatment would be par for the course during filming.

Fortunately, in the film all of Karloff’s final dialogue is uttered in silky urbane tones of perfect English, all the more appropriate for a hyphenate of earned doctorates from all the best universities. He actually appears to savour his lines pleasingly, relishing the Bondian bad-guy hospitality with edge: “See that he is quite comfortable – for the present”, teasing Barton with a gratefully-received glass of (actually salt) water and cackling at the cruel joke, the fiend. Even his gorgeous, Western-looking daughter Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy) has her siren-like charms undermined slyly upon her entrance by him: “My ugly and insignificant daughter”.

At least The Mask of Fu Manchu’s director Charles Brabin (replacing the sacked Charles Vidor) had money spent on detailed and convincing set design, beginning with the intriguing opening to the tomb guarded by two ornate warrior demons. The expedition party breaking it open consists of the distinguished Jean Hersholt as the German Dr Berg, Barton's daughter Sheila (Karen Morley) her fiance Terry Granville (Charles Starrett), and McLeod (David Torrence). Barton’s abduction means time is even more precious. Berg wastes no time admiring the beautifully-rendered design. “Mac, gimme the axe”.

Mcleod is tragically given a weapon in reply that night when a coolie zip-lines into his room while he’s guarding the treasure. He is fatally stabbed while shooting the assassin. I must say a quick word about the lovers who I’d rather had traded places with him. The ‘Yellow Peril’ alert activated by the news of Barton’s kidnapping is certainly embodied by the over-ripe histrionics of Morley. She is a perfect match for Starrett’s Terry, the lantern-jawed, pith-helmeted hero explorer. Her unconvincing wails bounce off his stiff granite determination like bullets twanging off a cliff-face. With their line deliveries proving attention-drawing liabilities as performers, they are made for each other.

After McLeod’s back-stabbing, Tense Terry sets his chin to ‘stun’ and secretly takes the sword and mask to Fu, hoping to exchange then for Barton. Fu suavely claims Sir Lionel is merely his guest. Fu links the sword up to a crackling Tesla coil to test the sword’s veracity, which is bad news for Terry as it is fried to ashes. Our hero didn’t know that Nayland-Smith (recently arrived) switched a phony scimitar with it. He is whipped mercilessly under the perversely-thrilled gaze of Fah Lo See who is developing the hots for his western integrity. She wants him as a plaything, which Daddy is only too happy to oblige since it gives him the chance to perform surgery and inject Terry with “Dragon’s blood, my own blood, and the organs of different reptiles mixed with the magic brew of the scared seven herbs”.

Terry is spaced-out when he returns to the expeditionary camp, numbly pretending to his friends that Nayland-Smith wants the real relics to be taken by him. Sheila’s feminine intuition spots that his acting has suddenly become more naturalistic but they go along to see where he will lead them.She exposes the fallacy in Fah Lo See’s brainwashing, bringing Terry back to his stoic senses by appealing to his deep-seated love for her.

   This allows Karloff to grandly enjoy announcing even more tortures, including the room of the Golden Peacock for her, and a fiendish sand-timer controlled see-saw poised over a pit of crocodiles for Nayland-Smith. These cliff-hanger threats fondly recall those fun Republic serials of the era, and the climactic use of a million- volt ray-gun by our heroes is pure Dr Zarkhov.

The Mask of Fu Manchu made only a small profit upon release. A later 1960s series of films starring Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu fared better. Then again, the disastrous 1979 The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu placed a sad final cap on Peter Sellers’ incredible career.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)

In 1932, director James Whale followed his huge success with Frankenstein by creating another atmospheric chiller, continuing his collaborations with actors Boris Karloff and Ernest Thesiger and other creative personnel from his previous films, as well as introducing Charles Laughton to both the genre and American audiences in his first Hollywood role.

What was to become a classic horror film staple plot actually began as a faithful adaptation by Benn Levy of the esteemed J.B. Priestley’s 1927 novel Benighted concerning a group of bedraggled tourists who take refuge in a spooky house terrorised by a family keeping sinister secrets. The film retains the original novel’s characters, its oppressive gothic atmosphere and the essence of post-World War One angst embodied in Roger Penderel, a shell-shocked survivor of the battlefield. In fact, there is a richly effective theme of gloom that hangs over all of the players which they must fight valiantly to dispel in order to ultimately come to terms with life by the following morning.

We open with Penderel, (double Oscar-winner and famous Garbo co-star Melvyn Douglas), being chauffeured haphazardly through torrential rain and mud by his beleaguered friends Philip and Margaret Waverton when they are forced to seek shelter at a nearby house.

The Wavertons are Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart, who steered interesting careers for themselves in real-life.  Massey was a Broadway star who would go on to recreate cast-mate Karloff’s celebrated stage turn as Jonathan Brewster (a role written for and in-jokingly referencing him) on screen when the former was locked into still performing it on War Two for over 40 years, till her comeback eventually resulted in becoming the oldest Academy Award nominee in history as centenarian survivor Rose Dawson in James Cameron’s Titanic at the age of 87. (She died after reached her own century in 2010).

The bedraggled friends are ‘greeted’ at the door by the impassive, unsettling visage of Boris Karloff as the mute, scarred butler Morgan. Billed for blunt brand-name exploitation simply as Karloff in posters, he also suffered the indignity of a clumsy prologue card that feels the need to explain he is the same marquee surname from Frankenstein. Producer Carl Laemmle Jr then compounds the insensitivity by still not quoting his first name, somewhat undermining the final compliment: “We explain this to settle all disputes in advance, even though such disputes are a tribute to his great versatility”. (Surely the marketing team could have negated any confusion and been a shade more respectful to the actor by labelling him as ‘Boris ‘Frankenstein’ Karloff’?).

Regardless, Karloff generates an impressive air of brooding menace without dialogue, gradually turning more zombified and threatening as we learn more about the house occupants. We meet the curious brother and sister act of Horace (Ernest Thesiger) and Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore). He is a nervous, cadaverous host while his deaf, inhospitable sister glowers and barks with irascible puritan disgust at the ‘godless’ family around her. Moore was a stage actress and committed suffragette who, via her daughter Jill Esmond’s marriage to Laurence Olivier, became his mother-in-law. Thesiger of course became part of Whale’s film repertory company, soon to play Dr Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein after working once again with Karloff on The Ghoul.

Our worst fears about Morgan are confirmed by Horace when he privately reveals to Massey that his servant is “an uncivilised brute” prone to dangerous rage when drunk. Margaret’s response is an impressive sang-froid, more keen to remove her wet clothes than letting the homicidal potential of the butler sink in.  Rebecca takes her to a room to change where she surveys the young lovely with suspiciously enthusiastic disapproval: “You revel in the joys of fleshly love, don’t you?” she drools. Suddenly, a vigorous knocking at the door heralds new guests to the impromptu party…

ENTER LAUGHTON

Charles Laughton, like Lon Chaney, only made a handful of what might be classed as horror films in his enormously varied career gallery. Both actors achieved renown in the same part, Quasimodo, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Laughton’s 1939 version is arguably the greatest interpretation to date. Despite their other shared trait of great versatility, Laughton managed to escape the misleading label of ‘horror actor’ that forever followed Chaney. This may be largely due to Chaney’s tragic death in 1930 when sound was in its infancy. Much of his huge output of silent films is lost, increasing the vividity of his brilliance as Hugo’s endearing monster, as Eric, The Phantom of The Opera and his dual roles in the still-missing London After Midnight. Laughton was fortunate in only having moon-lighted from his esteemed stage work to dabble in silent shorts written by H.G. Wells and British ‘quota-quickie’ features before making an immediate and long-lasting impact in Hollywood just as the technology for ‘talkies’ began to be viable. His good fortune in the profession nonetheless connected him with a number of talents who became famous in horror cinema.

Laughton was a Yorkshireman, born in Scarborough to hotelier parents. He was schooled at the strict Jesuit college of Stonyhurst whose regime instilled in him life-long feelings of Catholic guilt, which cannot have made his emerging homosexuality any easier to bear in an already repressive era. Being the eldest of three boys, Laughton was primed to take over the family business of the grand Pavilion Hotel by training in London, arranged through his notoriously upwardly mobile mother Eliza, at the very posh Claridge’s. Charles gained his first sampling of the delights of the West End theatre world, appreciating the work of actors such as Gerald Du Maurier and other names whom he would meet as hotel guests.

The young man’s work experience was cut short though when he signed up to fight in World War One. He eschewed the opportunity for the officer’s rank that his social position would have allowed him, having no appetite for a leading role in that sphere. He joined up as a lowly private and fought until he was gassed in battle during the very last week of conflict. The result was a lingering double legacy for life of throat problems and a new sombreness that would never quite leave the formerly light-hearted boy. This dark shadow was common to returning ex-soldiers, something J.B. Priestley would allude to in The Old Dark House’s source novel.

Laughton’s awakened appetite for the stage led him to amateur roles with the Scarborough Players whilst running the family hotel. This crystallised his burgeoning ambition for the actor’s life, so at the relatively advanced age for a drama student of 24, he was auditioned successfully at RADA before a panel including Claude Rains, thus establishing a meaningful professional link with the eventual leading man of Universal’s The Invisible Man (directed by James Whale) and their 1943 remake of The Phantom of the Opera. Laughton was a focused, reclusive student, not wasting a second in learning from what was only a one-year course back then. His character detail and inventiveness was becoming extraordinary, moulding the plump clay of his physique and unprepossessing face into memorable manifestations of his inner creativity.

Laughton’s work was getting noticed in student productions, even in parts not wholly suited to him. He earned this prescient remark backstage after Pygmalion by none other than George Bernard Shaw: “You were perfectly dreadful as Higgins, but I predict a brilliant career for you within a year”.

The renowned Shavian perceptiveness was bang on target. Within that year, the ex-student was directed by the illustrious Theodore Komisarjewsky in Gogol’s The Inspector General opposite his recent tutor Claude Rains at London’s Barnes Theatre. After acquitting himself well in two Chekhov plays, Laughton then made his West End debut cameoing in Liliom at the Duke of York’s with Ivor Novello who of course had been Hitchcock’s spooky The Lodger on screen in 1927. He was already creating a hugely impressive start to his career. Indeed, in Simon Callow’s excellent biography Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, he notes that the year after graduating, in 1927, the actor notched up “seven featured roles in seven West End productions”. Crucially, this enabled him to bypass the lower levels of cheap-jack repertory which can lead to bad habits in technique. He was accustomed to working with the very best and would never sink to anything less than fellow thoroughbreds from here onwards – an expectation that wasn’t always the most understanding when dealing with others.

Despite such a busy schedule, it wasn’t all work with Laughton. Whilst in the play Prohack, he found mutual solace in a relationship with actress Elsa Lanchester with whom he would share the rest of his life. She captivated him with her bohemian sensibility and good humour as she would thrill audiences famously in 1935 as The Bride of Frankenstein under James Whale’s direction. Whale made another horror connection with Laughton’s prodigious work-load in the Grand Guignol A Man With Red Hair, a frightening play detailing the bitter revenge of Laughton’s character Crispin upon a world shunning him for his ugliness. Whale was a sometime actor still at this point and played Laughton’s son. While it sounds like a more psychotic version of his later Quasimodo, the adaptation of Hugh Walpole’s text was by Benn Levy who would rework Priestley’s Benighted into The Old Dark House. A critic for Theatre World praised Laughton’s first scene with echoes of the PTSD (called ‘shell-shock’ back then) that haunted the later Whale film: “His entrance is like the first whiff of poison-gas we were once familiar with. A thing so evil and malignant that it can paralyse one’s power to combat it by its apparent harmlessness...”

1931 was the dramatic turning point for Laughton in both his professional and private life. The West End stage run of Payment Deferred was the hit that took the couple across the Atlantic to New York exposure and from there to the offer of a Hollywood film debut. However, before he and Elsa could take advantage of this, someone else’s more sinister opportunism would have to be faced. During rehearsals in London, Laughton’s secretly homosexual life had made him the victim of attempted blackmail by one of his pick-ups. A policeman became involved in the incident and an utterly ashamed Laughton was forced to confess his double life to Elsa. She was shocked and felt betrayed by his deceit, yet after asking the truth about the story, from then on, to her credit, never discussed his gay persuasion with him again. They remained a steadfast couple – but with unspoken quicksand in their marriage never to be entered into from that day.

Although Laughton would never reconcile his hidden demons, he at least had plenty of public success from channelling his energies. When his Broadway work led to a Hollywood contract, he seized the opportunity lustily, sensing this was his medium from the beginning. The possibility for re-takes suited his perfectionism and the care taken by each studio department allowed the highest level of craftsmanship to be provided (and indulged for a demanding artist). His first Hollywood role was supposed to be for Paramount in Benn Levy’s The Devil and the Deep, but when that script proved unfinished, they loaned him to Universal where James Whale was now ready to direct his old friend in The Old Dark House…

Laughton’s entrance into Tinseltown via the eerie house of the Femm family was a powerhouse one. Initially he dominates his first scene as Sir William Porterhouse, bursting in as a hearty whirlwind of northern energy with his young playmate Gladys Ducane (Lilian Bond). He chuckles and disarms, using well the actor’s native Yorkshire accent and a matey, carousing unpretentiousness to undercut the grandeur of his title. This reveals itself later to be something of a bluff cover for a deep-seated legacy of bitterness under the surface. Laughton expertly shifts the tone to a heart-felt confessional where he recalls the painful spur of social snobbishness at his firm that drove his wife to commit suicide and turned him into a vengeful possessed capitalist: “I swore I’d smash those fellers and their wives who wouldn’t give my Lucy a kind word. Hah! And I ‘ave smashed them…at least most of ‘em”.  

After Penderel and Gladys become unconvincingly fast lovers, Laughton surprises again by not converting his commanding energy into slighted rage. Instead, he moves us by giving them a gentle, resigned blessing borne of a mature understanding that he and the ex-chorus girl were only temporary companions.

The guests’ soulful unburdenings are contrasted with Karloff’s Morgan carrying out his warned-of alcoholic rampaging. He is genuinely unnerving. As with Frankenstein’s monster, Morgan is more enigmatic and frightening without dialogue. He is an unstable threat, coming after Margaret and Philip all the more relentlessly for not being talked away. No exposition or pre-amble, just the desire to kill them. Penderel is lucky to fend him off on the stairs.

If you thought the two Femm hosts on display are kooky, wait till you see the others hidden up that staircase. There is the 102 year-old father, Sir Roderick, an appropriately-wizened old Catweazle, cleverly cast with actress Elspeth Dudgeon who was billed as John Dudgeon. Whale was apparently unable to find an old enough male for the part. (Happily, having a female play him has the bonus of creating a convincing ‘childish treble’ in such an aged man’s voice).

Possibly the most lethal ‘Femm fatale’ of all is held back for the climax. Brember Wills is Saul, a bearded dissembling wack-job whose fondness for pyromania is so dangerous that he is usually locked away, tended to by a strange bond with Morgan. We are teased with a close-up of his hand before he appears. He tries to engage Penderel in his hobby: “I know things about flames that nobody else in the world knows!” After recounting the biblical story of his name-sake’s attempted spearing of the young David, he fails equally to pin Penderel with a flying knife and almost burns the house down before he is neutralised, causing Karloff to break down in affecting tears over his wounded body.

Whale directs the cast well, allowing each actor their moments in the sun (or shadows) to create a memorable ensemble and a spirited addition to the familiar tropes of horror film lore. As we have explored, Whale, Karloff, Massey and Laughton would all continue to forge memorable work in the genre…

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932)

In 1932, the RKO studio waded into the horror genre with The Most Dangerous Game, a reliable Hollywood plot that would be remade many times over the decades, based on a short story by Richard Edward Connell. The film itself made good use of recycling as its sets and some of the cast were to be reused shortly after for the awesome King Kong.

Mixing a sinister atmosphere with action-thriller overtones, the film details the evil game played by an insane Russian Count (Leslie Banks) who ensnares ship-wreck survivors onto his island in order to hunt them to death for his own sickening sport. It’s a pleasing, fat-free 62 minutes of perverse fun, plunging us almost literally into a prologue for our hero Joel McCrea (later achieving fame with Sullivan’s Travels and Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent). McCrea is Bob Rainsford, a handsome, none-too cerebral big-game hunter and writer devoid of sympathy for the creatures he hunts. Controversially, he claims in recounting one adventure to his friends on board a ship that his quarry, conveniently anthropomorphised, enjoyed the sport as much as he did: “As a matter of fact, we admired each other” - (forgetting the small matter of the disparity between each sides’ resources for one thing). Rainsford sees society as made up of either being the hunter or the hunted – and soon he will get to test that hypothesis from the other side.

Using excellent model-work, the ship is wrecked by the coral reefs the party were warned about by the Captain. We see some of Rainsford’s friends picked off by opportunistic sharks, already proving his point, while he is washed ashore on an island as the sole survivor. He makes his way to a chateau, observing that the shore lights have now changed. Something macabre is afoot, a feeling amplified by the chilling knocker on the iron door of a figure cradling a woman, whether captive or saved damsel we do not know - but the arrow piercing his chest foreshadows mortal combat to come.

Rainsford finds himself accepted immediately as the house-guest of Count Zaroff, the aforementioned noble, an elegant émigré of the Russian Revolution. Banks enjoys himself in the role, channelling his English suavity into a Russian (and occasional Scottish?) no doubt picked up in his classical stage work which would lead him to Olivier’s film of Henry V in 1944. Zaroff’s warm sense of hospitality  clashes with an odd intense stare, matched only by that of his mute cossack man-servant Ivan (Noble Johnson). A welcome glimmer of dark humour is offered when Zaroff bullies Ivan into smiling for his new guest. The hench-man’s mouth cracks into an oddball grin totally at odds with the fierce eyes above them.

Rainsford discovers he is not the only stranger in a strange land. Four other survivors of a previous wreck have been taken in - in more ways than one. They include Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong as siblings Martin and Eve Trowbridge, biding their time till they play heroine Ann Darrow and the great showman Carl Denham respectively in King Kong. Armstrong distinguises (and extinguishes) himself as Martin, a nouveau-riche lush whose permanently-sozzled state allows him to be late-night fodder for Zaroff’s merciless gaming. Eve and Rainsford stumble across his body brought back by their host, and are made an offer they can’t refuse – to be give the chance to escape pursuit across the island - “No bigger than a deer park”. If they can avoid capture by dawn, they will be set free. In Zaroff’s world, the most dangerous game is not the animal but the human…

The scene is set for an engrossing last act game of cat-and-mouse whereby all of Rainsford’s experience at setting animal traps is easily dodged by the supremely confident Zaroff across lushly-furnished jungle sets. The hunter begins his hunt firing from a Tartar War Bow he is proud of, evading a falling log-trap and mocking the twosome playfully in his fetching black Milk Tray cat-burglar rollneck. When a fog rolls in, the cheating swine cannot resist increasing the home advantage further by switching to a high-powered telescopic rifle and then unleashing his hounds after the couple. The Hounds of Zaroff incidentally was the UK title for the picture. King Kong fans will recognise the log across the ravine that would figure in a memorable fight scene in that movie. Chased up a tree, Rainsford sees the slavering dogs below and grows enough of a sudden conscience to ruefully observe of his former sport’s victims: “I know how they feel…”

Finally, Zaroff gets his comeuppance in battle after thinking his attack pooches have dispatched Rainsford off a cliff. Even at the last dying breath, he tries in vain to still be the big game-hunter.

The Most Dangerous Game benefits from its lean construction and execution by Ernest P Schoedsack as writer and co-director with Irving Pichel. It discards any leaden back-story or sub-plots, eschewing for example any pace-killing romance between Rainsford and Eve that would tempt other film-makers, to make a horror thriller that travels light and plays entertainingly with the dark side...

KONGO (1932)

KONGO (1932)

This 1932 M-G-M horror melodrama, based on the stage play by Chester Devonde and Kilbourn Gordon is a rarity and not often discussed within the genre, perhaps because it is essentially a jungle soap opera with only suggestions of the macabre. The one element that does work on a vividly Grand Guignol level is the central performance by Walter Huston as Deadlegs Flint, a bitter, wheelchair-bound monomaniac consumed with the need to avenge an old score on his ex-partner Gregg who stole his wife deep in the heart of the African jungle setting. Huston is terrific in the role, a cigar-chomping, grizzled piratical tyrant – reprising his part from the original Broadway Biltmore run in 1926.

He rules the servile natives, his chattering chimp Kong, white cronies Hogan and Cookie (Mitchell Lewis and Forrester Harvey) and his mistress Tula with an iron hand, which doesn’t stop those closest to him from ripping of his brandy and cigarettes behind his back. The most subversive of his camp is Tula, played by Lupe Velez, in real life known as the ‘Mexican Spitfire’ due to her fiery temper and sexuality, a monicker that gave rise to a same name film series capitalising on her personality before her tempestuous life flamed out suicidally at age 36.

Flint subjugates the natives with tricks that create the illusion of his having real magical powers of a voodoo doctor, as well as bribing them with booze and sugar lumps. He has used this blend of the supernatural and cynical greed as a hold over the villagers to construct an 80 mile zone that he controls all access to for the last 18 years while he bides his time plotting against Gregg, ‘The man who sneered’, and left him lame, on a wall calendar.

Flint had arranged to have Gregg’s daughter Ann (musical star Virginia Bruce) raised by nuns in a Cape Town convent, feeding her the myth that her father is a missionary of God. Hogan is sent to bring her to Flint, posing as one himself. Her cloistered purity is then horribly degraded over two years as Flint reduces her saintly innocence to the level of a run-down alcoholic hooker before bringing her into his camp.

Fortunately, aid comes in the unlikely form of grimy and drug-addicted Doctor Kingsland, played by Conrad Nagel, an actor whose matinee-idol looks brought him fame from the silent era easily into the talkies. He shows his character versatility by entering the world of Kongo against type, tottering in a soiled suit and hopelessly dependent on the druggy properties of Biang root. He falls almost literally for Ann after a toxic episode with Tula weakens his resolve and increases his addiction temporarily. Flint wants the doctor to operate on his legs and ghoulishly detoxes him by an off-screen slitting of his chest: ‘I’m gonna puncture ya and let the leeches do the rest…” Ann rescues him from the worst excesses of the blood-sucking treatment outside and the operation on Flint is undertaken.

When Gregg arrives in the compound, Flint discovers that his plot to shock his old rival with the appalling state he has driven the man’s daughter to backfires when Gregg reveals that Ann is in fact Flint’s daughter, a cruel twist of biological fate later used in the Jean de Florette films. Flint is so crushed by the news that his conscience finally gets the better of him. He is unable to save Gregg from being killed by protective tribal henchman Fuzzy, but at least manages to send Kingsland and Ann to safety while he holds off the natives. In a touching moment before sacrificing himself to the marauding villagers, Flint finds it in his soul to pray for the lovers, and then hauls himself out of his wheelchair to meet his doom under the natives’ onslaught.

The theatrical source behind Kongo is evident on screen - the stage production was based in Flint’s store and the film rarely steps outside the set, relying on long, talky expository scenes that are often less than engrossing or cinematic before the climax heats things up. The actors give the piece a sweaty energy and commitment, yet Kongo’s third-act parental revelation and business skulduggery belong more to melodrama than horror cinema…

DOCTOR X (1932)

DR X (1932)

In the early years of sound film, it wasn’t always a monochrome world on screen. Warner Brothers had been experimenting with two-strip technicolour for their releases, including horror films. In 1931 they produced The Runaround as part of an abortive attempt to make colour a viable attraction, restricting costly colour prints to major cities whilst striking monochrome prints for lesser markets.  Dr X was released a year later and although the technique failed to catch on, it allows us to enjoy an early horror big studio talkie with an added lustre and modern look.

Dr X was based on the play Terror by Howard W. Comstock and Allen C. Miller in 1928. Upon mounting it in New York in 1931 they had to change the name to avoid it being confused with The Terror by Edgar Wallace. The play thus became Dr X and retained the name when Warner’s decided to film it, bringing in Hungarian émigré Michael Curtiz as director, who would become famed for such classics as Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Aside from the brightness accorded by colouring, Dr X benefits from the black humour and the exuberant fast-talking, wise-cracking of Lee Tracy as Lee Taylor, intrepid reporter on the trail of New York’s ‘Moon Killer’, who rips out the deltoid muscle from the base of the brain of each of six victims and subjects them to cannibalism, murdering them on successive full moons. Tracy supplies the same wise-guy energy as later movie screwball comedies, offsetting the grislier meat elsewhere on display courtesy of Lionel Atwill and his Academy of Surgical Research.

British-born Atwill was already a star on Broadway and parlayed this into notable horror film roles as cultured professionals in the 30s and 40s for Warner’s, Fox and Universal - such as Mystery of the Wax Museum, Mark of the Vampire and Son of Frankenstein.

Atwill’s Dr Xavier finds himself under the spotlight from local detectives since each slaying occurs close to his academy. Dr X takes the men on a quick lab tour, introducing them to each of his eccentric and vaguely sinister colleagues, all of whom are presented with equally suspicious clues and backgrounds. There is the voyeuristic Haines (John Wray), the secretive and wheelchair-using Duke, Harry Beresford, and the facially-scarred Rowitz (Arthur Edmund Carewe). Upon hearing that Professor Wells (Preston Foster) has been to Africa to study cannibalism, one of the cops practically falls over himself to clamp Wells into an electric chair before even meeting him: “Why didn’t you tell us this before? It’s as good as a conviction”. Fortunately, he’s not a presiding judge. His premature shutting of the case is hampered when they discover Wells has no left hand, instead making do with a prosthetic glove.

Taylor meets the doctor’s daughter in the captivating form of Fay Wray, who began a fruitful run in horror cinema here culminating in becoming an indelible scream with 1993’s legendary King Kong. As Joan Xavier, she uses her charms to persuade the lovestruck Taylor to hold off his story while her father tries to clear his institute’s name.

Dr X offers the police a test at his Long Island estate that may prove the innocence of his team or find the killer. Echoing Prince Hamlet and John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, he plans to subject each team member to images and a re-enactment of the committed murders while they are strapped to their chairs. Bamboozling the cops and the audience with some expository flimflam about using *cough*radio waves as well as a heart-rate monitor, X is sure that any guilty party will incriminate himself by causing their assigned ‘thermal tube’ to overflow. Dr X recruits his maid and butler to perform the re-enactment, but pandemonium ensues – Taylor hides in a closet but is gassed by an unattributed skeletal hand; Wells, whose handicap allows him to run the experiment free of blame, suffers his own tubal overheating by suddenly falling through a glass door; meanwhile, after a disorienting blackout the suspected Rowitz is found dead, a scalpel having been applied to the base of his brain. He is later cannibalised for good measure.

It turns out that the ruled-out Wells was in fact the killer all along. His Africa flesh-finding mission was just that, a red alert not a red herring. (Maybe the hasty cop shouldn’t have been held back by that pesky ‘innocent till proven guilty’ red tape). He’d been secretly studying a way to create ‘Synthetic fleshhhhh’, famously rumbling the line as he liberally coats his face and hands with a porridge-like paste that reconstitutes his skin, covering the dummy hand and disguising his face into Rondo Hatton-esque heavy features. It’s not explained what, if any, are the supernatural properties of the human flesh he went all that way to harvest. (If there were none inherent, why go so far for immaterial material since he’s not above killing folk on his home turf for it?). No matter, for as he threatens to add Joan to his digestive tract, Taylor overcomes a cowardly streak to grapple with the mad doctor, hurling a lamp at him which causes Wells to turn into a human fireball, smashing through the window to plummet down on to the rocks below. Taylor is now free to put an ad in his newspaper’s society column concerning his heroic self and the lovely Joan.

Dr X is fun and deftly mixes comedy with the horror in a blending of laughs, cannibalism, murder and implied prostitution which definitely would have struggled to get past the censor board when the draconian Hays Code soon came into force. There’s also an all-too-brief sassy cameo by Mae Busch, who varied her marvellous battle-axe turns as fearsome wives or girlfriends for Laurel and Hardy with other genres: e.g. Rosie O’Grady opposite Lon Chaney in the 1925 silent version of The Unholy Three and here a cathouse madam whose telephone Taylor borrows to call in his story.

Curtiz, Atwill and Wray would be reunited in Technicolor the following year in Mystery of the Wax Museum as part of an incredible production output by Curtiz. According to IMDB he directed 13 films just between 1932-33, a furious pace that at one point on a Saturday during Dr X had him shooting for 24 hours solid, lensing eight minutes of the finished film in that one day. This explains why at times you can hear slightly garbled or hesitant delivery of lines, particularly by Atwill. Though Curtiz wasn’t in the same league as the notorious William ‘one-shot’ Beaudine, he could perhaps have allowed re-takes of the more obvious fluffs to the trained ear…

WHITE ZOMBIE (1932)

The early 1930s were not just a period of raiding classic literature for horror studios eager to profit from the new booming business in horror films. Anything that could create profitable terror in the hearts of the punters was viable material, so when Victor Halpern’s film White Zombie debuted in July 1932, its themes of voodoo witchcraft and occult possession in far-flung Haiti injected an exotic variant. Though the film itself is highly-flawed and tame, it was the first to hint at the coming sub-genre of the zombie movie. How was this mythology begun and why did it arrive at the time it did? Let’s put it into context by setting sail back through time to a dark chapter in world history.

THE HISTORY OF VOODOO

There are many misconceptions about Voodoo. The depiction of colourful practises, especially within the realms of on-screen horror, have tainted it with entirely negative connotations. We often associate it with an intoxicating, primitive overload of the senses – the seductive, insistent thump of primal drumming, lurid imagery of priests gibbering in tongues, black magic rituals of animal sacrifice, tranced worshippers hurling themselves about in a rising, orgiastic fervour, pins jammed into dolls transmitting pain to a remote victim - all presided over by the top-hatted, grinning funster Baron Samedi. There is tribal excitement, the anticipation of supernatural feats and by the end of the show one unlucky (or unwilling) contestant may be dead or alive…or something unnervingly in between.

All of these elements are prurient fun if not taken seriously, but Voodoo is actually a genuine, sober religion that was forged under the most appalling conditions to give a beleaguered people a means of uniting and protecting them. It is condescended to by the mainstream yet forged with earnest principles and rituals no more fantastical than those held to by the major faiths. (The resurrection of life as proof of mystical power and faith? Miracles? These are all strangely familiar).

 The English-speaking world was not introduced to the concept of the zombie, the infantryman of the voodoo world, until 1889 when journalist Lafcadio Hearn wrote an article for Harper’s Magazine called ‘The Country of the Comers-Back’ about the phenomenon of the ‘corps cadavres’ or ‘walking dead’ that he heard rumours about in Martinique. He was only able to provide a flavour of the superstitious mutterings. It would take another travel writer, the American William Seabrook, to plunge whole-heartedly into his research first-hand and bring back the raw meat of folklore for westerners in the crucial volume The Magic Island.

Seabrook began as a buttoned-down square, following his college education into journalism then the advertising world before realising that he had the thrill-junkie soul of a true adventurer to satisfy. Rather than wait for America to draft him into World War One, he joined the French Army as an ambulance driver to drive right into the heart of the action. After the war, he tried to fit himself into the hip arts scene of New York’s Greenwich village literary set, but the highbrow elitists dismissed him as pandering to sensationalist supernatural stories and lurid sex crimes. He would ultimately develop the persona of the risk-taking, globe-trotting reporter who dared to travel where white men rarely ventured. He thrived on encountering bizarre and hostile cultures, immersing himself in their ways even to the point of tasting human flesh when studying cannibals.

Seabrook lived with the Bedouins in Arabia, the jungle tribes of Africa, and many other places but his greatest impact came from his time in the Caribbean island of Haiti. On the surface, this conventional-looking chap blended right in with the other white settlers in the capital, Port-Au-Prince in 1928 – but what he would transmit to his readers was anything but decent and restrained. Far from being a critical observer, his prose pulsed with recording only the direct experiences of unbridled perversion and sexual experimentation in his new environment (hence the insistence on trying cannibalism for his book Jungle Ways). He had already developed a taste for the kinky, reputedly travelling the world equipped with whips and chains in his luggage, and although this robbed him of objectivity, who cared when they could vicariously feast on the exciting eye-witness accounts he brought back?

It was a Haitian farmer, Polynice, who was Seabrook’s passport into the chilling territory of Caribbean ‘voudoun’. Through him, the writer understood how the economic culture of slavery first of all created the melting-pot from which voodoo and its belief system emerged.  Thousands of captured slaves had been imported from Africa to the West Indies to work the enormous French-governed plantations trading in sugar, coffee and cotton since the 17^th century. Indeed, by the time of the French Revolution in 1789, Haiti (its name meaning ‘mountainous’ in the native Indian tongue) produced over half the world’s coffee and 40 percent of the sugar for Britain and France, which was the dominant European nation at that time). As their industrial need for cheap, illegally-exploited labour grew, the French shipped in thousands more slaves from West Africa. Gradually, the religions of the native Indians, the white slave traders and the various African cultures began to merge into a complicated belief system taking elements of African faiths and Roman Catholicism. This was the basis of Voodoo.

By 1804, Haiti’s black population had managed to free itself from slavery for good via revolutions led by Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines, even repelling a 40,000 strong French force led by Napoleon – to finally declare itself free with an Act of Independence. However, the freedom-fighting left a devastated country that had no infrastructure or experience in self-rule. Into the early twentieth century the country was continually besieged, particularly by repeated interventions from America, keen to maintain control of the Panama Canal. By the time of Seabrook’s fact-finding mission, Haiti had been an unwilling victim of American military and cultural occupation since 1915.

Under its new masters, the Haitian religion of Voodoo was prohibited, forcing it underground. Practitioners were forced to worship within the privacy of mainstream Roman Catholic churches - a co-existence that did not trouble them, but was not mutually-supported by Catholics. In spite of, and maybe because of, such opposition, Voodoo established a growing following among the powerless, inhumanely-treated people in Haitian society.

In Jaime Russell’s comprehensive guide to zombie film history, Book of the Dead, he zeroes in on a vital aspect of Voodoo, that of bodily possession by the gods:

“A person is comprised of two souls, the gros-bon-ange (literally ‘the big good angel’) and the ti-bon-ange (the little good angel). The first of these is an individual’s life force, the second is everything that defines them as them. For a god to take possession of a worshipper, the second of these two souls has to be cast out of the body. The spirit of the god then takes over the empty shell of flesh. Later, when the god departs, the ti-bon-ange returns to the body. In voodoo, much as in Christianity, the soul and the body are considered separate entities…”

This is crucial in understanding the vulnerability of the voodoo worshipper to perceived hijacking of their disembodied soul as a zombie by agents of evil beyond the safety of their rituals:

“According to zombie legend, such necromancy usually occurred after the sorcerer brought about the victim’s “death” through a combination of magic and potions… the sorcerer captured their essential soul and, on the eve of the burial, opened up their grave and removed the body…then bring(s) this corpse back to “life” as an obedient, mindless slave that could be put to work on some distant part of the island…”

To Haitians, the threat of zombification of their dead relatives was no mere superstition. They took it so seriously that they would take elaborate precautions to prevent it happening in the afterlife. A wealthy family could afford the security of a private tomb to prevent access. Poorer families might bury their loved one under heavy stonework or at a busy cross-roads (referenced in White Zombie), or even station a family member to watch over the graveside till the body had time to decompose. A more extreme measure was to poison the body or shoot it so it would be of no use to evil sorcerers.

In a culture so barbarically treated by self-imposed overlords, the Haitians feared the prospect of becoming a zombie far more than being the victim of one. Death was at least regarded as a heavenly escape from the earth-bound misery of subjugation, so everything humanly possible was done to avoid their monstrous servitude being carried over for eternity into the afterlife.

After Polynice told Seabrook his account of seeing an army of undead employed by an unscrupulous farmer during the bumper sugar crop of 1918, he took the writer two hours’ ride away to allegedly witness slave zombies himself working in the sugar cane fields. True to his creed of reporting only personal experience, Seabrook got up close and personal: “There was something about them unnatural and strange. They were plodding like brutes, like automatons…The eyes were the worst…in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind but staring, unfocused, unseeing...”

To an audience back home, reading such lurid accounts of far-off events not only gave them a vicarious thrill but Seabrook’s journals were a justification for America’s foreign domination of the territory under the guise of civilising what was seen as a savage land. With this ghoulish interest in mind, the eventual co-opting of the material by Hollywood studios was inevitable, but like Dracula and Frankenstein before it, voodoo mythology was first presented as American entertainment in the theatre. In February 1932, producer and writer Kenneth Webb mounted the play Zombie in New York. It was a cheapjack three-act piece that avoided any of the costly copyright issues that came with translating the previous two horror juggernauts. The play was crude, racist and exploitative, narrowing not only its budget but its focus to one room in a Haitian bungalow, wherein the husband half of a plantation-owning couple dies and then is revived as a zombie by one of the senior native staff to fulfil his plan for estate control. The wife solves the mystery with the aid of two American friends, while the rich history of Haiti is reduced to two black-faced white actors (later replaced with Haitians to garner publicity goodwill) and a staged walking-dead attack.

Reading the plot, Zombie suggests a poor attempt at a single-set, Agatha Christie whodunnit with voodoo elements tacked on. Unsurprisingly it failed in the theatre, but the possibilities for the basic ingredients were not lost on brothers Victor and Edward Halperin (director and producer respectively). They believed that in more talented hands, a voodoo-related story could capitalise on the new wave of cinema horror and set about proving this, much to Webb’s initial excitement and then despair when he realised that they had no need of clearing any rights or recompense for him. (Webb naively thought that somehow he had a claim on anyone using voodoo and its living dead concepts in their story). The Halperins’ commissioned film script wasn’t based on his material, so his law suit was groundless.

The brothers Halperin were taking a mighty gamble with their proposed ‘zombie movie’ as they did not have a major studio to bankroll them. The only form of insurance they could take out was to head-line the film with a recognised star, and this they did by asking Bela Lugosi. He jumped at the chance of the lead role of the suave, mesmeric Murder Legendre soon after finishing the film of Dracula. This was largely due to his dire need to generate income since his contract for the aforementioned smash hit only paid him $500 a week – he’d been low-balled by Universal all too easily when they saw how desperately he wanted to transfer his stage success in the part to the film version. Also, his high-handedness in turning down the role of the Frankenstein monster placed him in temporary disfavour with them, increasing his concerns about where else he could gain employment. This poor bargaining position in the Halperins’ favour attached him to their movie, White Zombie, for $800 a week over just 11 days. Sadly, this repeat of his Dracula exploitation went further when the film turned a $62,500 budget into a surprising $8m box-office take, probably indicative of the public’s burgeoning taste for horror chills.

White Zombie is essentially a love-triangle co-opting voodoo practises and Lugosi’s now crystallised screen persona into a tale with only scant connection to the modern zombie film. A young American couple, Neil and Madeleine Parker - Madge Bellamy and John Harron - are reunited in Haiti and plan to wed. On their coach-drive to the home of plantation owner Charles Beaumont, played by Robert Frazer, they encounter bodies being buried at a crossroads. Their frightened black driver explains the lore we explored earlier about protecting the dead from after-life servitude. We are also introduced to Lugosi with two impactful close-ups of his fiercely staring eyes before he speaks, thus conveying his malevolent hypnotic influence. (At least in this film, charges of racist portrayals are mitigated by having the evil machinations perpetrated by the westerners rather than the ‘natives’).

Lugosi’s Legendre is a dark colleague of Beaumont, who it transpires has designs upon the lovely Madeleine and enlists his occult friend to poison her so that after the funeral he can revive her as a zombified life companion. This of course soon pales when he realises that he can have her pallid presence but never the soul and life she had when alive. After Neil is plagued by nightmares of his dead bride-to-be, he finds her tomb empty and teams up with missionary Dr Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn) who follows the clues to Legendre’s cliff-top castle. Madeleine is ordered by Legendre to kill Neil but Bruner prevents her. Neil and Bruner battle a motley crew of zombies Legendre has converted out of his sworn enemies - a witch doctor, a Captain of the Gendarmerie, A Minister of the Interior who resembles a Disney Pirate and an oddly grimacing High Executioner, before breaking the spell held over Madeleine by temporarily knocking out the voodoo maestro. The zombies are dispatched over the edge of the cliff, and the regretful Beaumont, who’d pleaded with Legendre to undo his handiwork, is poisoned into fellow undead slavery, but on being freed from his master joins him in a header over the cliff edge into oblivion. Madeleine is restored to life and the lovers are once again reunited.

In spite of its limitations that make the horror elements feel applied to the film rather than an organic part of the story, White Zombie is not without interest. An early scene showing Legendre’s sugar mill business populated by an army of zombie labourers is atmospheric and amplified by the harsh industrial sound effects of the machinery. Victor Halperin’s use of shadows has drawn comparison in later decades with the work of Val Lewton. Lugosi in the role of Legendre had by now already developed a Svengali showman ‘type’ that Hollywood had been recycling as an evil plot catalyst since The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. It is an easy gig for him as the evening-dressed, suave, glowering subjugator of impressionable minds he had already essayed in Dracula and also in 1932’s Murders in the Rue Morgue but it was work and arguably a recognisable niche for him, not yet an imprisonment as Count Dracula would later become. He gives this part a novel touch in the recurring hypnotic reinforcement gesture of touching the finger-tips of both hands together and then rolling the fingers around in a spiralling clasp – a move lovingly emulated by Martin Landau in his portrayal of Lugosi in Ed Wood.

Ultimately White Zombie is mostly of interest for what it heralds in zombie cinema rather than what it contains. Over the next decades the offspring of voodoo rites (and not forgetting bad science) would stir, shamble inexorably forward then break into hair-raising speed into the new millennium…