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For city-dwelling adults without kids, Halloween can be truly frightening. With the pressure on to outdo ones friends, frenemies and total strangers with a costume that strikes the perfect balance between creative, alluring and topical, the average October 31st night out can be a lot like sixth grade, except with the added toxic influence of alcohol and biological clocks. Plus, this year the streets are expected to be full of Sexy and/or Ironic and/or Demonic Sarah Palins. Scary! So why not stay home and watch movies instead? If you’re gonna convince anyone to abandon their plans and spend the night on your couch instead, you’ve got to have a theme and a plan, so we’ve put together an outline for a full night of films, all of which are available on DVD and/or online, based around one of the ultimate icons of classic horror: Frankenstein. We lay it all out after the jump.
7pm: Frankenstein (1910) Directed by J. Searle Dawley
My long-dormant interest in silent horror was revived recently by Picasso and Braque Go To The Movies, a great documentary that played at the Toronto and Hamptons Film Festivals which examines the influence of early cinema on early 20th century fine art. Inspired by excerpts seen in that doc, I went on the hunt for this silent short (it’s just under thirteen minutes in length), is the first known cinematic adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. Though the film was shot at Edison Studios and is often billed as a Thomas Edison production, Edison actually had nothing to do with it. Though this Frankenstein is hardly graphically violent, it was initially censored in Britain for essentially being too creepy; this is no doubt thanks to director Dawley’s incredible, pioneering special effects, which especially pop out in the making-of-the-monster sequence. Thought lost for decades, a print was discovered in the 70s. Still, prepare to begin your evening huddled around a computer screen: Frankenstein is not yet available on DVD, but you can watch it on the Internet Archive, on YouTube, or via Veoh above.
7:15: Bride of Frankenstein (1935) Directed by James Whale
The virtually undisputed masterpiece of the first golden age of filmed horror, James Whale’s sequel to his own 1931 Universal blockbuster opens with a prologue that could almost be characterized as meta. Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon) expresses mock disbelief that Mary Shelley’s “bland and lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein, a monster created out of cadavers out of rifled graves.” Elsa Lanchester, who will show up later as the Monster’s lightning-struck bride, here appears as Shelley, and she looks up from her embroidery and defends “her moral lesson [about] the punishment that befell a moral man that dared to emulate God.” The film then jumps to the wreckage of windmill fire where the first movie left off, from which point it picks up a subplot from the novel and twists it into unforgettably melancholy ends. Maybe I’ve just seen it too many times to be scared or to even really laugh at some of the more over-the-top performances; at this point, I find Bride to be unbearably sad. Especially in its second half, beginning with the fugitive monster’s encounter with the blind man who will teach him to speak and feel. And there’s one line that just breaks my heart, over and over again: the mad doctor Praetorius asks the Monster if he understands how he came to be. Boris Karloff’s face falls (as much as it can under all that make-up) as he nods and says, “Made from dead. I loved dead. Hate living.” Once he’s able to articulate his thoughts, it soon becomes apparent that the Monster was the smartest guy in the room all along.
8:30: Gods and Monsters
A bit of a palette cleanser between the two out-and-out horror films on our list. Bill Condon won an Oscar for his exploration of the later years of director Whale, which contains footage from and flashbacks to the making of Bride of Frankenstein. The film is definitely fictionalized — Condon based his script on a novel, and Brendan Fraser’s character Clay the gardener was a fabrication — but a basic biopic was not on the agenda. As a work that draws connections between Whale’s homosexuality and his masterwork about a misunderstood other, Gods and Monsters could be filed alongside the work of Todd Haynes, as a kind of activist academia wrapped up in narrative film.
10:15: Flesh for Frankenstein
The Paul Morrissey-directed, Andy Warhol-produced takeoff on the classic tale of reanimation could be called Frankenstein, Italian Style. Initially planned as a 3D release (!) Flesh brings the Frankenstein story back to the playfully grotesque, surreal beauty evident in the silent version, but super-gory and explicitly sexual to the point of camp, it was also very much of the zeitgeist. Co-written by Tonino Guerra, who scripted Amarcord as well as many of Antonioni’s films of the 60s, and clearly influenced by the Giallo horrors blossoming under the direction of Dario Argento and Mario Bava.
11:50: Young Frankenstein
Mel Brooks’ satire spoofs all three Frankenstein films of the 1930s, and it, along with the brief clip of Colin Clive at the beginning of Oingo Boingo’s video for Weird Science, landed in my consciousness at a much earlier age than any of the original films it pulls from. I don’t find myself laughing as hard as I did at age 13, but I would be remiss not to list it here. Plus, much, much later in my cinematic development, I learned that the Puttin’ on The Ritz bit, the famous dance number with Peter Boyle which the NY Observer recently cited as the backdrop for the “funniest joke in the history of film,” was a loose take-off on the recital played by Boris Karloff’s piano virtuoso zombie in my favorite horror film of the 30s, The Walking Dead (which is unfortunately not on DVD; otherwise, it would surely have made this list.)
1:35: Targets
To put it in the crassest terms possible, by the time Peter Bogdanovich’s Roger Corman-produced directorial debut came around, thirty years away from his career peak, Karloff was so far removed from young Frankenstein that he might have been walking dead. 80 years old and rocking half a lung, with about a year left to his life, Karloff contractually owed Corman some screen time. In an effort to scrapt two barnacles simultaneously, the producer told whiz kid Bogdanovich that he could make any film he liked, so long as he used 20 minutes of new footage of Karloff, and 20 minute of recycled footage from the 1963 Corman pic The Terror, starring Karloff and Jack Nicholson. So Bogdanovich, with screenplay help from Sam Fuller, crafted a story that would have Karloff essentially playing a version of himself, an aging horror star who makes one final public appearance at a drive-in for a special screening of one of his films. Karloff wasn’t up to a starring role (he allegedly sat in a wheelchair breathing through an oxygen mask between takes), so this became the b-plot to the suburban killing spree of an enrared Vietnam veteran, who comes face-to-face with Karloff in the film’s climax. For all of the extenuating circumstances, Karloff’s performance in Targets is masterful, embodying the last vestige of horror as myth in conflict with horror as reality.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth