Thread by @john_murdy

Been thinking about how to approach Universal Monsters to close out 2018 and decided to dedicate the rest of this week to it. This maze was extremely personal to me so to provide context I’m going to post part 1 of an essay I wrote on The Monsters earlier this year...

The name of the essay is “The Protector of Monsters” and it’s about my lifelong obsession with The Monsters, how I view the films, etc. I pulled together a bunch of pics from my collection to help illustrate it. Thought this would be a good way to kick off the subject...

I first saw Frankenstein on TV when I was 4 years old. At the conclusion of the movie my mother found me crying and thought “Oh God! I’ve traumatized my son.” But after talking with me, she soon learned that I was not afraid of The Monster…I just felt so damn sorry for him...

What she didn’t realize was that even at the age of four, I understood that Frankenstein wasn’t the monster in James Whale’s film…it was the people who were the real monsters. Those nasty villagers armed with torches and pitchforks that set fire to the windmill.

To me, even as a little kid, the Universal Classic Monsters weren’t really Horror movies, they were Shakespearean tragedies filled with stories of unrequited love, self-destructive ambition and inescapable fate.

Frankenstein is the perfect example of this. The Monster didn’t ask to be created. He was the end product the extreme hubris and unbridled ambition of Dr. Henry Frankenstein....

The Monster’s body is a literal patchwork of society’s failures, crudely stitched together from the corpses of executed criminals robbed from graves. Even his “abnormal” brain is a mistake, a panicked substitute when the hunchback Fritz accidentally destroys the “normal” one

Violently jolted to life with a blast of electricity, The Monster is thrown into the world with no ability to cope with it. All throughout the many films, he is looking for one thing…a friend and everywhere he goes he is met with hatred and hostility.

Perhaps the most horrifying & saddest scene in the original film is when he encounters the little girl Maria playing in the forest. Being a child, Maria is the only one not afraid of the Monster and invites him to play with her. For a fleeting moment, The Monster is happy…

And then Maria runs out of flowers…Thinking this is part of the game, The Monster tosses Maria into the lake and she drowns. The Monster runs off…not fully comprehending his actions. A few scenes later the girl’s grieving father carries her lifeless body through the village.

To me, this scene is more tragic than Ophelia’s death in Hamlet or the dual suicides in Romeo and Juliet. This is the murder, albeit accidental, of a child. Pretty strong stuff for a horror movie from the 1930’s.

If you look closer, there is always something deeply tragic going on under the surface of these “Monster Movies.” And as I grew older, I realized that many of the lives of these filmmakers and stars were equally as tragic as the characters they portrayed or helped to create.

Lon Chaney Sr, the “Man of a Thousand Faces” who stared in the silent classics “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “The Phantom of the Opera” truly suffered for his art with the often painful make up effects he created for his deformed and disfigured characters.

Both his parents were deaf (which explains his amazing pantomime skills as a silent film actor) and his first wife famously tried to commit suicide in public. A notoriously private person, Chaney died of a throat hemorrhage in 1930 at the age of 47.

According to his will, Chaney was buried in an unmarked crypt at Forrest Lawn, intentionally anonymous in life & death. His last great silent role as the vampire in “London After Midnight” was lost in a fire…never to be seen by the audiences that would have appreciated it most.

Lon Chaney’s son Creighton (known professionally as Lon Chaney Jr.) spent the first ten years of his life totally neglected, bouncing between various homes and boarding schools due to his parent’s unstable relationship and uncertain careers.

Always in his famous father’s shadow, he finally broke through with his heartbreaking performance as Lennie in “Of Mice and Men” which lead to his most famous role in “The Wolf Man.”

Unfortunately, that film typecast Chaney forever and he spent the rest of his career consigned to playing a bevy of monsters in increasingly shlocky films or questionable roles in westerns.

One of the saddest stories about Chaney is his friendship with a dog named “Moose” who played the wolf that bit him in “The Wolf Man.” Chaney was so enamored with the dog, he purchased him from the man who owned him and from that point forward he was his constant companion.

Sadly, Moose died when he was run over by a truck on the Universal lot during the making of “Cobra Woman.” The only actor to play Frankenstein’s Monster, The Mummy, The Wolf Man and Count Dracula (or at least his son), Chaney died in 1973 from a heart attack.

Bela Lugosi was a classical actor in his home country of Hungary (he even played Jesus Christ) and a wounded veteran of World War 1 before coming to America. His big break was the stage role of Count Dracula, which he also played in the Universal film that made him a star.

Fearful that Dracula would typecast him, Lugosi famously turned down the role of The Monster in Frankenstein complaining that it had no lines. This decision damned Lugosi to constantly playing second fiddle to the actor who took the role…Boris Karloff.

Later in life, Lugosi became addicted to opiates and was the first star to go public with his problem. He spent his final years acting in Ed Wood’s notoriously bad films like “Plan 9 From Outer Space” which was completed after his death. He was buried in one of his Dracula capes.

Other actors and filmmakers associated with these films had similarly sad fates. Dwight Frye, the character actor who played both Renfield in Dracula and the hunchback Fritz/Karl in The Frankenstein films had a fatal heart attack on a bus in Hollywood at the age of 44.

Make up legend Jack Pierce, who had created the iconic look of Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Wolf Man didn’t adapt with changing times/materials and was unceremoniously let go in 1946. He ended his career working on the talking horse TV show “Mr.Ed.”