Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

Conversely, here I think we do have a sequel that beats the original. Not to say that this is a great film, necessarily, but it struck me tonight as being better than I recalled the last time I watched it… It’s rather plainly made, to be sure, having been a victim of Universal imploding in the mid-30s; with the studio spending rather above its means, the initially high budget got slashed and the A-list cast went with it, and once uncle Carl had the studio removed from his control the whole horror genre at Universal got slashed too for a while under the new ownership. Still, though it’s basically a B picture, efficiently if much less personally made than Whale’s films, it’s quite good entertainment, and the plot’s attempt to make the vampire sympathetic (a victim of Dracula trying to free herself from his curse) is interesting, to say nothing of the lesbian, or at least bisexual, overtones, which were more than tacitly acknowledged in the studio’s advertising. Like Dracula, we may wonder what might’ve been had original plans come to fruition (I only discovered tonight that James Whale was originally slated to direct it), but what we have is still worth watching.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

I don’t know, I’m still not convinced by the claims that this is better than the original Frankenstein, let alone the greatest horror film ever made. I used to think that if you ran the two films together you’d get a pretty fair approximation of the whole plot of the novel (albeit with some great differences even so), but with a few more years’ experience I can tell how daft I was back then. They’re two markedly different films, and perhaps that’s part of the problem I have with Bride; the first film is such an essentially serious, sombre affair that I find it kind of difficult to reconcile the more ironic/comic aspects of the sequel with it… and, for that matter, I still find the intensity of Karloff’s rampage in the middle of the film (which was toned down considerably from the pre-release cut) a bit ill-fitting with the likes of Una O’Connor’s snarky old housemaid and Ernest Thesiger’s people in bottles. It struck me watching it again this evening that I’d likely have far fewer problems with it were it a film in its own right rather than a sequel to something else. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly good example of 1930s genre filmmaking and Karloff is terrific again (though I do think he was wrong to oppose the creature learning to speak). I just don’t entirely buy the hype.

Frankenstein (1931)

Like Dracula, Universal’s Frankenstein hailed less from the original novel than it did the stage version from Hamilton Deane and other hands, and like Dracula it has a few noticeable plot holes and other problems. But damn me if it isn’t a much better film, as I suspect it always has been; it seems to have a lot fewer problems overcoming the obviousness of its theatrical origins, and it’s vastly less timid about its material (brains in jars, dwarfs hanging, children drowning, none of this off-camera anticlimax shite). Also, director James Whale was clearly muchmore in tune with the story he was filming than Tod Browning and/or Karl Freund was/were on Dracula; there’s a much stronger feeling of the people responsible for the film actually caring about it. If original director Robert Florey really did have the original idea to go for an expressionist style, Whale went with it brilliantly, and I think we should be thankful that Bela Lugosi was passed over for the creature’s role… Karloff now just seems so eminently right just as Lugosi was right for Dracula, it’s hard to imagine the film having worked so well any other way. I’ll take this over a hundred other more prestigious and “respectable” Hollywood films of that decade any time…

Dracula (1931)

Unfortunately it really doesn’t improve much with age however many times I watch it and hope I’ll like it better than I did the last time; as the man says, historical importance is no necessary guarantee of quality. This Dracula is, nonetheless, of vast importance; for the first time American cinema took on a supernatural theme and took it seriously rather than just writing off the monstrous goings-on as a perfectly human hoax, and though it’s hardly the first horror film as such it arguably did open the genre floodgates for good thereafter in a way that none of its predecessors did. Apart from that, however, it’s hard not to view it through the filter of its various problems, most notably the way in which it starts brilliantly and then rapidly goes downhill… Apparently the book was considered for adaptation many years earlier, but was deemed too problematic (on censorship grounds) and too expensive, so the stage play (a couple of bastardised generations removed from Stoker’s original) was deemed an acceptable alternative. The end result is that the film can’t escape its theatrical origins (is that why the Transylvania scenes work, cos apparently they weren’t in the play?), nor the apparent lack of enthusiasm of its makers; Wiki suggests Tod Browning was somewhat despondent at the recent loss of his old mate Lon Chaney (the original contender for the lead role) and so was content to let cinematographer Karl Freund handle most of the directing duties, as has long been suggested by its nominal “hero”, David Manners, who was no fan of the material either. Just as well Bela Lugosi, in the role that made him famous and typecast, gave it his all even if some others couldn’t be bothered; like Max Schreck in Nosferatu, he’s pretty much the prime reason for still watching the film other than for the historical considerations. It’s a stiff like many of its contemporaries, but it should still be seen.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Going back over the blog and adding categories, I discovered I’ve covered hardly any horror films (five posts so far, and the last three just in the last week). This is something that must be rectified, so I decided it was time to dust Dawn of the Dead off; also, it was uncle George’s 70th birthday on the 4th, so how better to mark the occasion (if slightly late)? It only occurred to me while watching it tonight that you can also view it as a kind of war film; if, as someone says during the film, it’s a war between the living and the dead, then our heroes could be considered an invading army occupying the land held by the dead, until another invading army in turn displaces them. Try transplanting it to Iraq or something. I daresay this is hardly an original critical insight, none of mine ever seem to prove original, but there you go anyway. In any case, it really is one of the titanic achievements of the horror genre and of American indie cinema generally; I don’t know where Romero’s gifts went on Diary of the Dead, but they were in full evidence back in 1978, creating one of a handfulof horror films that justifies being more than 90-100 minutes long (as a general rule I believe horror films—more so than most movies—work best at shorter lengths so that they don’t dissipate; this is one of the few exceptions) and inadvertently pioneering a thousand cheesy synth scores for the next decade along the way…