A look at the development of the horror genre
Wartime horror movies were purely an American product. Banned in Britain, with film production curbed throughout the theatre of war in Europe, horror movies were cranked out by Hollywood solely to amuse the domestic audience. The studios stuck with tried and tested ideas, wary of taking risks that might suggest they had no measure of the zeitgeist, and trotted out a series of variations on a theme. This was not an age of innovation, but horror movie memes were, nonetheless, evolving.
If the horror movies of the 1930s had dealt in well-established fictional monsters, looking back towards the nineteenth century for inspiration, the 1940s reflected the internalisation of the horror market. The Americans looked at themselves as “safe”, whereas everything else, particularly anything hailing from that frightening, chaotic, unreasonable and uncontrolled place known as Europe was dangerous. Yet, try as they might, the Americans could not keep themselves separate and pure, their basic European roots kept peeking through, their links with the lands of their ancestors eventually pulling them into World War Two. In the same way, many horror films of this period deal with roots peeking through – in the form of men or women who were subject to the emergence of a primal animal identity. It's interesting to see this device in Disney's Pinocchio (1940) as the bad boys are turned into donkeys. What does it all mean...?
It wasn't donkeys but wolves who posed the main global threat at the outset of the 1940s. Hitler himself strongly identified with the iconography and legends of the wolf. The name 'Adolf' means "noble wolf" in Old German. He used "Herr Wolf" as a pseudonym early in his political career. Various Nazi party HQ were named for wolves - Wolfsschulcht (Wolf's Gulch) in France, Werwolf (Manwolf) in the Ukraine and Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) in East Prussia. The SS were "my pack of wolves", he made his sister change her name to 'Paula Wolf' and his favourite secretary was one Johanna Wolf (he referred to her as 'Wölfin' (she-wolf).
“One of his favourite tunes came from a Walt Disney movie. Often and absent-mindedly he whistled "Who's Afraid of The big Bad Wolf?" —an animal, it will be recalled, who wanted to eat people up and blow their houses down." —p27 The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler Robert G.L. Waite (Da Capo Press 1993)
The imagery he used caught on in not-so-flattering ways. Propagandists of the period habitually depicted him as the Big Bad Wolf of fairy tales, as demonstrated by this 1942 cartoon entitled Blitz Wolf (Check out the other WW2 propaganda cartoons posted by this user). It seemed the marauding wolf typified the predators lurking in the corners of public consciousness.
So it seemed a natural step for Universal to follow up their minor 1935 hit, The Werewolf of London. Although there is a well established werewolf mythology extending back to the ancient world, there was no single established story (as with Dracula and the vampire myth) ripe for easy adaptation. It fell to screenwriter Curt Siodmak (who had fled the Nazi wolves himself in 1937) to pen a story to fit the title Universal had been knocking around for a while. The Wolf Man (1941) is a mishmash of several wolf legends, with added ingredients. Siodmak stirs pentagrams, gypsies, silver bullets and the full moon together to create a robust myth. It owes little to established European traditions, but established a new set of cinematic rules which Hollywood lycanthropes would adhere to for decades. Set in a contemporary Wales (where no one has ever heard of the war), the story follows Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr) who returns to his ancestral home from America, only to become infected by a bite from a gypsy named Bela (Lugosi). With a starry cast including Claude Raines, and spectacular makeup and special effects, the picture was a big hit.
Never one to miss a trick, Universal followed this up with Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man in 1943. This sees a revived Wolfman (he was shot in the end of the first film) seeking the help of Dr Frankenstein to cure his lycanthropy. The good doctor has passed on, but Talbot instead runs into the frozen Monster (played this time, rather confusingly, by Bela Lugosi. It's even more confusing when you remember that Lon Chaney Jr played the monster in Ghost of Frankenstein 1942). There's a battle to the death between the Monster & the Wolfman – all good clean fun. It was a hit, and Universal really milked the sacred cow dry with House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945).
House of Frankenstein spins the casting merry-go-round another couple of turns with Boris Karloff playing a mad scientist vowing to emulate Dr Frankenstein, cure Larry Talbot and reactivate the monster. He murders a carnival freak-show host, and then uses one of his horrors (Count Dracula) to try and murder his enemies – unfortunately Drac is zapped by the first rays of the sun. yes, they all die at the end, only to be revived for House of Dracula, which involves the Count and the Wolfman desiring to be cured of their foibles. They go & ask a kindly mad scientist, who inadvertently revives the Monster to complete the unholy triumvirate. They all die in the end, apart from the Wolfman, who, apparently cured, rides off into the sunset. The increasingly desperate (and ridiculous) combinations of monsters effectively killed this phase of the horror film. From lovingly-crafted masterpieces like Bride of Frankenstein”, the genre had totally devoured itself within a decade. It was only left to Abbott & Costello, in their series of horror parodies (Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) etc) to hammer the final nails into the coffin. The Universal Monsters (Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, The Monster) who had cast such terrifying shadows on their debut, would never be frightening again.
While Universal was sliding further and further towards the bottom of the barrel, over at RKO, they were trying something new. Producer Val Lewton formed a "horror unit" that turned out a series of successful entries to the genre between 1942 and 1946. Lewton was a novelist and former story editor for David O. Selznick , and he eschewed "those mask-like faces, hardly human, with gnashing teeth and hair standing on end" of the Universal monsters in favour of suggestive shadows. He drew on literary source material, for a series of tight (under 75 minutes), low budget (less than $150,000) features starring former A-list players that were instant hits, and still chill today. Cat People (1942)
Cat People follows the story of Irena, a young woman who carries with her the belief that she is cursed, and will turn into a large, dangerous cat if she consummates her marriage. A mainly psychological thriller, much is made of what lurks in the shadows (particularly in the famous swimming pool scene), and the audience is left to make up their own mind (unlike in the 1982 remake). It was a great success, earning $4M (off a $134k original budget) and was followed by The Curse of the Cat People in 1944. I Walked With a Zombie(1943) is often referred to as the "Voodoo Jane Eyre", as it mines Bronte's story for inspiration (Lewton had worked with Selznick 1944 version starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine). A naive young nurse new to the West Indies finds herself looking after a plantation owner's wife who may (or may not) be the subject of a curse. The Body Snatcher (1945), a non-Universal pairing of Karloff & Lugosi was billed as “The Screen's Last Word in Shock Sensation - the Hero of Horror joins forces with The Master of Menace”, it is in fact a measured exercise in psychological horror where the monsters are humans who have lost their moral compass. A truly amazing box set of Val Lewton movies on DVD is now available —The Val Lewton Horror Collection (Cat People / The Curse of the Cat People / I Walked with a Zombie / The Body Snatcher / Isle of the Dead / Bedlam / The Leopard Man / The Ghost Ship / The Seventh Victim / Shadows in the Dark).
The RKO movies pointed in the right direction, and have much in common with some of the horror thrillers of the 1990s. But it is the bloated, creaking, and well-flogged corpse of the Universal monster pictures that truly represents the ending of this first horror movie cycle. However, as any student of the supernatural will tell you, if a thing looks dead, that's the time to be most afraid, as you never know what might come shooting out from beneath the tombstone....