The Halloween Horror Month: Volume VI
By Darren Williams
24th November
"I like the dark. It's friendly."
- Irena Dubrovna - Cat People
The 1940s
The 1940s saw a downturn in the fortunes of horror cinema. While there are still classics coming through this decade, they're noticeably less than in the 30s, and Universal appeared to be content to turn their monsters into jokes through comedy pairings and pointless sequels like The Invisible Man Returns and The Mummy's Hand. The war was one of the main reasons for the downturn, with the adult occupied with war, the films were aimed at a more juvenile audience. In Britain there was even a virtual ban on horror. There also seemed an endless stream of bargain basement filler material from The Ape to The Mad Monster.
Universal did produce The Wolf Man, a decent film whose reputation is far superior than the actual qualities of the film itself. Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr) returns to his birthplace in Wales but finds himself bitten by a wolf. When there is a murder in the village, Talbot begins to believe he's become a werewolf. Siodmak's script is rather remarkable when you think about the mythology it created, everything you think you know about werewolves comes from this film. The film's biggest flaw is the lead. Chaney Jr. was a decent actor and managed to bring sympathy to the role, but he didn't possess the genius of his late father. Chaney would be cast in various other Universal horrors but he would be denied the part his father made famous when they remade The Phantom of the Opera.
Otherwise Universal seemed content to trade on past glories. Just two years after The Wolf Man made his debut they were already teaming him up with Frankenstein's Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. Frankie was already on a downward spiral after the abysmal, The Ghost of Frankenstein, in 42 and Universal seemed intent on finally killing off its creation. The death knell would finally sound in 48, when he, Dracula and the Wolfman all teamed up with Abbott & Costello in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. It's an entertaining enough film, but the characters would never be taken seriously again. And A & C would milk this idea for all it was worth, meeting a whole host of monsters with the inevitable diminishing appeal. Son of Dracula was a better sequel from Universal, but that was largely thanks to the presence of Robert Siodmak. The studio that defined horror in the 30s was crumbling, luckily there was another studio ready to take its place.
The undoubted highlight of the decade was the series of horrors Val Lewton produced for RKO. The cycle started in 1942 with Cat People. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, the film was obviously inspired by the success of The Wolf Man, but it has a subtlety and depth that film could only dream of. Oliver and Irena meet and marry, but Irena has a fear that if her passions are aroused then she will turn into a cat. Despite the silliness of the premise, it's one of the most haunting and truly adult horror films ever created. The RKO horror cycle was created to ape the success of Universal and raise money for RKO, Lewton opted for a less is more approach that proved popular with audiences around the world, with Cat People becoming a huge box office hit. Some of the film may feel a little cliched to a modern audience, but Cat People was the film that invented many of those ideas. It was a truly innovative film and one of the greatest horror films of all time.
The following year Lewton and Tourneur would team up again for I Walked with a Zombie. A loose adaptation of Jane Eyre, Zombie takes the Rochester segment and transports it to a plantation in the West Indies. Betsy is hired to care for Jessica Holland, the wife of Paul Holland, owner of a sugar plantation on an island in the Caribbean populated by the descendants of African slaves. The small white community all occupy positions of power, the black community practice voodoo and have a strong belief in zombies. Jessica appears to have lost her will and is in a trance-like state that could be linked into the voodoo belief. I Walked With A Zombie is a master-class in creating scares and atmosphere through the power of sound and suggestion. It's one of the most unnerving yet elegant films in the genre. The same year also saw them take on The Leopard Man together. More of a mystery than an outright horror, it may be lesser in comparison to the classics that came before, but it's still a tense and accomplished film
The same year also saw Lewton team with Mark Robson on a pair of films, The Ghost Ship and The Seventh Victim. The Seventh Victim was the best. Mary (Kim Hunter) finds out that her boarding school tuition hasn't been paid in months and her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has disappeared. Mary leaves for New York to try and find her missing sister, encountering her secret husband (Hugh Beaumont), a mysterious psychiatrist, and a modern day Satanic cult along the way. Leaving pretty much everything to the imagination, The Seventh Victim is a film of ideas. It takes the cult seriously, grounding them in realistic rather than ritualistic behaviour. Greenwich Village is a desolate place filled with threats, shadows and bohemian poets. The Seventh Victim also shares the same air of dread and fatalism that you'll find in many noirs. In fact, it's one of the most doom laden films I've ever seen. It could be argued to have been far more influential than it's somewhat obscure standing would suggest. Both the setting and the themes seem tomake it an obvious influence on Rosemary's Baby, and it even includes a shower scene that appears to have influenced a certain Hitchcock movie. The world of The Seventh Victim is one where every action could have a sinister motive, where you can never really be certain what is reality and what is merely the delusions and paranoias of the characters. Even though The Seventh Victim was the classic of the pair, that's not to say The Ghost Ship wasn't a fine and atmospheric film. Although there are no ghosts, it's an intense little film that deserves to be more widely seen than it is. Robson and Lewton would go on to work together on two Boris Karloff films. Isle of the Dead was a feverish tale of a plague ridden island, inspired by the famous painting. Bedlam was set in the infamous Bethlehem asylum with Karloff as the cruel Master Sims, who plots to have a rival committed to his dubious care.
Lewton would also team up with Robert Wise on a number of occasions, including The Body Snatcher. A young med student takes the job as the assistant of a renowned doctor. But soon discovers he's using stolen bodies as teaching aids. Adapted from a R.L. Stevenson novel, The Body Snatcher features one of Boris Karloff's most sinister performances and was the second highest grossing hit for RKO. Better still was The Curse of the Cat People, a semi-sequel to Cat People focusing on the child of Kent Smith and Jane Randolph's characters, but feeling more like a sinister fairy tale than the original. It should have been played every day at Universal as a reminder how to make great sequels. While Jacques was making a name for himself with RKO, his father Maurice Tourneur, was directing The Devil's Hand. It's another fine reworking of Faust, this time a man gets a talisman that gives him all he desires, but as always, there's a price to pay when the Devil comes a-calling.
In addition to the RKO films, Karloff also found himself returning to the mad scientist role a number of times in the 40s. Before I Hang, with its death row doctor becoming a Jekyll and Hyde figure, was a decent film. Even better was The Devil Commands, aided in no small part by having Edward Dmytryk as director. Karloff's scientist who wants to contact his dead wife is one of his most sympathetic performances, despite the character's descent into evil. And in many ways he's finally getting to play Frankenstein himself, rather than the Monster here. Lugosi also appeared in at least one minor gem in the 40s, The Dark Eyes of London. Based on an Edgar Wallace story, it was an excellent outing for Lugosi and one of the last really good films he'd be involved with.
Laurel and Hardy come face to face with a murderer in "Saps at Sea"
It wasn't just Universal producing comedy-horrors, the trend continued in other places as well. The results were sometimes sublime, sometimes idiotic. The run of comedy horrors continued with Bob Hope picking up where he left off after The Cat and the Canary, despite a few dubious racial stereotypes, The Ghost Breakers is a far more enjoyable film. Mainly because it's not a remake of a superior film. Laurel & Hardy collided with a murderer in Saps at Sea. Will Hay took on The Ghost of St. Michaels and My Learned Friend, neither of which were as good as his 30s films, but still highly enjoyable. The film of Ghost Train is a staggering disappointment, largely thanks to Arthur Askey's annoying lead performance. The devil popped up in Hellzapoppin' and I Married a Witch was a charming comedy that managed to take in the witch-hunts and burning at the stake. Best of them all was Arsenic and Old Lace, a classic farce where Cary Grant's theatre critic discovers his beloved aunts have been poisoning men and burying them in the cellar.
Animation continued to take inspiration from horror. Disney seemed to get into the business of terrifying children as well. One of the segments of Fantasia was the 'Night on Bald Mountain' sequence, while it scared the life out of me as a child, it's less impressive as an adult. A Disney that still holds the same power is the Pleasure Island sequence of Pinocchio, maybe it's just the idea of children being punished for getting what they want. Better still was their take on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the superb short, Donald Duck and the Gorilla. Other animated heroes that took on horrific elements were Tom & Jerry in shorts like Fraidy Cat and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse. Chuck Jones gave us the likes of Hair-Raising Hare and Scaredy Cat, Apple Andy brought The Devil into the picture, and Tex Avery gave the world Who Killed Who?
The output from world cinema was still a trickle, The fascination for sequels eve affected horror outside America when China gave us Midnight Song 2. There were also absolutely astonishing films like Carne's The Devil's Envoys, Cocteau's fantasy masterpiece, La Belle et la Bete. Dreyer gave us a film to rival his 30s offering, Vampyr, with Day of Wrath. Set in a small Danish village in 1623, Day of Wrath is Dreyer's dark tale about the Danish church's persecution of women accused of witchcraft and the chilling lengths people would go to in order to incriminate others. There were a few other notable Spanish language films, including The Revolt of the Ghosts. The best offering from Spain was Edgar Neville's underseen masterpiece The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks. In 19th Century Madrid, a young man, Basilio, is aided at roulette by a ghostly one-eyed figure. He tells him he's the ghost of a famous archaeologist named Don Robinson de Mantua, that he was murdered and his death disguised as a suicide. His daughter is now investigating the death and he asks Basilio to protect her. Basilio also discovers that there's a subterranean city, built by Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, that's now inhabited by a sinister group of hunchbacks who indulge in crimes from smuggling to rape and murder. Haunting cinematography and wonderful art direction that give the whole film a nightmarish feel.
In Britain, Tod Slaughter continued his reign of terror with Crimes at the Dark House, a film that almost feels like a greatest hits compilation. There was an adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. It remains the best adaptation of Wilde's classic story, thanks in no small part to the casting of George Sanders, one of the men most obviously born to deliver Wildean lines.
Ealing Studio filmed The Halfway House in 1944, a decent tale about a group of travellers staying at an inn with a few spooky tendencies. Not really a full-out horror, it was a human drama with a ghost story wrapped around it to add an extra level. The year later the studio would go full-throttle when they made Dead of Night. Dead of Night could claim to be the greatest horror film ever made. It certainly contains one of the most frightening sections ever put on film. It's an anthology horror film with each section directed by a different one of Ealing's most famous directors. There's a wrap-around story of an architect being invited to a country house, he has dreamed of the house many times and he knows something bad will happen, when he tells the owners and their guests of his worries, their attempts to reassure him starts them a cycle of ghost stories that culminate in the nightmarish Dummy story with a career best performance from Michael Redgrave as a tormented ventriloquist.
British cinema produced a series of minor gems through the 40s. A Place of One's Own was a charming ghost story. Vernon Sewell created the classic Latin Quarter, and followed it up a few years later with his comedy-horror, The Ghosts of Berkeley Square. The Quota quickies produced some minor gems like House of Darkness and The Monkey's Paw. Some of the most British seeming films were actually American. Like The Uninvited. Filmed in America, but set in Britain, The Uninvited was one of the most intriguing ghost stories of the time. A brother and sister move to Cornwall but find the house haunted. In many ways it feels close to romantic melodrama, and the brother and sister feel more like a married couple. Despite some of the films more dated qualities, it works, in large part through Milland's performance.
Another filmed in America, but British in spirit film was when Rene Clair's took on And Then There Were None and created one of the best of the many adaptations of this proto-slasher. Literary adaptations were all the rage. Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Five Orange Pips' was adapted as The House of Fear, probably the best of the later Rathbone Holmes films. There were a couple of unfaithful Poe adaptations in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. Even Dylan Thomas got in on the act when he scripted The Three Weird Sisters.
Gaslight (1940) is one of many Patrick Hamilton adaptations of the decade.
There was a series of Patrick Hamilton adaptations throughout the 40s. In 1940, Thorold Dickinson directed Gaslight, a story of a high-strung woman being driven insane by her deceitful husband. There was a more famous adaptation four years later and Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for the lead role, while Charles Boyer was nominated as her husband and Angela Lansbury (giving the best performance of the lot) was up for supporting actress as the sinister maid. The remake may be more popular, but it's not 1/10 the film that Dickinson's was. The Hamilton adaptations stayed in America after that, Hangover Square came about in 45. Most famous as the film that killed Laird Cregar, it's a wonderfully dark mystery/horror about a composer who suffers murderous blackouts. Cregar should have won the Oscar and the film should be far more famous than it is. The most popular of the Hamilton adaptations remains Hitchcock's Rope. Based on a real-life murder-case, Rope is famous in some circles because Hitchcock filmed it to look like one unbroken take. The horror in the tale is based on the Nietzschean argument the killers put forward, that they were allowed to murder because of their intellectual superiority. Rope is one in a long line of borderline horror titles Hitchcock produced in the 40s, including Rebecca, Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt.
Dickinson would direct a second classic this decade, this one, an adaptation of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, would have a relatively higher profile than Gaslight, but it's still underseen. A Russian officer tries to learn the secret of an elderly countess's success at gambling. Anton Walbrook was one of the finest actors of the 40s and he turns in one of his best performances here as the Captain who finds himself trapped in the horrific world of Edith Evans Countess in this atmospheric tale of greed and how easily it can destroy.
William Dieterle bookended the decade with two masterful films. The first, The Devil and Daniel Webster, is often acclaimed as the Citizen Kane of gothic horror films. Yet another take on the Faust myth, a farmer sells his soul to Satan (a superb Walter Huston) for riches but when the devil comes to collect, he enlists a famous lawyer to defend him. In The Devil and Daniel Webster, Dieterle created one of the most beautiful films of its time. In 48 he'd created another. Portrait of Jennie is an intriguing mood piece about an artist inspired by the ghost of a young girl he meets. Like many of the supernatural offerings of the time, the focus was on romance, not scares, but it remains one of the most enchanting and atmospheric films you could hope to see.
There were unsung classics dotted throughout the decade. There was Flesh and Fantasy, Julien Duvivier's anthology of occult tales. Meshes of the Afternoon Maya Deren's nightmarish experimental short. Strangler of the Swamp gave us a truly spooky film about a haunted swamp. Then there was The Beast with Five Fingers, a stunning horror about the death of a crippled pianist. When greedy relations squabble over his will, the dead man's hand resurrects for vengeance. Peter Lorre gets to play mad in only the way he can as the disembodied hand crawls its way around the dead man's house in this wonderfully entertaining little film.
One of the most interesting events in 40s cinema was the popularity of film noir. A large number of the greatest film noirs of the period cross the line between horror and noir. Films like The Spiral Staircase, in particular can be seen as a forerunner of giallo, with its killer obsessed with ridding the world of 'imperfect' women. In addition to The Spiral Staircase you have other boundary-blurring offerings like Nightmare Alley, The Red House, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, The Window, Sorry, Wrong Number, Obsession, even the Faustian Alias Nick Beal cross the line between horror and noir. Edgar G. Ulmer created two of the finest with Bluebeard and his honestly frightening tale of fate's cruel tricks, Detour.
As ever, horror fiction continued to produce classics. There were short stories like John Collier's Evening Primrose and Special Delivery. Fritz Leiber gave us Smoke Ghost, The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, Spider Mansion and Conjure Wife. Unpublished Lovecraft's kept coming, such as Beyond the Wall of Sleep. Manly Wade Wellman wrote The Devil Is Not Mocked and Shonokin Town. Robert Bloch made his name with stories like Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper and The Opener of the Way. William Hope Hodgson wrote the horrific Carnacki story, The Hog. There was The Demon Lover from Elizabeth Bowen, Between Sunset and Moonrise by R.H. Malden, A Little Place off the Edgeware Road by Graham Green, Stanley Ellin's The Speciality of the House
Arkham House continued to publish ground-breaking work like the stories of Clark Ashton Smith, L.P. Hartley, West India Lights by Henry S. Whitehead, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard all had legendary collections published by Arkham. In 1947 they were to publish one of their most famous and influential collections, Ray Bradbury's Dark Carnival. Bradbury was propelled to stardom and in the 40s he wrote a staggering number of accepted classics, from The Crowd to The Scythe to The Coffin, The Emissary, Let's Play Poison, Skeleton and the grisly The October Game.
In addition to these you had Shirley Jackson horror of conformity and social obligation, The Lottery. Kenneth Patchen's truly insane, The Journal of Albion Moonlight. A.L. Rowse's West County Stories. Many of the best stories of Borges had a horrific flavour. Dennis Wheatly did his best work with The Haunting of Toby Jugg. Jack Williamson gave us Darker Than You Think. Nigel Kneale, who was to become one the genre's greatest and most influential writers, published Tomato Cain and Other Stories. Mervyn Peake wrote Titus Groan, the first of his Gormenghast trilogy. Orwell wrote the nightmarish 1984. One of the greatest of all was L.T.C. Rolt's Sleep No More: Railway, Canal and Other Stories of the Supernatural. Despite it being little read today, this creepy collection of tales of horror set around Wales and the West Country is one of the greatest collections of short stories by a single writer I've ever come across.
Radio horror came into its own during the 1940s. After the likes of Lights Out and The Witch's Tale had pioneered the way in the 30s Inner Sanctum, with its trademark creaking door, kicked off the 40s and following soon after were shows like Suspense, Escape and Quiet, Please. If you think these shows can't possibly be scary, maybe for many today you're right, but those who can listen to stories like The Thing on the Fourbleboard, Vincent Price's remarkable performance in Three Skeleton Key or Cary Grant giving one of his finest dramatic performances in On a Country Road without feeling a chill or two are pretty desensitised to proper horror storytelling.
And horror made the leap to a new medium when the popular Lights Out was given a television outing. While it can't be said to have been as popular as the radio series, it was to show the way for the likes of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and every other horror anthology series.
Much of the best horror of the 40s played on uncertainty and moral ambiguity. From Cat People through to the horror/noir hybrids, so much of what scared people in the 1940s was some unknown or imagined other. For a world that spent half the decade in a brutal war, it makes sense. Throughout the first half of the decade, nobody knew what kind of world they were entering, and there was obviously going to be uncertainty afterwards, combined with deep sorrow over all who gave their lives in so many battles. It's only fitting that for a decade that saw such turmoil, the only face you can put to horror is a question mark. But the 50s were coming, and they were bringing the atomic age, and a whole new set of fears, with them.
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