Monster Mash

A little reflection on The Universal Monsters.

And so we’ve come to the end. The Halloween season wraps (get it? Like The Mummy?) today, as does the Spooky Season Spooktacular: Universal Monsters. It’s been a wild and busy ride, and I’d like to use this post to sort of make it all connect somehow, the monsters and the posts and the horror.

I wrote about the monsters I chose in chronological order of movie release date, as a way to sort of see the progression of the franchise as the posts went on. Dracula, of course, came first, followed by Frankenstein, then The Mummy, and, finally, The Wolf Man. Now, these are not all of the Universal Monsters movies, as you all know, but I have not seen the others and don’t know where to, so those are the ones you get.

Dracula, and by extension the Universal Monsters, started as a chance Universal didn’t want to take. The general public wasn’t to keen on monster movies anymore, not like they had been during and right after World War 1. A new monster movie could lose Universal a lot of money, and ruin its reputation as a presentable film studio. But Tod Browning made his case and made it well, and so Dracula was born, and Bela Lugosi cast.

Because of the initial success of Dracula, Universal went on to make more monster movies, and cast more people as their monsters. Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney Jr. are the monsters that were written about in this series of posts (Karloff played The Mummy as well as Frankenstein). Just like today, they were all famous for their monsters, Lugosi and Karloff specifically. Dracula and Frankenstein were subjected to countless photoshoots and double features together, which was unfortunate for them because they hated each other. But, be that as it may, those actors made those monsters famous - and the other way around - in a way that dramatically changed the state of pop culture forever.

Now, this is where I’m going to ask the question I do with a lot of classic horror. I asked it about Friday The 13th, and I’m going to ask it again: Did they know? As Universal was making these movies did they know that Dracula would forever after look and talk like Bela Lugosi in almost everything he was in? Did they know that Frankenstein would always be green and stitched together with bolts in his neck, grunting and groaning his way through life because of Boris Karloff? Did they know that werewolves and werewolf legends would forever, whether conciously or not, look to The Wolf Man for guidance? Did they know, for that matter, that any of these movies would be that long-lasting? That almost a hundred years later, people would still be watching those original movies and loving those monsters, with movies like Lisa Frankenstein, Ginger Snaps and Bubba Ho-Tep, and full-blown pop culture phenomena like Dracula Daily? I don’t know. I don’t know whether they kept the franchise going just to make money, or if they had the sense that this would be the thing to last.

But I do know that the Universal Monsters lasted, and that’s a beautiful thing. From using the act of bringing something old and damaged back to life as a way to heal yourself, to using werewolf transformation as a metaphor for the ostracization that young women go through during puberty, even to using mummies as a way to represent the disrespect shown to the dead and the dying, the Universal Monsters are still thriving today. Monsters are vital to pop culture, and the Universal Monsters are at the root of making sure they stay there.

So here’s to you, Universal Monsters. I’m glad you’ve stayed.