Universal Monsters #13: The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942, Erle C Kenton)

I’ve set myself the challenge of watching all 28 films from Universal Studios’ golden age of horror that feature Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

Bela Lugosi’s name was made playing Count Dracula, initially on stage for two years then in Universal’s movie adaptation in 1931. His interpretation – the halting Hungarian accent, the languid demeanour, the dinner suit and cape – became the definitive Dracula and raised the actor to the status of a horror star. But he didn’t play the part again on film for 17 years.

Instead, his 1930s and 40s were dominated by Gothic, spooky and scary characters in non-Dracula horror films, amongst them Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), White Zombie (1932), Island of Lost Souls (1932), Mark of the Vampire (1935), The Raven (1935) and The Dark Eyes of London (1939). He also cropped up a few times in the Universal Monsters series. In 1939, he played the grotesque henchman Ygor in Son of Frankenstein; in 1941, he cameoed as a gypsy with a secret in The Wolf Man. Despite Dracula being his most famous role, it’s in these other films where you best see Lugosi’s talent for injecting empathy and soul into macabre, off-kilter characters.

He was given perhaps the best opportunity to shine when Universal chose to focus on Ygor for their follow-up to Son of Frankenstein. Although created for Son of…, the sidekick was essentially the same character as the hunchbacked Fritz played by Dwight Frye in the studio’s first Frankenstein film. Fritz was not taken from Mary Shelley’s novel – he was added to the mythology for a 1823 stage adaptation – but this run of films cemented the idea of a deformed, uneducated yet loyal aide to a powerful villain. Throughout the 20th century and beyond, this trope-character has been used in myriad films and TV shows – House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), House of Wax (1953), Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966), Dracula vs Frankenstein (1971), Young Frankenstein (1974), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t (1979), The Munsters’ Revenge (1981), Count Duckula (1988-1993), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Van Helsing (2004), Igor (2008), Victor Frankenstein (2015) and countless more.

The Ghost of Frankenstein, which has precious little connection to Mary Shelley, begins with a prologue set soon after the previous film. Local villagers, fed up with the misery brought to the area by the Frankensteins, attempt to destroy the family castle. However, their actions accidentally resurrect the Creature, much to the delight of Ygor who has been keeping vigil over his friend’s resting place while playing a mournful tune on a horn. After being brought back to life, the Creature is initially weak, though thankfully he gets struck by lightning during a storm and this peps him up. ‘Your mother was the lightning,’ says Ygor, referring back to the character’s creation. ‘She has come down to you again.’

The pair resolve to seek out Baron Frankenstein’s second son and ask for help. Arriving in the town of Visaria, the Creature befriends a small girl – a deliberate nod to the first Frankenstein film‘s most infamous scene – but is arrested after killing a villager he thought was being antagonistic. Meanwhile, we meet Dr Ludwig Frankenstein (Cedric Hardwicke, The Invisible Man Returns) who has just carried out a revolutionary brain operation at his medical practice. He lives with his grown-up daughter, Elsa (The Wolf Man‘s Evelyn Ankers), while her beau is the local prosecutor, Erik (Ralph Bellamy, another The Wolf Man alumnus). After the Creature’s arrest, Erik asks Ludwig to assess the prisoner ahead of a trial. Oddly, they all just treat the Creature as if he were a madman; no one seems to notice he’s a stitched-together cadaver brought to life artificially. But then Ygor appears and blackmails Ludwig into helping him – the doctor doesn’t want the locals knowing about his family’s macabre history.

Elsa is also in the dark about the backstory – that is, until she finds the Frankenstein family papers. As she reads them and is aghast at the actions of her grandfather (Frankenstein and Bride of…) and uncle (Son of…), we’re treated to flashbacks from the earlier movies. Ludwig, meanwhile, is feeling the pressure. He wants the Creature euthanised, but his assistant Bohmer (Lionel Atwill, who had played a different role in Son of…) refuses to assist with the operation: ‘It’s murder!’ he cries. Ludwig therefore decides to go ahead alone. His conscience starts playing tricks on him now and he sees visions of his father’s ghost, who argues that the Creature’s criminal impulses could be cured… by swapping its brain with someone else’s! Cedric Hardwicke doubles up to play the spectral role, even though we’ve *just* seen original Henry actor Colin Clive in the flashbacks, and there is a clear echo of Hamlet here with the conflicted son given fatherly guidance from the afterlife. When the Creature realises what Ludwig has in store, he wants his brain replaced with the little girl’s. But Ygor and Bohmer overhear and conspire to swap it with Ygor’s instead…

After his trio of appearances as the Creature, Boris Karloff was unable to reprise the role this time (he was busy starring in Arsenic and Old Lace on Broadway). So in his place director Erle C Kenton cast the rising star of the Universal stable – the 6’2″ Lon Chaney Jr, fresh from his success in The Wolf Man. Sadly, rather than capture the inner sadness and sympathy that Karloff had found, Chaney gives a lumbering, vacant performance. Frankly, anyone could be behind the make-up. Elsewhere, Hardwicke, Bellamy and Ankers – the latter two playing similar characters as those in The Wolf Man – all fail to make an impression. In fact, almost the entire cast play their scenes in a blandly straight way. It’s melodrama without the heightened emotions, while Kenton directs as if he’s keen to get home that day. Bela Lugosi’s enjoyably theatrical performance is left to add the fun and ghoulishness.

Five secrets of life artificially created out of 10

Next: It’s war!

Alien: Isolation – The Digital Series (2019, Fabien Dubois)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

An entire multimedia franchise was spawned by Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Alien, encompassing movie sequels, comic books, novels, roleplaying and video games, crossover stories with the Predator series, and even theme-park attractions. The quality has varied as much as the competing claims of canonicity, but while most cinemagoers only know of the high-profile films released in 1979, 1986, 1992, 1997, 2004, 2007, 2012, 2017 and 2024, dedicated Alien fans have rarely been without new material to enjoy.

One such diversion was a digitally animated drama that dropped onto YouTube in 2019. Alien: Isolation is an adaptation of a successful 2014 computer game of the same name – and like the game, it focuses on a character with a special connection to the film series…

In the original Alien of 1979, there was never any mention that spaceship warrant officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) had a daughter waiting for her back home. The first sequel, Aliens, was similarly mute on Ripley’s family life. But when the latter movie was rereleased in expanded form on laserdisc in 1991, bonus scenes revealed that she was a mother.

We learn that her daughter, Amanda, had been a child when Ripley left Earth. However, after an attack by a murderous alien creature aboard her ship the Nostromo, Ripley then spent an unusually long time in a process called hypersleep. Fifty-seven years passed while she was in suspended animation, and company suit Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) now has to break the news that 66-year-old Amanda Ripley-McClaren (‘Married name, I guess’) recently died of cancer. It’s a devastating blow for Ripley, of course – after all, she’d promised to be back for Amanda’s 11th birthday. It was also, we may assume, an unnervingly meta moment for Sigourney Weaver, because the photograph used to illustrate the grown-up Amanda (below) is actually of Weaver’s actor mother Elizabeth Inglis.

Cutting this subplot out of the original version of Aliens in 1986 reportedly upset Weaver greatly – understandably so, as it robs Ripley’s subsequent relationship with a young girl called Newt of an added maternal subtext. But even though she only appears in a photograph, Amanda was later to have a life away from James Cameron’s action masterpiece – in what’s known as the ‘Alien expanded universe’. In 2014, she appeared as a playable character in the video game Alien: Isolation and also cropped up in novels and comic strips. Then, due to the critical success of Isolation, plans were made for an animated adaptation – seven 10-minute episodes, comprised of scripted scenes from the game plus newly created sequences to plug the narrative gaps.

The story begin 15 years after the events of the 1979 movie. With no word of the long-missing Ellen Ripley, her now-adult daughter Amanda (voiced by Andrea Deck) has lots of questions and plenty of abandonment issues (‘You can’t count on anyone’). So when the Nostromo’s flight recorder is salvaged from deep space, Amanda can’t resist the chance to find out what happened to her mother. Accompanied by an android called Samuels (Anthony Howell) and lawyer Nina Taylor (Emerald O’Hanrahan), who both work for the conglomerate Weyland-Yutani, Amanda travels to Sevastopol space station to retrieve the recording. However, they arrive to find the station damaged, its crew either dead or on the point of mania, its android workers murderous, and the decks overrun by a deadly alien creature. After barely escaping several dangerous encounters, Amanda then meets the station’s marshal, Waits (William Hope, who’d played the not-dissimilar Lieutenant Gorman in Aliens). He reveals that the ship that saved the flight recorder also found a crashed alien ship… and unknowingly brought a savage creature to Sevastopol…

The project’s origins as a video-game adap are obvious throughout, for good and bad. Echoing the most dynamic first-person games, sequences encompass both grand scale and sweaty claustrophobia, and some scenes – especially those that use Amanda’s point of view – are genuinely suspenseful. There’s also a cute fidelity to the design work of the movies, whether it be the recreation of some sets from the first film or the general vibe of an entropic industrial future. The whole series is admirably violent and bloodthirsty; action sequences have punch; the sound design is very good.

But the simplistic plot is a series of mini-quests, meaning a stop/start momentum, and the quality of the animation depends on whether footage has been grandfathered in from the game or created anew. Despite a decent voice cast, the characters’ dead-eyed expressions undercut any emotional connection and, perhaps inevitably, it soon feels like you’re watching someone else’s Playstation session rather than following a story. A novelisation of the game, by tie-in master Keith RA DeCandido, was published soon after this digital drama and made a much better stab at fleshing out the gameplay and making us care about what’s happening.

Six proprietorial materials out of 10

Universal Monsters #12: The Wolf Man (1941, George Waggner)

I’ve set myself the challenge of watching all 28 films from Universal Studios’ golden age of horror that feature Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

There had been plenty of werewolf stories beforehand, of course: lycanthropy myths can be found in numerous cultures; Little Red Riding Hood and Dr Jekyll are spins on the idea; and Bram Stoker used a fair amount of the lore in his 1897 novel Dracula. But there hadn’t been many werewolf *movies* before 1941. Other than a couple of now-forgotten silent films – The Werewolf (1913) and Wolf Blood (1925) – the only true example had been made by Universal Studios in 1935. The creaky, stagey Werewolf of London starred Henry Hull as an English botanist who is bitten and cursed to become a wolf while in Tibet.

When the same studio decided to commission a new horror picture on the theme, they didn’t have a foundational text to adapt like with Dracula, Frankenstein or The Invisible Man. So instead they took the key tropes of the genre and weaved an original story, creating an effective chiller that would become arguably the most influential werewolf tale of all time.

As the story begins, the second son of the aristocratic Talbot family returns to Talbot Castle after the death of his elder brother. Larry, who has been away for 18 years, is back to reconcile with his father and help run the estate. While he settles in, Larry also meets and flirts with a local woman called Gwen who works in an antiques shop. (When and where all this is taking place is debatable. The outside world is not referenced, we see both cars and horse-drawn carriages, and there’s a panoply of accents in the cast. A 1943 sequel confirmed that we’re in Wales, but no one familiar with the nation would guess that based on this movie.)

When some travelling gypsies arrive in town – they come every autumn, we’re told – Larry takes Gwen and her friend Jenny for a fortune-telling. However, in the woods near the gypsy camp, Jenny is attacked by a wolf. Larry manages to kill the animal, though is bitten in the process. Then later both Jenny and a gypsy called Bela are found dead. Suspicion quickly falls on Larry and Gwen, and they become pariahs in the town. Eventually, Bela’s elderly mother Maleva explains to Larry that Bela was a werewolf. *He* was the animal who attacked Jenny and bit Larry, and that means that Larry is now a lycanthrope too… The next night, Larry undergoes a grisly transformation and becomes a hairy, savage man-beast who – now out of control – kills a villager. Consumed by guilt after he morphs back into a human, Larry confesses all to his father, but Sir John just assumes Larry is deluded…

The film is powered by economic storytelling and moves at a canter. But the script and the cast still pack in plenty of feels for a horror quickie – characters are sincerely upset when there’s a murder, Larry is driven close to tears by his ordeal, Maleva has a scene of genuine melancholy as she grieves for her son. Meanwhile, multiple references to dogs, wolves, wolfsbane and the moon keep things thematically pleasing, and the movie is moodily staged by director George Waggner and cinematographer Joseph Valentine, with plenty of fog, high-contrast light, big sets, expressive camera moves and tight cutting.

For a relatively cheap B-movie churned out in just 25 days, The Wolf Man also has an impressive cast. Claude Rains adds authority and paternal weight as Sir John; fellow Brit Evelyn Ankers is likeable as Gwen; while Ralph Bellamy, whose career stretched from 1931’s The Secret Six to 1990’s Pretty Woman, appears as Gwen’s bland fiancé Paul. The poor gypsy Bela is played by his namesake, Dracula star Bela Lugosi, who only has seven lines of dialogue but still makes a big impression. Veteran Russian actor Maria Ouspenskaya, a former student of Soviet theatre bastion Konstantin Stanislavski, is both memorable and moving as Bela’s wise, wisened mother, Maleva.

The lead character of Larry, meanwhile, was a star-making role for Lon Chaney Jr. Just 35 at the time of filming, but looking 10 years older, Chaney was the son of the first Lon Chaney – the ‘Man of a Thousand Faces’ who had been the 1920s’ biggest horror star, had revolutionised the use of macabre movie make-up, and was earmarked to be Universal’s Dracula before cancer killed him in 1930. Junior had spent a decade in bit-part roles before The Wolf Man, and while he never reached his father’s heights as an actor, he ended up as one of Universal’s most bankable assets. In the seven years between 1942 and 1949, he played the Wolf Man five times, the Mummy three times, Frankenstein’s Monster and Count Dracula once each. (He also ultimately appeared in eight films with The Wolf Man co-star Evelyn Ankers… despite the pair hating each other off-camera.)

At several points in The Wolf Man, villagers recite a piece of doggerel: ‘Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and autumn moon is bright.’ Heavy-handed, perhaps, but it does flag up the subtext. If this film is about anything beyond movie thrills, it’s about the duality of mankind; the potential in all of us for dark, dangerous impulses. Larry’s transformation into a werewolf is achieved simply, via dissolves, but the full body make-up looks rather comedic to modern eyes. So Chaney’s decision to play the character with real anguish when in his human form goes a long way in selling the horror.

Eight mazes of his own mind out of 10

Next: Frankenstein’s a ghost!