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The right of Alison Peirse to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior written permission of the publisher.
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Notes 185
Filmography 213
Selected Bibliography 217
Index 229
vii
viii
ix
endured lengthy journeys up and down the A1, made endless cups of
tea and have got really good at doing sympathetic faces. Also, Chris
Peirse, Lynn Dart and Kristyn Gorton have always known how to
make me smile when things got a bit too much.
I have dedicated the book to my husband Paul Fairclough and our
daughter Kitty because it is impossible to articulate how important
they are to me in the acknowledgements alone. Paul, you are my
world and I wouldn’t be who I am without you. You have lived this
book for the past year and I think my greatest gift to you is that I
have finished it.
Much earlier versions of Chapters 4 and 5 have been previously
published as follows: ‘The impossibility of vision: Vampirism,
formlessness and horror in Vampyr’, Studies in European Cinema 5/3
(2009), pp.161-70; ‘Bauhaus of horrors: Edgar G. Ulmer and 1930s
film’, in Gary D. Rhodes (ed.) Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2008), pp.275-88. I would like to
thank Intellect and Lexington Press respectively for permission to
reprint.
xi
Like film genres, film cycles are a series of films associated with each
other through shared images, characters, settings, plots or themes.
However, while film genres are primarily defined by the repetition of
key images (their semantics) and themes (their syntax), film cycles are
primarily defined by how they are used (their pragmatics).13
Let’s get our definition of the ‘horror film’ out of the way early on.
By pinpointing Dracula as the progenitor of the horror talkie, I’m
not suggesting that horror films did not exist before this period.
German films The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), Genuine (1920) and
Nosferatu (1922) are commonly listed as important silent examples,
but there was also a significant amount of horror-centred produc-
tion going on elsewhere: in Hungary, Károly Lajthay’s Drakula
halála (1921) was the first cinematic adaptation of Dracula, while
in France Jean Epstein’s avant-garde La chute de la maison Usher
(1928) provides an earlier aesthetic example of how to represent
the ‘undead’.15 When Soul Meets Soul (1912) and The Avenging Hand
(1915) are American and British examples of the mummy film; the
British film The Beetle (1919), an adaptation of Richard Marsh’s
novel, in which the High Priestess of Isis is reincarnated as a
loathsome beetle, has a similar Egyptian bent.16 It is, however,
probably the gruesome physical performances of Lon Chaney in
American silent films such as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1923)
and The Unknown (1927) that provide much of the groundwork
several Edgar Allan Poe stories ‘to form the basis for another
horror picture’, and described The Black Cat as ‘Universal’s Next
Horror Pic’.27
As this rather tangled web of examples reveals, there is no sin-
gle moment in the 1930s at which horror becomes acknowledged
either as a specific cycle, or a stable generic category. At varying
points from 1931 to 1933 the word ‘horror’ changes from referring
to the effect it has on the audience to attaching to a ‘type’ of film.
This transition occurs at different times depending on the country
in which the word is used, and whether in a newspaper, trade jour-
nal, magazine, etc. When and where this takes place and by whom
seems to depend on personal preference and (I assume for crit-
ics) editorial control. Some American critics, especially the most
enthusiastic advocates of ‘shocking’ cinema, used the term regu-
larly and with gusto from late 1931, while others, most disdainful
of the thrills provided, used it only as a term of denigration from
around 1933 onwards. Some studios, such as Universal, pushed the
horror angle early; others, such as MGM, were later adopters of
the genre. Censorship bodies are a different matter again: in the
UK, thanks to Annette Kuhn’s important work on the history
of British censorship, we can trace back the use of ‘horror film’
to a Home Office circular Children and ‘A’ Films, distributed in
March 1933.28
In America, we have seen how the MPPDA was made aware
of the ‘horror picture’ angle in 1931, but significant inroads into
the censorship of horror film production did not occur until 1934
when the Production Code was enforced. And as Chapter 7 on
Werewolf of London (1935) reveals, the amendments and deletions
demanded by the PCA could be circumnavigated by a smooth-
talking, silver-tongued (and probably highly paid) producer. So
while there may be many meanings tied up in the word ‘horror’
through the 1920s and 1930s, I have chosen to use it in relation
to a specific cycle of 1930s films that do remarkable, despicable,
often supernatural and frequently murderous things on screen. I
do not attempt to define ‘essential’ features of this period for the
simple reason that there are none. No single tradition emerges
from this body of work: in my survey of a multiplicity of spine-
chilling, blood-curdling terrors, some draw on the gothic literary
canon and some are brand-new stories, some are nationally spe-
cific, some are seemingly universal, a few have had a major influ-
ence on later generations of horror filmmaking but many have
already critically crumbled to dust, until this moment forgotten
and unloved.
AFTER DRACULA
10
Tim Bergfelder et al.’s position that sets aid ‘in identifying charac-
ters, fleshing out and concretising their psychology; and . . . help
in creating a sense of place in terms of “mood” or “atmosphere. . .’
and are ‘crucial in defining a film’s genre’.34 Yet exploring the film
through its architecture, highlights how European modernism
and a burgeoning émigré culture in Hollywood engender a dis-
tinctly Continental sensibility in the spaces of American horror
film. Similarly, while Chapter 3 locates White Zombie within its
poverty-row contexts – belonging as it does to a small and select
group of independent 1930s films, including Frank R. Strayer’s The
Vampire Bat (1933) and Condemned to Live (1935) – of equal impor-
tance are the film’s aesthetic connections with French silent cin-
ema, particularly La chute de la maison Usher.
The second aim of this book is to consider the horror genre’s
transatlantic evolution; many of the European horror films of this
period have had (to be generous) only the most cursory scholar-
ship and some (particularly some of the British films) have had
none at all. Chapter 6 offers a wide-ranging and ambitious sur-
vey of British horror cinema in the 1930s, a topic that may come
as somewhat of a surprise to many film historians who have sug-
gested for years that the genre simply did not exist in Britain at
this time. Drawing on The Ghoul, The Clairvoyant and The Man
Who Changed His Mind, the chapter illuminates a unique moment
in film history: the British film industry’s attempt to internation-
alise its outputs at the same time as the emergence of the horror
genre in sound film. Chapter 4 explores Vampyr and contextualises
it simultaneously as both European art cinema and horror film.
The last major concern of the book sees a return to American cin-
ema. After Dracula attempts to question and complicate histories
of horror film and within this the usual choices of ‘origin’ films
and film moments. This relates directly to my decision to con-
sider this body of films in terms of a film cycle, rather than as a
snapshot of a broader genre. As Klein explains:
More often that not, a genre ends up being defined by a few central,
or ‘classic’ texts, or those texts that conform to one critic’s definition
of a particular genre. This traditional approach to genre is fundamen-
tally ahistorical, marginalising texts that could enrich, rather than
11
12
on Strayer’s The Monster Walks (1932), The Vampire Bat (1933) and
Condemned to Live (1935).38 Beyond America, Gary D. Rhodes pro-
duced good work on the 1930s Mexican horror cycle but there is
still much work to be done on German cinema of the early 1930s,
and how films such as Alraune (1930), Unheimliche Geschichten
(1932) and Der Student Von Prag (1935) work through ideas around
horror.39 In order to enrich our understanding of just how diverse
the 1930s were as a decade of production, I want to highlight the
increasing availability of East Asian horror cinema: Ye Ban Ge
Sheng/Song at Midnight (1937) – a Chinese version of Phantom of the
Opera – and the Japanese bakeneko eiga (ghost cat film) Kaibyo nazo
no shamisen/The Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen (1938) are just
a few of the East Asian films that potentially open up vibrant new
areas of research in horror film history. While my choice of films
is necessarily limited, I hope that my interdisciplinary approach
will reveal something more of the wide disparities across horror
filmmaking in the 1930s and bring to light a cycle of films of which
many have been forgotten and unloved – until now.
13
In the centre of the room, on a long-legged deal table, the silent form
of an Egyptian peasant, who lived twenty-six centuries ago, swathed
in hundreds of yards of grave clothes, with a hieroglyphic-covered
coffin lid (which by the way did not fit the poor mummy) behind it.
Mr Rider Haggard, who sat in the front row among a bevy of ladies,
15
was the observed of all observers – I should not be in the least sur-
prised if his next story turned round some mysteriously embalmed
subject of one of the Pharaohs.4
16
17
the scroll. Norton turns around to face the mummy but the
monster remains off-screen, the camera pans left and attempts
to capture it, but it is too late. Two loose strips of bandage trail
through the doorway as the mummy leaves the building. The scene
ends as Norton laughs hysterically, his mind suddenly and irrevo-
cably lost.
The awakening of the mummy is one of the central scenes
of horror in the film. This was noted at the time by film crit-
ics in both the American and British trade press and newspa-
pers; in Variety’s write-up of the ‘weird’ film, ‘the transformation
of Karloff’s Imhotep from a clay-like figure in a coffin to a liv-
ing thing is the highlight’, while the revelation of the hand was
described as ‘ghastly’ by the Manchester Guardian, ‘presented by
signs more horrible than a blunt statement’.12 Audiences at the
time also admitted to a certain amount of fear. In An Everyday
Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, Annette Kuhn examined oral
testimonies of British cinemagoers in the 1930s, including those
who watched The Mummy. The awakening sequence is repeatedly
identified as a particularly terrifying moment in the memories
of her interviewees, many of whom were children at the time.13
This sequence is then a demonstration of the way that horror
emerges through the cinematic animation of the mummy, finally
freed from the shackles of the lecture-theatre unrollings and the
constraints of the printed word. This is not to say that this is
the first mummy film; the monster had already appeared in the
British films The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901), The Avenging Hand
(1915) and the American one-reeler When Soul Meets Soul (1913).14
Nonetheless, this is the first mummy film after Dracula and thus
has a certain cultural cache; it represents a turning point in the
history of the horror genre as the studio reacts to the success of
its films in 1931.
The film explicitly invokes the spectacle of Dracula in the fol-
lowing scenes, when the mummy reappears in order to find the
reincarnation of Princess Anckesenamon. In writing The Mummy,
John Balderston transplants the main story, characters and themes
of Dracula onto 1930s Egypt, deviating from the typical narratives
of fin de siècle literary fiction, which feature male protagonists
falling in love with female mummies. As Bradley Deane remarks
18
‘the men in these stories are less inclined to flee from a mummy
than to marry her, to see in her a chance to be kissed rather than
cursed’.15 Ten years have elapsed since Norton’s unfortunate
meeting with the mummy. Joseph’s Whemple’s son Frank (David
Manners) returns to Egypt with his colleague Professor Pearson
to coordinate another dig. The mummy, now masquerading
as a local Egyptian man Ardath Bey, appears at the excavation
and informs Frank of the whereabouts of the tomb of Princess
Anckesenamon. With Bey’s assistance, Frank and Pearson coax
Joseph Whemple out of retirement, locate the tomb and donate
the contents to Cairo museum. Once the findings are on dis-
play in the museum, Bey secretly performs a ritual to resurrect
Anckesenamon but the resurrection is unsuccessful; instead a
young woman named Helen Grosvenor is hypnotically drawn to
the museum where Frank finds her unconscious on the museum
steps. His curiosity aroused, he takes her back to his apartment
and when she wakes up he sits at the side of her chaise-longue and
leans forward, asserting his attraction to her. Joseph Whemple
and Helen’s guardian Dr Muller (Edward Van Sloan) enter the
room; at the same time Frank kisses Helen. The two elder men
look upon the couple in horror, Whemple muttering ‘the curse
has struck her, and now through her, it will strike my son’. Less
than a minute after Frank’s daring kiss, Bey walks into the room.
Frank looks searchingly at Helen but she does not return his look;
she only has eyes for Bey, the other three men in the room forgot-
ten (Figure 1.1).
This scene will have been familiar to 1930s audiences, hav-
ing been enacted the year before when Count Dracula visited
Dr Seward. Before his arrival, Seward’s daughter Mina and her
fiancé John Harker (also played by David Manners) sit together
on the sofa holding hands. As they talk, Dr Van Helsing and
Dr Seward enter the room and then Dr Seward has an unexpected
visitor: Count Dracula. The vampire, still (for the moment) under
the guise of an eccentric European aristocrat, is admitted into the
room. He immediately turns his attentions to Mina, who gazes
adoringly up at him, even as she holds her hand to her neck where
a chiffon scarf disguises the wounds he has inflicted upon her. As
the vampire and Mina chat, Van Helsing looks into the mirror of
19
an open jewellery box and discovers that the count lacks a reflec-
tion; he sends Mina away and repels the vampire with a cross.
Fittingly for a film so bound up in the past, The Mummy invokes
remembrance to expel the monster while simultaneously demar-
cating Muller as the Van Helsing character (a fairly simple deduc-
tion as actor Edward Van Sloan plays both parts). Muller instructs
Frank to take Helen back to her hotel. Alone with the monster,
Muller says, ‘I have something else to show you, a photograph’. He
reveals a picture of the mummy in his casket, taken ten years earlier
at the time of the awakening and the original dig (Figure 1.2). Bey
looks at the photograph and in a moment of shock he sees his own
corpse; the moment resonating with Roland Barthes’s suggestion of
the ‘. . . rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the
return of the dead’.16 The photograph captures a specific moment
in time and crystallises it, a corpse viewed by a man reliving his
own, horrible death. The mummy may have managed to escape the
roving camera in the awakening scene, but the photograph tem-
porarily freezes his progress; it also functions as a demonstration
20
Figure 1.2 A point of view shot: Ardath Bey (Boris Karloff) stares at a
photograph of his mummified corpse in The Mummy (1932, Karl Freund).
21
22
attempt to bring her back from the dead, stymied by his discovery
by the royal guards. They conclude with Anckesenamon’s father
condemning him to death.
While the flashbacks are set in ancient Egypt, their stylisation
reflects the émigré director’s past work in German silent cinema,
a chapter of cinema history that profoundly influenced 1930s
American horror film. The sequences do not contain dialogue,
background music or sound effects, Bey’s brief comments replace
intertitles and the acting is gestural and excessive. Yet possibly
the most important element is that every image is set within the
oval edges of the pool, so the audience is aware that the sequence
functions as a story-being-told, ‘framed’ by the mummy’s account.
This framing recalls some of the films Freund worked on during his
time in Weimar Germany. Freund, who was born in Koenigshof in
the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now part of the Czech Republic)
worked as director of photography in a number of notable films,
including Der Golem (1920), The Last Laugh (1924) and Metropolis
(1927). It is Der Golem that The Mummy’s flashback echoes the
most, particularly its Rose festival sequence when a decorative
mask is used to create an almost symmetrical ‘sunburst’ across
all four sides of the frame. So while The Mummy may return to
ancient Egypt, in its evocation of European silent cinema it also
repeats a more recent past, personal to the film’s director.
In the following scene the royal guards execute Imhotep. This is
one of the two moments (the other being Norton’s laughter at the
beginning) singled out by the New York Times as being genuinely
horrifying.20 It is certainly one of the most unsettling moments
in the film. Imhotep is bound, the bandages cover his mouth, and
the voiceover ends: as the mummy relives his death, he is silenced.
His body dominates the image, filling the tight medium shot.
His mouth opens, gasping for air, his pupils dilate and he des-
perately looks around for a means of escape. But then, for a brief
moment, he gazes into the camera, returning the audience’s look
(Figure 1.3).21 The returned gaze of the monster occurs regularly in
1930s horror films: it can be seen in Karloff’s undead Egyptologist
in The Ghoul as he chases his niece and nephew around the old
dark house; similarly in Island of Lost Souls the frenzied beast men
attack the lens before dismembering Dr Moreau in the House of
23
Figure 1.3 Imhotep (Boris Karloff) gazes despairingly into the camera as
he is mummified alive in The Mummy (1932, Karl Freund).
Pain. In Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dr Mirakle looks into the cam-
era as he insists to his assembled audience that he will prove man’s
kinship with apes, while in Vampyr the female vampire Marguerite
Chopin looks into the camera as the audience is positioned from
the point of view of protagonist David Gray – at that moment
sealed within his own coffin. In White Zombie, Murder Legendre
kills the heroine Madeline and walks into the camera creating a
moment of all-encompassing blackness, and in Werewolf of London
Dr Glendon kills the person that he loves the most, and in a big
close up, howls his werewolf shame and anguish to the audience.
The fact that only monstrous characters possess the power to
return the gaze, and that this occurs only at moments of explicit
horror, says much about the shock effect of a returned look. It is
an attack on the viewer; it creates disquiet. Imhotep’s anguished
stare is cut off as bandages are wrapped across the remainder of
his face. His wriggling, bound body is placed inside a sarcophagus,
a death mask placed on top. He is now imprisoned by a series of
24
25
26
cut off at the wrist – feet which dance by themselves – all these
have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when,
as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity
in addition’, before noting that ‘many people experience the feel-
ing in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to
the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts’.26 1930s horror
films have a certain conjunction with this idea. Just over a decade
after Freud’s essay was published, Dracula director Tod Browning
(described at the time as ‘the Edgar Allan Poe of Pictures’)
declared ‘people are most easily frightened by the idea of a dead
person not really being dead – the vampire, zombie or such un-
dead creature. This is the foundation of all horror themes. Then
comes the fright caused by the possibility of dead people being
brought back to life’.27
In her analysis of The Mummy, Griselda Pollock suggests that
the film is a play ‘on the twin forces of the uncanny’, owing to its
focus on the return of that which was familiar and the resurgence
of beliefs previously surmounted.28 Freud links the uncanny to
repression, arguing:
27
Karloff (the Uncanny) rises to new heights in the role of the MUMMY
who comes to life and proves he is no dumb mummy by falling madly
in love with the gorgeous girl as played by Zita Johann. The MUMMY
sets a new pace for others to follow. The MUMMY is another proof
of Universal’s daring originality.32
Actress Zita Johann stands on the right hand side of the image.
Her face is strangely blank and serious, as if the mummy has hyp-
notised her. She wears a short white slip, and appears to be pulling
down one of the straps to reveal her bare shoulder, suggesting she
is pliant, and read to do the monster’s (potentially sexual) bidding.
The monstrous elements then emerge from Karloff’s appear-
ance, star status and ‘uncanny’ branding, while the promotional
28
The display reached from the sidewalk to the very top of the Mayfair
Theatre building. The giant banner and solid wall display built over
the top of the marquee were carried out in weird colours with yellows,
greens and purples predominating. Two massive heads of Karloff
were set in front of the wall display. The eyes were cut out and pasted
over with glazed cloth. Dimmer light attachments were hooked up to
these eyes and flashed them up and down with stunning effect.36
29
30
The prisoner, in the witness box, said that while he was talking to the
girl in the park noises came into his head and it seemed as if steam
was coming out of the sides of his head, and as if a red-hot iron were
being pushed into his eyes. He thought he saw Lon Chaney, a film
actor, in a corner, shouting and making faces at him. He did not
remember taking a razor from his pocket, or using the razor on the
girl or himself.43
It is notable here that not only did the defendant ‘see’ Chaney but
the actor, popularly billed as ‘the man of a thousand faces’, is also
making faces. Chaney appeared at a moment of high stress and
apparently precipitated acts of violence: it seems that the poten-
tially ‘harmful qualities’ of the horror film became a legitimate
form of defence even before the genre was properly established.
What is of most interest here, though, is Mr Justice Humphrey’s
summing up of the case in court, counselling the jury. Talking of
London After Midnight, the judge advised:
If any members of the jury had seen [the film], or even the advertise-
ments of Lon Chaney looked like when he was acting in that film,
they might agree it was enough to terrify anybody – If the prisoner
saw a film of this character the jury might not think it remarkable or
as any way indicating insanity that he should, in a moment of emo-
tional excitement, remember the horrifying, terrible aspect of an
actor in a part in which he was purposely being terrible.44
31
32
the armless man in The Unknown, and that in The Road to Mandalay
(1926) the chemical drops that he used in his eyes permanently
damaged his vision. It is Locan’s discussion of The Hunchback of
Notre-Dame that is most useful here:
He hurt his spine with the harness he wore to stunt his body – he
took the design from Victor Hugo’s original drawings, made a sketch
and propped it up in front of him. It took him three hours to put the
hunchback make-up on. He was supposed to keep it on only three
minutes at a time. Instead he would say ‘O, I can stand it another half
an hour until you get another shot’.52
. . .my worst makeup was in The Mummy. That took nine hours to get
on. There were two makeups in that – one the mummy in the tomb,
and the second, the mummy come to life. The nine-hour makeup
was the first one. Clay was applied, allowed to dry, then covered in
wrappings; then more clay and more wrappings. The second mummy
makeup took four hours; it was uncomfortable in the extreme
as the wrappings were put on wet and as they dried they tight-
ened, and it was very difficult to speak my lines with my throat so
constricted.53
33
By the 1930s and the advent of the horror film, press reception
really focused its Chaney allusions on the new breed of monsters
appearing on screen. This is the time when what I describe as the
‘cult of the make-up chair’ begins to appear in the popular press.
Throughout the 1930s, whenever a (male) actor took a horror role
requiring physical transformation, press and publicity reports
dwelled on the length of the time that the makeover took, and
the physical distress caused by inhabiting the role. The lengthier
the time reported, the greater the discomfort, the better: Chaney
was evoked with uncanny regularity in these discussions. Even by
1935 the comparisons had not let up. In response to Werewolf of
London, Variety discussed Henry Hull’s transformation into the
werewolf and proclaimed ‘Hollywood can certainly use another
Lon Chaney, and here is one right in its lap’.55
But within this seam of criticism, there is something specific
to Karloff that insistently binds him to the silent film star. It
begins with Frankenstein, for which a reviewer described Karloff
as ‘affecting an augmented stature and a blood-curdling makeup
that even a Lon Chaney would find it difficult to surpass in hor-
rifying abnormality’.56 While another newspaper article (or pos-
sibly studio publicity material masquerading as such) described in
some detail Universal’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’, otherwise known
as make-up artist Jack P. Pierce’s make-up room. According to
the reporter, pictures of Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
and The Phantom of the Opera hang on the wall; alongside them a
photo of Karloff in his Monster make-up is ‘given the place of
honour’.57 Karloff discussed Frankenstein in a newspaper interview
as production on The Mummy was coming to a close. He explained
how he obtained the height and structure of the monster by ‘mam-
moth boots weighing twenty pounds each, and by the heavy har-
ness of fifteen more pounds. The whole make-up weighed nearly
seventy-five pounds. At the end of a few hours I was exhausted’.58
The interviewer then suggested that undertaking roles requiring
extreme transformations was apposite timing following Chaney’s
recent demise. Karloff sharply rejected the idea: ‘no. . .I don’t want
to be another Chaney. I would be extremely proud to follow in the
footsteps of an artist like Chaney, but the things he did are his
monument. No one has the right to go prowling around trying to
34
35
36
I t begins with a hunt for a girl. A very specific kind of girl. Age
between 17 and 30, height between 5'4"and 5'8". She must be
an unknown, with no screen credit to her name nor a cast credit
in a professional stage production. She can be a blonde, brunette
or redhead, so long as she is able to pass convincingly as a monster
– a panther-woman to be precise, the creation of Doctor Moreau,
arguably one of the nastiest of the many mad scientists to grace
1930s horror film.1 In July 1932 Paramount initiated the nationwide
hunt for the panther woman as part of the publicity drive for the
studio’s planned horror feature Island of Lost Souls, an adaptation of
H. G. Wells’ novel The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). The winner
would receive a five-week contract with Paramount at $200 a week,
with expenses paid to travel to and stay in Hollywood.2 The excite-
ment was palpable: in Atlanta, for example, 180 girls submitted
their photographs to E.E. Whitaker, manager of the Paramount
Theatre, and in total over 50,000 girls across America auditioned
for the role, generating nationwide interest in the film, particularly
in cities that featured local young women in the final stages of the
competition.3 In late September, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a
photograph of 19-year-old local resident Kathleen Burke as one of
the finalists in the national competition; Burke posed alongside the
other three finalists, Gail Patrick, Lona Andre, and Verna Hillie.
The following day, the same paper reported that Burke, who had
previously worked as a copywriter and model, was the winner.4
For all the razzmatazz and ballyhoo of this sensational hunt for
a new horror ‘star’, the panther woman herself retained a certain
level of intrigue. She can be counted alongside the Bride in Bride
of Frankenstein, Countess Marya Zaleska in Dracula’s Daughter and
Madeline Parker in White Zombie as one of the few female monsters
37
38
39
Figure 2.1 Doctor Moreau (Charles Laughton) explains to Lota the pan-
ther woman (Kathleen Burke) that she will meet a ‘man from the sea’ but
that she must not discuss Moreau, the Law or the House of Pain in Island of
Lost Souls (1932, Erle C. Kenton).
40
41
I heard a sharp cry behind me, a fall, and turning, saw an awful face
rushing upon me, not human, not animal, but hellish, brown, seamed
with red branching scars, red drops starting out upon it, and the lid-
less eyes ablaze. I flung up my arm to defend myself from the blow
that flung me headlong with a broken forearm, and the great mon-
ster, swathed in lint and with red-stained bandages fluttering about
it, leapt over me and passed.17
42
find out if she can produce children. In doing this she becomes
an amorous, sexual beast, and much of the horror of the scene
emerges from the explanation that Moreau gives of his work in
the novel: of the stubborn beast flesh growing back, the impos-
sibility of perfect hands and the extensive work on the female
puma. At the time this was seen as particularly gruesome scene, a
point reaffirmed by the number of contemporary film critics that
highlighted the seduction as a central moment of horror.18 Parker
sits alone by the pool, reading a book. In the top right hand corner
of the frame, Lota’s feet appear and quickly move left through the
shot. She moves swiftly and silently with feline grace, dropping
down daintily next to surprised Parker. She stretches her slim
long legs, points her face into the sun and lets her hair cascade
down her back, a spectacle of visual pleasure. Staring intently
into Parker’s eyes, she pushes herself against his body and gazes
at his mouth (Figure 2.2). He finally succumbs and takes her into
his arms, kissing her slowly and passionately, the pair encased in
the gentle glow of soft, seductive lighting. Yet Parker suddenly
Figure 2.2 Lota the panther woman (Kathleen Burke) seduces Edward
Parker (Richard Arlen) in Island of Lost Souls (1932, Erle C. Kenton).
43
stops kissing her and hangs his head. This is one of the most
understated but intriguing moments of the whole film: why has
he stopped? Arguably, it is because he feels guilt over his engage-
ment to fiancée Ruth Thomas, but equally it could be that in her
kiss Lota transmits something of the beast within, whether a
sharp smell, a tiny, excited bite or a pointed tooth scoring the soft
flesh of Parker’s lips. Still overwhelmed by passion, Lota refuses
to relinquish her gaze, pushing her face close to his. He grabs her
hands and a moment of pure horror ensues: her fingernails are
now garishly painted claws (Figure 2.3). The beast inside Lota has
erupted as she experiences sexual pleasure, the panther breaks
out of her carefully carved flesh. This is the female sexuality of
which Wood spoke of in his essay, and while Wells’ Moreau was
only able to have ‘hope’ for the transformation of the puma, the
horror film takes his idea to its logical conclusion: the vivisected
panther woman, described as Moreau’s ‘most nearly-perfect crea-
tion’, temporarily attains the hero Parker.
44
45
46
47
Figure 2.4 Race horror: the dark skin of ape-man Ouran (Heins Steinke)
is contrasted with the white wardrobe and white lighting of Captain
Donohue (Paul Hurst) and Ruth Thomas (Leila Hyams) in Island of Lost
Souls (1932, Erle C. Kenton).
throughout 1930s horror film, we can also point to the film’s liter-
ary source for much of this material. Wells repeatedly describes
the beast folk in relation to black and brown skin, wearing turbans,
their appearances arousing disgust and repulsion, and committing
barbaric acts. When Prendick is first rescued and brought aboard
the schooner, he sees a strange-looking man, ‘in some indefinable
way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me profoundly –
the huge half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever
seen in a human mouth – there was a curious glow of excitement
in his face’.30
In the following scene, Moreau notes Ouran’s desire for Ruth
and lets him into the compound. The threat is clear: having failed
to make Parker mate with Lota, he will now attempt the same
experiment with Ouran and Ruth, setting up a sequence that
Williams describes as ‘evocative of screen stereotypes of interra-
cial rape going back to Birth of a Nation’.31 Ruth retires alone to bed.
48
49
50
51
52
53
New York Times. In the first of two reviews, Hall clearly struggled
with the ‘quality’ signifiers of Island of Lost Souls, which include
Laughton’s performance and the film as literary adaptation – the
latter point made by Hall in the first sentence of the first review.
The production design is also carefully crafted and beautifully
shot, a point Hall conceded, for ‘although the attempt to horrify is
not accomplished with any marked degree of subtlety, there is no
denying that some of the scenes are ingeniously fashioned and are,
therefore, interesting’.48 Most importantly for this analysis, Hall
emphasised Laughton as the best actor, arguing that he greatly
enhanced the film. The second review, which focused entirely on
Laughton, was published as part of a film round-up column nine
days later. In it, Hall wrote: ‘the outstanding feature of this film is
the fact that even in such a role as Doctor Moreau, Mr Laughton
never for an instant is off key’.49 He elevates this film to art, for
‘this film, with all its uncanny and unpleasant ideas, is worth an
hour of anyone’s time, if merely to watch Mr Laughton’.50 A gen-
eral consensus emerges: while the attempts to shock are crass
and the horrific elements are unpleasant, the involvement of
Laughton means the film is worth watching. Thereby, with a clear
conscience, reviewers were able to recommend a most debased
and disreputable film through their marshalling of star status and
‘worthy’ cultural connotations.
So where did that leave the panther woman? Somewhere near
the bottom of the critics’ reviews. In the 1930s, the typical format
of an American newspaper film review comprised an introduc-
tory paragraph and the subjective experience of the reviewer, a
pronouncement on the success of the leading actors, an extended
plot summary and two final paragraphs, the first of which noted
the minor actors and their roles and the last the other films or
vaudeville acts playing at the theatre as part of the bill. In such
configurations, the discussion of the panther woman was invari-
ably located in the second-to-last paragraph as part of the minor
actor’s list, often with a simple acknowledgment that Burke won
the panther woman competition and/or was a newcomer. She was
reduced to several pleasant, harmless adjectives: ‘decidedly allur-
ing’ in the Atlanta Constitution, ‘a bit of grotesquerie’ in the Los
Angeles Times preview and ‘vivid’ in the same paper’s review a few
54
weeks later, as having ‘weird makeup’ in the New York Times and
being ‘beautiful’ in the Hartford Courant.51 Burke’s most extensive
review comes from the newspaper of her home city, Chicago. The
title of the review is promising enough, ‘Chicago Sees “Panther
Girl” in First Film’, yet the analysis of the panther woman still
only amounted to a handful of words at the end: ‘she hasn’t much
more to do than crouch and run and open her eyes wide, but she
is agile and camera conscious, and very well suited to the part she
plays’.52 Despite the extensive pre-production publicity generated
through the national competition for the role, the interviews with
Burke during filming, and provocative posters printed in regional
and national press in the opening weeks, the writers focused on
the mad scientist narrative and Laughton, the man at its heart. For
the critics, the panther woman was marginal to the film. It was the
female audience, not the (predominantly male) film critics whom
the nationwide competition appealed to; it offered the ‘it could be
you’ promise to whisk the reader away from her humdrum life and
to start again in the glittering world of Hollywood.53 In the film
itself Lota is marginalised in the male-centred narrative, a pup-
pet of Moreau’s desires; in the critical reception she was similarly
unassuming, a passing footnote in a New York Times review.
This echoing absence also says something more about the rep-
resentation and perception of female characters in 1930s horror
film. Women were accepted as beautiful victims, like Lucy and
Mina in Dracula or Joan in The Black Cat; they could be feisty
reporters like Fay Wray in Mystery of the Wax Museum, reincar-
nated Egyptian princesses in The Mummy and even sharp-witted
scientists in the (rather progressive) The Man Who Changed His
Mind. But crucially, in fact quite decisively, they could never be
truly monstrous. Even Madeline of White Zombie explains away
her temporary ‘undead’ nature as a dream and falls thankfully into
her husband’s arms. Furthermore, if women became monsters
and articulated horror through sexual desire, they were simply not
accepted; the critics looked away. If we return to Ager’s article
and her reference to Burke’s heavy make-up, we can see that the
cult of the make-up chair was inverted by gender: while male mon-
sters might spend hours sitting still and were then applauded for
wearing thick and disfiguring make-up – which everyone agreed
55
It’s not so easy to shake off a sobriquet like ‘The Panther Woman’,
Kathleen Burke is finding out. Starting as an innocently friendly intro-
duction to picture audiences, it has developed, in Murders in the Zoo,
into well nigh a dastardly curse. After all, if a girl keeps on being called
‘Panther Woman’, she’s got to do something about it no matter how
gentle and domestic her real instincts may be – [Burke] has therefore
to keep pulling herself together trying to fix a wild gleam in her eyes,
trying to slink with feline stealth, trying to flare up with savage fire. All
this panthering to do, when plain facing the camera is hard enough!57
56
Albeit with an acid tongue, Ager was the only writer who really
attempted to grapple with Burke’s roles: it is telling that it took
the lone female film critic on Variety to do it. Her comments
stripped back the layers of meaning evoked in the original Island
of Lost Souls pre-production campaign: despite being ostensibly a
search for a female monster, this was really a beauty contest by
another name and, as the winner, Burke was ill-equipped to live
up to the symbolic demands of the female monster. Indeed, her
absolute obedience and supplication in the film towards her tor-
turer Moreau reveals just how much Island of Lost Souls is a tradi-
tional male-centred mad scientist narrative. This problem follows
Burke to Murders in the Zoo, as Ager noted, where she simultane-
ously attempts to live up to the panther woman monicker that
brought her into the pictures and at the same time attempts to
transcend it as an actress in her own right. Ager’s repetition of the
word ‘trying’ in her review suggests that Burke strives and fails,
that her efforts are so obvious that she does not inhabit the char-
acter at all; the audience is more likely to notice her inadequate
efforts in front of the camera than become immersed in the plot.
This brings us to the conflict at the heart of this chapter: to what
extent is the panther woman actually a monster? On the one
hand, the film depicts her as a hybrid, dark skinned and exotic
beast from the South Seas, whose intense sexual desire results in
claws erupting from her fingernails. On the other, she is spirited
and friendly, self-sacrificing and heroic, beautiful and loving – not
really evil at all. Is she, more simply, ‘pretty Katie Burke from
Chicago’, a girl who happened to hitch a lift on the horror train
as it rolled into Hollywood? While we can debate this endlessly,
a letter written to the movie page of the Chicago Daily Tribune in
July 1933 reveals what at least one actual fan thought:
Dear Miss Tinee: I was so delighted to see our own Kathleen Burke
in another picture. Though Murders in the Zoo was a rotten picture,
the good acting of everyone in the cast partially redeemed it. . .The
Panther Woman was such an ugly part for this beautiful girl and she
is beautiful. I say hurrah again for an American girl, and especially a
Chicago girl.58
57
For ‘Mrs W.’, writing to the letters page, Burke is not expected
to be foreign, or monstrous, or ugly. She is a beautiful American
girl who deserves better parts in better pictures. Never achieving
more success or notoriety than in her first film, Burke worked in
Hollywood until 1938 in minor supporting roles, before turning to
theatre work and eventually moving out of the public eye. After
her death in April 1980, obituaries referenced her as the panther
woman.59 The beast flesh crept back; she was never entirely free
of her feline alter ego.
In exploring the relationship between the film and its intertexts
– the nationwide audition campaign, on-set reports, publicity
posters, film reviews, star journalism and fan letters – this chapter
concludes that the relationship between the initial pre-produc-
tion campaign and the film itself was flawed. The panther woman
as represented in the pre-production campaign struggled for a
meaningful place within the mad scientist narrative, and despite
posters of her stamping on Broadway and its male patrons, she
remained virtually invisible in the film reviews that turned with
interest to Laughton. The female monster in this horror film was
a façade; to many critics and some fans she was the end product
of a beauty contest, her horror diminished by her attractiveness.
Indeed, in the Variety review of Island of Lost Souls, the writer sug-
gested that Lota ‘is too much like a girl to even suggest transfor-
mation from a beast. Her part is little more than a White Cargo
bit’.60 Yet if we take a longer view, perhaps acknowledging the
shift Klinger suggests from the synchronic approach (how history
appears at one point in time, in this case 1932–3) to the diachronic
(the study of history over a period of time) we can still salvage
her importance.61 As Tim Snelson and Mark Jancovich have both
pointed out in their respective studies, it is not until the 1940s
that Hollywood horror films position the woman as both monster
and victim; Snelson pinpointing Cat People’s popularity in 1942 as
inspiring ‘a cycle of female monster films – in hope of also imitating
its phenomenal box office success’.62 Notably, as part of his prepa-
ration for Cat People, producer Val Lewton screened Island of Lost
Souls and closely analysed the panther woman.63 While her mean-
ing in 1932 and 1933 may have been muddled, by the early 1940s
she was evidently already recognised as an important progenitor
58
59
60
61
62
63
soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and
endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life – it is a
dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.
People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the
body before it has had time to rot, galvanise it into movement, and
then make of it a servant or a slave, occasionally for the commission
of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation
or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb
beast if it slackens.20
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65
Haitian history and slavery. From the mid 1930s, the five lead-
ing Haitian exports were coffee, cotton, sugar, sisal and bananas,
which accounted for over 90 per cent of exported commodities.24
The largest proportion of sugar crops were produced on planta-
tions run by foreign companies.25 Black slavery comes to light
in this history, as Laurent Dubois points out that ‘sugar was the
economic miracle of the eighteenth century [and] – slavery was
deemed essential to the production of sugar’.26 Sure enough, the
zombie mill workers are black. In a very long shot inside the mill,
zombies carry baskets of cane to the thresher, and the grinding
wooden machinery emits an animalistic roar, an aural shock in a
film that contains only the sparsest dialogue and sound effects.
The zombies trudge in a circle around a large wooden grinder en
masse, moving in uncanny automation. Beaumont sees a zombie
dressed in white with a basket on its head. The creature loses its
balance and falls off the balcony into the grinder. The camera
tracks down the exterior of the grinder and comes to rest upon
the zombies rotating the machinery below, with the implication
that the fallen zombie is being torn to pieces in the grinder.
Haiti was built upon slavery. Christopher Columbus claimed
the island of Hispaniola for Spain in 1492 and, from as early as
1510, Spanish colonisers uprooted Africans from their homes.27
They sold them as slaves and shipped them across the Atlantic
to endure inhumane conditions in the mass agricultural develop-
ment of mines and sugar plantations. France and Spain divided
Hispaniola in 1697, and France named her colony Saint Domingue,
which according to Kieran Murphy became integral to the global
‘slave trade triangle’, a ‘modern system of subjugation that was
geared toward the complete commodification and alienation of its
workforce in order to maximise productivity’.28 The slaves’ revolt
began on 14 August 1791, and over a decade of violence followed
before the establishment of Haiti as the first Black Republic in
1804. Yet it remained politically unstable, ‘largely due to inter-
national cold-shouldering, power-hungry leaders, and recurrent
clashes among the Haitian colour-coded classes’.29 The invasion
of the US marines on 1 September 1915 compounded the island’s
troubles, as did the ensuing instigation of martial law and forced
labour until the US withdrawal in 1934.
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67
68
69
I thought that beauty alone could satisfy, but the soul has gone.
I can’t bear those empty staring eyes!
Beaumont bemoans Madeline’s transformation
into a white zombie
In charting her demise and transition into the afterlife, the film’s
attention now turns to Madeline, a character performed by actress
Madge Bellamy in an uneasy, sexualised-yet-unavailable fashion.
In the scene following Beaumont’s pact, Madeline dresses in her
bedroom for the wedding. There are four full-length shots in the
sequence in which Madeline wears only a bra and knickerbockers;
in one shot she turns front-on to the camera and poses, seemingly
admiring himself in the mirror image as the audience looks back.
The scene may have only seven shots but it lasts for 30 seconds.
The languid, contemplative and erotic tone, commented on rather
mockingly by the Chicago Daily Tribune’s reviewer, signals not
70
only its voyeuristic purpose but also the film’s pre-Code status,
for such an overtly titillating display would not have been passed
by the Production Code Administration a few years afterwards.41
Later, Madeline refuses Beaumont’s marriage proposal and
he gives her a flower tainted with the zombie potion, which she
smells and tucks into her bouquet. She marries Neil and at the
wedding breakfast Beaumont and Neil toast the new bride; at the
same time Legendre stands outside the house, carving a wax doll
draped with Madeline’s scarf. She raises her goblet in response to
the salutations for her good health, looks into its murky depths
and stutters ‘I see death’. In a shot from Madeline’s point of view,
Legendre’s head and glowing eyes are superimposed within the
goblet. Outside the house, Legendre burns the wax effigy and
Madeline dies in Neil’s arms. In a final moment of disruption,
Legendre turns his assaultive gaze on the audience. In a linger-
ing medium shot, he stares directly into the camera and walks
towards it, the viewer becoming, like Madeline, another victim of
his powerful look. The scene ends as Legendre’s blurred face fills
the screen, fading into an all-encompassing blackness.
There have been several interpretations of Legendre’s stare.
Rhodes argues that it constructs a unique identification point for
the viewer, the ‘spectator-as-character’, a device that ‘allows the
spectator to become – albeit in a very limited fashion – a charac-
ter in the narrative’.42 For Rhodes, ‘this cinematic device moves
the viewer from a more traditional and perhaps more passive
role as spectator to a more active role as participant/character’.43
Arguably, Legendre’s look suggests the opposite, commanding
the most passive and masochistic of positions. Legendre’s direct
look into the camera is a violent act, unsettling and discomfiting;
it assaults the audience, who does not expect its look to be turned
upon itself. The moment also functions as a repeat of Lugosi’s
glowing eyes in Dracula, to which the Film Daily made extensive
comparisons in its White Zombie review, beginning ‘another vari-
ant on the Dracula theme and with the work of Bela Lugosi it has
the same quality of spooky thrills and weirdness’.44 Notably the
review concentrated entirely on the Lugosi angle and the ‘white
zombie’ element of the film; very little was made of the slavery or
71
72
73
74
75
76
doesn’t arise from the table until the very last few frames of the
film. Utterly submissive, his body given over to the whims of the
bokor, he has become a white male zombie and his penance for
taking Madeline is almost complete.
Neil has discovered that his wife’s corpse has been stolen, and
enlisting the aid of Bruner, has travelled to Legendre’s castle. In a
typically ineffectual manner, he passes out when they get into the
grand hall. Legendre instructs Madeline to stab Neil but Bruner
thwarts her. For a moment she returns to consciousness and finds
herself privy to a rather Macbethian moment; she stands over
her husband, confused, clutching a dagger. She runs out onto the
veranda and tries to throw herself off the cliff, but is prevented
by the suddenly recovered Neil. Legendre’s henchmen surround
him, and he shoots Chauvin, whose pop-eyed gaze never falters as
he stares down the camera lens. A last moment of shock: the zom-
bie finally addresses the audience in the same fashion as Legendre.
Neil’s escape from the white male zombies is hardly as thrilling: he
scrambles past them as they walk off the side of the cliff: the very
perfunctory nature of their deaths was picked up in the New York
Times review, that when zombies ‘have served their fell purposes,
they can walk off high cliffs and out of the picture’.56 Beaumont
unexpectedly appears and throws Legendre off the cliff before
committing suicide, launching himself into the icy depths of the
sea below. Beaumont’s final gesture completes his masochistic
narrative: as we have already seen in The Mummy, Mystery of the
Wax Museum and Mad Love, death is the only possible outcome
for the failed gazer.
All monsters and characters of generally dubious intent have
been despatched over the side of the cliff. Now, it merely remains
for the uncanny female cadaver to be restored to life. In the various
source tales this return can be dramatic. In Poe’s tale, Madeline
Usher’s return is theatrical. The vault doors are flung open and she
emerges in a bloodied shroud, her emaciated frame ruined by her
struggle, and ‘with a low moaning cry’ she falls upon her brother
and ‘now final death agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and
a victim to the terrors he had anticipated’.57 Similarly, in another
key source for the script, The Magic Island, the ending is equally
horrible. White Zombie evidently borrows heavily from Seabrook’s
77
78
79
This astute observation has its relevance for 1930s zombies too,
with their dual function as slavery allegory and alternative mode
of gendered possession. But Wood’s idea that the zombie chal-
lenges people to change – which in White Zombie’s case would
apply to racial and gender politics – is not consistently worked
through in the film. As Edna Aizenberg comments, 1930s and
1940s zombie films simply transpose ‘the zombie from enslaved
black victim vitiated by white colonisation to virginal white vic-
tim menaced by black erotic rites’.62 White Zombie’s uniqueness
emerges from the film’s origins in Seabrook’s outré travelogue, in
which he reflects ‘werewolves, vampires, and demons were cer-
tainly no novelty. But I recalled one creature I had been hearing
about in Haiti, which sounded exclusively local – the zombie’.63 Its
interest for studies of 1930s horror film and the idea of a specific
cycle of horror cinema during this period comes from its Haitian
setting, which taps into public perception of the island’s voodoo
heritage, a cultural inquisitiveness charged by the bestselling The
Magic Island and colonial ideologies of contemporary occupa-
tion. The 1930s undead were represented (and interpreted in the
media) as an exciting glimpse into native voodoo practices quite
distinct from America’s gothic horror lineage. Yet the film’s nar-
rative structure draws heavily on the gothic canon (with a liberal
dosing of Poe and Hoffmann) and contains many haunting, time-
less moments. Former silent film star Bellamy is so incredibly dull
that the audience is unable to differentiate between her acting
living and dead, black actors are accorded screen time but disap-
pear into the mist as the narrative dispenses with them, and a pen-
niless émigré actor already famous for his portrayal of a vampire
is drawn to the poverty row in order to capitalise on his success.
He stares into the camera, carves wax dolls and performs on the
same sets that made him famous a year earlier. The end result is
uncanny, however you look at it.
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81
more evident.5 As such, while Vampyr may not be the first film to
resist interpretation, it is certainly one of the earliest horror films
to create this sense of elusiveness. Consequently I do not attempt
a definitive reading but instead consider it as a kind of cinematic
dream-work, deploying psychoanalytic ideas and terminology.
I argue that Dreyer’s inimitable treatment of vampirism emerges
from its indistinct narrative, slow pacing and appeal to the uncon-
scious, all arguably present as a result of its art cinema sensibili-
ties, private funding and interwar European cultural context.
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83
84
At the time I made Vampyr I had been living in Paris for four or five
years. In Paris at that time, you couldn’t help but be caught up in the
excitement and the imagination which the various artists and move-
ments created, whether ‘cubism’, ‘Dadaism’, ‘Surrealism’, or what have
you. I knew several painters and I was involved in discussions with and
about them. So, of course, I was influenced, but by the excitement,
the energy, the variety of work, not by any particular painter or move-
ment. At the time of Vampyr I was ‘over head and ears’ in interest in
abstract art.24
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87
are few points of correlation between the novella and film. The
narrative substantially increases the age of the female vampire,
transforming her from a young beautiful woman into an elderly
crone. This departs from the original lesbian reading of the text
that charts the relationship between two young and beautiful
women.
The servants carry Léone into the house and upstairs to her
bedroom. She sits up in bed and cries for her ‘damned’ soul
(Figure 4.1). Her sister Gisèle attempts to comfort her, but Léone
suddenly smiles and gazes greedily back, in the grip of a vampiric
and incestuous blood lust (Figure 4.2); she opens her black eyes
wide and exposes her white glistening teeth. Léone’s bloodlust is
communicated through the smallest movements of the actor’s face,
Sybille Schmitz’s unearthly and unsettling acting chiming with
Dreyer’s confession, some 35 years later, that what he ultimately
seeks is to obtain ‘a penetration to my actors’ profound thoughts
Figure 4.1 ‘If only could die!’: Léone (Sybille Schmitz) sits up in bed, dis-
traught, as she realises she has become the vampire’s victim in Vampyr (1932,
Carl Theodor Dreyer).
88
by means of their most subtle expressions. For these are the expres-
sions that reveal the character of the person, his unconscious feel-
ings, the secrets that lie in the depths of his soul’.35 Vampirism is
not evoked through the erotic representation of Sapphism or the
detailed depictions of wounds, but through Schmitz’s perform-
ance and the obtuse presentation of Chopin’s assault. Writing
on Chopin’s attack in the mist, Rudkin suggests that: ‘we have to
strain to see this through the baffling haze – it is a moral effect
too: by denying us what in a film we most need – visibility – we are
metaphorically put into the predicament of the vampire herself,
straining for what she most needs’.36 Although Rudkin’s alignment
of spectator and vampire is excessive, his comments resonate with
broader issues regarding the film’s treatment of vision. The hazi-
ness of the vampire attack undermines the ability of the audience
to see what is happening; the moment of horror is hidden away like
the shooting of the châtelain.
89
The village doctor (who secretly works for Chopin) arrives to treat
Léone. She grimaces as she is examined, her countenance pale,
her eyes dark and her large teeth exposed. Her eyes remain closed,
and when the doctor pulls back her eyelid, her eyeball rolls back
in her head. In a moment reminiscent of the eye and the razor-
blade in Un Chien Andalou (1929), Léone’s eyes reveal only a fleshy
white opaque surface, while the horribleness of her medical
examination bears similarities to Freud’s story of his patient Irma.
In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud recounts a morbid dream
that centres on an unpleasant examination of Irma’s diseased
throat by Freud and his physician friends. In the dream Freud
meets Irma in a great hall and realises she is ill. He peers into her
throat, Irma initially resists and then her mouth ‘opens wide,
and I find a large white spot on the right, and elsewhere I see
extensive greyish-white scabs adhering to curiously curled forma-
tions, which are evidently shaped like the turbinal bones of the nose’.37
Freud calls upon his colleagues to examine the unfortunate Irma,
and the physician Leopold calls attention to ‘an infiltrated portion of
skin on the left shoulder (which I feel, in spite of the dress)’.38
In his analysis of the dream, Freud decides that the meaning
lies in a desire for professional revenge against his colleagues Otto
and Dr M., Freud’s dream has, however, also been interpreted
as a disavowal of potential connections between the body of
the woman and abjection. In his seminar ‘The Dream of Irma’s
Injection’, Jacques Lacan re-reads Freud’s dream for his students.
Lacan reinterprets the central point of the dream, the revelation
of the interior of Irma’s throat:
There’s a horrendous discovery here, that of the flesh one never sees,
the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the
secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything
exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it
is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself is something
which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety,
the final revelation of you are this – You are this, which is so far from you,
this which is the ultimate formlessness.39
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92
93
Figure 4.3 One of the most iconic images from the film: the ‘dead’ yet
seeing protagonist David Gray (Nicolas de Gunzberg) is viewed from inside
his coffin in Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer).
94
shot reveals Chopin, seemingly asleep, her eyes shut and her face
bathed in a strong white light. The servant picks up an iron bar
and holds it over the vampire’s chest.
This is a crucial moment at which to pause our analysis. Upon
this single frame multiple analyses diverge, depending on which
print, language version, or restoration is viewed. This is a cru-
cial issue in reading Vampyr (harking back once again to Wood’s
acknowledgement of its inherent difficulty) as the staking scene
fundamentally affects the reading of Gray’s character. Until 2008,
when Criterion and Eureka released the Martin Koerber restora-
tion, composed of prints from Cineteca del commune di Bologna
and Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, the main DVD
available for the home market was a poor amalgamation of sev-
eral prints with dialogue dubbed in German and intratextual writ-
ing in French and Danish, as released by Image Entertainment
in 1998. In the Image Entertainment version, the stake is not
shown entering the body; instead the moment of penetration is
suggested through an image of the sky, the camera perfectly static
as clouds drift past the line of vision. The cloud movement con-
firms that this is not a photograph, but the product of an (undead)
gaze, the crosscutting with the attack on the vampire unequivo-
cally aligning with Chopin’s point of view. A sharp, metallic clang
is heard, repeating, as if a hammer strikes a blow upon the stake,
but it is not shown. Most importantly, the cutting of the material
implies that the servant stakes the vampire, but the recent digital
restorations include the deleted scenes as extras, revealing a pro-
longed, brutal and quite beautiful staking, one reduced to its most
essential components: a hand, a stake and a hammer. Framed in
close up, in the bottom of the shot, the servant’s pale hand holds
tightly to the iron stake that dominates the image. With alarm-
ing speed, a heavy wooden mallet leaps down through the top of
the frame and strikes down upon the head of the stake. The serv-
ant stands chest-deep in the grave, surrounded by earth and look-
ing away from the supernatural carnage that is taking place at his
feet. As the hammer rains down, Gray is revealed standing aloft
of the graveside and swinging his hammer judiciously and con-
fidently (Figure 4.4). The hammer hits the stake down through
the bottom of the frame and the penetration of the vampire is
95
Figure 4.4 In a scene originally deleted by the censors in 1932, David Gray
(Nicolas de Gunzberg) hammers the stake into the female vampire’s body
in Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer).
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97
98
99
Arguably, Breton’s desire for that ‘certain point of mind’ was found
in this film, made only a few years after he wrote the manifesto:
in the space opened up by the lack of ‘contradiction’ between the
living and dead, real and imagined, the hero of Vampyr hunts for
the vampire. In its amalgamation of ‘high’ art cinema and ‘low’
horror culture, combined with its ‘incommunicable’ nature,
Vampyr remains slippery to demarcate, resistant to definition.
In an interview with Film Comment in 1966, two years before his
death, Dreyer pleaded for filmmakers to find their own style, to
avoid following the standard form ‘and we shall try to make more
and more individualistic films, and on individualistic terms, so
that we say that we feel the director and the style of the director
in the film. Otherwise we will be making the same thing again and
again’.58 He had already achieved this in Vampyr, a inimitable con-
tribution to European art film and horror cinema: his presence is
felt in the film’s unique qualities, and he is as much part of the film
as Gray himself.
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101
102
AILOUROPHOBIA
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Black Cat’ (1843) is the first-
person narrative of an alcoholic predisposed to murderous rages.
He gouges out the eyes of his beloved cat Pluto, hangs it and
then kills his wife with an axe. He buries her corpse in the wall,
accompanied by the very much alive replacement cat. The nar-
rator’s ailourophobia (his fear of cats) is unbounded; in describ-
ing his emotions towards the replacement cat his disgust oozes
from the pages: ‘I did not, for some weeks, strike or otherwise
violently ill use it; but gradually – very gradually – I came to look
upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odi-
ous presence, as from the breath of a pestilence’.11 When rework-
ing the story for cinema, however, it seems that director Edgar G.
Ulmer was not too concerned about Pluto. In February 1934 he
worked on the story draft with mystery writer Peter Ruric, who
then produced the completed script.12 The film was scheduled
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That’s not quite fair to Mr Poe, either, because outside of the title
and the fact that a black cat does stalk around every once in a while,
this is not the story your customers may have thrilled to in their read-
ing days. Take full advantage of the exploitation possibilities and
your fans’ love of the Karloff–Lugosi brand of horrors, and sell it fast.
It won’t hold up on a long run.16
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105
106
107
108
house has a mouth, then it is the door’.31 In the case of The Black
Cat, the front door does function in this fashion; the boundary
between sacred and profane is breached as the group enter the
property. They leave behind the safety of the outside world and
enter a realm of satanic ritual and sadistic torture. Joan and Peter
do not leave until after the deaths of everyone around them;
Poelzig’s property swallows them up. The doors are locked as they
enter and the couple only escape at the film’s conclusion when the
house explodes.
As the bedraggled company are ushered into the house,
Poelzig awakens in his boudoir, a room intersected by oversized
and angular steel struts. Shadowed in darkness, and veiled by the
gauze draped over the four-poster bed frame, Poelzig slowly sits
up in bed. He switches on a small bedside light that illuminates
the room but casts his own body in even deeper shadow. Silently,
he leaves the room and goes to greet his guests. Poelzig’s slow and
stiff initial movements reference the Monster in Frankenstein and
the resurrection of Imhotep in The Mummy, yet horror film fans
may be breathing a sigh of relief, for the architecture of the build-
ing makes clear that Joan and Peter have not mistakenly stum-
bled upon a traditional old dark house. Art and design historians
know better, however: as Joseph Rosa reveals in his study of con-
temporary cinema, there is a long-standing relationship between
modern houses and evil characters in film:
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110
111
Figure 5.2 ‘I wanted to have her beauty always’: Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris
Karloff) reveals his favourite dead female exhibit, Karen Werdegast
(Lucille Lund) in The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer). Her husband, Vitus
Werdegast (Bela Lugosi), is not pleased.
112
long blonde hair, set in waves, stands straight up at the roots, yet
she is utterly still. Deborah Jermyn has argued in relation to con-
temporary Hollywood cinema that the ‘female corpse becomes
such a disruptive presence in the text that any accusations of
mere salaciousness are made redundant’; certainly in this case the
scopophilic potential of the exhibit is undermined by the corpse’s
incorporation into a ghoulish and necrophiliac set design.35
Lit up in stark opposition to the shadowy darkness of the base-
ment, Karen and her fellow female corpses are unsettling and
bizarre museum pieces. Poelzig’s dead women hang suspended,
the shadows hiding any structural support and giving the impres-
sion that the bodies float outside time and space. These two
scenes contain no real narrative impetus. Poelzig’s initial sortie
lacks purpose, while Werdegast’s discovery of his embalmed wife
only reinforces his hatred towards a man he has already sworn to
kill. Nonetheless, these moments are deeply disturbing and by far
the most uncanny passages of the film; it is noticeable that the
set design turns to the extremes of cinematic expressionism to
achieve this effect. Much of The Black Cat revolves around the
relationship between set design and horror, and Poelzig’s col-
lection of cadavers takes the artistic theme in the realms of the
unreal, transforming the archetypal horror dungeon into a bizarre
and unsettling gallery space.
On discovering the death of his wife, Werdegast elects to play
a game of chess with Poelzig, with Joan as the prize (Figure 5.3).
The game takes place in the open-plan living room, the two men
leaning toward the circular high-gloss black table, and teetering on
the edge of tubular metal chairs that echo Marcel Breuer’s famous
B3/Wassily design for Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus.36 The
design of the room includes long, horizontal ribbon windows, noted
above, that owe more than a little to Le Corbusier’s Villa ‘Le Lac’
and his new form of architecture.37 This design is subverted slightly
for its horror setting: the influx of light is tempered by long curtains
of white gauze. Even the most modern of horror homes requires
its dark corners. The chess set that the two men play with is ornate
and expensive-looking, but the wooden box that holds its contents
has been deeply and roughly cut into, creating a set of jagged let-
ters whose message cannot be deciphered. These markings, while
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Figure 5.3 Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) challenges his enemy Vitus
Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) to a game of chess, with Joan Alison (Julie Bishop)
as the prize in The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer).
they are shown in only one or two shots, add a ghastly punctum to
proceedings; they are a detail that once seen draws the spectator
into a moment of appalling contemplation and causes them to
question the defacement of the box. While the chess set and the
gallery of cadavers serve to disconcert, the narrative itself dissolves
into a series of vignettes with only the loosest sense of causality to
advance the plot. Soon after the chess game, the local gendarmerie
arrive at the house to investigate the accident, and a lengthy (and
very jolly) dialogue-driven scene unfolds that has no further bearing
on the plot. Scenes do not build in the classical Hollywood sense;
as the daily New York paper The Sun commented, ‘the less closely
you look at its plot the more chance you have of enjoying it. It won’t
stand much inspection’.38 For example, later in the film Joan will
faint again and when she awakens she will find herself in the com-
pany of Madame Karen Poelzig, Werdegast’s daughter (for Poelzig
has married his stepdaughter, after murdering her mother, who
shares the same name). With a crown of waist-length frizzy golden
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115
Dracula, Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mummy. The Black
Cat’s musical director Heinz Roemheld, who reportedly used a
50-piece orchestra to score the film, drew on a number of com-
posers, including Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Schumann, Bach,
Brahms and Beethoven.41 Like Poe’s own stories, classical music
was in the public domain and therefore free to use, but Roemheld
insists that Ulmer stipulated a classical score, ‘partly because
Ulmer was portraying the satanic character in the story, Hjalmar
Poelzig, as an arbiter elegantiarum – possessing refined taste’, lend-
ing what William H. Rosar describes as ‘an air of sophistication or
class to his film’.42 Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde before it, The Black
Cat then uses Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D Minor’ to create
an intellectual atmosphere of horror, its effect so powerful that
it was repeated again the following year in next Karloff–Lugosi
horror vehicle, The Raven.43
Evening arrives, and Poelzig prepares a black mass to sacrifice
Joan. The sequence begins as Poelzig’s congregation gathers in the
living room. He wears the garments of the High Priest, a long black
loose robe with voluminous sleeves and contrasting cuffs and neck,
a rope is loosely tied at his waist to gather together the material (but
which also signals his role as executioner); around his neck rest two
pieces of jewellery, a simple five-pointed star and a long chain com-
posed of links. The robes are segmented with sharp diagonal lines
in the white piping of the gown. Poelzig’s make-up, created by Jack
P. Pierce, is a white-powdered face in sharp contrast to his large
black eyebrows, which in turn stand out against his grey receding
hairline. Heavy black eye make-up and whitened lips then comple-
ment each other and suggest the walking dead. He slips across the
Bakelite floor; his smartly attired guests slowly follow as he moves
towards the camera. A spatial dislocation then occurs; a straight cut
from the modernist living room goes directly into a room built for
the black mass. While Poelzig’s living and sleeping quarters would
not look out of place at Walter Gropius’s office at the Dessau
Bauhaus, the hidden ritual room take on a baroque sensibility, the
Bauhaus aesthetic overtly refracts the iconography of the old dark
house while keeping the function the same: the property is littered
with trap doors, hidden rooms and secret passageways.44 The rit-
ual room is spatially and stylistically disconnected from the rest of
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the house and is built as a theatre set, highly artificial and painted
entirely black. Vases of drooping and dejected lilies hang from the
walls and silver girders provide structural support in the enclosed,
claustrophobic space. Its hand-crafted fakery is paramount to the
effect, harking back to the painted expressionist sets of Wiene
and Paul Wegener in the Weimar: it is here, in the flat surfaces
and painted depths, that the horror lies, echoing Myron Meisel’s
assertion that Ulmer’s set design is so powerful, that ‘a few sticks of
wood in primary shapes, dressed with a modicum of essential props,
when photographed in shadows that respect no natural light, can
create a world cognizant of the legitimacy of nightmare’.45
Similarly, the following moments combine the fantastical style
of Caligari and Genuine with Faust (1926), where the command-
ing figure of Poelzig becomes akin to Emil Jannings’ Mephisto.
A giant broken crucifix sits upon a platform, and its crossed shape
provides an ideal lectern for Poelzig’s satanic incantations. He
lifts his hands to his face and covers his eyes; a panning wide angle
reveals his congregation changing into hooded black ceremonial
robes. The ceremony begins: with a chillingly impassive face,
Poelzig begins his Latin chant. He raises his hands to the (black
painted) skies and his congregation flock around his pulpit, while
the flat black background, the silver girders literally pointing up
to the sky and the twisted crucifix – revealed as a double cross –
creates an occult setting (Figure 5.4). Five women kneel down in
front of the altar and drop their robes to reveal the same cotton
white dresses worn by the cadavers in the gallery.
The action then moves to Joan’s bedroom, where she is forcibly
held down by two women and dressed in sacrificial garments before
being dragged to the altar, her desperate screams echoing in the
room. On witnessing the diabolical congregation, Joan faints once
more, conveniently draping herself over the centre of the crucifix.
Poelzig moves slowly towards her inert body, delicately brushing
aside the gauzy fabric of her puffed sleeves, and tracing the con-
tours of her skin. The tactility is sickening, an awareness that at any
moment this tenderest of touches will transform into murderous
brutality. At that moment, one of the congregation turns around to
look towards the back of the room (at what, we never learn), screams
and faints. Distracted, Poelzig tends to his flock, while Werdegast
117
Figure 5.4 High Priest Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) presides over his
Black Mass in The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer).
and Thamal liberate Joan from the crucifix. As she wakes up, she
informs Werdegast that his daughter is still alive, but his sorrow
quickly comes as he finds Karen on the slab in the dungeon.
Poelzig arrives, dashes Joan to the floor and tries to strangle
Werdegast, beginning the final and inevitable physical confron-
tation between the two men. Like so many of 1930s horror films,
The Black Cat concludes with two men bound up in an intimate and
bloody dénouement, echoing White Zombie, Werewolf of London and
The Ghoul, to name but a few. This film is more overtly sadistic and
horrible than most though, perhaps channelling the gruesome pow-
ers of Poe. Werdegast straps Poelzig to an outsized torture rack,
chanting ‘how does it feel to hang on your own embalming rack
Hjalmar?’. In a moment of pure homoeroticism, Werdegast tears
off Poelzig’s clothes to the sounds of the sempre forte ed agitati sec-
tion from Liszt’s ‘Sonata in B Minor’, revealing his thin and sunken
chest. Wild-eyed and wild-haired (always a sign in the 1930s that a
character has lost his mind), Werdegast grins maniacally as he grabs
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120
121
D oes the 1930s British horror film exist? Not according to Ian
Conrich, who argues ‘there was in fact no British horror cin-
ema of the 1930s’.1 Conrich is not alone, as several accounts of this
period of British cinema dismiss its horrific possibilities, citing
censorship issues and cultural taboos.2 Peter Hutchings argues
that in the 1930s, ‘British cinema was strikingly deficient in hor-
ror production’, and although sympathetic to the 1930s ‘shocker’,
James Chapman similarly suggests that ‘a British “horror cinema”
did not really emerge until after the Second World War’.3 In such
a context, the title of this chapter might seem provocative but
it considers the production of British studio Gaumont-British
(G-B) during the 1930s in order to tell a different story.4 During
this period the director of production, Michael Balcon, used his
Continental contacts and aggressively marketed British pictures
to the US – part of the history of the internationalisation of British
film documented elsewhere.5 He was attempting to make G-B, in
John Sedgwick’s words, ‘a major player in the world film industry
and therefore to rival in scale and output the principal Hollywood
studios’, and to achieve this by ‘sustained access to and penetra-
tion of the American market’.6 Similarly, Tim Bergfelder posi-
tions Balcon as a producer keen to produce distinctive material
for international markets by combining the ‘fast-paced, fluid nar-
ration of American cinema with the mise-en-scène and visual crafts-
manship of Ufa’.7 Our interest in G-B and Balcon is thus because
he made a clutch of horror films as part of his strategy for achiev-
ing American success. The three G-B horror films discussed in
this chapter – The Ghoul (1933), The Clairvoyant (1935) and The
Man Who Changed His Mind (1936) – expose the diversity of horror
themes during this period; they depict old dark houses and raise
the dead in The Ghoul, display psychic abilities in The Clairvoyant
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and condemn the mad scientist in The Man Who Changed His
Mind. I am, however, equally concerned with their production
contexts and the idea of transatlantic exchange: The Clairvoyant
and The Man Who Changed His Mind were made by Gainsborough,
which had been associated with G-B since 1928, and Balcon was
the production director for both companies; indeed G-B released
all three films in America.8 These films star Boris Karloff, Claude
Rains and Ernest Thesiger, the former two on loan from Universal
to G-B; at the same time Balcon imported American stars such as
Fay Wray on short-term (often one-film) contracts.9 This chap-
ter explores the idea of transnational exchange in relation to the
formal and generic characteristics of the three films and locates
them within their censorship, production, distribution and
reception contexts. In the process it reveals much about British
perceptions of the American requirements of horror films, and
in the process, American ideas about the British film industry in
the 1930s.
123
Annette Kuhn has explored how, in the early 1930s, the British
government came under increasing pressure about children view-
ing films with ‘sordid themes’, and that in 1932 the issue coalesced
to become about ‘frightening films’.11 Dracula and Frankenstein
were not initially categorised as horror films and, as Kuhn reveals,
it wasn’t until the BBFC’s 1932 Annual Report that the ‘horror’
film was discussed for the first time. Having introduced in 1913
the ‘U’ for universal (suitable for all) and ‘A’ rating (more suit-
able for adults), in 1933 the BBFC introduced an ‘H’ for horrific
advisory rating to sit alongside the ‘A’ certificate and eventually
replaced the advisory certificate with a full ‘H’ certificate in 1937.12
In June 1933 London County Council offered a definition of hor-
ror that was to become standard: ‘one likely to frighten or horrify
children under the age of 16 years’.13 A number of American hor-
ror films had already been substantially cut or banned before the
introduction of the advisory certificate. Freaks and Island of Lost
Souls were banned, while Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Murders in the Rue
Morgue and Doctor X suffered huge cuts of 731 feet, 352 feet and 205
feet respectively.14 Paramount had evidently begun to self-censor
after Island of Lost Souls: for the UK release of Murders in the Zoo,
the shocking opening scene in which Lionel Atwill sews a man’s
mouth shut must have already been cut as there is no mention of
it from the censors or the trade show reviews in May 1933.15 After
the introduction of the advisory certificate, the BBFC did not
reject a single horror film. While this suggests that the advisory
rating allowed the censors to pass a broader range of films, it is
equally apparent that film producers were simply responding to
the increasingly strict censorship in Britain and America, cour-
tesy of the machinations of the BBFC and the newly empowered
Hays office.16
In The Ghoul, Egyptologist Professor Henry Morlant (Boris
Karloff) purchases a jewel of everlasting life. After his (apparent)
death, his nephew Ralph and niece Betty gather at his gloomy
mansion in Yorkshire to hear his will. Morlant then returns from
the dead to take back the jewel stolen from his tomb, however it
becomes apparent that Morlant did not in fact die – and so is not
resurrected. In the film’s conclusion, it is revealed, almost in pass-
ing, that Morlant was a victim of catalepsy, and was mistaken in
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his belief that he had returned from the dead. This is a key point
for the film censors. When reviewing The Ghoul’s scenario report,
the BBFC reader commented ‘though the appearance of Morlant
may be “horrific” for the moment, there is nothing in either scene
or dialogue that we are likely to take an exception to. The explana-
tion of his reappearance is quite plausible and there is no attempt
to portray the supernatural’.17 By ‘explaining away’ the supernatural
with catalepsy, The Ghoul is able to explore other avenues of hor-
ror, namely bodily violence. This is evident about an hour into the
film: Morlant has returned from the dead, found the jewel and gone
to his tomb to pray to the god Anubis. He rips open his shirt and
carves a ritualistic symbol into his own body as a sacrificial gesture,
blood streaming down his chest. Yet when The Ghoul was submit-
ted to the BBFC on 14 July 1933 it was passed without deletions and
with certificates ‘A’ for ‘adult’ and the advisory ‘H’ for ‘horrific’.18
In The Clairvoyant, Maximus (Claude Rains) and his wife Rene
(Fay Wray) perform a music-hall clairvoyance act, but when Max
sees a sultry woman, Christine Shaw, in the audience, his real
psychic powers ignite with catastrophic results. The Clairvoyant’s
producers had a straightforward run with the censors, but it did
encounter a few early issues. G-B submitted Ernst Lothar’s origi-
nal book to the BBFC in December 1934, stating their intention
to film it. An extensive report followed, focusing in depth on the
book, and concluding ‘this story is in my opinion suitable for pro-
duction as a film’.19 Yet, when the film scenario was submitted two
months later, the disgruntled censor commented, ‘this play does
not follow the book story at all’, and then, while pointing out that
it is ‘a strong drama’, demanded two, potentially loaded changes:
that ‘no reference should be made to the Carlton Club’ and that
because ‘the dramatic words and action of Counsel recall the trial
of Christ’ some dialogue must be modified.20 It is interesting to
see that politics and religion remain so important: the long-estab-
lished Conservative gentlemen’s club is excised from a spiritualist
script, while the writings of Matthew and Luke are removed to
avoid offending Christian organisations. The Clairvoyant was then
submitted on 22 May 1935, passed ‘A’ with no deletions, suggesting
that its modifications and emphasis on melodrama outweighed its
more horrific elements.21
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The Ghoul and The Clairvoyant may have had relatively painless
interactions with the censors but the passage of The Man Who
Changed His Mind’s from scenario to finished film was far more
complicated. The original synopsis for The Man Who Lived Again
(its original title) was submitted to the BBFC on 11 October 1935.
In the synopsis, the character Nagy murders Orlok and disposes
of his body in an acid bath. Nagy then murders a police inspector
and brings his dead dog back to life with an artificial electronic
heart installed by Professor Manton. Nagy is executed for mur-
der, and the professor fits an artificial heart in Nagy’s corpse, res-
urrecting him in time to admit he murdered the inspector, thus
freeing the police’s main suspect. The first reader rejected this
synopsis, suggesting that this was ‘a “horror” film if ever there was
one. In view of Mr Short’s decision on such subjects, I consider it
unsuitable for production in this country’.22 The second reader is
equally disgusted, commenting:
this story comes under the criticisms of ‘horror’ films made by the
President at Cardiff. I consider the methods used to destroy the bod-
ies revolting, and I do not think it is a pleasant idea to hand over the
body of a hanged man for experimental purposes – in my opinion this
story could never be suitable for production as a film.23
Further notes were added six days later. The censor and ‘J.B.W’
interviewed ‘Mr Meslie and Mr Kurt Siodmak’, whereupon the
writers explained that they did not want to make a ‘horror’ film,
but a psychological story. Accordingly, they planned to revise
and resubmit the synopsis.24 Siodmak, famous for (among other
things) creating Larry Talbot’s The Wolf Man in the 1940s, worked
for G-B from 1934 to 1937 and was clearly already writing horror
stories before moving to Hollywood. The synopsis was revised on
22 October with the murders completely deleted. Script examiner
Miss N. Shortt commented that ‘the story remains the same with
the elimination of the chief horrors. Providing the actual resus-
citation of the dead body is more inferred than shown, I think
there is now no objection to the story being produced as a film’.25
The final screenplay was credited to English writers Lawrence
du Garde Peach, Sidney Gilliat (the latter best known for his
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127
a ‘very good sir’ and delivery boys referring to all and sundry as
‘guv’nor’. But there is more to the representation of national iden-
tity than colloquialisms and pertinent props. This chapter now
considers how Britishness is marked within the formal qualities
of the films, arguing that while it occurs in the locations and set-
tings, what is intriguing is the quite different and unusual ways
in which each film handles ‘authentically’ British moments, and
places them within broader discursive patterns of European and
American cinema.
In The Ghoul, cousins Betty and Ralph drive up to Yorkshire
to Morlant Manor, an archetypal old dark house whose unpleas-
antness is signalled by Betty’s friend Miss Chaney’s exclamation,
‘what a horrible house! I wish I was back home in bed’. There they
discover family secrets, dark corridors and abandoned rooms, and
when Morlant (eventually, inevitably) returns from the dead, the
spaces of the gothic house become an integral part of the narra-
tive drive. Sadly, the character of Morlant is woefully and unim-
aginatively underused: he spends most of his time entering and
exiting doors at either side of the imposing staircase, staggering
down corridors and peering into empty rooms. This is contrasted
with the bland ‘adventures’ of Betty and Ralph, who also aimlessly
wander around the neglected property. They survey abandoned
bedrooms, build fires in the neglected fireplaces of damp sitting
rooms and spend a lot of time being baffled as to what to do next.
In this, the set up of The Ghoul is faithful in its mimicry of the
1920s American old dark house film; it follows the same conceit
where the plot initially appears to be supernatural but succumbs
to logical explanation when Morlant is revealed to be alive. But
this is arguably also where its Britishness emerges, as these ‘old
dark house’ narratives can be understood as emanating from the
nineteenth-century gothic fictions of British writers such as Ann
Radcliffe, with her decaying castles and ultimate recourse to
rationalism. There is also an added transatlantic dimension: two
years earlier, English director James Whale directed The Old Dark
House for Universal, a horror adaptation of English writer J.B.
Priestley’s thriller Benighted (1928). Described by Kinematograph
Weekly as ‘Universal goes British!’, it may have been an American
production but it featured an almost entirely British cast, including
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The Ghoul’s Boris Karloff and Ernest Thesiger.27 Indeed, the cast’s
seeming obsession with tea-drinking annoyed American co-star
Gloria Stuart (who went on to star in The Invisible Man with Claude
Rains), who complained that the English were ‘clannish’ and ‘had
tea at eleven and four, the whole English cast and Whale, and they
never once asked me or Melvyn [Douglas] to join them’.28
Kim Newman points out that in 1933, the filmmakers could
have seen only a couple of American horror talkies, and as a result
some of the ‘eccentricities’ of the film relate to genre expectations
of the time, that ‘like The Old Dark House, it owes more to The
Cat and the Canary or The Bat than Dracula or even The Mummy’.29
While the old dark house is central to its construction, the film
has more connections with Frankenstein and The Mummy than
perhaps Newman acknowledges, and it is here that its American
qualities (or aspirations) are most obvious. There is a clear expec-
tation that The Ghoul’s audience will have seen Frankenstein and
The Mummy; as The Times noted upon its release, Karloff ‘has
made a great reputation for himself in Hollywood as a player of
parts in which a note of horror dominates’.30 Several scenes are
organised around this expectation, including Morlant’s botched
attack on Miss Chaney, a weak repetition of the Monster’s assault
on Frankenstein’s fiancée Elizabeth. Miss Chaney stands alone at
the French windows in the library, looking out into the garden
for her intended beau, Aga Dragore. Morlant walks up behind her
and grasps at her neck but, apparently without reason, he then
walks away. Chaney turns and screams only when the door slams
behind him. Such staging is symptomatic of the representation of
Morlant. He fails to arouse fear in the characters, instead stalking
the house unnoticed and unable to interact. If his victims do not
know that he exists, how can he frighten the audience?
Morlant’s resurrection, 46 minutes into the film, is likewise
indebted to The Mummy, a fact identified by the American press,
with one reviewer describing the film as ‘a fast-moving exciting
piece, which is “horror” to whatever extent one is susceptible to
cinematic horror’, and that the film is ‘virtually The Mummy redi-
vivus’.31 The very small movements of the Egyptian mummifica-
tion casket signal Morlant’s return. A single hand slowly pushes
129
the casket lid up. An exterior shot depicts a full moon casting
light over the entrance to the tomb, and the door slowly opens.
There is silence as Morlant leaves the tomb, mirroring the silence
of the mummy when it is first resurrected. Morlant then discov-
ers that his jewel of eternal life has been stolen, and the follow-
ing close-up emphasises his face. As an aged professor, Morlant
doesn’t require particularly extensive facial make-up, but his vis-
age is a work of art: it has the texture of crumpled paper and the
unpleasant tightness of badly burned skin (Figure 6.1). His heavy
brow and bushy black eyebrows overshadow his eyes to the extent
that they appear to recede entirely into the back of his head. This
was noted in the reviews, a writer commenting on Morlant’s
‘deeply furrowed face, his eyes veritably in pits, his whole body
confounded almost beyond description – that is Karloff’.32 Jack P.
Pierce was not on hand for The Ghoul though – in a film awash with
émigré technicians, including cinematographer Günther Krampf
and art director Alfred Junge – German artist Heinrich Heitfield
transformed Karloff into Morlant. When the Picturegoer went on
130
a set visit during the shooting of the film in April 1933, writer P.L.
Mannock described the makeover:
131
into the night, his eyes open wide in surprise. He silently backs
away into the shadows of the room and then tiptoes towards a
table stacked with towers of books. Having selected a tome, he
stands tilted at a 45-degree angle, holding aloft an address book
with an expressive flourish that would not be out of place in
Orlacs Hände (1924). The camera lingers upon Thesiger’s body and
privileges his exaggerated facial expressions; at the same time
Karloff, who (besides being off-screen presumed dead for over
half the film) is abandoned to wide-angle long shots and flat static
spaces.
The final moments of The Ghoul prove to be an uneven mix of
The Mummy and ‘old dark house’ narratives. When Morlant slits
his chest open the statue moves – yet again mirroring the final
moments of The Mummy – but the supernatural is revealed to be
a feint, carried out by a dastardly confidence trickster who has
posed as the local helpful parson. In The Mummy, Frank and
Muller are frozen by the monster’s powers, and can only look on
as Anckesenamon calls upon the power of Isis to crumble the
mummy into dust. The Ghoul is rather less powerful. Morlant
faints and Ralph and the fake parson argue. Dragore shoots at
Ralph and Betty and then fights Ralph. The fistfight is utterly
underwhelming, something apparent to the American director T.
Hayes Hunter even as he filmed the scenes. In a second visit to
the set, the Picturegoer watched Hunter film repeated takes of the
fight between the actors Harold Huth (Dragore) and Anthony
Bushell (Ralph). Privately, Huth claimed that he had been made
to fall over 43 times alone in the previous 24 hours. According to
the Picturegoer, the scene was rather difficult:
‘Now you guys! This is no pink tea’ exhorted ‘Happy’ Hunter, domi-
nating everybody. ‘All right, turn’ em over’. Strenuously, grasping and
snarling, the two men grappled fiercely, stumbling and hitting . . . ‘I’m
afraid that’s no good’ was the director’s comment. ‘Just a couple of
tame wild cats.’36
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133
also in the audience and gazes sadly at Max as he sits down heavily
at the corner of the stage and removes his blindfold. But as the
black cloth falls from his eyes the scene becomes invested with
supernatural power, a strong white light builds in intensity until
Max’s face shines bright white (Figure 6.2). He gazes at Christine
and in close up as she returns his gaze without a shadow of a smile.
The humiliated fake psychic and the sad woman are united in a
single look and the psychic connection is complete. In a series
of shot-reverse-shots, Max becomes suddenly invigorated, pro-
ducing prophecy after prophecy and demonstrating true psychic
ability. He then stumbles, ‘I see – I see’ before falling to floor.
He remains in a trance until Rene returns to him, and Christine’s
bewitching spell is broken. Like The Ghoul, The Clairvoyant then
leaves behind London for Yorkshire. Unlike Betty and Ralph,
preoccupied with tiptoeing around Morlant manor, Max has the
more down-to-earth premonition of a coal mining accident at the
Humber Shaft. Max travels to the mine and speaks passionately
Figure 6.2 On-stage in the music hall, Maximus (Claude Rains) experiences
his first real psychic premonition in The Clairvoyant (1934, Maurice Elvey).
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135
136
137
Haslewood. Dick warns her not to work with Laurience, who has
a terrible reputation, but his efforts are in vain as Clare blithely
dismisses his protection and boards a horse-drawn carriage to
Laurience’s house.
The carriage pulls up some distance from Laurience’s neglected
property. It is shrouded in heavy shadow, the trees grow peril-
ously close to the building and weeds choke the pillars that frame
the grand doorway. The inhabitants of the house have clearly
turned their backs on the outside world, a fact emphasised by
the opaque white fabric that covers the windows: no one can see
out, and no one can see in. The manipulation of the gothic sud-
denly becomes less arch: Clare is frightened as she is denied her
request to be taken right to the door, and the driver abandons
her. As she rings the doorbell, a crosscut reveals an empty hall
bereft of adornment. Clayton, a small, thin man in a wheelchair,
answers the door and introduces himself as Laurience’s assist-
ant. In Clayton, who is regularly experimented on by Laurience,
the mad scientist narrative makes its first inroads into the film,
Within moments of meeting Clare, Clayton verbally marks him-
self as monstrous, lingering with some relish on his description of
his ‘intercranial cyst’ and remarking ‘most of me is dead, the rest
of me is damned. Laurience manages to keep the residue alive’.
Clare meets Laurience in his laboratory; he emerges from behind
a bench of test tubes and beakers, white chalk covering the back
of his jacket and his grey hair knotted and wild. While his dubious
character has already been hinted at, his horrific nature is mani-
fested for a moment in the set design. He looks into an elaborate
gilt mirror, scowling and showing his teeth, his visage paralleled
with the face of a gargoyle that is sculpted into the mirror sur-
round: the man and the monster aligned in the glass (Figure 6.3).
Having met Laurience, Clare retires to her spartan bedroom high
in the eaves and sits on an oversized wooden four-poster bed,
brushing out her long blonde hair. There is a sudden noise and
Clare looks up, brush suspended in her hand. A moment passes
before she realises that Dick has followed her to the house and is
throwing gravel at her window. He promptly attempts to climb
the ivy that winds up the wall of the house, only to fall off and
be chased by Laurience’s dog. The film’s parodic gothic form
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139
his research. Laurience, with his heavy, dark eyes, wrinkled face
and wild white hair stares at Clare, her youth and beauty reflected
in her luminescent skin and shiny blonde hair. He begs Clare to
understand, ‘I understand, I’m old, but – I could take a new body,
a young body, and keep my old brain! And you too, you won’t
always be young – I offer you eternal youth, eternal loveliness’. He
then transfers his own mind into the body of Clare’s boyfriend
Dick, and the desires of the mad scientist are revealed.
The formal analysis of the three films reveals very different
approaches to defining Britishness in horror film. They are united
in using British locations and settings as markers of national iden-
tity, but it is in their interactions with European and American
contexts that discrepancies occur. The Ghoul uses the 1920s pop-
ularity of the old dark house, drawing on its manifestations in
British literature and American cinema. It employs émigré techni-
cians, who give the production design an expressionist tone, and
trades extensively on British actor Karloff’s American film roles.
The Clairvoyant similarly employs actors already established in the
American horror film industry but undermines audience expecta-
tions by creating a film immersed in British heritage. Indeed, while
the supernatural ability of the psychic may mark the film as horrific,
the mining disaster is one of the darkest and most sombre moments
of all three films. Similar disjunctions occur in The Clairvoyant’s
production design, as it demands that its émigré technicians turn
to the moderne, popularised in contemporary American cinema. The
Man Who Changed His Mind parodies the gothic mode and discards
it for a straight American mad scientist narrative, and notably it is
the only film out of the three that had a good critical reception in
both the UK and US. This suggests that for a 1930s British horror
film to be internationally popular, its ‘Britishness’ must be quickly
discarded in favour of American tropes. Hence, the final section
of this chapter considers the films in light of their literal ‘transat-
lantic exchange’: Balcon’s desire to internationalise his films and
exploit the American market, the deals struck between individual
American cinemas and British studios, the transfer of American
and British actors between Hollywood and London and the criti-
cal reception of the three films.
140
I’m not trying in any way to alter the national character of our pic-
tures, merely to make them more readily acceptable to the point of
view of American entertainment.45
Michael Balcon, Director of Production at G-B,
Interviewed by the Observer film correspondent, May 1935
In 1933, the New York Times outlined the need for an increased
exchange of material between Hollywood and Elstree, partly
owing to ‘considerations evolving from the financial crisis and the
present economic conditions in the world at large’.46 It highlighted
G-B as an organisation with ‘its eyes wide open for the possibili-
ties of the American market’ and singled out I Was a Spy (1933),
Waltz Time (1933) and The Ghoul as crucial to the company’s bids
for American success. Balcon’s need for The Ghoul to have inter-
national appeal then generated interesting material in the critical
reception. It was filmed during April 1933 at G-B’s recently refur-
bished studios in Lime Grove, Shepherd’s Bush.47 It was trade
shown in the UK on 25 July and premiered at the Capitol cinema
in London on 7 August 1933 and then premiered at the Rialto in
New York in January 1934.48 In the UK, critics largely ignored
it. The Guardian did not review it, The Times mentioned it very
briefly as part of the influx of British cinema on London screens,
while the Observer provided a cursory six-line review of its regional
release over two months after its London premiere, in which it was
dismissed as a ‘muddled mystery story, which takes place mostly,
and leaves the audience entirely, in a fog’.49 This is fairly typical
of the response of the Guardian and Observer to horror films dur-
ing the 1930s; reviews of The Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein and
The Black Cat were first covered upon regional release, and almost
always in dismissive and disparaging tones.50 The fan magazine
the Picturegoer did offer a full review, but described it as ‘undoubt-
edly poor’, saying that the film concentrates ‘neither on the maca-
bre nor the melodramatic, but makes an entirely unsatisfactory
compromise between the two’, a charge to be laid against The
Clairvoyant two years later.51 To this extent, the UK broadsheet
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142
Perhaps the movies – cinemas, they are called in England – are the
most notable example of the American influence abroad. There are
practically no English motion pictures in England, so to speak. There
are a few companies, but out of every ten pictures advertised about
nine will be American-made built around American stars, or around
English stars who work in Hollywood. Motion picture theatres are
not plentiful – they haven’t the motion picture mind yet.64
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144
145
146
With its suggestions of The Mummy, the image of Karloff and the
body of a beautiful woman, it is unsurprising that The Ghoul then
‘did better business than anticipated’, Hart’s strategy producing
‘a highly effective seller for a none too hot picture’.83 Similarly, if
any of the exhibitors followed the suggestions of The Man Who
Changed His Mind’s American pressbook – which suggested pro-
curing a local chimpanzee and display him in a cage in the lobby
with a sign saying ‘IS THIS CHIMP IN HIS RIGHT MIND?’ –
public interest would probably be aroused.84 Without knowing
the box office takings for individual American cities, it is hard to
know how much impact, if any, the critical response had on actual
audience figures. It could well be that the lure of Boris Karloff in
The Ghoul and The Man Who Changed His Mind, and Claude Rains
and Fay Wray in The Clairvoyant was enough to get the punters
queuing at the cinema door.
This chapter has revealed that the combination of the hor-
ror genre and British filmmaking was not the easiest to sell in
the 1930s. The positioning of the three films as ‘horror’ led many
British newspapers simply to ignore or dismiss them. American
actors who performed in them were often indifferent to their
potential, while American film critics used them as a platform to
make fun of ‘Britishness’ and the British film industry as a whole,
reinforcing Hollywood’s status as the producer of gold-standard
cinema. Despite this, the material is valuable as it provides an
alternative way of thinking about the initial horror film cycle of
the 1930s. Balcon’s productions are a discrete body of films at
the centre of a fourfold moment in film history: the increasing
internationalisation of the British film industry, the interwar
transnational European émigré culture, the transatlantic passage
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148
149
150
The writer apologizes for the confusion of the last chapters. His
excuses are that the chronology in the script is none too clear, and
further that the elucidation of the events in the story was none too
easy. Aymar, as we have said, first came face to face with Bertrand
during the Pipcus affair, and though in our elaboration of the Galliez
script we went off the track in the last chapter, we intend to come
back to our duty in this one.7
Why should this one wolf be shut up for an individual crime when
mass crimes go unpunished? When all society can turn into a wolf and
be celebrated with fife and drum and with flags curling in the wind?
Why then shouldn’t this dog have his day too?8
151
the author was of medium height but peculiarly frail and graceful, with
mild blue eyes that seemed to reproach you. The other, the actor, was
short and roly-poly, with apple cheeks and the smile of a baby. They
spoke in such gentle tones that you had to lean close to hear them. In
the bright sun, it was hard to believe that one was Guy Endore, author
of Werewolf of Paris – the other Peter Lorre, murderer of M and dia-
bolic surgeon of Mad Love.12
152
153
154
the New York Times writing in 1941 that ‘in the field of jitters, the
Rialto is undoubtedly tops. A goose pimple is its trademark’.23 By
the 1930s Times Square was in serious decline, Prohibition and
the Depression wreaking havoc on what was ‘once a centre of
upmarket cultural consumption’.24 In February 1933, with a final
screening of Island of Lost Souls, bankrupt Paramount relinquished
ownership of the Rialto and handed over control to Arthur
Mayer, who as Tim Snelson and Mark Jancovich explain, posi-
tioned the Rialto’s programming in opposition to the post-1934
Hays Office:
Werewolf of London was the last screening at the Rialto before the
building was demolished in May 1935.26 Its significance emerges as
not only the first werewolf film, but in its relationship to censor-
ship and exhibition practices: it is the first film in this book to deal
at pre-production stage with the Hays office, it is then marketed
explicitly as a disreputable ‘horror film’ through its relationship
with the Rialto; it also played an important part in the cinema’s
exhibition history.
FOREIGN HORRORS
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156
157
158
159
Pierce framed his face with strips of long gray wolf hair. A set of
pointed fangs like a wolf’s were fitted over the natural teeth in Hull’s
lower jaw. His eyes were reduced to two-thirds normal size by past-
ing the corners tight. His upper lip was coated with absorbent cotton
and collodion which gave it a wrinkled appearance. His hands were
covered with hair and fitted with long claws. Six hours were needed
to don this make-up.36
160
We quite agree with you in the point that you raise that the picture
should not be unduly terrifying and we have eliminated from the
script any transvections into the animal, wolf, and our transvections
are merely from our normal players to people with hirsute tendencies
with naturally a pointing of the ears and noses and a lengthening of
the fingers, not dissimilar to what was done to the picture Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde.38
161
162
Figure 7.1 A first-person point of view shot: the viewer becomes the
werewolf as it climbs onto a balcony and prepares to attack in Werewolf of
London (1935, Stuart Walker).
163
Figure 7.2 Aunt Ettie (Spring Byington) screams into the camera as the
werewolf approaches in Werewolf of London (1935, Stuart Walker).
164
We see a girl of the poorer class walking down a dim street. She is
naturally a little frightened because of the neighbourhood and the
darkness of the street – the girl, being of the lower class, is wear-
ing a skirt which is not too lengthy, possibly having shrunk when
she herself washed it, being quite without money to send it to be
165
He knew when an attack was coming on. During the day he would
have no appetite. It was particularly the thought of bread and butter
that nauseated him. In the evening he would feel tense and both tired
and sleepless. Then he would arrange his window and lock his door,
and having taken his precautions, he would lie down. Frequently he
would wake in the morning, in bed, with no recollection of what
had happened at night. Only a wretched stiffness in his neck, a las-
situde in his limbs, that could come from nothing but miles of run-
ning, scratches on his hands and feet, and an acrid taste in his mouth
argued that he had spent the night elsewhere.47
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167
As with so many 1930s ‘mad scientist’ films, the final act of Werewolf
of London concentrates on concluding the monstrous homo-
social male narrative and restoring the heterosexual relationship.
Glendon leaves London and travels in secret to Lisa’s family home,
an imposing country manor, where he instructs the groundskeeper
to lock him up in a suitably cobwebbed crypt. Lisa and Paul also
arrive at the estate, whereupon the transformed Glendon breaks
out of the crypt, attacks Lisa and fights Paul, who recognises him
before he escapes once more. With a werewolf for a husband, Lisa
is legitimately able to fall into Paul’s arms. Glendon’s assault on Lisa
represents the proper dissolution of the ‘rectangular’ relationship:
the four characters are split evenly into two couples, Paul and Lisa
set as the heterosexual norm, Yogami and Glendon as the doomed
werewolves, set to pursue (to the death) their bestial homoerotic
bond. The fight to the death takes place as Glendon escapes Lisa’s
family home and sneaks back to his laboratory. He leans eagerly
over the marifisa as the final bud flowers, but his much longed-for
temporary respite from werewolfery is not to be: Yogami appears
and takes the sap for himself. Transformed, Glendon grabs him
and locks him into an intimate, violent embrace, their faces almost
touching. He then throttles Yogami, bends him backwards over
a bench, and tears at his blood-streaked face, while his victim
beats him in vain with a silver-tipped cane. The Tibetan assault is
reversed and the logic of Frankenstein comes into play: Yogami is
now the helpless victim assaulted by his own creation.
Glendon pins Yogami to the floor by his neck, killing him.
He then looks directly into the camera in an extreme close up:
at first, his face is still, then he whimpers and howls, his distress
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169
. . .men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at
the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the
contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be
reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neigh-
bour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also
someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him – to
use him sexually without his consent – to humiliate him, to cause his
pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. 54
170
Tinee is a staff writer pen name (matinee), and the many reviews
quoted from Tinee in this book are undoubtedly from a number of
different reporters. What is, however, particularly pleasant about
a Tinee review is the almost universal enjoyment of horror films
(as well as the very bad jokes – when reviewing Doctor X s/he puns
‘if you liked Dracula and White Zombie you’ll probably get a kick
from Doctor X. But don’t X-pect too much! Forgive me!’).61 While
171
many newspaper critics during this period not only disliked hor-
ror films but also refused to engage with them in any meaningful
way, Tinee can always be relied upon to delight at the new mon-
sters and to peruse the macabre depths to which the narratives
will go. As Tinee so thoroughly enjoys the horror cycle, it leads
me to wonder if the veil of anonymity afforded by the nom de
plume is what makes the horror film an acceptable pleasure to a
film critic during the 1930s. Consider Island of Lost Souls’ reception
(Chapter 2) and how Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times tied
himself in knots trying to dismiss the film while simultaneously
acknowledging its quality signifiers. This contemptuousness is
certainly still evident in Werewolf of London’s reception: Scheuer
of the Los Angeles Times and Andre Sennwald of the New York Times
managed only moderate approval, the former grudgingly describ-
ing it as ‘a good picture of its kind’, with the latter admitting it
was a ‘pretty valiant bit of gooseflesh melodrama’.62 And again,
as with Island of Lost Souls, many reviewers struggled to reconcile
the film’s intentionally horrific sensibilities with its possibili-
ties of being a good film. This is typified by the New York Herald
Tribune’s response, which admitted ‘strong nerves are needed to
cope with the Rialto’s new offering’ and criticised the plot (weak
with ‘too many loose ends’) and ‘stereotyped’ direction.63 This was
also the response of Monthly Film Bulletin and Film Daily, the latter
arguing that the acting ability of the cast made the film ‘better
than it actually is from a story standpoint’, but as a horror film
it ‘well acted and calculated to satisfy fans who like this kind of
hoke’.64
In 1935 Universal released four horror films in quick succes-
sion: The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Werewolf of London, The Raven
and Bride of Frankenstein. The last was a prestige production with
a respected director and a popular lead actor. Its A-picture status
is evident in production statistics: it took 46 days to shoot and
ran more than $100,000 over budget at $400,000, more than
double Werewolf of London’s $195,000.65 The differences in budget
and production were not the only points of contrast between
the two films. The British settings of the werewolf picture, so
important to the middle section of the film, are also lacking when
held up for comparison with Whale’s film, which was made by a
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173
let off anything. Scarcely recovered from the horrors of the recent
Bride of Frankenstein, they were scared all over again yesterday when
Werewolf of London had its premiere at that theatre’.71 It appears
that Bride of Frankenstein was the primary draw, and that audiences
were not sufficiently recovered to stomach a second horror film
(from the same studio) so soon afterwards.
The unfortunate comparison between the two films is exem-
plified by Variety’s reviews, published side by side on 15 May 1935.
Variety describes Glendon’s story as ‘neither sufficiently gripping
nor more than moderately shocking’, adding that the ‘name value
is slight’, and ‘the picture is a distinct takeoff on Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde. But without the kick of the original’.72 In contrast, Whale’s
picture is ‘an imaginative and outstanding film’, and ‘one of those
rare instances where no-one can review it, or talk about it, with-
out mentioning the cameraman, art director and score composer
in the same breath as the actors and director’.73 Valerie Hobson
featured in both – playing Lisa in the werewolf film and Elizabeth
in the Frankenstein film – having flown over from England on
a four-picture contract to Universal.74 But rather than being an
asset that elevated the B picture, she performed weakly in both
films, described by Variety as a ‘comely girl with few opportuni-
ties’ as Lisa, and ‘not at all convincing’ as Frank’s fiancée in Bride
of Frankenstein.75
The New York Times hinted at ‘a change in plans’ that had
brought Bride of Frankenstein forward to replace Mister Dynamite
(1935) in the release schedule, but perhaps the simultaneous release
date suggests a lack of faith in Werewolf of London itself.76 In being
released with Bride of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London can be seen
as a sacrificial gesture for the film critics who, by 1935, had tired
not only of Universal’s output but also of the film cycle as a whole.
Whether planned or not, this is certainly what happened. Bride
of Frankenstein was very positively received yet Time described
Walker’s film as a ‘nasty little fantasy’ that was ‘sillier than Bride
of Frankenstein’ and ‘more alarming for small children than Mark of
the Vampire’.77 Picturegoer was entirely venomous, shrieking about ‘a
thoroughly preposterous story, which presents you with macabre
thrills without attempting either to justify them or make them
really convincing. This is an example of the “horror for horror’s
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175
176
I first started writing about horror films when I was a PhD stu-
dent at Lancaster University. My thesis explored how the writ-
ings of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and Sigmund Freud could be
brought together to illuminate the aesthetic experience of horror
cinema. I loved the theoretical incursion into film genre, the cool
intellectualism of reading demanding material and ruminating
upon what it could bring to my film analysis. Yet when reflecting
on this, what really stands out to me is how a theoretical study
can be researched and written anywhere. In my case, it often was.
Because I lived some distance from my university office, my thesis
was written in pubs, cafés, at other people’s houses (I never worked
well at home), on trains, and on occasion in the bars of airports.
Theory is an eminently portable methodology, and it reflected my
needs and interests at the time. There was a single trip to the BFI
National Archive in London, to use its research viewing facilities,
and a couple of slightly aimless visits to the British Library Boston
Spa in West Yorkshire, where I wandered around randomly pick-
ing up bound issues of Moving Picture World, not really sure what
I was doing. Throughout, I remained entranced by theory, my
research turned inward, forming part of a discourse around the
limits of psychoanalysis for understanding the address of horror
cinema.
The sealed-off world of my graduate study will probably come
as a surprise to those of you who have read After Dracula and
who (I hope) sense my passion for researching and interpreting
the past. While I still champion the importance of psychoanal-
ysis for understanding some of the mechanisms of horror cin-
ema, this book is as much a cultural history, an excursion into
not only film texts but also film intertexts. Much of the shift in
my methodological approach can be mapped in relation to how
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178
179
180
181
182
183
of the 1930s – could not have been achieved without the devel-
opments in online film access and archival practice. If we return
to the assumptions about genre unpicked in the book’s introduc-
tion, we can see how digital transformations hugely affect our
ability to ‘do’ film history; it brings to mind Christine Gledhill’s
comment that ‘genres are fictional worlds, but they do not stay
within fictional boundaries: their conventions cross into cultural
and critical discourse, where we – as audiences, scholars, students
and critics – make and remake them’.6 I’m at pains here not to
sweepingly suggest that everything is now available for the taking
in our brave new online world, but it cannot be denied that the
sheer amount of material freely and instantly available to us today
fundamentally changes the way we (re)view horror film history.
It certainly offers endless opportunities to make and remake our
own canons, and it is very much hoped that After Dracula will pro-
vide food for thought as you create your own.
184
INTRODUCTION
1. Dracula and Frankenstein release dates taken from Tom Weaver et al.,
Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946, 2nd edn (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2007), pp.21, 38. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde premiered at
the Rivoli Theatre in New York on 31 December 1932 and went on gen-
eral release on 2 January 1932. ‘Production credits on “ten best”’, Film
Daily, 11 January 1933, p.10.
2. Steve Neale, ‘Questions of genre’, Screen 31/1 (1990), p.50.
3. The 1931–6 demarcation appears in Andrew Tudor, Monsters and
Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Wiley
Blackwell, 1989), p.24; Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading
Ladies: Gender, Sexuality and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New
York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996), p.1 and Robert Spadoni,
Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror
Genre (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), p.2. Reynold
Humphries includes 1939–41 in the first cycle, arguing that the three
years are ‘both a renewal and a widening of the concerns manifest in
the films produced up until 1936’. The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941:
Madness in a Social Landscape (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006),
p.viii. David J. Skal views the first cycle as lasting 20 years, begin-
ning in Germany in 1919 and ending in America with Universal’s Son
of Frankenstein in 1939. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror
(London: Plexus, 1993), p.206.
4. Tom Weaver et al. comment on Laemmle’s departure that ‘the various
management teams that succeeded him were a corps of faceless bank-
ers and producers who, unlike the reigning moguls of the other studios,
didn’t have the innate instinct for picturemaking’, Universal Horrors,
p.4.
5. The text of the 1930 Production Code is reproduced in Thomas
Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American
Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999),
pp.346–65. The terms of the 1934 enforcement were as follows: ‘any mem-
ber company of the MPPDA (all major studios) and any producer using
the distribution facilities of the majors (thus, any respectable independ-
ent) would be bound to process its product through the “Production
Code Administration” and acquire a stamped “Certificate of Approval”.
A violation of the rules would incur a fine of $25,000 for “disrupting the
185
186
24. Mae Tinee, ‘White Zombie, horror film, opens theatre’, Chicago Daily
Tribune 26 April 1932, p.11; ‘Schedules show cycle of “horror” pictures
continuing’, Film Daily, 1 August 1932, p.1.
25. Philip K. Scheuer, ‘Next season’s films on way’, Los Angeles Times, 12 June
1932, p.B11.
26. Mollie Merrick, ‘Hollywood in person’, Los Angeles Times, 16 December
1932, p.4.
27. ‘Variety bulletin’, Variety, 3 February 1933, p.5.
28. Annette Kuhn, ‘Children, “horrific” films and censorship in 1930s
Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22/2 (2002),
p.200.
29. Mark Jancovich, ‘Reviews’, Screen 48/2 (2007), p.262, emphasis original.
30. Jancovich, ‘Reviews’, p.263.
31. Christine Gledhill, ‘Rethinking genre’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda
Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2003), p.221.
32. Gledhill, ‘Rethinking genre’, p.221.
33. Jamie Sexton, ‘US “indie-horror”: Critical reception, genre construc-
tion and suspect hybridity’, Cinema Journal 51/2 (2012), pp.67–86; Tim
Snelson, ‘“From grade B thrillers to deluxe chillers”: Prestige horror,
female audiences, and allegories of spectatorship in The Spiral Staircase
(1946)’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 7/2 (2009), pp.173–88;
Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure: Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the
Video Nasties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Daniel
Martin, ‘Japan’s Blair Witch: Restraint, maturity and generic canons
in the British critical reception of Ring’, Cinema Journal 48/3 (2009),
pp.35–51; Russ Hunter, ‘“Didn’t you used to be Dario Argento?”: The
cult reception of Dario Argento’ in William Hope (ed.), Italian Film
Directors in the New Millennium (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press,
2010), pp.63–74.
34. Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street, Film Architecture and
the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p.11.
35. Klein, American Film Cycles, p.19.
36. Karen Hollinger, ‘The monster as woman: Two generations of Cat
People’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the
Horror Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996), pp.296–308;
Elizabeth Young, ‘Here comes the bride: Wedding gender and race in
Bride of Frankenstein’, Feminist Studies 17/3 (1991), 403–37.
37. George E. Turner, ‘Jinxed from the start: The Monkey’s Paw’, American
Cinematographer 66/11 November (1985), pp.35–40.
38. George E. Turner and Michael H. Price, Forgotten Horrors: Early Talkie
Chillers from Poverty Row (London: Yoseloff, 1979).
39. Gary D. Rhodes, ‘Fantasmas del cine Mexico: The 1930s horror film cycle
of Mexico’, in Steven Jay Schneider (ed.), Fear Without Frontiers: Horror
Cinema Across the Globe (Godalming: FAB Press, 2003), pp.93–103.
187
188
189
190
191
19. ‘First lady of the movies’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 27 November 1932,
p.D3.
20. ‘In black and white’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 November 1932, p.17;
‘Tailored pajamas’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 December 1932, p.25.
21. ‘Action heroines’, Los Angeles Times, 20 November 1932, p.12.
22. ‘Something NEW hits blasé Broadway’, Variety, 24 January 1933, p.22.
23. ‘Inside stuff - pictures’, Variety 17 January 1933, p.47.
24. ‘Horror cold, animals too’, Variety 7 February 1933, p.5.
25. ‘Screen notes’, New York Times, 3 January 1933, p.19; ‘Pictures for week
ending Jan. 27’, New York Times, 22 January 1933, p.X5. The Paramount-
Publix Corporation went into receivership at the end of January 1933 and
closed the Criterion Theatre, and on 1 February, gave up control of the
Rialto, transferring the film to the Brooklyn Paramount. ‘Screen notes’,
1 February 1933, p.13; ‘Rialto Theatre closes its doors’, New York Times, 2
February 1933, p.21; ‘Screen notes’, New York Times, 3 February 1933, p.21.
26. Rugh, ‘Vampire Bat’, Variety, 24 January 1933, p.19.
27. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative
History of Blacks in American Films, 3rd edn (Oxford: Roundhouse, 1994),
p.13.
28. Steven Jay Schneider, ‘Mixed blood couples: Monsters and miscege-
nation in U.S. horror cinema’, in Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas
L. Howard (eds), The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the
Literary Imagination (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2004), p.76.
29. Harry M. Benshoff, ‘Blaxploitation horror films: Generic reappropria-
tion or reinscription?’, Cinema Journal 39/2 (2000), p.47.
30. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, p.16.
31. Williams, H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies, p.166.
32. Angela M. Smith, Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror
Cinema (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), p.215.
33. Cecelia Ager, ‘Going places’, Variety, 24 January 1933, p.19.
34. Mae Tinee, ‘Chicago sees “Panther Girl” in first film’, Chicago Daily
Tribune, 29 December 1932, p.9.
35. Wood, ‘An introduction to the American horror film’, p.203.
36. Scheuer, ‘Eerie cinema proffered’, p.A7.
37. ‘May take censor to court on Isle of Lost Souls’, Film Daily, 9 January 1933,
pp.1, 3; ‘Passed after slashes’, Film Daily, 31 January 1933, p.2.
38. David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (London:
Plexus, 1993), p.171; Tom Johnson, Censored Screams: The British Ban on
Hollywood Horror in the Thirties (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), p.75;
James C. Robertson, The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action,
1919–1975 (London: Routledge, 1993), p.52.
39. Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film (Harlow: Longman, 2004), p.22.
According to surviving BBFC records, the cuts list ran as follows: Reel
3 - Remove ‘They’re vivisecting a human being - they’re cutting a man to
pieces’; Reel 4 - Remove the shots of men working a treadmill, and the
comment ‘Some of my less successful experiments’; Reel 8 - Remove all
192
193
194
195
196
2. There are many different versions of Vampyr in archives and available for
home viewing. In turn, academic writing on the film is based on the anal-
ysis of a number of different versions of the film. The original version of
this chapter was written in 2008 and published in January 2009 in Studies
in European Cinema; the analysis was based on a Region 1 DVD produced
by Image Entertainment released in 1998. The Image Entertainment
DVD is an amalgamation of several prints with dialogue dubbed in
German and intratextual writing in French and Danish. The Image
Entertainment DVD appears to be combined from two main versions,
‘an English-titled, German-language version’ held by the BFI in 16mm
and 35mm prints, and a second English-titled, German-language version,
‘distributed by Jorgen S. Jorgensen, Gloria Film’. David Rudkin, Vampyr
(London: BFI, 2005), p.28. The article was revised for After Dracula in
2012, and was based on the Martin Koerber restoration composed of
prints from Cineteca del commune di Bologna and Stiftung Deutsche
Kinemathek in Berlin, made available on the Eureka Entertainment
‘Masters of Cinema’ Region 2 DVD released in August 2008.
3. Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Issues in European cinema’, in John Hill and
Pamela Church Gibson (eds), World Cinema: Critical Approaches (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.56–64.
4. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), p.27.
5. Vincendeau, ‘Issues in European cinema’, p.57.
6. ‘Censor Objects to Joan of Arc’, Film Weekly, 22 October 1928, unpagi-
nated (courtesy of BFI Special Collections).
7. Ib Monty, ‘Carl Th. Dreyer: An Introduction’, in Jytte Jensen (ed.),
Carl Th. Dreyer (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), p.11.
8. Mordaunt Hall, ‘Poignant French film’, New York Times, 31 March 1929,
p.107.
9. Jean Drum and Dale D. Drum, My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films
of Carl Th. Dreyer (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000), p.142.
10. In their unsurpassed study of Dreyer’s entire body of work, the Drums
write that it was rumoured that Dreyer broke a contract with Société
Générale des Films, which he categorically denied, but ‘he would not
discuss what the problems were. In the fall of 1931 he brought a lawsuit
against the company in Paris and this no doubt furthered his reputation
among producers of being difficult and not altogether a safe director to
employ.’ My Only Great Passion, pp.145–46.
11. Rudkin, Vampyr, pp.18–19.
12. The protagonist is often called ‘Alan Gray’, ‘Allan Gray’ or ‘David Gray’.
Donald Skoller observes that David Gray is the character name, and
Alan Gray was used ‘in the Aryan version shown in Germany’. Dreyer in
Double Reflection: Translation of Carl Th. Dreyer’s Writings About the Film (Om
Filmen) (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton, 1973), p.98. De Gunzberg’s name is
spelled in a number of different ways. This chapter follows the spelling of
197
his name in the magazine Vogue, where he was Senior Fashion Editor for a
number of years. See ‘Fashion Department’, Vogue 161.5 May (1973), p.3.
13. Anon, ‘The Strange Adventure of David Gray’, Close Up 8/1 March (1931),
p.50; Herman G. Weinberg and Gretchen Weinberg, ‘An interview
with Baron de Gunzburg’, Film Culture, 32 (1964), pp.57–58.
14. Weinbergs, ‘An interview with Baron de Gunzburg’, p.57.
15. James C. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship
in Britain, 1896–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p.59; Tom Dewey
Matthews, Censored: The Story of Film Censorship in Britain (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1994), p.79.
16. Casper Tybjerg, ‘Waking life’, Sight and Sound 18/9 (2008), p.33.
17. Tom Weaver et al, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946,
2nd edn (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2007), pp.21–24.
18. Weinberg, ‘An interview with Baron de Gunzburg’, p.59.
19. Dreyer discusses his influences in Michael Delahaye, ‘Between Heaven
and Hell: Interview with Carl Dreyer’, Cahiers du cinéma in English 4
(1966), p.7. Ten years before Vampyr, Dreyer published a rhapsodic
essay on Sjöström’s Klostret I Sendomir/The Monastery of Sendomir (1920),
translated by Casper Tybjerg in his ‘Dreyer and the National Film in
Denmark’, Film History 13.1 (2001), p. 23.
20. Des O’Rawe, ‘The great secret: Silence, cinema and modernism’, Screen
47/4 (2006), p.399.
21. A Special Correspondent, ‘The pictures across the channel’, Observer, 8
January 1933, p.12. Boerge Trolle makes links between Dreyer, Epstein
and the French director René Clair, ‘The world of Carl Dreyer’, Sight
and Sound 25/3 Winter (1955–6), p.123.
22. See William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage (New York,
NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1968).
23. Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Garde
and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2007), p.20. For an exploration of avant-garde and
experimental film practices in Britain during the interwar period,
see Jamie Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2008).
24. Quoted in Drums, My Only Great Passion, p.151.
25. Robert Desnos, ‘Avant-garde cinema’, originally published in Documents
7 (1929). Reprinted in Paul Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and its Shadow:
Surrealist Writings on Cinema (London: BFI, 1978), p.37.
26. The French Surrealist Group, ‘Some surrealist advice’, originally pub-
lished in L’Age du Cinéma, 4–5, August–November (1951). Reprinted in
Paul Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on
Cinema (London: BFI, 1978), p.25.
27. Ian Christie, ‘The avant-gardes and European cinema before 1930’,
in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), World Cinema: Critical
Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.66.
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
Foreign affairs’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 2.1 (1982),
p.39.
11. Annette Kuhn, ‘Children, “horrific” films, and censorship in 1930s
Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22.2 (2002), p.199.
12. Tom Johnson, Censored Screams: The British Ban on Hollywood Horror in
the Thirties (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 1997), p.11.
13. Kuhn, ‘Children, “horrific” films, and censorship in 1930s Britain’,
pp.199–200.
14. James C. Roberston, The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in
Britain, 1896–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p.58.
15. Johnson, Censored Screams, p.88.
16. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors, p.59.
17. The Ghoul Synopsis, BBFC Scenario Report #130, 10 February 1933,
BFI Special Collections, London.
18. The Ghoul Synopsis, BBFC Scenario Report #130.
19. The Clairvoyant Synopsis, BBFC Scenario Report #372, 27 December
1934, BFI Special Collections, London.
20. The Clairvoyant Synopsis, BBFC Scenario Report #392, 12 Feb 1935,
BFI Special Collections, London.
21. The Clairvoyant Synopsis, BBFC Scenario Report #392.
22. The Man Who Lived Again Synopsis, BBFC Scenario Report #476, 11
October 1935, BFI Special Collections, London.
23. The Man Who Lived Again Synopsis, BBFC Scenario Report #476.
24. Following Matthews’ account of 1930s BBFC personnel, we can assume
‘J.B.W’ is Joseph ‘Brookie’ Wilkinson, the administrative head of the
BBFC during this period. Censored, p.58.
25. The Man Who Lived Again Synopsis, BBFC Scenario Report #476.
26. ‘High Court of Justice King’s Bench Division, copyright dispute: Alleged
infringement by a film, De Maudit v. Gaumont-British Corporation,
Limited’, The Times, 24 November 1939, p.2.
27. Quoted in Tom Weaver, et al, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic
Films, 1931–1946, 2nd edn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), p.62.
28. Lee Server, ‘Gloria Stuart’, Films in Review, February (1988),
unpaginated.
29. Kim Newman, ‘The Ghoul: A Video Watchdog Round Table Discussion’,
Video Watchdog http://www.videowatchdog.com/home/RoundTable/
ghoul.htm [accessed 31 May 2011].
30. ‘New films in London’, The Times, 7 August 1933, p.8.
31. W.A. Whitney, ‘The Ghoul’, Washington Post, 10 February 1934, p.14.
32. Whitney, ‘The Ghoul’, p.14.
33. P.L. Mannock, ‘On the British sets’, Picturegoer, 8 April 1933, p.30.
34. Robert Spadoni has similarly suggested that Karloff’s performance as
the Monster in Frankenstein ‘calls to mind the German Expressionist act-
ing style, which to many Veidt in Caligari epitomises’. Uncanny Bodies:
The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2007), p.114.
205
206
207
208
209
31. Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror
Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p.59.
32. Oscar Wilde (non de plume ‘C.3.3.’), ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’
(New York, NY: Brentanos, 1906), p.3.
33. Quoted in Weaver et al., Universal Horrors, p.133.
34. ‘Pictures’, Variety, 27 February 1935, p.3.
35. ‘Henry Hull uses weird make-up in film thriller’, Los Angeles Times,
18 May 1935, p.A7.
36. ‘Henry Hull uses weird make-up’, p.A7.
37. Joseph I. Breen, ‘Letter to Mr Harry Zehner’, 28 March 1935, Box
#778/26851, Werewolf of London PCA, MHL, AMPAS, Los Angeles,
California.
38. Robert Harris, ‘Letter to Mr Joseph I. Breen’, 30 January 1935, Box
#778/26851, Werewolf of London PCA, MHL, AMPAS, Los Angeles,
California.
39. ‘Foreign film news’, Variety 6 September 1932, p.11. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
was released on 31 December 1931 hence its inclusion in the 1932 Film
Daily list. ‘Grand Hotel leads ten best list’, Film Daily, 11 January 1933, p.1.
40. John Mc. H. Stuart, ‘Memorandum’, 7 February 1935, Box #778/26851,
Werewolf of London PCA, MHL, AMPAS, Los Angeles, California.
41. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(London: Penguin, 1994 [1886]), p.81.
42. Peter Hutchings, ‘Horror London’, Journal of British Cinema and
Television 6/2 (2009), p.190.
43. Linda Williams, ‘Film bodies: Gender, genre, and excess’, Film Quarterly
44/4 (1991), p.4, her emphasis.
44. Breen, ‘Letter to Mr Harry Zehner’, 15 January 1935.
45. Robert Harris, ‘Letter to Mr Joseph I. Breen’, 30 January 1935. For fur-
ther discussion of the correspondence between the Hays office and
the film’s producers, see Worland, The Horror Film, pp.124–25; Skal,
The Monster Show, p.194; Spadoni, ‘Strange botany’, p.55 and Reynold
Humphries, The Hollywood Horror Film 1931–1941: Madness in a Social
Landscape (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), pp.57–58.
46. ‘Horror story well written and played’, p.3.
47. Endore, The Werewolf of Paris, p.148.
48. The quote refers to the final line in the poem ‘Two Loves’ by Lord Alfred
Douglas, which can be interpreted as an ode to homosexual love. It was
published in The Chameleon in 1894, an issue to which Wilde had also
contributed. Wilde was confronted with the poem during his indecency
trial. Lisa Hamilton, ‘Oscar Wilde, new women and the rhetoric of
effeminacy’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions
(London: The Regents University of California, 2003), p.242.
49. Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, p.3.
50. ‘Werewolf of London’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 May 1935, p.D7.
51. C.C., ‘Werewolf of London now playing Georgia’, Atlanta Constitution, 9
July 1935, p.12; J.W.U.T, ‘Werewolf of London’, Monthly Film Bulletin 2/16
210
May 1935, p.57; ‘Werewolf of London’, Harrison’s Reports 18 May 1935, p.78;
‘Werewolf of London’, Motion Picture Daily, p.10.
52. F.S.N., ‘At the Rialto’, New York Times, 10 May 1935, p.25.
53. Relatedly, Robert Spadoni has argued that the film has an obvious gay
subtext, but ‘perhaps this overtness is one reason why it is hard to find
an extended queer reading of this film; it may seem that there is little
work of interpretation to do when so much lies on the surface’. ‘Old
times in Werewolf of London’, p.3.
54. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilisation and its discontents’, in Angela Richards
(ed.), Penguin Freud Library 12: Civilisation, Society and Religion (London:
Penguin, 1991 [1930]), p.302. Translation: ‘Man is a wolf to man’.
55. ‘Werewolf of London’, Harrison’s Reports, 18 May 1935, p.78.
56. References to Jekyll and Hyde are in ‘The Werewolf of London’, Time,
20 May 1935, p.32; Bige, ‘Werewolf of London’, Variety, 15 May 1935, p.9;
F.S.N., ‘At the Rialto’, p.25; Andrew Sennwald, ‘On a swan song’, New
York Times, 19 May 1935, p.3; ‘The shadow stage’, Photoplay, July 1935,
p.104. References to The Invisible Man in F.S.N., ‘At the Rialto’, p.25,
and Marguerite Tazelaar, ‘Werewolf of London - Rialto’, New York Herald
Tribune, 10 May 1935, no page number given.
57. ‘Horror story well written and played’, p.3.
58. ‘The shadow stage’, p.104.
59. ‘Werewolf of London’, Motion Picture Daily, p.10.
60. Mae Tinee, ‘Werewolf of London gives thrills, chills’, Chicago Daily Tribune,
19 May 1935, p.D6.
61. Mae Tinee, ‘Doctor X: Another movie made to scare you’, Chicago Daily
Tribune, 12 September 1932, p.15.
62. Philip K. Scheuer, ‘New horror film eerie’, Los Angeles Times, 19 May
1935, p.25; Sennwald, ‘On a swan song’, p.X3.
63. Tazelaar, ‘Werewolf of London - Rialto’, unpaginated.
64. J.W.U.T., ‘Werewolf of London’, p.57; ‘Werewolf of London’, Film Daily, 10
May 1935, p.11.
65. Figures from Alberto Manguel, Bride of Frankenstein (London: BFI,
1997), p.14.
66. Manguel, Bride of Frankenstein, p.11.
67. Quoted in Weaver et al., Universal Horrors, pp.138–39.
68. ‘New films in London’, The Times, 10 June 1935, p.8.
69. ‘Picture crosses’, Variety, 24 April 1935, p.29.
70. Sennwald, ‘On a swan song’, p.X3; ‘Screen notes’, New York Times, 9 May
1935, p.25.
71. ‘Werewolf of London’, Philadelphia Exhibitor 15 May 1935, unpaginated;
Scheuer, ‘New horror film eerie’, p.25.
72. Bige, ‘Werewolf of London’, p.9.
73. Kauf, ‘Bride of Frankenstein’, Variety, 15 May 1935, p.9.
74. ‘Screen news here and in Hollywood’, New York Times, 26 August 1942,
p.22.
75. Kauf, ‘Bride of Frankenstein’, p.9; Bige, ‘Werewolf of London’, p.9.
211
76. ‘Screen notes’, New York Times, 7 May 1935, p.28. Mister Dynamite was
then reviewed in New York on 2 June. Andre Sennwald, ‘Reading the
log for May and April’, New York Times, 2 June 1935, p.X3.
77. ‘Werewolf of London’, Film Daily p.11; ‘The Werewolf of London’, Time, p.32.
78. Lionel Collier, ‘On screens now’, Picturegoer, 9 November 1935, p.23.
79. William Troy, ‘Films: Through the closet door’, The Nation, 29 May
1935, p.640.
80. Nelson B. Bell, ‘Thoughts on horror era, renaissance and Miss Ulric’,
Washington Post, 21 February 1932, p.A1; Philip K. Scheuer, ‘Eerie cinema
proffered’, Los Angeles Times, 10 January 1933, p.A7.
81. Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation
Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p.153.
82. Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”, p.153.
83. Humphries, The Hollywood Horror Film, p.viii.
CONCLUSION
1. Adrian Bingham, ‘The digitization of newspaper archives: Opportunities
and challenges for historians’, Twentieth Century British History 21/2
(2010), p.225.
2. O.B., ‘Comment and review: Actor’s viewpoint’, Close Up 6/5 May (1930),
pp.212–13.
3. Jason Jacobs, ‘The television archive: Past, present, future’, Critical
Studies in Television 1/1 (2006), p.17.
4. Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality
and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1996), p.76.
5. Peter Hutchings, ‘Monster legacies: Memory, technology and horror
history’, in Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich (eds), The Shifting
Definitions of Genre: Essays on Labelling Films, Television Shows and Media
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), p.219.
6. Christine Gledhill, ‘Rethinking genre’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda
Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2003), p.241.
212
213
214
Last Laugh, The (1924, F.W. Murnau, Universum Film AG, Germany)
Le ballet mécanique (1924, Fernand Léger, France)
Les lèvres rouges/Daughters of Darkness (1971, Harry Kümel, Showking
Films/Maya Films/Ciné Vog Films/Roxy Film, Belgium/France/
West Germany)
Lèvres de sang/Lips of Blood (1975, Jean Rollin, Nordia Films/Off Production/
Scorpion V, France)
Lodger, The (1927, Alfred Hitchcock, Gainsborough Pictures, UK)
London after Midnight (1928, Tod Browning, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
USA)
Lot in Sodom (1933, James Sibley Watson, USA)
M (1931, Fritz Lang, Nero-Film AG, Germany)
Mad Love (1935, Karl Freund, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA)
Magician, The (1926, Rex Ingram, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, USA)
Maniac (1934, Dwain Esper, Hollywood Producers and Distributors, USA)
Man Who Changed His Mind, The (1936, Robert Stevenson, Gainsborough
Pictures, UK)
Mark of the Vampire (1935, Tod Browning, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA)
Mask of Fu Manchu, The (1932, Charles Brabin, Cosmopolitan Productions/
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA)
Medium, The (1934, Vernon Sewell, Test Films, UK)
Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang, Universum Film AG, Germany)
Miracle Man, The (1919, George Loane Tucker, Paramount Pictures,
USA)
Mister Dynamite (1935, Alan Crosland, Universal Pictures, USA)
Monkey’s Paw, The (1933, Wesley Ruggles and Ernest B. Schoedsack, RKO
Radio Pictures, USA)
Monster Walks, The (1932, Frank R. Strayer, Ralph M. Like Productions,
USA)
Most Dangerous Game, The (1932, Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack,
RKO Radio Pictures, USA)
Mummy, The (1932, Karl Freund, Universal Pictures, USA)
Mummy’s Curse, The (1944, Leslie Goodwins, Universal Pictures, USA)
Mummy’s Ghost, The (1944, Reginald Le Borg, Universal Pictures, USA)
Mummy’s Hand, The (1940, Christy Cabanne, Universal Pictures, USA)
Mummy’s Tomb, The (1942, Harold Young, Universal Pictures, USA)
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932, Robert Florey, Universal Pictures, USA)
Murders in the Zoo (1933, A. Edward Sutherland, Paramount Productions,
USA)
Mystery of Edwin Drood, The (1935, Stuart Walker, Universal Pictures,
USA)
Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933, Michael Curtis, Warner Bros. Pictures/
The Vitaphone Corp., USA)
Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur, Sabre Film Production, UK)
Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero, Image Ten/Laurel
Group/Market Square Productions/Off Color Films, USA)
215
216
217
Bonitzer, Pascal, ‘Partial vision: Film and the labyrinth’, Wide Angle 4/4
(1981): pp.56–63.
Bordwell, David, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1981).
Bourguignon, Erika, ‘The persistence of folk belief: Some notes on canni-
balism and zombis in Haiti’, Journal of American Folklore 72.283 (1959),
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Tell Tale Heart, The (1934) 3, 105, 123 Walker, Stuart 154, 163–164, 169,
Theatre Royal (Peter Street, 173–175
Manchester) 206n.50 Wegener, Paul 117
Thesiger, Ernest 123, 129, 131–132, Wells, H.G. 37, 41, 44, 48–49
173, 181 Werewolf of London (1935) 8, 12, 24,
Thompson, Elizabeth 52–53 34, 115, 118, 149–176
Tinee, Mae, 53, 57, 145, 171–172 Werewolf of Paris, The (1933)
Tivoli (The Strand, 150–152, 166–167, 176
London) 206n.50 Weston, Garnett 61
Turim, Maureen 28 Whale, James 1, 53, 85, 128–129,
Turner, George E. 12, 61–62 172–174
Tybjerg, Caspar 83 When Soul Meets Soul (1913) 5, 18
White Zombie (1932) 4, 7, 11–12, 24,
Ulmer, Edgar G. 62, 103–106, 108, 37, 55, 60–80
112, 114, 116–121 Wiene, Robert 106, 117, 181
Un Chien Andalou (1929) 90 Wilk, Christopher 102
Uncanny 6, 10, 14, 26–35, 53–54, 62, Williams, Keith 41, 48
66, 74–75, 77, 80, 111–113 Williams, Linda 164
Undying Monster, The (1942) 150 Williams, Tony 60
Unheimliche Geschichten (1932) 13 Winter Garden Theatre
Universum Film AG (Ufa) 83, 122 (Broadway, New York) 46
Unknown, The (1927) 5–6, 33 Wolf Man, The (1941) 12, 126, 150, 176
Wood, Robin 35, 38, 44, 51, 79–81,
Vampire Bat, The (1933) 11, 13, 87, 94–95
46–47, 61, 136 Worland, Rick 9
Vampyr: Der Traum des Allan Gray/ Wray, Fay 45, 55, 76, 123, 125, 136,
Vampyr: The Strange Adventure 142–143, 146–147, 173
of David Gray (1932) 3, 10–11,
24, 81–100, 102, 115, 178, 197n.2 Ye Ban Ge Sheng/Song at Midnight
Van Sloan, Edward 19–20 (1937) 13
234