Monster Mash
by Cal Meacham
All art is stylized. That may not sound like a great revelation, but it struck me forcibly at one point when I was much younger, and I don’t think I’ve gotten over it. You notice it when you see something unfamiliar – Chinese Opera, or Japanese Noh plays, or African string figures. Or Hong Kong martial arts film with ludicrous sound effects and excessive “wire work”. A lot of people thought the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was excellent, but my wife and I kept looking at each other as we watched it. People running on vertical walls with no visible means of support bother me. Yet I loved the movie The Matrix, which features similarly unbelievable gymnastics. Of course, in that case, the explanation was one I was much more used to entertaining – it’s all science fiction, an the story involved Virtual Reality. It’s not that I’m totally unfamiliar with the culture behind those martial-arts flicks. I’ve read books purporting to be factual accounts of Taoist monks performing similar feats, and Alexandra-Neel’s books on Tibetan Buddhist miracles. But it’s not part of my expected entertainment world. It doesn’t work for me.
The logical extension of this observation is to flip it around and to look at the things that I do feel comfortable with and look at them objectively, to see just how weird they really are. Superheroes with spandex tights, capes, and secret identities. Sitcoms with half hour plots and wacky neighbors. Law and Order shows that seem gritty and real, but are really unusually clear-cut and require at least one “unexpected” twist. Dialogue in virtually any play, movie, or television show.
I’m not criticising these things. For some reason things tend to fall into a particular fashion, or maybe a rut. It might be of practical origin – movies tend to be 90 minutes to two hours long because that makes it profitable to show them three or so times a night. Occasionally you get our three or even four hour blockbuster, but that’s rare. You have very few Russian War and Peace or German Berlin Alexanderplatz. And yet there’s no fundamental reason we can’t have regular five hour movies with higher admission prices – it just didn’t develop that way. The ancient Greeks used to listen to marathon readings of epic poetry. Some people in the world still do.
My concern in this essay I with a very small niche in the stylizing of our entertainment – the way we picture monsters in the movies. Human imagination is infinite, yet our monsters seem to have fallen into a very few categories, and those are very stylized. Yet we tend to ignore exactly how much of a rut they’ve fallen into. The movies have more recently been trying to break out of the ruts, I admit, but they’re pretty deep, and popular perception still tends to picture them in their stereotyped garb. Furthermore, there are forces trying to keep them that way – Universal pictures tries to keep a lock and a copyright on their “classic” monsters. Universal doesn’t own Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, the Werewolf, and Water Monsters, but they own the way they have been depicted in their films. I want to look at how our images of these beasties came to be, and how they could have ended up differently.
Frankenstein – Yeah, I know that “Frankenstein” is the creator (First name a very European “Victor” in the book, but American-friendly “Henry” in the first Universal film), but the name quickly became applied to the Monster in the popular mind, so I’m keeping it there. The vision of Frankenstein we all have in our heads – that square0topped, black-haired green figure with inexplicable neck bolts and a castoff suit – appeared full blown in James Whale’s 1931 movie. It doesn’t follow the description given in Mary Shelley’s book very closely (which describes him as resembling a revived mummy, with watery eyes. It does have black lips and (arguably) lustrous black hair, but most of the memorable elements come from elsewhere. If you look at photos from Peggy Webling’s play (nominally the basis for the film, although any resemblance is minimal), you see that the Frankenstein Monster looks like a shaggy and unkempt individual wearing too much lipstick. There was a filmed version in 1910, made by the Edison film company and starring Charles Ogle as the Monster. For years it was thought to be lost, but a print has surfaced recently in he hands private collector. Portions of it have leaked out onto commercial videotape (I have one of these ), so that we can now see the wondrous “creation scene” that was lovingly described in The Edison Kinescope at the time. Most of this seem to have been done by destroying a mannequin and running the film backwards – state-of-the-art special effects at the time, since most people had no idea what film running backwards looked like. What intrigues me is that Ogle’s monster appears to have a rather flat-topped head, especially in the stills published in The Edison Kinescope. I’d been told that this look was first developed for the 1931 Universal film, but I suspect they may have been influenced by this vision from twenty years earlier.
The film that crystallized our image of Frankenstein is, of course, James Whale’s 1931 version, starring Boris Karloff (William Henry Pratt) as the Monster, with makeup by Universal’s master makeup man, Jack Pierce. Universal realized that the appearance of the monster was the key to the film, and early publicity capitalized on this, running photos in which the actor’s head s covered with a cloth, and using a silhouette (that didn’t resemble the Real Thing) on its opening credits. The opening credits didn’t even mention Karloff’s name, noting that the Monster as played by “?” (Karloff was credited in the closing credits, however.)
Pierce did an impressive job, especially given the limitations of the time, when latex rubber appliances were not et available. Pierce used nose putty and fullers earth and other tricks to make Karloff seem weird and unearthly, unnaturally tall and cadaverously thin. That flat-topped head gave him a weird profile and seemed to add height. The thick-soled boots added inches, as well as making a clunking gait natural. The arms and legs of his clothes were deliberately short to make him seem much larger. Karloff, who normally wore a partial denture, left it out, giving him a much more hollow cheek. Pierce is the man responsible for putting those odd and useless “neck bolts” onto the monster, thus giving Gary Larsen and others countless opportunities for jokes.(Pierce, interviewed years after, said he intended the as electrodes.) In early test sketches, he’d placed large metal staples directly into the forehead, over conspicuous bulges. The neck bolts probably looked less painless, and more acceptable.
The Universal Monster wasn’t terribly faithful to Shelley, but it was effective, which was the important thing. He popped up in cartoons and was mentioned in the stage play “Arsenic and Old Lace” (Karloff, in fact, often took the role of Jonathan Brewster, said to resemble the Monster). They brought Karloff back two more times to play the role. Afterwards it was played by Bela Lugosi (who’d originally turned it down), Lon Chaney, Jr., and Glenn Strange. In later years other interpretations of the Monster would emerge that owed nothing to Pierce’s and Universal’s copyrighted image – Lon Chaney jr. played the monster again on TV’s Tales of Tomorrow in the 1950s. Britain’s Hammer films revived the horror genre in the late 1950s, introducing Christopher Lee as a very different monster. And so on, to the Kenneth Branaugh version of Frankenstein. But there have been plenty of Universal-sanctioned and Universal-inspired version to keep the older image alive – The Munsters, Young Frankenstein, The Monster Club, the Universal Studios tour… So it seems likely that the square-topped bolt-necked version will be with us for a long time, as ineradicable as Sidney Paget’s deerstalker-and-ulster Sherlock Holmes.
Vampire – Before the nineteenth century the Vampire was an uncouth blood-drinking corpse with some very strange legends surrounding it. They were obsessive/compulsive, so you could protect yourself by spilling grain over your threshold. An invading vampire would feel compelled to count them all, and would thus be occupied until the sun came up. Try to imagine Bela Lugosi or Frank Langella being stymied by that dodge.
The early nineteenth century gave us the first work of vampire fiction – John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), a story inspired by the same night of horror-tale-telling by Lake Lucerne that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The other participants in this shockfest – Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron – also contributed stories, but Shelley’s was less successful, and Byron never completed his. The surviving fragment apparently served as the basis for Polidori’s story. But Lord Byron was probably the model for Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven. Polidori (Byron’s doctor and his friend) cleaned up the vampire’s act, and at a stroke gave us the “titled” vampire. Ever since, vampires have been largely members of the aristocracy. No longer would they be merely the ghosts of suicides, buried at midnight at the crossroads. Polidori’s story itself served as the basis for two operas.
Almost thirty years later Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood was serialized in the “penny dreadfuls” of Britain. Written by James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest, it ran for 209 weekly issues. The titular vampire is Lord Francis Varney, who lives in a sort-of-1700s setting. If killed, he can be revived by moonlight. The 800 page long novel (It has been reprinted at leas twice in the past fifty years) veers wildly in its descriptions of Varney and his adventures. Sometimes he is a real vampire, sometimes merely pretending. He wanders over Europe, and ultimately commits suicide by leaping into Mount Vesuvius. Critics, not having the stomach for the tale, often quote from he beginning and wonder at the sprawling tale, passing it all off as the work of someone paid by the word. But they miss h point. Think of Varney the Vampire as a comic book, and it all makes sense. If you condensed all of Superman’s adventures into a single book would it make literary sense? It would have the same meandering plot and impossible contradictions.
And, like Superman, Varney would have its fans who would cherish it and use it to fuel their adult ambitions. Bram Stoker must have read Varney, because he adapts parts of it for his masterwork, Dracula (1897). If Polidori gave us the cultured, titled vampire, and Rymer/Prest made him popular, then Stoker gave us the details of the modern myth. I am always amused by the obligatory scene in vampire films where someone is reading the book of the old legends, because the truth is that there aren’t any old legends. At least not like the one the film is handing to us. Stoker seems to have invented the details about the vampire not being visible in a mirror, and being warded off by garlic, not being able to cross running water, and being harmed by holy objects like the Host, holy water, and the cross. (Although, curiously, not the vampire’s destruction by sunlight. After all, he actually shows Dracula walking through London by daylight. The film vampire to evaporate under the sun was Count Orlock in the silent film Nosferatu (1922).) Stoker’s inventions seem authentic, and that is to his credit. He appropriated them from other places, or invented them outright.
The popular novel was adapted as a play in 1924 by Hamilton Deane (who had played the Frankenstein monster in Peggy Webling’s play, and would play Dracula in his own play), which was extensively rewritten by John Balderston for its Broadway run. It was this version that crystallized the appearance of Dracula, putting him in elegant evening dress and cape (Raymond Huntley, who originated the role in London, complained later in life that he had to provide his own suit). The costume seems to be partly due to Dracula’s titled estate, and partly due to the use of elaborate tricks during the show. “Dracula is, in fact, a variation on the familiar image of a vaudeville magician…” writes David J. Skal in book V is for Vampire. Dracula’s famous high-backed cape owes its existence to the stage play – it allowed the actor playing Dracula to “disappear” (through a trapdoor) and be replaced by a flying bat.
The facial appearance of Dracula and the heavy East European accent derive from Lugosi, who portrayed Dracula on Broadway. And it must be admitted that it was effective. His accent gave an air of verisimilitude to the part – Frank Langella’s “handsome” Dracula in the 1977 revival doesn’t really sound as if he’s from a foreign land. The slicked-back hair is in keeping with the character, too.
Lugosi played vampires in several films after that, eventually playing Dracula on film again in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. He played Dracula on stage for the rest of his life, much to his chagrin – he was offered very few other stage roles. He was ultimately buried in his Dracula costume. In his later years he played others roles – a magician on the TV show “You Asked For It”, a Las Vegas revue – in his Dracula cape and costume, continuing to propagate the image.
And so the image of the vampire we now have evolved from Polidori and Byron’s aristocrat, with Stoker’s “authentic” embellishments, and picked up additional baggage from the necessities of staging.
There’s nothing inevitable about this image, though. It was simply the one that was most widespread and which resonated well. Had the history of the productions been slightly different, our main image of the vampire might have been different. Had Raymond Huntley agreed to come o the US to play the role he started in London, we might be used to a Dracula with Mephistophelean hair “horns” and a notable white streak in his hair. Had Stoker’s widow not prosecuted the German film company Prana-Film for its pirating the novel Dracula as the basis for the film Nosferatu and destroyed almost all copies of it, we might have as the predominant vampire image Max Schreck’s rat-faced Count Orlock. If Lon Chaney’s vampire film London After Midnight had done better (and not been lost), our idea of the vampire might be a top-hatted figure with wild eyes and rows of sharpened teeth. Think about that while you watch Sesame Street’s “The Count” and eating your bowl of Count Chocula cereal.
The Werewolf / Wolfman – This one is truly a creation of the movies. Although there have been stories about people who could change into animals from time immemorial, the idea of a part man/part wold, and the associated mythology of full moons and silver bullets did not exist until they were invented at Universal studios. The idea of people who could change at ill into wolves, especially for dark purposes, has been around for a long time, and has been handled in literary works. The Werewolf of this sort was often tangled up with the Vampire, and anyone who has read Stoker’s book will recall the huge “dog” that leapt ashore at Whitby when the Demeter ran aground.
But it took Hollywood to invent the unwilling werewolf, who turns into a werewolf against his will and desire. There'’ a hint of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde in this, since Jeckyll, at least in the latter portions of the book, cannot control his transformations. But Jekyll is morally responsible for his condition, since he willingly and knowingly became the immoral Hyde. The Werewolf/Wolfman, on the other hand, is an undeserving innocent, forced to become a monster against his will and through no fault of his own. This is something new in the world of monsters.
So is his appearance. Real Werewolves become actual wolves, which I why Dracula transformed could be mistaken for a dog. But the Hollywood Wolfman is sort of half wold/half human. Nothing in legend suggests such a creature. There have been blends of human and animal in the story and art in the past, but no wolf-human hybrids I am aware of.
You can see why they did it. To do a wolf convincingly you’d have to get a convincing performance out of a wolf or dog – unlikely. Or else you’d have to do it with a “rod puppet”. Given the technology at the time, this would have looked stiff and unreal. There’s no way such a thing could interact believably with people in a film. And you certainly couldn’t do it with an actor in a mask.
So, to solve the dilemma, Hollywood invents the Wolfman or Werewolf. Take your actor and apply liberal and complete makeup – hair on the face and hands, enlarged canine teeth, pointed ears. If you can, add a sort of time-lapse transformation scene. Now you have a creature that can be played by a human being. More important, you leave the bulk of the face, especially the eyes, free, so that the actor can emote. Th audience can thus empathize with him, something very hard to do with a puppet. This, I think, is a very important point, and one often overlooked by the genera public – you want the actor to be able to act. It pleases the actor, but it also provides a more satisfying experience for the audience, too. That’s why the same technique has been used so many times in series like Star Trek. One wag has suggested that all aliens look like humans with different forehead bumps. And it’s true. It’s partly costs – it’s hard and expensive to Computer Generate aliens every week – but I believe it is largely to create sympathetic aliens. We just relate much better to almost-human liens. This makes it less likely that we’ll be seeing Hal Clement’s or Jack Chalker’s aliens in movies in the future. About the only film-maker using very un-human aliens extensively has been George Lucas in his Star Wars films.
But where did this idea come from initially? I strongly suspect that the make-up, although it could logically be developed as I suggest here, was actually the result of the influence of anomalously hairy people, such as “Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy”, a “prodigy” exhibited by P.T. Barnum. Jo-Jo (Feodor Jeftichew) was the son of a similarly hairy prodigy, who was exhibited in Europe in the 19th century. There were other such people throughout the years in central Europe, and there I even an Austrian word to describe them – Haarmenschen (“Hairy Men”). Jo-Jo’s “act” was also similar in spirit to that of the celluloid wolfmen. It’s easy to imagine makeup artist Jack Pierce seeing a picture of the hair-faced Jo-Jo and using it as inspiration.
The first human-wolf was The Werewolf of London, a 1935 Universal picture starring Henry Hull as Wilfred Glendon, a botanist who contracts lycanthropy in Tibet. He’s not actually the first werewolf – that honor goes to Warner Oland (the once and future Charlie Chan), who plays Dr. Yogami, who attacks Glendon and infects him with the disease. Glendon finds himself turning into a wolf-creature at night, and hopes to cure himself with the aid of a rare night-blooming flower from Tibet. Much of the modern “werewolf” mythology isn’t present here. It showed up for the first time in the 1941 film The Wolfman, which also gave us the first appearance of Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot. The screenplay as by Curt Siodmak, and he is the one who gave us many of he features of wolfman mythology. (Siodmak also wrote the novel Donovan’s Brain, which was subsequently filmed three times and did more than anything else to popularize the Mad Scientist image of a disembodied brain floating in an aquarium.)
The Big Furry Monster with Sneakers in Bugs Bunny Cartoons -- This one surprised me, in several ways. I’ve seen this big orange furry beast so many times that I was sure that he was a Warner Brothers cartoon regular. But until 1980, he’d only appeared in two cartoons. I also thought that h was a Bob Clampett creation, but both of those early cartoons were by Chuck Jones. I suppose I should have realized that – Jones was the Warner animator with the Mad Scientist fetish.
He first showed up in the cartoon Hair-Raising Hare, released May 25, 1946. The story was by Todd Pierce, and opens with Bugs Bunny in his comfortable burrow, convinced he’s being watched. He is – by a Mad Scientist who looks and sounds like Peter Lorre (who never did play a Mad Scientist in the movies). He lures Bugs to his castle laboratory (all Mad Scientists have their labs in castles) with a sexy mechanical female rabbit. Once at the castle, Bugs encounters the Big Orange Furry Monster in Tennis Shoes, and the rest of the cartoon is devoted to his chasing Bugs. The most memorable part comes when Bugs adopts the persona of a manicurist (“Monsters must lead such interesting lives!”) and places the monster’s hands into water bowls containing mousetraps. Ultimately, Bugs frightens the monster away by pointing out the audience. (“Ahhhh! People!” screams the monster, and runs away.)
Jones returned to the same basic story six years later in Water, Water, Every Hare, released on April 19, 1952. This time the story was by Michael Maltese. The Mad Scientist in his castle this time scoops up Bugs Bunny as he drifts by on his bed (he’s been flooded out of his burrow). The Scientist figures hat he can use Bugs’ brains for his robot. The same orange hairy monster is in this non-Lorre Mad Scientist’s employ, and chases after Bugs with the usual results. The manicurist gag is repeated, with the minor variation that Bugs acts like a hairdresser (“I think an interesting monster should have a intereresting hairdo!” he says just before putting up the monster’s hair in dynamite curlers.) The monster is ultimately dispatched with the aid of a draught of shrinking potion. In this cartoon, the monster is named “Rudolph”.
The monster disappeared for almost thirty years, an was resurrected for the 1980 cartoon Duck Dodgers and the Return to the 24 ½ Century. Maltese again scripted and Jones directed. This time the Monster is in the employ of Marvin the Martian, who is trying to blow up the Earth (as usual). When Daffy, as Duck Dodgers, tries to stop him, Marvin sends out the Monster. In this cartoon, the monster was named “Gossamer”, which has become his official name in Warner Brothers merchandising. In this cartoon, he looks a bit more abstract than in his previous appearances. He is also revealed to be nothing but Hair and Sneakers, which contradicts Water Water, Every Hare, where you can see a bald scalp under all that orange fur after the dynamite curlers go off. (But since when did Warners cartoons care about continuity?)
Gossamer/Rudolph made a few cameo appearances after this in Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters and Space Jam. It’s surprising that he appeared in so few cartoons. He seems to have a lot of presence for so few formal engagements.
But where did it come from? What was Jones’ inspiration for the Beast? If people can ask where Shakespeare got his plots, I can surely ask what inspired a modern cartoon director. It’s possible that Jones just took the idea of a “big, hairy monster” very literally, made him bright orange for effect, and stuck sneakers on him as a humorous touch. But I suspect there might be a definite incident behind his genesis.
The Warner’s gang made fun of Disney in their cartoons, and of the film Fantasia in particular. The most notable example is Bob Clampett’s 1943 cartoon A Corny Concerto, which copied Fantasia in some of its artwork. I suspect that Rudolph/Gossamer is another case of Fantasia spoofing. If you pay close attention to the very first number in Fantasia, Bach’s “Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor (arranged for orchestra)”, you’ll notice something interesting two thirds of the way in. After the falling “pixie dust” sprinkles and the dramatic Blobs of Color, just about eight minutes into the piece, the screen goes dark and you hear a series of menacing, descending notes on the strings. The animators interpreted his with a large, can-like figure almost in silhouette walking/waddling away from the camera an toward a distant light. In that menacing silhouette, with its “horror movie” motif, you have the ingredients needed for Gossamer. The can already has the right top-heavy appearance. All you have to do is make it hairy with orange fur and add a couple of eyes. And maybe sneakers, so it can waddle silently, if menacingly.
References
Actually, most of this is the result of a childhood wasted watching hours of both classic and really bad science fiction and horror films on Creature Feature, Supernatural Theater, and Chiller Theater, not to mention The Big Show/The 4:30 Movie. And reading Famous Monsters of Filmland, Monster World, Castle of Frankenstein, The Monster Times, Fantastic Films, Cinefantastique, Cinefex and other magazines too obscure to mention. All of which has undoubtedly warped my perception of reality and my future actions. (Do you think I wrote a book on Greek mythology because I love Aeolian hymns and Greek strophe, or because of films like Goliath and the Dragon and Jason and the Argonauts?) Some of it came from handy references, though. Here are a few of them:
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies by Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald – indispensable to the lover of Warner Brothers cartoons, although not much help in my search for Rudolph/Gossamer. For that you need:
http://cartoons.tatay.cjb.net/
and
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/magic/employees/christian.fuhrhop/private/Cels/Cels.html
Hollywood Gothic by David J. Skal – the best book on the plays and films of The Count
V is for Vampire by David J. Skal – More info on vampires, arranged alphabetically. A woefully underadvertised and underpublicized book.
The Monster Show by David J. Skal – I didn’t use this directly in this essay, as I couldn’t find my copy, but thought ‘d mention it.
The Annotated Dracula by Bram Stoker, annotated by Leonard Wolf
The Annotated Frankenstein by Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley, edited by Leonard Wolf
Frankenstein: The Original Shooting Script , edited by Philip J. Riley -- lots of good background info, too.
Three Gothic Novels edited by E.F. Bleiler. Dover book (1966), containing Polidori’s “The Vampire” and he Lord Byron fragment that inspired it.
Varney the Vampyre, or The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Priest. Dover book from 1972, with intro. By E.F. Bleiler A two-volume set, and pretty hard going.
The Big Book of Freaks by Gahan Wilson and 46 other artists, Paradox Press, 1996. Contains information on how they did the makeup for “Frankenstein”, as well as having a section on "Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy" and similar hairy people.