Our friend Jonathan Lapper, the brains behind the Cinema Styles blog, has been hosting an “October Kill Fest” all month.  The series, bespoke for spookiness and dead-icated to the eternal (restless) spirit of Halloween, isn’t always for the squeamish… but all diehard MonsterKids and fans of classic Hollywood cinema should have a ball with this montage Beautiful Monsters, posted today.

What distinguishes the Universal monsters – and for the purpose of this discussion, we’ll limit that number to Count Dracula (as played by Bela Lugosi), Frankenstein’s Monster and The Mummy (Boris Karloff to the second power) and The Bride of Frankenstein (Elsa Lanchester) – from other bogeys of this vintage and later years is their utter luminousness.  They practically glow in the dark, these creatures (a quality pushed to the nth degree a generation later with those great glow-in-the-dark Aurora model kits – I had ‘em all).  When they are onscreen you simply cannot tear your gaze away.  No amount of CGI or digital jiggery-pokery can replace the alchemy of ordinary theatrical make-up matched with the perfect actor for the role.  I feel so fortunate to have come of age at a time when these films – close to forty years old at the time I learned of them – were being rediscovered and celebrated through “Creature Feature” television broadcasts (in my case, I received veritable master class in classic horror via late night TV broadcasts from Channel 4 in Needham, Massachusetts) and in the pages of such magazines as Jerry Warren’s Famous Monsters of Filmland and Calvin Thomas Beck’s Castle of Frankenstein. 

It was far from a foregone conclusion that a 10 year-old boy growing up in a small New England mill town in 1970 or ’71 (staunchly conservative and largely Catholic) would respond so favorably to the thrill of classic monsters over, say, The Rolling Stones or hotrods or Dirty Harry… but respond I did, as if in answer to some kind of predestination or fate.  While I found extra space in my heart for many interests (I collected clippings about the NASA launches in a scrapbook, traded baseball cards, holstered dual plastic sixguns and hiked the local woods with a hatchet strapped to my belt alongside a rawhide bota filled with Tang) monsters were my preoccupation, my passion, they were my heart.  They may even have saved me from the drug use that clamped down on my graduating class, separating the freaks from the geeks somewhere between grades 6 and 7.  And unlike a lot of things we once felt intensely passionate about but which embarrass us in later years (in my case, Mountain Dew, Drakes’ Funny bones, the PLANET OF THE APES TV series and the eternal – I thought – beauty of Marie Osmond), the Universal monsters continue to thrill and delight me.  I have seen these movies dozens of times apiece and they never get old for me, they have never lost their magic and their charm.  Or their beauty.

We’re left with a beguiling paradox.  Monsters created - dredged up from dusty volumes of Gothic literature, from our collective fear of the dark and of the unknown, and drawn from memories of human disfigurement suffered during The First World War – with the express purpose of scaring us actually capture our hearts.  Three quarters of a century after the fact we still cannot get enough of them.  Or as John Keats put it…

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darken’d ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits…