God and the Devil are pretty different, I hear, but there’s one thing they have in common – details. One of the things I love about old movies is the feeling I get from insert shots and second unit bric-a-brac that has little narrative currency but which adds tremendous texture and mood to the piece. Often times these items are hand held objects — pocket watches, pen knives, fountain pens, keychains, letters, business cards — that belong to the characters and say something, however subtly, about them.

Case in point: check out Graf Orlock’s alarm clock from F. W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF TERROR (1922). I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a clock in a movie that I’ve coveted more. If I owned this item I’d be watching it all the time, the way I did my Dad’s bedside clock-radio back in the 70s, the one whose numbers were on flaps that dropped down into place like on a high school football field scoreboard. I’d watch those numbers turn over for hours. The attraction with this clock, though, is that on the hour Death himself rings the bell with his scythe, whole holding aloft an hourglass that serves as a potent symbol of our mortality. What a great thing for a vampire to own! I wonder who made this clock – was it art director Albin Grau or some anonymous prop guy who never expected to receive credit? Either way, bravo. I’d like to think someone on the cast or crew of NOSFERATU kept this gem. I’d like to think it still exists somewhere and that it still keeps perfect time.

You might recognize the etching on the right from Carl Boese and Paul Wegener’s THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD (1920), a prequel to Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s earlier THE GOLEM (1915). The film recounts the creation of a man made out of clay, constructed by Rabbi Loew to protect the citizens of Prague’s Jewish ghetto in the 16th Century. Early in the film, Loew consults his blueprints and we get a hint of what his Golem will look like. Loew hews pretty closely to his plans during construction but if you’ve seen the film you know that Paul Wegener is considerably more thickset than this — draw your own conclusions. Again, I want to know who drew this, not that it matters. Insert shots such as this are something of a mania for me – I tend to focus on these fleeting details and lose interest in the narrative flow. The pedigree of the production staff is pretty amazing: it was shot by Karl Freund (who later directed THE MUMMY for Universal) and hard at work in the art department was Edgar Ulmer (who also fled to the States and directed THE BLACK CAT for Universal). Could Ulmer have drawn this? Isn’t it pretty to think so?

In Tod Browning’s DRACULA (1931), there’s an eerie, wordless scene early on that shows Bela Lugosi’s undying Count rising from his coffin in the vaulted cellars of Castle Dracula. (For the record, the shot exists as well in George Melford’s Spanish language version, shot on the same sets with a cast of mostly Mexican actors.) A quick cutaway shows this miniature coffin and a wasp that seems to have arisen from within. It’s a daft, incongruous, nonsensical aside and I love it! A yellow jacket that sleeps in a coffin! This is the kind of detail that sticks with you long after the notion of immortality and shapeshifting have ceased to be novelties. You see something like this and your imagination goes into overdrive, trying to contrive the precise scenario that brought this curio into Dracula’s possession. Did he pick it up at an art fair, at an estate sale? Was it a gift? Was he psyched to receive it or did he turn it over in his hands with obvious distaste while intoning a perfunctorily polite “Thank… you… very… much. I… shall… treasure… it… always” and then just kind of toss it aside down in the hole?

In Lambert Hillyer’s DRACULA sequel DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1935), the Count’s 200 year-0ld progeny attempts to turn her un-life around by embracing goodness and psychiatry. It doesn’t take, of course, and before you can say Peter Kürten she’s padding around London tearing open veins. Men, women, boys, girls, she doesn’t care — if it bleeds, she feeds. Not quite the mesmerist that her old man was, Marya Zaleska relies on the stupefying properties of an heirloom ring and a French manicure to mollify her potential victims. Nobody doesn’t want to look at this ring, not one person, from lowly British bobbies to aristocratic men about town. Of course, I’m dying to know what became of this prop ring after DRACULA’S DAUGHTER wrapped. Did it just go back into the Universal prop department. Did it make any more movies? Does anybody know?

You will recognize this particular number, of course, as the silver wolf’s head cane from Universal’s THE WOLF MAN (1941), the one that sweet Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) sells to obnoxious Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) in her father’s silver wolf’s head cane shop. Larry’s purchase of the cane allows him to kill the werewolf (Bela Lugosi) terrorizing Llanwelly but his bid to play the hero also leaves him infected with the curse of the lycanthrope. Truth be told, I’ve always found this cane a little on the gaudy side and I don’t think I would have enjoyed using it for its intended purpose. (Having said that, I will admit that it rocks its unintended secondary use of beating werewolves senseless.) Nonetheless, if I knew this prop existed somewhere I’d make an effort to go see it. Is this the first practical prop that associated with a horror movie hero, like Freddy Kruger’s knife glove or Jason Voorhees’ machete? A facsimile of it popped up in Wes Craven’s werewolf movie CURSED (2005) a few years back but the less said about that the better.

In Robert Siodmak’s SON OF DRACULA (1943), one of the Louisiana locals (Frank Craven, to be specific) who suspects his new neighbor Count Alucard might actually be Dracula does something that more horror movie protagonists should do to prepare for taking on ancient evil: he reads the book! I’m not quite sure what book Craven actually reads but it isn’t Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Still, the fact that a book about Dracula exists in a movie about Dracula and that it is readily available in some two-bit, 0ne-horse Southern backwater and that the protagonist actually has a copy of this book in his house never failed to impress me as a kid and it continues to impress me to this day. (Contrived as this development may be, I still prefer it to how the Winchester brothers always have to resort to the Internet to fight monsters on SUPERNATURAL.)  If you’re really watching the movie closely when the book is introduced, look sharp before the camera pushes in to focus on these two paragraphs and you’ll see that both pages open to us are nothing but these two paragraphs reprinted over and over and over, as if the author of the book went completely insane while writing it and his madness leached over to the publishing house who slapped it between leather covers.

In Robert Florey’s uneven but sublimely atmosphere MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932), carnival prognosticator and orangutan enthusiast Bela Lugosi sends this note to heroine Sidney Fox, hoping to entice the sweet young Parisian thing into a life of… well, I shudder to think. The letter on the left is the work of a full-on madman of course, the kind of guy who’d strap you to an X-beam, take your blood, call you impure and drop you in the Seine without so much as an excusez-moi … but that stationery! Chic alors, I’d kill to have stationery like that. And that penmanship, well… the schools don’t teach that anymore, do they? Nowadays Dr. Mirakle would probably send the mademoiselle a text … and it’s just not the same, is it? No, moving forward I expect we’ll be seeing a lot fewer handwritten letters inserted into Hollywood feature films and more’s the pity. Of course, you know what I’m thinking. Who actually wrote this? Does anybody know?

Val Lewton understood stuff. The visionary behind a series of films made for RKO Radio Pictures in the mid-40s as competition for the monster movies being cranked out at Universal, Lewton imbued all of the pictures he produced with a palpable sense of wonder, of longing, of curiosity and regret. He had a particular sensitivity for the way that personality is imprinted on inanimate objects and how those same articles recontour and repurpose the lives of those left holding them. In CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944), an imaginative but lonely young girl (Ann Carter) finds a photograph of her father’s first wife (Simone Simon) and subconsciously grafts the dead woman’s face onto the form of an imaginary friend, an adult to whom she can speak freely and honestly and in whose company she feels protected and loved unconditionally. Discovery of the photograph in his daughter’s hands sends the father (Kent Smith) into a tailspin of guilt, remorse and fear, remembering the woman as a schizophrenic haunted by the notion that she bore an ancient curse. That the father has kept the picture says a lot about his character, that he lives with one foot in the past and one in the present just as his daughter lives with one foot in the real world and the other in a world of make-believe. Produced behind the backs of the suits at RKO in the guise of a cash-in sequel to CAT PEOPLE (1942), CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE eschews ooga-boogary to instead tease out the psychology at the bottom of fear and dread, leaving the horror genre with a rich and rewarding character study of postwar American alienation.

The ultimate trophy wife, Fay Wray spends a goodly bit of KING KONG (1933) being carried around, set here, picked up there, scooped up, dropped and generally reminding us via her abject portability of how possession was at a premium during the Great Depression. The film is about ownership, be it having an angle on one’s destiny (which Wray’s plucky but impoverished Ann Darrow cannot say about herself at the top of the film), containing something bigger than ourselves (I think we all know of whom I speak) or grabbing hold of something big enough to put you on Easy Street for the rest of your life — a big deal, a hit movie or a 60 foot ape. Characters exert proprietary dominance over one another throughout KING KONG,  with poor wiggly Ann becoming the hot potato that all of the male characters — human and other — pass between them.

I’ll stop here because I think I’ve dumped enough stuff in your lap. My hope is that — if you don’t already do this — you’ll go back to the movies with a keener eye for the little things whose moment in the frame is countable in mere seconds but which exert a beguiling power that makes you think of them and even covet them long after they are folded up, tucked away, put back into a cabinet or dropped absently into a pocket. And, who knows, maybe this will get you (as it has me) to look at your own possessions and wonder, if your life were a movie, which items would give the best clues about your character. Would it be your Blackberry? Your signet ring? Your Creature from the Black Lagoon belt buckle? Can we trust ourselves to make the distinction between flattering ourselves and knowing ourselves? Can we be that honest? Does anybody know?