If you have yet to see a Lon Chaney movie, it probably should not be THE MONSTER (1925). Made after his iconic turns in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923) and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (which was filmed immediately before but released eight months after THE MONSTER), this silly Roland West joint is best reserved for compleatists of the so-called Man of 1,000 Faces. Chaney sits out the first third and even when he does show up he doesn’t sport particularly impressive make-up or get to tear the place up as he did in so many of his best roles. And yet I’m here today to plead the case of THE MONSTER as a progenitor of a couple of different types of horror movie, whose descendants we continue to see more than eighty years down the road.

THE MONSTER  begins with a bang… or rather a crash. A motorist tooling along the backroads of rural Danburg, Indiana, at O’Dark Thirty, is sent careering off the tarmac by what appears to be a car approaching from the opposite direction… but which turns out to be merely his own reflection. Up above this chaotic scene, in the boughs of a tree, a whey-faced ghoul in a Grim Reaper’s cowl (George Austin, identified by intertitle as “a human monster”) has lowered a large mirror onto the roadway in order to force the driver off the road. As the victim lies senseless, perhaps even lifeless, beside the twisted wreckage of his vehicle, pallid arms burst forth from the earth as if from the depths of a freshly-dug grave to clutch at the still-warm bounty and pull it down below the surface. Now that, horror fans, is an opening!

What follows isn’t nearly as good — namely, about a reel’s worth of tension-blasting yuks as the hayseed residents of Danburg mingle with the local authorities at the crash site to puzzle over what has happened. Comic relief in what would come to be called horror movies (the designation had not at this point been coined) was more the rule than the exception in 1925, the example of Germany (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, NOSFERATU, THE GOLEM) notwithstanding, and so the audience is treated at this juncture to some broad play-acting as our protagonists are introduced in the form of a bumbling would-be detective (Johnny Arthur), the object of his affections (Gertrude Olmstead) and his rival (Hallam Cooley) for those affections. When Olmstead seems to favor the attentions of the older and more worldly Cooley (who was in fact 15 years younger than the “juvenile” lead), Arthur grumps it into the night, where his witnessing of yet another arranged crash (this time involving Olmstead and Cooley, don’t'cha know) propels THE MONSTER into its A-plot and jostles the audience out of its stupor.

THE MONSTER‘s use of a horror situation in which motorists find themselves enmeshed due in large part to the machinations of resident fiends anticipates a rich vein of rural horror that is exemplified by THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974). The booby trap by which the unwary and the unlucky are diverted to their presumed doom in THE MONSTER brings to mind the lesser lights of MOTEL HELL (1980), where bear traps were employed by unethical fritter-makers to blow the tires of passers-by, and WRONG TURN (2003), in which a family inbred West Virginia melonheads uses barbed wire to shred the radials of milk-fed cityfolk. Eventually, though, THE MONSTER gets in out of the rain (and lightning) to spend the lion’s share of its run time between the walls of a purportedly disused sanitarium, at which point the film becomes a first cousin to the likes of THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932) and THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959). When metal shutters drop down to seal off every possible avenue of escape, one can’t help (well, I can’t help) but flash on THE RAVEN (1935), in which odd duck Bela Lugosi (and disfigured heyboy Boris Karloff) detain a houseful of guests for considerably more than charades. There are even notes here of Hammer’s DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965) — in which star Christopher Lee is retained in the wings like Chaney’s mad Dr. Ziska for a considerable portion of the build-up, while the heroes turn doorknobs and venture down dark corridors in an increasingly desperate bid to get the Hell out — and that slasher era oddment TOURIST TRAP (1979), in which three Jills and  Jack have the devil’s own time of escaping from Chuck Connor’s in-country mannequin habitat.

One sure-fire way to guarantee I will not watch your new horror movie is if there’s a scene where some poor sap (usually a woman, often screaming) is strapped to a gurney, with the awful expectation that there will be some gnarly sub-standard surgery to follow, performed by a gibbering mental deficient for whom an Xacto knife is as good as a No. 10 scalpel. We’ve seen this tableau much too much lately, in COPYCAT (1995), CREEP (2004), HOSTEL (2006), TURISTAS (2006), TIMBER FALLS (2007), SHADOW (2009) and many other contemporary horror flicks in which unpleasantness is confused with a symphony of terrors. Bela Lugosi might be considered the father of “torture porn” by having pricked Arlene Francis on the crossbeam in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932) and skinned Boris Karloff alive in THE BLACK CAT (1934) but here’s Lon Chaney strapping down Gertrude Olmstead nearly a decade earlier. (Olmstead married well and retired from show business in 1926, meaning she appeared in only 27 more films post-THE MONSTER). Ziska’s mad plan (within a plot structure that borrows a trick from Edgar Allan Poe’s The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether) is to learn the secret of life by transferring Cooley’s soul, at the moment of electrocution, to the more tender corporeality of Olmstead. There seems to be no higher priority beyond mad science — another writer might have had Ziska testing the soul switch-out with a crazed mind towards perfecting the process for the benefit of a terminally ill wife — and perhaps the desire in Hollywood to denigrate people with ethnic sounding surnames. One of the most remarkable things about THE MONSTER is that it doesn’t in any way involve a gorilla.

To suggest that Lon Chaney is unremarkable in THE MONSTER is not to say that he is unwelcome — far from it. Chaney is always watchable, always fascinating, just to see his mind working while he’s in front of the camera. Though he is better known for his grotesque or patently dramatic roles he has more in common with such great silent comedians as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. There’s intelligence in his playing, calculation, estimation and a measure of improvisation that have kept his performances dynamic and alive through the decades while those of many other then-bankable Hollywood leading men have been relegated to the antique shop. THE MONSTER is most fun in its third act, after Chaney’s arrival, but truth be told the movie is never really his. Roland West’s aerobic direction (he chose to adapt this Crane Wilbur property for the movies while waiting for the rights to the playwright’s better-known and better-received THE BAT to become available… and they would the following year) and the chiaroscuro cinematography of future Academy Award-winning cinematographer Hal Mohr (who later shot THE WALKING DEAD and other features for Michael Curtiz and shared an Oscar for his work on Universal’s Technicolor remake of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA) come together to turn the final half hour into a crowd-pleasing three-ring circus as Chaney schemes, Olmstead screams and Arthur earns his amateur detective’s badge… the hard way.

However THE MONSTER may seem to have had the jump on a number of classic horror movie tropes (including the old dark house gambit, predating as it does West’s THE BAT, Paul Leni’s THE CAT AND THE CANARY, Roy del Ruth’s THE TERROR and Alfred Santell and Bryan Foy’s respective cracks at THE GORILLA), I can’t say it’s a seminal film. Not everything that comes out of the gate first is seminal. Some movies just incorporate the raw classic materials without fully integrating or realizing them and nobody knows what could have been until somebody else comes along later on and nails it. (Case in point, the largely forgotten holiday-set, lunatic-comes-home slasher SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT vs. the instant classic HALLOWEEN.) I would recommend the film, though, as a seldom-discussed Lon Chaney credit, as an arguable progenitor of both rural horror and torture porn and as a reminder to horror lifers who need to know, who really need to know, that certain fright tropes still being carted out today as if novel are as old as the Hollywood Hills.

THE MONSTER is available exclusively from The Warner Archive.