LECTURE THREE

Universal had been involved with horror films from silent days. Lon Chaney had done films there and in a sense launched the studio on its route to films which relied heavily on make-up - something Chaney was a master of. With the advent of Chaney's death in 1930, his reign as king of the horrors came to end. So in 1931 when Universal made Dracula other performer needed to be found. Bela Lugosi, who had played the role on stage, fought valiently for the role and got it. The success of Dracula was followed by the production of Frankenstein but Lugosi was asked to audition - he believed for the doctor, but in fact was being asked to play the monster. He rejected the role, something he regretted later. Boris Karloff took the part and this catapulted him into a kind of stardom he had not had before, Unlike Lugosi, he accepted the next role - that of Imhotep in The Mummy. These three films are the most famous of the Universal films, although the studio made many others including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the Invisible Man and then produced their fourth famous monster in 1941 with the appearance of Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolf Man. This story which is a kind of Jekyll and Hyde story in which an evil side of a person emerges - in this case in the form of an animal - a wolf. The doctor in the story in fact makes the point overtly. It will not until Universal makes The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1953 that another creature would appear that caught the enthusiasm of the audience the sme way the earlier four had.

As a result of financial problems caused by Orson Welles Citizen Kane which went over budget and was not producing large box office figures, RKO decided to try its hand at horror films as well. They established a B level unit to make cheap horror films which would hopefully produce revenue. Val Lewton was chosen to head the unit as producer and Jacques Tourneur as director. Both were foreign born, Lewton in Russia to a family with a famous actress, Alla Nazimova (most famous for her Salome). Lewton's family moved first to Berlin and then came to the U.S. He was raised in part in Port Chester, NY before going to California. Tourneur was the son of a well known French director Maurice Tourneur. Father and son had been in the U.S. early but went back to France. Jacques returned and together with Val Lewton they made the first three of the units horror films:

Both Tourneur and Wise made films "saluting" Lewton, Tourneur's being curse of the Demon and Wise's being The Haunting As noted, Lewton set up as a low budget horror film producer for RKO, a studio impressed by Universal’s success in the horror area. (The Wolf Man was 1941, Cat People 1942)

Universal’s films were famous for their make up and special effects which were costly. The complex make up for their early films was initiated by Lon Chaney and so the studio had a history of “make up” and the way to go.

Low budget leads often to creativity. Lewton was not impressed with the Universal horrors which he saw as just make up and special effects. Said he was interested in terror, not horror something more psychologically scary perhaps, but often with a questioning as to whether or not the supernatural is really there. Lewton wanted to show as little as possible preferring to let the viewer create the real “terror” by imagining what happened. One can only speculate how a producer and director today would shoot The Leopard Man.

Ultimately he was given Boris Karloff to work with and was appalled since Karloff was a major star in the films he hated and Lewton refused initially to work with him. They finally sat down together and discovered that Karloff hated the films he was in and was dead on with Lewton. They did two films together - The Body Snatcher and Isle of the Dead. Karloff went on to do his own TV series called Thriller which was much more in keeping with what he and Lewton liked, and also appeared in Mario Bava’s I tre volti della paura (Black Sabbath) – an anthology film which will be show later

Some films (the supernatural ones) require that the audience accept the existence of the supernatural from the start. Others question it, usually coming down in favor of its existence. Those that don’t are few – I Bury the Living, The Woman Who Came Back, The Scarlet Claw, The Hound of the Baskervilles. In The Wolfman science is clearly wrong. We see the transformation and then the doctor asserts that this whole thing is in Lawrence Talbot’s head! How is that possible when we ourselves just saw the transformation. The scientist must be wrong. The supernatural is real.

So 2 distinct approaches appear in the supernatural horrors - does the film focus on the make-up and/or transformation and whether or not the film ultimately requires a suspension of disbelief (and thereby causes the audience to accept the existence of the supernatural).The WOlf Man, scientific explanation is ridiculed in the sense that the audience has seen the transformation of Lawrence Talbot into the wolf, and yet the scientist is saying such things are not possible and are only the result of the persons mind.

By and large films of this sort tend to come down on the side of the existence of the supernatural and against the scientific or rational approaches. In a sense this sets up a kind of dichotomy between the rational and anti- rational (not irrational) - that is it sets up a dichotomy between those things which can be scientifically approached and those which in a sense, can not. In this was art is akin to the supernatural

Notes on Cat People