UNIVERSAL CLASSIC MONSTERS: ICONS OF HORROR COLLECTION - 4K UHD Blu-ray (Universal, 1931-41) Universal Home Video

In its heyday, Universal Studios was Hollywood’s homegrown Transylvania, catering to the public’s intense fascination for all things supernatural and terrifying. Why anyone should wish to experience visualizations of such tales of the macabre has been a perplexing psychological question. It goes without saying, most people would not wish to be terrorized by some ominous, unspeakably wicked, and unknown force of nature in their own lives. Yet, on film, this catharsis of fear effortlessly translates into the ‘good scare’…and, for good reason. Inside the relative safety of a darkened theater or, perhaps, pensively perched - warm and cozy - on the edge of our couch with a cup of cocoa nuzzled between our finger tips we can vicariously experience what, in life, would be a truly horrific exercise to scare our psyches forever.  The definition of a ‘monster’ derives from the word ‘demonstrative’ and loosely thereafter, from the word, ‘demonstrate’. So, monsters teach us something about ourselves and, at least in the classical sense, are templates to forewarn humanity of its own human – and occasionally, inhumane – foibles.  And film, perhaps better than even the imaginative properties of our mind, to be exorcised by great literature or a radio broadcast, rapidly evolved into the medium of choice, where our nightmares could be collectively expelled, if never to be entirely expunged from the darkest recesses of our minds. Universal’s horror tradition is often accredited to Carl Laemmle Jr., the juvenile wunderkind who inherited the studio from his father. But actually, Laemmle Sr. had already established the genre as the studio’s bread and butter during the silent era, including two Lon Chaney classics; The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), among others. Despite these initial successes, Universal’s fortunes foundered. By the late 1920’s, when junior stepped in as president, the company had fallen into temporary receivership.  

Undeniably, the real golden age of Universal horror began under Laemmle Jr.; his foray, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931); the celebrated retelling of Braum Stoker’s gothic tale. However, the movie adaptation is heavily skewed to Broadway’s ‘Dracula’; a play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, as in 1922, F.W. Murnau had created, arguably, the definitive homage to Stoker’s blood sucker with Nosferatu – an expressionist masterpiece that unfortunately did not have the consent of Stoker’s widow or rights permission. As such, a lengthy and costly lawsuit concluded with a court decree that all prints of Nosteratu should be destroyed. Nevertheless, on this side of the Atlantic, Laemmle Jr. felt reasonably secure, his Dracula would not suffer a similar fate. The Deane/Balderston play deviated just enough from Stoker’s original to avoid injunction, and it was also a proven commodity with audiences. But perhaps best of all, it produced the iconography of the vampire in Bela Lugosi - a soft-spoken Hungarian who, ironically, was first passed over for the part by Laemmle Jr. By all accounts, the shooting of Dracula was chaotic, with Browning relying heavily on Karl Freund to lens many of the scenes, while the script by Garret Fort daily evolved as a work in progress. To complicate matters and inflate the budget, in the days before post syncing made it possible to overdub actors for the foreign language market, Dracula was being photographed twice, by day with Lugosi, and, at night, with an all-Spanish cast after Browning’s unit had gone home. Viewing the two movies side by side, one is awestruck by the visual finesse of the Spanish language version. The camera is more mobile with fluid maneuvers inside these cavernous sets.

But Browning’s version had Lugosi. And the actor gave a startling – occasionally bone chilling – performance as the diabolical Count who keeps vampire brides in his castle cellar.  Our tale begins with solicitor, Renfield’s (Dwight Frye) perilous journey to Castle Dracula. The Count assures his victim that no harm will come to him, but later hypnotizes and devours Renfield.  The master and his hapless slave, having gone mad from being bitten, board a schooner for England. Renfield is committed to a sanatorium and Dracula meets the kindly Dr. Seward (Herbert Bunston) his daughter, Mina (Helen Chander), her fiancée, John Harker (David Manners) and a close friend, Lucy Weston (Frances Dade) while attending the theater. Lucy becomes transfixed by Dracula who wastes no time feasting on her blood. When Lucy dies from this encounter an autopsy reveals two small puncture wounds on her neck. Meanwhile, Renfield’s obsession with eating bugs causes Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) to do an analysis of his patient’s blood. Dracula turns his attentions to Mina. Although his love bite does not destroy her, Mina too becomes dreamlike and aloof. Thus, when Dracula returns for a more cordial visit, Van Helsing and Harker quietly deduce that he is responsible for their recent tragedies. Meanwhile, Lucy has risen from the dead to prey upon young children in the park. Van Helsing plans to take Mina away to spare her a similar fate, but instead orders Nurse Briggs (Joan Standing) to guard her with a wreath of wolf bane. Dracula attempts to hypnotize Van Helsing but is driven back by the crucifix. After Dracula’s compelling Mina to bite Harker fails, Harker and Van Helsing pursue Dracula to his coffin and wait for daylight, whereupon Van Helsing drives a stake through the Count’s heart, thus releasing Mina from his curse.

Dracula was such a colossal success, Laemmle Jr. immediately put Frankenstein (1931) into production. He now had the time and, more importantly, the money to create an ambitious work of horror. Directed by James Whale, like Dracula before it, Frankenstein is very loosely based on Mary Shelley’s immortal literary masterpiece, as reconstituted in play form by Peggy Webling.  Makeup genius, Jack Pierce created an iconic monster quite unlike the one described in Shelley’s novel, making a superstar out of relatively unknown, Boris Karloff. It is rumored Karloff spent nearly 6 hours in the makeup chair being transformed with toxic and occasionally painful applications. Like Lugosi, Karloff was an otherwise soft-spoken cordial gentleman, quite unlike his monolithic alter ego, and therein perhaps lies the enduring success of the creature he portrays, sympathetically and with a tragic underlay of endearing sadness.The screenplay by Francis Edward Faragoh and Garrett Fort begins with Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive), the brilliant, though slightly demented scientist whose ambition it is to stitch together a human out of body parts stolen from recently deceased and unearthed cadavers.  However gruesome the prospect, Henry keeps the secrets of life and death mostly to himself, and, on the surface at least, leads a very normal life that includes his engagement to Elizabeth Lavenza (Mae Clarke). Eventually, Elizabeth learns the truth and is invited into Frankenstein’s inner sanctum to witness the miracle of life. Using a Tesla coil, Henry shocks his creation with voltage generated from a violent electrical storm. The creature is born, but without Henry realizing that the brain implanted in it once belonged to a criminal mastermind.

Part of the genuine beauty of this film is Karloff’s performance as the monster, fearful, tragic and ultimately doomed never to be loved or understood. Indeed, from the moment the monster comes to life, he is treated rather appallingly by Henry and his hunchback assistant, Fritz (Dwight Frye), who chain their creation in the dungeon and terrorize him with flames from a torch. The monster escapes and ventures into the real world where he learns kindness from a peasant girl who encourages him to pluck the petals off a daisy and cast them upon the water of a nearby lake. Taking the exercise too literally, the monster tosses the girl in after the petals where she regrettably drowns. The monster’s shock, disbelief and genuine panic at having killed his one true friend is heartbreaking. After stalking a terrified Elizabeth on her wedding day, the monster retreats to an abandoned windmill, pursued by angry villagers who torch it and thus presumably destroy him.

By now, the monster cycle was in full swing at Universal. After several original attempts to create home-grown terror, the studio once again fell back on a time-honored horror masterpiece, bringing H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1933) to life, starring the inimitable Claude Rains. But Wells’ nightmarish terror presented something of a challenge in that its star would never be seen. Instead, special effects trickery would create the illusion of an absence while Rains played virtually all of his scenes wrapped in a swath of bandages. However, Universal knew what it was doing when it cast Rains - an instantly recognizable voice with intense sincerity that could pull off the seemingly impossible feat of making an audience care for someone who ‘visually’ – at least – was not present. Rains had not been the first choice for the part, but he proved the only choice in the end, after Karloff, Chester Morris and Colin Clive all turned it down. Rains is Dr. Jack Griffin, a reclusive stranger newly arrived in a tiny English village. His presence startles innkeeper Mr. Hall (Forrest Harvey) and his wife (Una O’Connor); enough for Hall to order him out of his establishment. But when the police arrive, Griffin disrobes to reveal that he is, in fact, invisible. Tearing off into the night, Griffin is identified only by his hysterical laughter that continues to terrorize the town’s folk. Eventually, the town comes to know Griffin from Flora Cranley (Gloria Stuart) who is desperately in love with him. The good doctor had been experimenting with ‘monocane’; a dangerous drug that rendered another test subject - Griffin’s dog – mad. Naturally, Flora’s father, Dr. Cranley (Henry Travers) is most concerned, even more so when Griffin forces Cranley’s assistant, Dr. Kemp (William Harrigan) to become his invisible cohort in a plot to take over the world.

Kemp attempts to alert the authorities. But, after Griffin overhears an officer declaring the whole thing to be a colossal hoax, he decides to murder him simply to prove otherwise. Later, Kemp telephones Cranley who brings Flora with him to subdue Griffin from committing more murders. The plan backfires, and Griffin derails a train, killing many. In retaliation, the police offer a reward to anyone who can devise a plan to capture Griffin. The chief detective (Dudley Digges) uses Kemp as bait to lure Griffin out of hiding. He dresses Kemp in an officer’s uniform and orders him to drive a car away from his house. But once the vehicle is out of range, Griffin reveals that he has been hiding in the backseat all along and helps steer the car and Kemp over the edge of a cliff. Seeking shelter inside a nearby barn, Griffin is ‘found’ by a farmer when he notices that his hay stack is snoring. The police arrive and mortally wound Griffin. With Flora at his side, Griffin admits that his experiments were evil; his body gradually becoming visible after he has died.

By the early 1940s, Universal’s terrors were internationally famous. To keep the cycle going, the studio developed another wholly original creature - The Wolf Man (1941), marking it as the only classic monster in the studio’s home-grown folklore to be consistently played by the same actor, Lon Chaney Jr. In the past, Chaney often assumed hand-me-downs of the other famous monsters in Universal’s canon when their creators were either unavailable or unwilling to partake of the exercise. But The Wolf Man was Chaney’s alone and he commanded it with an uncanny knack for capturing the empathetic distortions of a man forced to live half his life as a self-destructive animal. George Waggener directed this classy classic from an original screenplay by Curt Siodmak. The legend of this half man/half wolf creature is purely a Universal concoction, its poetic folklore suggesting that “even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the autumn moon is bright” absolute genius in all its pulpy panache from Siodmak’s pen. In The Wolf Man, we are introduced to Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who returns to his ancestral home in Wales to reconcile with his father, Sir John (Claude Rains) after the death of his only brother. Becoming enamored with local antique dealer, Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), Lawrence purchases a silver chalice with markings of a wolf. Gwen forewarns this is an ill omen of the ‘werewolf’. That night Gwen’s friend, Jenny Williams (Fay Helm) is attacked by a creature not unlike the one in Gwen’s description. The chivalrous Talbot slays the beast but is gouged in the chest for his efforts. Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya), a gypsy fortuneteller reveals to Talbot that the creature was actually her son, Bela (Bela Lugosi) and that he has brought the transformative curse upon himself.  From this moment forward, Talbot repeatedly stalks the village with bloodthirsty desires to kill. Eventually, Sir John begins to suspect the obvious. After Gwen narrowly escapes, Sir John murders his own son to spare her life, using the same silver-tipped cane Lawrence did to defend Jenny against Bela.

Universal Home Video’s debut of 4 classic monsters from its golden era in 4K initially gave me considerable pause. For starters, the original film elements for all of these iconic outings had been afforded considerable ‘ground-up’ restorations in previous decades, with minor tweaking occurring ever since as the studio continued to mine – then, repackage and release its monster mash-ups to DVD and Blu-ray. How much better could any of them look in 4K? The answer…plenty! Where the previous Blu-rays yielded some very impressive visuals, when directly compared to the monsters’ reincarnations in UHD 4K, even these highly lauded, standard hi-def releases now decidedly pale.  The biggest discrepancy between the original Blu-ray releases of all 4 monster movies housed in this collection and their UHD 4K counterparts, is contrast. The 4K renderings are noticeably darker, the Blu-rays now looking as though to have had their contrast artificially boosted. These darker UHD renders do not obscure fine detail, however. On the contrary, if anything, the most minute aspects in hair, skin and overall production design now steadily creep to the forefront of the image. We can see pours in Karloff’s skin, glinting strands in Lugosi’s pomaded hair, fibers in Chaney’s wolf man make-up, and the textures of gauze in Rains’ bandages. Truly, the monsters have never looked better than this. Universal has done its history proud here. The original DTS mono tracks have been adequately ported over from the standard Blu-ray editions, and ditto for the extras too. Virtually everything that was a part of the Universal Classic Monsters Blu-ray set has been returned for your consideration here, and, actually included on the 4K disc versions. This set also contains the original Blu-ray editions with these same extras. I’ll not go into the details of these goodies in this review as I have already done so extensively on the indie Blu-rays reviewed back in 2012. But you get all of the audio commentaries, all the featurettes, and all the bios and documentaries extensively produced by the studio in 2012 to honor their heritage. Bottom line: the 4K UHD release of Universal Classic Monsters: Icons of Horror Collection is a must have for horror aficionados. Might we expect a Volume 2 in 2022? Hmmmm. In the meantime, very highly recommended.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

Overall – 4.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

5+

EXTRAS

5+