accent on horror: bela lugosi`s scared to death

ACCENT ON HORROR: BELA LUGOSI’S SCARED TO DEATH
By Gary D. Rhodes and
Bill Kaffenberger
In the months following
the end of World War II, the
American film industry achieved
great economic success. As film
historian Thomas Schatz wrote in
Boom or Bust: American Cinema
in the 1940s, “Hollywood enjoyed its best year ever” in 1946.
The industry looked toward
greater and greater profits, and
why not? Troops returning home
could only mean a significant
increase for ticket sales.
For the fiscal year ending
November 2, 1946, Universal
Studios reported the biggest
profits in its lengthy history
(“Universal Profit in Year Record
High $4,565,219,” Motion Picture
Herald, February 1, 1947). Monogram’s profits also increased to
record levels (“Monogram Had
$216,999 Profit for 26 Weeks,”
Motion Picture Herald, February
22, 1947). And by the end of 1946,
PRC—a company known for its
poverty-row output—had grown
confident enough in its role in the
marketplace to drop low-budget
films from its program.
What did that mean for the
horror film? In 1945, the situation
appeared tenuous. On the one
hand, studios released numerous
horror films that year. On the
other hand, in September 1945,
Variety predicted that “balanced
films” would replace “cycles.”
That was in addition to Universal’s using “psychological goose
pimples” as the basis for a few of
their new “chillers,” rather than
relying on the old “monsters.”
But in 1945, perhaps the key
question was the very meaning of the word
horror. Years earlier, by the end of 1932, horror
concretized as the film genre’s name, much
as other genres had one-word monikers
like musical or gangster. And it had served
Hollywood quite well, representing a clear
narrative tradition in the space of six letters.
In spring 1945, however, a new kind of
“horror” film complicated the meaning of
that word. The Allied liberation of German
death camps had many effects, not the least
of which were terrifying nonfiction images.
Public screenings of such film footage
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were partly due to General Eisenhower: he
believed Americans needed to see “what
the enemy had done.” As Motion Picture
Herald wrote, audiences who viewed the
Nazi films “have seen all the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse riding at last over
the brink of a fetid hell.”
Much of the American press labeled
footage of the Nazi atrocities as “Horror
Films.” A Gallup poll revealed that 60% of
the American public believed the Nazi films
should be shown in theaters. In St. Louis, for
example, 81,500 persons attended 44 screen-
ings of the footage, which had originally been
scheduled for only twelve performances.
And increased theater attendance occurred
in numerous parts of the country when these
films were screened.
Continued reports of similar films appeared in the press in 1946, including details
of footage shot by the Nazis. The February
27, 1946, Los Angeles Times described films
screened at Nuremberg that showed:
…German soldiers laughing
while one of them swung an axe
Such movies were variety] isn’t drawing crowds.” After menin addition to 1946 com- tioning “those shockers with an ingredient
edies like Monogram’s of psychology” in them, the reporter profeature Spook Busters with ceeded to ask Lugosi about the “horrors
the Bowery Boys (released of war” on-screen. The actor promptly
in August) and Columbia’s responded that audiences liked fictional
short subject A Bird in the horror, as they preferred the “unreality” of
Head (released in April), them to any real atrocities in movies.
as well as a number of Others working in the film industry
horror films that had been also understood this expanded meaning of
released the prior year but the word horror. In 1946, for example, Curt
which still remained in Siodmak—screenwriter of such films as
general distribution, in- The Wolf Man (1941)—wrote in The Screen
cluding Universal’s House Writer, “Almost every melodrama contains
of Dracula (1945).
scenes of horror, though the A-Plus pro
In April 1946, Holly- ducer would never accept that term for his
wood Reporter announced million-dollar creation. When horror enters
that “horror pix” were the gilded gate of top production, it is glorigaining “heavier adult fied as a ‘psychological thriller.’ But a rose
patronage,” adding that by any other name…”
they were “winning uni- Even if some of those producers esversal appeal,” thanks to chewed the word horror, others did not. In
bigger budgets and higher an August 1946 issue of Liberty magazine,
standards. Here the discus- Joseph Wechsberg took pains to detail the
Bela Lugosi in disguise in the bullets-flying finale of Genius at
sion centered not on films different kinds of screen horror that existed,
Work. (Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)
like The Flying Serpent or going so far as to say: “Horror can be a great
Valley of the Zombies, but many things, from the psychological thriller
to behead helpless Yugoslavs, of
on motion pictures of a different type, those to the strictly monster tale. The witch scene
S.S. men swinging corpses after
that were more psychological or suspenseful. in Disney’s Snow White [1937] and the whale
hangings, and of ferocious dogs
Hollywood Reporter specifically cited such in Pinocchio [1940] were nothing but horror.”
and starving hogs devouring other
1946 releases as RKO’s The Spiral Staircase and Perhaps the larger umbrella of horror
victims were shown today on [a]
Bedlam, the latter produced by Val Lewton as it was being perceived in 1946 could also
motion picture screen to the interand starring Boris Karloff. They also drew include RKO’s film Genius at Work, which
national military tribunal.
attention to Columbia’s The Walls Came paired Lugosi with Lionel Atwill. Why the
Tumbling Down (1946). HorAfter mentioning such films as The Cabinet ror—in another expanded
of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Dracula (1931), use of the term—for more
another journalist noted, “In all the grim discriminating tastes.
record of man’s inhumanity to man there is Such an elastic underlittle to match the wholesale crimes of which standing of “horror” could
the last batch of Nuremberg defendants well have allowed the
now stand convicted.”
Hollywood Reporter to cite
While the Nazi atrocities on the screen other movies in general replaced pressure on the meaning of the term lease during 1946, includhorror film, they did not halt Hollywood’s ing Hitchcock’s Spellbound
production of fictional horror films, some of (which had premiered
which were quite similar to those of earlier during the final days of
years. For example, throughout 1946, audi- 1945), as well as a few forences saw Monogram’s The Face of Marble and eign films that appeared
PRC’s Strangler of the Swamp (January), PRC’s on American screens, inThe Flying Serpent (February), PRC’s The Mask cluding the Swedish-made
of Diijon and Universal’s House of Horrors The Girl and the Devil and
and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (March), the British-made Dead of
PRC’s Devil Bat’s Daughter and Republic’s The Night and Frenzy.
Catman of Paris (April), Universal’s She-Wolf Bela Lugosi was
of London and The Cat Creeps and Republic’s well aware of all these
Valley of the Zombies (May), and PRC’s The issues, speaking about
Brute Man (October). And, as the year came to them to a reporter as early
In order to pass as a woman, Genius at Work villain “The
a close, industry trade publications reviewed as spring 1945, when he
Cobra” (Lionel Atwill) prepares to shave his mustache as
Warner Brothers’ new film The Beast with Five said, “scarcely any horror
henchman Stone (Lugosi) brings him women’s clothes.
(Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)
Fingers (e.g., “Five Fingers All Thumbs,” Hol- film you can name [of the
lywood Reporter, December 20, 1946).
Dracula and Frankenstein
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