FRANKENSTEIN (1931)

What amazes me about FRANKENSTEIN is how-- despite the unbelievably high level of over-exposure that the figure of the titular mad scientist and his ghastly creation have gotten over the last eighty years-- the original movie still retains its power to chill. I mean, just walk into any department store this week and count all the Halloween decorations, tchotchkes, and geegaws that you can buy with jokey post-Herman Munster renditions of the Monster: flat head, green skin, clunky boots and neck bolts. Looking at the cheap plastic salt and pepper shakers and pumpkin-scented candles, you’d think that the Monster would be a completely exhausted and clichéd idiom by now. But it’s not.

There's something almost mythological about FRANKENSTEIN; I watched it last night in quiet wonder and was raptly caught up in the performances and the sets and James Whale's marvelous direction and Arthur Edelson's riveting camerawork. As near as I can recollect, I probably saw FRANKENSTEIN for the first time on a winter afternoon in February 1971 ; since then, I've seen it innumerable times on television and home video. But I was not distracted by over-familiarity even once last night. Seeing this on television in October 1957 must have been thrilling, even with commercial interruption.

In fact, here's the thing about watching this movie on TV with commercials: there are a few scenes in FRANKENSTEIN that end with black0uts that seem custom-made for ad breaks-- many scenes are self-contained intensities of horror that snap together nicely and build on top of each other, so I can imagine that commercials would be only a minor annoyance: you could ease back in your seat and catch your breath during the ads for some local pharmacy or automotive dealership, grab a snack, and settle in for the next segments of the movie. The pacing of the movie, in other words, could survive intact and still impress the viewer.

Of the assembled parts that make up FRANKENSTEIN, it is the creation scene in the expressionist medieval (some sources say "ancient Roman") watchtower that I find most arresting: the delirious excitement of Frankenstein, the perversely eager puppy-dog complicity of Fritz, the three aghast on-lookers in the "audience," and all of it going down amid Ken Strickfaden's sparkpunk arrays of "electrical illusionations, electresence and auratronics" -- it's really a sharp piece of filmmaking. What I find most well-done is that point when the operating table is hoisted up during the climax of the thunderstorm and we never get to see what exactly happens up there: we viewers all stare expectantly at the ceiling along with the five characters, but all we are shown is the result when the Monster is cranked back down into the lab. The mystery of creation stays a mystery.

As with RKO’s KING KONG, FRANKENSTEIN is one of those motion pictures that I wish I could travel back in time to see for the first-time with a cinema audience during its opening week. What would it have been like? Reviews from 1931 help to capture the mood a little (I like the one from Bioscope quoted by Bryan Senn in Golden Horrors: "As a crudely constructed blood-curdler, it will certainly thrill those who find their pleasures in things morbid and horrible"). I assumed that the next best thing to being there then would be to watch it now with someone who had never seen FRANKENSTEIN before. But I could not find anyone in my extended social circle to watch it with me last night, not even those few self-described horror movie aficionados. These people were especially disappointing for they, despite having never seen the movie, said that they weren't interested because FRANKENSTEIN was "too old," "too slow," "boring," and "black and white" (presumably this means "not worthy of any consideration").

Charleston, WV, 1956
Hamilton, OH, 1957

But television viewers fifty-three years ago were interested in FRANKENSTEIN. Right up to the premiere of SHOCK! in 1957, you could still find FRANKENSTEIN playing in movie theaters and still making money in the box office. So it makes sense, then, if you were programming the SHOCK! package on your station as part of an existing late-movie showcase or inaugurating a new "shock theater" show, FRANKENSTEIN would be the first movie of the bunch that you'd select to be shown because of the popularity of its theatrical re-release afterlife. As far as I have been able to tell, FRANKENSTEIN was almost unanimously the first of the SHOCK! films broadcast on television by the stations who had purchased the package (DRACULA appears to have been the only other choice). FRANKENSTEIN, in short, was the pick of the litter.

Dunkirk [NY] Evening Observer
Thursday, October 17, 1957

Most terror film scholars would agree that FRANKENSTEIN helped to launch the first "cycle" of horror movies in 1931 (Senn, for instance, calls it "the primary progenitor [if not by right of nascence, then by weight of influence] of the sound horror genre"). And, as I'll discuss in more detail in a few weeks when we get to DRACULA and SON OF FRANKENSTEIN in my viewing project, FRANKENSTEIN also helped to kick off the second cycle of Golden Age in 1938 when it was officially re-released by Universal after the collapse of the so-called horror film ban. But if the SHOCK! syndication series did indeed spawn the Monster Culture revolution as I have been hoping to explore for myself with this blog, than FRANKENSTEIN was also the midwife of a third horror cycle (classic horror movies shown on TV in the Silver Age). The power of this movie is remarkable and undeniable.

NEXT: "Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff star in Shock's full-length feature film THE INVISIBLE RAY. Tune in and see the man who had death in his finger tips. It's a shocker!"

FRANKENSTEIN Preview

"The daddy of all full-length features is here to scare you! That's FRANKENSTEIN on Shock on this channel! Here is raw horror-- a story that has shocked generations! Don't miss Boris Karloff in this spine-chiller!"



Friday night's viewing for all SHOCK! fans will be FRANKENSTEIN, the landmark 1931 James Whale film starring Boris Karloff and Colin Clive, with assistance from Dwight Frye. You can watch the film whenever you want, of course, or just revive your memory (proving that it's alive!) for the Saturday posting by Creeping Bride. Commentary afterward encouraged.

The SHOCK! Doctrine

"'Shock Theater' was the inaugural event of Monster Culture, a phenomenon of horror-movie hoopla that began in the late Fifties and continued into the mid-Sixties," David J. Skal writes in The Monster Show. ("Shock Theater" was the stock name that many stations used for their showcases that ran the SHOCK! titles, frequently with a horror host.) Skal is right , but I want to take the genealogy back a little further to look at what went into the decision-making process that SHOCK!'ed some of Universal's pre-1948 movies but didn't SHOCK! others.

We may never know the names of the Screen Gems programmers who fashioned the SHOCK! package...maybe some resourceful corporate historian can crack those archives one day and identify those responsible for launching what would become the mid-twentieth century horror revolution in US popular culture. If we could find a paper trail for these people, then perhaps we could figure out the rationale behind the process used to select these particular 52 Universal movies out of of the 600 that had been acquired. For now, I can only speculate on the thinking that went into choosing those motion pictures.

From the perspective of fans of classic horror films, there are some glaring omissions in this collection of movies made available to TV in October 1957-- where is JUNGLE WOMAN, BLACK FRIDAY, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, or THE INVISIBLE MAN'S REVENGE? With such obvious absences, we have to guess that the programming philosophy behind SHOCK! was to intentionally provide an eclectic mix of monster, mystery, and spy thrillers (1958's Son of SHOCK!, by comparison, was far more horror-centric). My first instinct , then, was to surmise that, when the SHOCK! package was first assembled at Screen Gems in the summer of 1957, the syndicators did not anticipate the appetite that the TV audience had for horror movies (despite the crazy ratings success of RKO's KING KONG on television in March 1956). Horror films were, after all, disparaged and despised by critics and studios; perhaps there was a belief at Screen Gems that a horror-movie-only package would not sell to TV stations, so a range of films was welded together for this particular cluster.

(Somewhere in their promotional materials, Screen Gems mentions that SHOCK! would be an "irresistible attraction for the mood programming of feature films." What in the world was "mood programming" on TV in the mid-1950s? Was it a common practice? This odd idea makes me think of the comment that Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas make in the second edition of Universal Horrors about how the SHOCK! package seemed to want to re-define that specific sensation to include "such allied emotions as fear, mystery, dread, tension, and intrigue" by including non-horror titles.)

But you can see how wrong my theory is when you look at the SHOCK! publicity sent out by Screen Gems-- all the big splashy pages emphasize only the horror movies: FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA, THE MUMMY, THE MAD GHOUL, THE WOLF MAN and THE INVISIBLE MAN are given pride of place over the mysteries and espionage thrillers; the front cover of the booklet (the image that Mirek made into the title banner for this blog) clearly features a bevy of monsters, rather than spies or private eyes, and the back-cover illustration (reproduced at the top of this post) is monstrous as well. "For years, tales of terror, macabre stories of ghouls and ghosts have fascinated millions in every form of entertainment," one page in the promo booklet reads. "Now, for the first time, the eerie world of the weird and the supernatural comes to television with stunning impact [...] SHOCK! captures audiences! holds audiences! builds audiences!"

It's clear, then, that Screen Gems understood that here was a thirst for horror movies and it was attempting to slake that thirst with SHOCK! And it didn't take long for them to be proven right: thirty markets aired SHOCK! in October and the ensuing ratings bonanza meant that many more stations would purchase the package and begin airing it in late December or early January 1958.

In our efforts to uncover the principle ideas behind the SHOCK! doctrine, it is worth noting that the stations that purchased the package were not under any contractual obligation to show all 52 films as part of the same showcase. When their stations finally did get their hands on SHOCK!, some local TV station program directors cherry-picked the offerings to front-load the monster movies and shuffled off the other titles to other time-slots-- something like THE MUMMY'S HAND would be broadcast as part of "Shock Theater," but SEALED LIPS turned up on Channel 21 (Fort Wayne, IN) in a decidedly non-SHOCK! context at 10am on "Mom's Morning Movie"; REPORTED MISSING was shown on a station in Camden, NJ on the "Million Dollar Matinee" at 5:30; A DANGEROUS GAME appeared as an offering on "The 4 O'Clock Movie" in San Antonio, TX in 1958; and ENEMY AGENT turned up on the 2pm "Early Show" on KOB-TV Channel 4 (Albuquerque, NM).

So although we may never find out exactly what the Screen Gems strategy was for SHOCK!ing some films and not others, we can also credit the autonomy of local stations in programming their own particular version of "Shock Theater" in this cultural shift-- in effect, the choices made by local TV station programmers in selecting which SHOCK! titles to show did as much to launch the Monster Revolution in their cities as did the Screen Gems syndicators who had done the SHOCK! bundling in the first place. But ultimately, it was neither Screen Gems syndicators nor local TV station programmers that were responsible for SHOCK!'s success: it was the viewers themselves who responded so enthusiastically to what they were seeing on late-night TV.



NEXT: The first film of my viewing project, FRANKENSTEIN, "airs" this Friday night, followed a few days later by THE INVISIBLE RAY. I hope that others will watch these movies and comment on them here.

Here is the suggested (slightly abridged) twenty-second promotion provided by Screen Gems for the movie:

"The daddy of all full-length features is here to scare you! That's FRANKENSTEIN on Shock on this channel! Here is raw horror-- a story that has shocked generations! Don't miss Boris Karloff in this spine-chiller!"

Swami Drana Badour -- Is He TV's First Horror Film Host?

It appears that Vampira was NOT the first horror film host on television. Swami Drana Badour was the host of MURDER BEFORE MIDNIGHT, a show that debuted on Chicago's WBKB on January 23, 1950, ending its run in 1952. The following information about Swami Drana Badour is chiefly taken from a discussion on the Classic Horror Film Board and the posts of Don Glut.

TV announcer Allen Harvey played the Swami, and the show ran from Monday to Saturday, showing films in serial-like form, as the program was only half an hour. Art Hern later replaced Harvey as the Swami.

Glut: "Accompanied by spooky music, the camera would slowly push in towards the Swami and his crystal ball, which is where the movie would begin. Then the shot would dissolve to the movie itself. The movies were not run in their entirety, but 'serialized' over three days. After the movie segment was over, the Swami would do an over-the-air quiz, phoning people at home and asking questions relating to the movie. Winners got a jackpot prize offered by sponsor Allied Motors."

Glut lists some of the films shown on MURDER BEFORE MIDNIGHT:

THE CORPSE VANISHES
WHITE ZOMBIE
PANTHER'S CLAW
A SHOT IN THE DARK
THE FACE OF MARBLE
BELOW THE DEADLINE
REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES
DARK ALIBI (Charlie Chan)
RED DRAGON (Charlie Chan)
SALUTE THE TOFF
HAMMER THE TOFF
RETURN OF THE APE MAN
SHADOW OVER CHINATOWN (Charlie Chan)
THE APE MAN
PHANTOM SHOT
NIGHT COMES TOO SOON
THE ACCUSED
THE NIGHT HAS EYES
IMPORTANT WITNESS
THE INTRUDER
MEET SEXTON BLAKE
THE CASE OF CHARLES PEARCE
THERE GOES KELLY
TANGLED EVIDENCE
LORD EDGWARE DIES
SOMEONE AT THE DOOR
THREE WITNESSES
ACE OF SPACES
PAUL TEMPLE'S TRIUMPH
WOMEN IN THE SHADOW

It's an eclectic brew, but certainly such a mixture of horror and mystery films was part of the Vampira show and, later, the SHOCK! and SON OF SHOCK! programming.

My suspicions are that a rigorous search through newspaper TV programing guides in other cities will uncover other horror hosts that predated Vampira and possibly the Swami himself. Our work has just begun!

The First Horror Film Host?

It would be a mistake to think that SHOCK! programming introduced the horror film host to television. Maila Nurmi, as Vampira, set the template with THE VAMPIRA SHOW that premiered in Los Angeles on May 1, 1954 on KABC. Films like REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES and FOG ISLAND were exhibited, with Vampira talking to the TV audience and doing commentary on the films. The show began at the midnight slot (another influence for many SHOCK! programs), with adjustments to 11pm then 10:30pm. The character of Vampira became a celebrity in the LA area, and even beyond, with a LIFE magazine spread and an appearance on a THE RED SKELTON SHOW that also hosted Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, Jr.

One can only speculate that Screen Gems, in creating the SHOCK! catalog and offering up the suggestion of a horror host for the films therein, had been aware of Vampira, and planned accordingly.

Horror hosting on television arrived even before THE VAMPIRA SHOW. For instance, LIGHTS OUT, based on the famous radio show, had a host--of original television programing. But Vampira may have been the first horror film host.

Setting up SHOCK!: A TV Archaeology

Satellite television, commercial-free cable TV subscription movie channels, DVRs, Netflix... it's hard to imagine (or depending on how old you are, "hard to remember") what it was like to watch a movie on television forty-five or fifty years ago. To get a sense of this, we need to look at what television was like. First of all, choices were fewer and the competition between stations was more fierce; with only a handful of channels from which the viewer could choose, stations struggled to find a programming formula that would deliver the demographic lion's share of an audience to advertisers. Network offerings with big-name stars were meant to pull in viewers, but that was only for a few hours a day. The rest of the time was filled with local programs made in a station's own studios, syndicated TV shows (cartoons for kids, for instance), or old movies that were licensed to the stations and shown in the afternoon and late at night.

[Here are the TV listings for Sandusky, OH on Saturday night 20 October 1956, a year before SHOCK! Note that choice is limited to four stations: three from Cleveland and one from Toledo and with a lot of overlap. This illustration is typical of what I found in my sampling of television listings from across the US for October 1956 where the number of options varied between two and eight channels available--- San Antonio, TX and Newport, RI listed four channels, for example, where Oakland, CA boasted five.]

In the days before DVDs, motion picture studios didn't know what to do with the older movies that were mothballed in their storage vaults. Occasionally, a known money-maker would be re-released theatrically in hopes for a second milking, but the percentage of those proven winners was small compared to years-and-years-worth of a studio's massive weekly output that sat in storage. Dumping these "relics" (that was the general opinion of the time) on to TV stations for broadcast became a way for studios to make money off of these products again; for their part, TV stations found that it was cheaper and easier to show twenty year-old movies from 3:30-5:00 PM Monday-Friday than to produce seven and a half hours of original studio-produced programming every week.

In 1957, syndicator Screen Gems (a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures) paid Universal-International $20 million for a ten-year contract that covered 550 (some sources say 600) films made before 1948. Screen Gems gambled that they could re-sell these titles to network-affiliated and independent TV stations that were hungry for programming; they began to package movies together for TV sale, making sure that were enough recognizable titles in each to make up for the unheard-of and forgotten low-budget programmers that were also in the bundle.

One of the packages of Universal movies that Screen Gems crafted for syndication was called SHOCK! This consisted of 52 thrillers (one for every week of the year) that included horror movies, murder mysteries, crime melodramas, and wartime spy suspense flicks. Although SHOCK! did contain a few proven box-office hits (FRANKENSTEIN [1931] and THE MUMMY [1932]), most of the other bundled titles were regarded as disposable lowbrow distractions with little or no aesthetic or critical value. It was thought that these movies would be fine for killing time for viewers and filling airtime for stations late at night. But the "disposable" entertainments of SHOCK! became wildly popular, and as we shall explore, sparked a craze for monsters and horror that would transform US popular culture for decades.

Next: The SHOCK! Doctrine

The SHOCK! / Son of SHOCK! Viewing Project

[newspaper clipping from the Hutchinson (KS) News, 27 October 1957]

In the months that follow, I will be blogging about all 72 of the Universal and Columbia films sold to television in the "SHOCK!" and "Son of SHOCK!" syndication packages in 1957-58. In addition to information and reflection on the films themselves, I'll also be commenting on some of the contexts for these movies, including those surrounding the experience of seeing them on television from the late 1950s and on through the 1960s and 1970s.

SHOCK! and Son of SHOCK! launched a cultural revolution for horror movies and all things monster in the US. I hope that this viewing project can provide some bit of understanding for how that radical change happened, starting as it did in the midst of a politically and socially reactionary historical era.

I encourage horror movie fans both young and old to view along and to add their own ideas and observations on this remarkable phenomenon, whether you are seeing some of these films for the first time or for the five hundredth.

Following the order listed in the SHOCK! promotional brochure sent to TV stations in 1957, our first viewing in two weeks will be Universal's FRANKENSTEIN (1931); between now and October 16th, I will put up a few short posts on the creation of the SHOCK! and Son of SHOCK! series in the interests of background.