Hollywood’s Legends of Horror
Studio: Warner Home Video
Rated: NOT RATED
WorkNameSort: Hollywood’s Legends of Horror
If the 1960s were the decade in which Hollywood grew paranoid of the government, then American cinema’s great fear in the 1930s was of the medical field. Five out of the six films in Warner Home Video’s Hollywood Legends of Horror boxed set concern mad doctors. Driven by lust, vengeance, lunacy and sheer megalomaniacal ambition, the physicians in these films virtually defined the demented doctor subgenre (whose finest hour was Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face). Here, they are probed by directors as distinct as Tod Browning, Michael Curtiz and Karl Freund. None of the films provide the kind of masterful tension and genuinely scary jolts Val Lewton would perfect in the following decade. These inchoate examples of early horror show a genre that flourished in Germany in the 1920s trying to find its footing in talkie-era America. As such, with the exception of the collection’s weakest title, The Return of Doctor X (1939), the specter of German Expressionism haunts each picture, and the special effects are endearingly crude.
The influence of the German silents is especially pronounced in Mad Love (1935), directed by Last Laugh cinematographer Freund. With photography by Citizen Kane director of photography Gregg Toland, Mad Love‘s visual dream team creates one of the most severe and oppressive production designs in classic Hollywood cinema, utilizing double vision and subjective camera trickery that makes even the picture’s banal melodramatic entanglements feel alive. Browning, best known for helming Freaks and Dracula, is featured in two titles, the supernatural whodunit The Mark of the Vampire (1935) and The Devil Doll (1936), a hysterical kitsch thriller with surprisingly affecting sentimentality.
Doctor X (1932), an early Technicolor film, is pure theater of the grotesque, with its cannibalistic villain remaining a mystery until the very end. The most impressive title of all is The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), in which Boris Karloff dons wicked eyebrows, long fingernails and a devilish mustache in a tour de force as the titular character. Made pre-Production Code, Fu Manchu gets away with graphic, elaborate torture scenes that still feel shocking today. Eastern culture is exoticized to ridiculous extremes, but the unsparing brutality of this creepy masterwork makes it the most modern film in the box set and a true antecedent to the 1950s Hammer horror films.
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2006.