It’s Halloween! I am watching other things besides Ewan McGregor’s entire filmography, and I have thoughts to share on some of them as well.
I mentioned in my first post that over the past couple of years, I’ve gone back to film classics that I missed. I’m not exactly actively trying to do a self-taught remedial film history, but it has been fascinating going back and realizing just how much early films have influenced things up to the present day.
Over the past several months, I’ve been watching some of the earliest films to be considered part of the horror genre. It’s honestly a shame I haven’t done this earlier, and I’m trying to correct it.
I find early horror fascinating to watch. In, say, the 1930s, the “motion” picture was still a fairly new phenomenon, and talkies were still very much a novelty. It took some time before every movie theater was outfitted with the equipment necessary to even play sound. It may sound condescending to say this, but it is true: People were more easily impressed back then.
So you may hear stories of women fainting and people absolutely losing their shit in the theater, and then you in 2022 watch the movie with the click of a button in the comfort in your own home and go, “Aw, they were just babies.”
But then there are moments that are genuinely chilling, that make you either lean forward or shrink away, that you recognize elements of from other more recent films because they still incite the same visceral reactions in people one hundred years later.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari springs to mind. A silent German expressionist film that is often cited as “the first horror film,” the movie features a hypnotist at a traveling circus who orders his sleepwalking subject to murder those who have slighted him. While the design and cinematography of the movie is famously striking, I have to admit that I started to zone out after a while. But the scene in which the somnambulist murderer Cesare enters the bedroom of the sleeping Jane…that’s the scene that made me say, “Oh, there it is. Horror.” Jane is lying in her bed, sound asleep in the foreground. Cesare, in the distant background, stalks toward her, slowly but steadily, and of course, silently. We in the audience can see his every achingly slow movement as Jane sleeps peacefully, and I could almost hear the shrieks of the audiences in 1920 trying in vain to warn her.
Or in Dracula, where the dockworkers board the supposed ghost ship, only to find Renfield in the hull. He leers up at them, wide-eyed, and gives an out-of-sync chuckle.
There’s also the moment where the maid faints upon being left alone with Renfield (he gives the same unsettling laugh) and then he slowly crawls toward her on all fours before the film cuts away. Dracula is a film that I think heavily suffers from the interference of the squeamish censors, but those two scenes provide nightmarish, almost surrealist moments that I think the film as a whole ended up sorely lacking.
In Frankenstein, there’s the scene in which the face of the monster is finally revealed. Rather than zooming in after he turns around to face the camera, there are several rapid cuts, each shot progressively closer. First, we see the monster’s entire massive, hulking size. Then the film cuts to a shot of his upper body, then we’re brought even closer, before finally ending on an extreme close-up of his gruesome face before cutting away.
This technique was later used and perfected by Hitchcock. He called it “the triple shot.” Think of the scene in The Birds where Jessica Tandy discovers her neighbor’s body.
But James Whale did it first, thirty years earlier, in Frankenstein. On a large screen in a movie theater in 1931, long before the invention of the pause button, this was another scene in which I could practically hear the contemporary audience shrieking in horror as they were rapidly drawn into an unexpected, extreme close-up of Jack Pierce’s stunning makeup effects.
Admittedly, it’s been years since I’ve read Frankenstein, but I do know the original Universal movies go in a very different direction than Mary Shelley intended. In a somewhat impressive move for early Hollywood, Frankenstein the movie ultimately paints the monster in a sympathetic light. He’s a creature who was created by a madman and then unleashed on a world that could never hope to understand him. Although Henry Frankenstein gets a(n undeserved) happy ending, the audience is left to ponder the tragic fate of the monster he created.
1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein develops this theme even further. In the sequel, the monster didn’t die at the end of the first film, actually, he got better, and proceeds to go on another rampage. However, the monster actually manages to befriend a blind hermit who takes pity on him and teaches him how to speak. This sadly doesn’t last long, as some hikers come along and are horrified to discover the monster, “rescuing” the blind man from him.
Having had a taste of companionship and compassion, the monster now knows what true loneliness is and actively resents his creator for forcing him to live again. However, when he’s told that the main antagonist of this movie, another mad scientist, wishes to recreate the experiment with a lady corpse, the monster is all in on the hope that he may once again have a friend, this time a wife.
If you’ve never seen The Bride of Frankenstein, you may be surprised, as I was, to find out that the eponymous bride is only actually in the movie for about the last five minutes and never says a word. And yet, those five minutes were enough to cement her completely into the popular consciousness. I’ve known for a while that Elsa Lanchester was a Queen, but I didn’t know until I watched Bride just how much of a queen she was. You should watch Bride of Frankenstein, it’s a good movie, which I’m about to spoil the very ending of.
After the lady abomination has been brought back to life, the monster is eager to befriend her. But she takes one look at him and gives a bloodcurdling shriek, shying away from him. He tries again, sitting down with her and taking her hand, patting it in a heartbreakingly patient and comforting manner. Again, she recoils from him. The monster realizes that she hates him, just like everyone else. And in her rejection, he fully realizes the sham of this supposed life they’ve both been forced back into. He’s alive again, but he could never hope to actually live. He’s a freak, an abomination, and he can never be accepted, even by someone who’s just like him.
Over the course of two movies of the monster killing accidentally, or lashing out in fear or anger or revenge, Bride of Frankenstein ends with him calmly reclaiming the agency he’s been denied since his resurrection. He allows Henry Frankenstein to flee with his innocent wife, (again, better than the man deserves, but whatever,) and turns to the new mad scientist who recreated the experiment with the bride. In the last line of the film, the monster tells him, “We belong dead,” and blows up the lab with the three of them inside.
It’s one of those endings that is tragic and you wish so badly it could have ended differently, but it also would have felt inauthentic to end it any other way. It’s the kind of tragedy that is both heartbreaking and strangely beautiful. The Bride of Frankenstein is a movie with many different tones and layers and a surprisingly complex emotionality and morality for early Hollywood, and I think it’s worth a watch. Not just for fans of horror, but for fans of movies in general.
Now, let’s talk about Twilight! I am, unfortunately, a Twilight apologist. I read it too many times when I was too young and I think it may have permanently altered my brain structure. I don’t think it’s good, exactly? It does still give me feelings sometimes. (I read Midnight Sun during the early days of the pandemic while I was still gaining my strength back after contracting a pretty serious case of COVID and the introduction made me cry, so, you know, that wasn’t my proudest moment.) But it is definitely fascinating. There are so many tiny things about both the books and the movies that have just burrowed themselves deep into my brain and I’ve given up on trying to detach them at this point.
For example, in Eclipse, Bella and Edward have an earnest discussion of Wuthering Heights. Bella’s not like other girls. Bella reads classic literature. And Bella says she relates to Cathy and Edward says he doesn’t like the book, but he does relate to Heathcliff. And, just…Stephenie Meyer would be in good company with all the gurlies on Goodreads who need a flashing neon sign that reads: “A Cautionary Tale” as a subheading. People can make fun of Twilight all they want, but at the end of the day, it’s basically a version of Wuthering Heights where Cathy and Heathcliff become vampires and stay together and make everyone else’s lives miserable and win forever, and the author only ever kind of dimly realizes that’s what she wrote. What could be more terrifying than that?
In the movie Breaking Dawn: Part One, there’s a brief flashback at the beginning. Edward, in a last desperate attempt to talk Bella out of becoming a vampire, tells her a part of his backstory that he avoided sharing until now, the night before their wedding. After he was turned by Carlisle, Edward went through something of a rebellious teenage phase. He resented Carlisle for having turned him into a vampire and then forcing him to only live on animal blood, which is not very delicious. Edward decided he wanted to live deliciously and went out on his own for a while, because he wanted to be a real vampire and eat people.
Throughout the series, when we meet other vampires that eat people, they don’t see humans as human, essentially. They occasionally play with their food, but that’s an exception to the rule. These vampires just see people as something to be consumed. It’s nothing personal. It’s just the natural way of things. The Cullens are considered hippy weirdo freaks by all the other vampires in the world, and it’s very funny.
Edward, however, doesn’t have the luxury of that perspective. Edward has the ability to read minds. But that phrasing makes it sound like an option. He has to read minds. He hears the thoughts of every person, human or vampire, within a three-mile radius, and he can’t turn it off.
And while Edward is, understandably, often annoyed by this and likes to look down on people with their frequently shallow passing thoughts, he can hear the good things too. He knows which man is looking forward to going home to his wife and the dinner she made. He knows which man is worried about how many mouths he has to feed. He knows which man is hoping to be the first in his family to go to college. Edward wants to eat people, but he also cannot turn a blind eye to the humanity of his prey. He cannot see them as something lesser. So what’s a vampire to do?
Well, Edward gravitates toward big cities, with lots of crowds to get lost in and higher violent crime rates. And he stalks the streets at night and becomes attuned to the thoughts of men who are actively planning to rape and/or murder people, and he kills and eats them before they can.
Yes, Edward Cullen’s canon backstory is that he wanted to eat people, so he turned his vampirism into a solution to the trolley problem with the help of his telepathy.
Of course, this didn’t last for very long before Edward realized he was acting as judge, jury, and executioner for men who had not actually committed a crime yet, and went back to Carlisle and stuck to only eating animals again. But he finally tells Bella this story in one last attempt to scare her off.
As usual, Bella takes Edward’s somewhat frequent confessions of, “I’ve killed, and I’ll kill again,” in stride. Bella’s like, “Well, if Batman had killed the Joker way earlier, maybe Jason Todd would still be alive-alive and Barbara Gordon would have an intact spinal column right now, so maybe Batman should just grow a pair and kill people sometimes because sometimes killing people is warranted.” So, uh, she still wants to go through with it and she does.
Why am I talking about this in the first place? Because when we flash back to this in the movie, Edward is sitting in a theater, watching The Bride of Frankenstein. And it’s about five minutes from the end, because we see the close-up of the bride shrieking in terror at the monster before Edward watches a woman leave the theater alone, then watches a shady-looking fellow follow her.
I guess Nosferatu or Dracula or even The Wolf Man would have been too on-the-nose, but I really would have enjoyed Edward silently scoffing at the inaccuracies and then leaving a vampire or werewolf movie to eat an attempted rapist. But he went to see Bride of Frankenstein, fine.
He follows the man who was following the woman and chomps him without the woman ever seeing. (He’d better get that dead body off the premises fast, because the movie’s literally about to end and the lobby’s going to be full.) And then there’s a brief montage of him chomping dudes and he says, they “were monsters…and so was I.” And then we’re back in the present and Bella’s like, “lol, whatever.”
And, just…I just think it’s very funny that of all the old-timey movies they could have used, they picked Bride of Frankenstein. The movie where the man who had his life unnaturally extended lashes out in fear or hurts people by accident, and is shown a few glimmers of companionship and happiness, before he realizes it’s all a lie and it could never be and ends it. A movie where a man finally regains his agency and rights a wrong that has been done against him, against another, and against nature itself. A movie that is equally a cautionary tale about the hubris of unethical scientists going too far and a commentary on society’s unwillingness to accept someone who is different. A movie that is a tragedy more than a horror movie and is by any measure a lasting work of art. A movie that ends with the reanimated corpse declaring, “We belong dead,” and willingly returning himself to his natural state.
They showed that movie in this movie. A movie where a man who’s had his life unnaturally extended intentionally murders people in a cold and calculating manner, and he ultimately realizes this was all a good thing, actually, and actively makes his bride an abomination just like him with her full consent and it turns out it’s sweet, actually, and they have their biological kid and their little found family of humans and werewolves and other vampires who suck the blood of other living creatures, and they get their storybook happily ever after. A movie that ends with a fucking clip-show and the word “forever” emblazoned on the screen, an unintentionally chilling promise.
This is why, somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about Twilight. They just didn’t understand the media they were referencing on any level, did they?
But also, you know, what if the monster was hot and wasn’t rejected by every single person he came across? What if he found unconditional love and acceptance and instead of, “Love dead. Hate living,” he said to his creator in a rare moment of true contentedness, “I’ve never thanked you for this extraordinary life.” I mean…that would be a pretty nice little what-if, right?
Look, The Shape of Water, Twilight is not. Because Guillermo del Toro knew exactly what he was doing, and Stephenie Meyer didn’t and no one involved with the movies really cared. But they are all extremely fun for all the wrong reasons.
There’s a line from a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode: “Never show a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie.” But Breaking Dawn did and instead of sadly thinking, “I could be watching Bride of Frankenstein right now,” because I was reminded it exists, it delivers this mental throat-chop of, “Huh?? Why’d they pick that one???” And something about your crappy movie has to be working in spite of itself if that’s the reaction it gives you by showing an extremely brief, context-less clip of a 1930s horror movie.
Happy Halloween!
Ewan Me: The Project Where I Chronicle My Attempt to Watch Every Entry of Ewan McGregor's Filmography to See If I Can 