Monsters After Midnight

This review contains major plot point spoilers. Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the film.

Frenzy is, in my humble opinion, Hitchcock’s most intense and disturbing film. Because it was made long after the production code had folded, it has all the graphic imagery that the 1970s, with its lack of overarching censorship, would allow. And so all the things that Hitchcock could not show in the past, all the things he could not do due to studios deciding star personas, are made possible.

After our cheerful little trip through the land of German Expressionism, we’re back in familiar territory and ready to move forward. Today’s film is the first in what we’re going to call the second part of Universal Horror’s Classic Era, which as you may recall lasts from about 1930 to 1960. Why are there multiple parts to this era, you may ask? It’s got to do with some behind-the-scenes corporate stuff going on in Universal at the time. I mentioned in our last review that I would give a more detailed explanation of all that, so here’s what you need to know.

Do you remember Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal? He was still around in the mid-1930s, but the work of actually running the studio had passed on to his son, Carl Laemmle Jr., in 1928. Laemmle Jr. can be credited with “modernizing” the studio with talkies, Technicolor…

I feel it’s time to shake things up a little with this series. Up to this point, we’ve only been looking at the movies which fall under the Universal Horror banner, and while the movies are certainly the backbone of this whole enterprise, they are not the only medium in which these stories and characters have existed. The monsters of Universal Horror can be found in books, TV shows, games, toys and much more. So for the month of Halloween, I thought it would be fun to dip our toes into this expanded universe.

You may recall how way back in my Bride of Frankenstein review, I bemoaned the fact that the Bride is the only major Universal monster who never appeared in another film. You may also recall my mentioning how I’d searched around to see what other official material had been released and found a licensed book intended…

As kids in the 70’s we would rush home on Saturdays evening to the words;

Gruesome ghouls and grisly ghosts,

Wretched souls and cursed hosts.

Vampires bite and villains creep,

Demons scream and shadows sleep.

Blood runs cold in every man,

Fog rolls in and coffins slam.

Mortals quake and full moon rise,

Creatures haunt and terrorize.

Those creepy spoken words were accompanied by haunting music, the slow motion images of the original Universal movie monsters, Dracula, his sidekick Renfield, Frankensteins Monster, the wolfman, the mummy scrolling across the TV screen. The words and the music were the intro to the now famous “Creature Features” show in Chicago during the 1970’s and produced and aired on WGN TV in Chicago.

Creature Features normally showed all the classic Universal Horror movies from the 1930s and 1940s, including, the Mummy Dracula, Frankenstein, The Creature From the Black Lagoons and others. They…