Creature Feature: The Re-Resurrection of the Hollywood Monster
In the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva Lord Byron suggested to his companions Percy and Mary Shelley that they pass a rainy evening by each telling a ghost story. While Mary turned her story into Frankenstein Byron's tale was adapted into The Vampyre by Dr John Polidori - one of the early vampire narratives which would later inspire Bram Stoker to write Dracula in 1897. Nearly two centuries on and their undead creations are joining forces with the Wolfman to do battle with Stoker's original vampire slayer in Van Helsing, released this summer. Considering the long history of the creatures and their varying interpretations in literature and film Van Helsing's monsters face a difficult challenge - will they still be able to scare us?
From the Shadows of the Past
 While Frankenstein was not brought to life until 1818 the origins of Dracula and the Wolfman go back much further than nineteenth century literature. The folklore myth of the werewolf in particular can be traced back to ancient Greece where Zeus as punishment for sacrificing a child transformed Lycaon, king of Arcadia, into a wolf. Similarly, the vampire myth is a combination of the various gods and beasts said to have fed on human flesh as well as the mystical and often life-giving properties associated with blood in many ancient cultures. Dracula himself is an amalgam of folklore and the real life of Vlad Tepes - a bloodthirsty fifteenth century ruler who often referred to himself as Vlad 'Dracula', meaning son of the devil. The two legends have many characteristics in common such as physical transformation, a set of specific weaknesses and the ability to create others of their kind. They also represent our most basic fears.
There are essentially two categories of horror - internal and external. The vampire and werewolf myths both play on external fears - that there is a monster out there in the darkness and it is coming to get us. However, through their ability to transform others into their kind they also embody our internal fears - the fear of the monster that we ourselves could become. It is this second fear that became more prevalent in nineteenth century literature as we entered a more scientifically and psychologically aware age. Thus in Frankenstein we have a man facing the consequences of creating something he is not yet ready to understand.
With such a vast global presence throughout history it is unsurprising that these creatures were among the first to be put in front of a camera. Dracula was first filmed in Hungary in 1921 as Dracula's Death (of which little footage now remains) shortly followed by F W Murnau's Nosferatu in 1922. Considering the changes the character has gone through over the years it is interesting that Max Schreck's rat-faced vampire is perhaps the closest to the Dracula of the novel. Mary Shelley's creation has had an even longer cinema career with the first film version of Frankenstein being made in 1910 by Thomas Edison. However it is the films made by Universal in the thirties and forties that have given us the most popular versions of all three monsters and those that are still referenced today.
The Universal Monsters
 Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula starred Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the role that the actor himself often referred to as a blessing and a curse. Although based on Stoker's novel the film actually takes much of its inspiration from the stage play written by Hamilton Deane and adapted for American theatre audiences by John Balderston. It was in this version that Lugosi first played the enigmatic Count and though not yet a romantic figure he was portrayed as more of an exotic foreigner with a dark secret than the monster of Stoker's novel. Although there are some scene-stealing performances from Dwight Frye's Renfield and Edward Van Sloan's Van Helsing, it is Lugosi's Dracula that forms a lasting impression - one that is still the most recognisable image of the Count today. The film does contain all the elements from the novel that would go on to shape Dracula's subsequent cinematic appearances - coffins, stakes and rubber bats are all present and correct.
James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein had its origins in another Balderston adaptation of a Deane-produced play and again made a monster of an otherwise versatile actor - this time Boris Karloff (Frankenstein was his 81st film). The film took many of the special effects from the stage version and it is here that we first see the monster being brought to life with electricity. But the most influential feature of the film has to be Karloff's monster with the now classic square head, bolts through the neck and lumbering gait. Again the creature is a long way from Shelley's creation although there are moments where the monster becomes aware of his humanity - something that was expanded on in Whale's 1935 sequel Bride of Frankenstein in which the monster learns to speak. Bride is also significant here as it opens with Mary Shelley conceiving the story that started it all at the Villa Diodati.
 It was not until 1941 that George Waggner filmed The Wolfman with much of the characteristics that we now associate with werewolves coming from Curt Siodmak's original screenplay. This time it was Lon Chaney Jr's turn to play a monster echoing many of the roles that had made his father famous in the silent era. Though one of the oldest in terms of its history the werewolf is the youngest of the cinema monsters and yet remains one of the most memorable. The film also featured the first instance of the most essential scene in any subsequent werewolf movie - the transformation from man into beast.
It was not only the three monsters that were the subject of Universal adaptations. Other famous creatures to be given the Universal treatment included The Invisible Man, The Creature From The Black Lagoon and The Mummy (recently re-made and followed by a sequel - both directed by the man behind Van Helsing, Stephen Sommers). The monsters also appeared in several films in which they faced-off against each other such as Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, House of Dracula, and House of Frankenstein. Karloff, Lugosi and Chaney acted in several of these films - sometimes playing the same roles, sometimes swapping one monster for another. In House of Frankenstein Karloff fills the mad scientist role while Glenn Strange took over the role of the monster. Lugosi had a chance to play Frankenstein's creation after his Ygor transplanted his brain into the monster's body in Ghost of Frankenstein. With no new monsters to throw into the mix and the actors who played them increasingly more concerned about the damage they were doing to their future careers the genre began to exhaust itself in the late forties. The films were inevitably spoofed in 1948's Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein - often regarded as the best comedy-horror film ever made.
Bringing Back the Dead
 With the monsters reduced to provoking screams of laughter rather than terror it was not until 1957 that they would truly scare us again. In The Curse of Frankenstein Chris topher Lee played the monstrous creation of Peter Cushing's Dr Frankenstein and for the next 20 years Britain would dominate the horror genre through the productions of Hammer Films. Inevitably Lee became typecast as the horror villain and went from Frankenstein's monster to Dracula, The Mummy, and many more to this day. Although the films often attempted a return to the literary source material they rarely strayed too far from the external horror of a monster stalking his victims. Once again the genre would run out of steam in the seventies with some truly bizarre attempts at breathing fresh life into the films. One of Hammer's last efforts was Roy Ward Baker's 1974 film The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires - a chaotic mix of European and Eastern folklore thrown together in an insane kung-fu vampire adventure.
With Hammer as dead as its monsters it was again a period of years before the monsters reappeared in their more classical forms. In the eighties and nineties there were several attempts at reinventing the genre - most notably Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein and Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, which included the original author's names in the title in case we had forgotten that these were once great works of literature. Both films merely served to show how much the movie monsters had moved on from their source material. In many ways the monster movies which embodied both internal and external horror could be seen to have split off in two very distinct directions. The external horror became the central premise behind every slasher movie - a genre that is closer to the Universal monsters cycle than it may seem. Films like Halloween, Friday 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street gave us a new breed of instantly recognisable creatures and in the case of Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger, another actor forever bound to the creature he portrayed (although this time Englund seems quite content with the typecasting).
 While Freddy and Jason hacked up teenagers, the vampire and werewolf found a new audience in wildly different reinterpretations of their stories. The more classical werewolf could always be found in films such as The Howling (1981) and more recently Dog Soldiers (2002), but at the same time films such as An American Werewolf In London and John Fawcett's Ginger Snaps (2000) have attempted to redefine the creatures by considering the humanity at their heart. Ginger Snaps in particular is a good example of internal horror and an interesting re-working of the transformation of the creature in relation to the transition of a teenage girl into adulthood. Here the focus is on fighting the monster within ourselves rather than the wolf that will kill all who dare cross its path. Another interesting interpretation of the werewolf came in Anthony Hickox's Full Eclipse (1993) in which Mario Van Peebles joins a vigilante division of the police force who induce the transformation to stalk their criminal prey. Again the focus is on battling the inner monster rather than an externalised evil.
 The vampire too has had many interesting re-interpretations over the last two decades despite the constant attempts at parody in films such as The Lost Boys (1987) and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 film Near Dark combined the horror genre with the Western and told the story of two families - one human, the other a gang of vampire misfits collected from various significant eras of American history - and the struggle of a young man caught between both. The vampires in the film are perhaps the most contemporary and realistic of their peers - constantly on the road, applying some incredibly practical solutions to their problems (the actors actually rehearsed blocking all the sunlight out of a room in the quickest time possible) and forever struggling with their immortality. This struggle was also at the heart of Tony Scott's 1983 film The Hunger and along with the two Anne Rice adaptations (Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned) has become the most recognisable characteristic of the modern vampire.
 Finally, via the vampire-slaying exploits of Blade and Buffy, we get to Van Helsing - Stephen Sommers' self-confessed tribute to the Universal monsters of the thirties and forties. Ironically, the film that most easily lends itself to a comparison is not the monster-mashes of House of Frankenstein, and Frankenstein meets the Wolfman, but 1987's Monster Squad in which a group of teenage boys do battle with a host of famous monsters. Sommers applies the same sense of humour along with a deep-rooted respect for the genre to his film. Van Helsing is not a horror film, but then neither was Sommers' earlier work The Mummy. The focus has shifted from the creatures to the hero and the adventures he has in defeating them. Still, the monsters do have a strong presence in the film but how far have we moved on from Lugosi, Chaney and Karloff and the comparatively primitive special effects used to bring them to life? Rather than a substitute for the make-up, CGI seems instead to have replaced the rubber bats that populated the early Universal films - equally ludicrous and unconvincing but the material is now a substitute for not only the bats but the monsters, the scenery and often the lead actors. Despite the excessive use of computer-generated effects Richard Roxburgh gives an enjoyable performance as the Count, albeit without the menace and mystery of Lugosi. It is also rather worrying considering his portrayal of a similar villain in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that Roxburgh may too be falling into the trap of playing villains for the rest of his career.
Van Helsing does not appear to mark the reincarnation of the Universal monsters cycle, but perhaps that is for the best. Can we afford to lose another great actor to Lugosi's curse? Can we stand to watch another resurrection of the genre degenerate into one ridiculous idea after another until one good parody finishes it off for the final time? In a society with fears much more complex than the monsters in the shadows, will these undead creatures ever be able to scare us again? The answer, for now, depends very much on the success of Van Helsing and whether it generates enough interest to spawn imitators or enough inspiration to create more faithful tributes. Until then we will always have the original Dracula, Frankenstein and The Wolfman - still stalking their own cemetery of cinema history after all these years.
Chris Regan
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