The Boris Karloff Blogathon : Day One

We are about to unfold the story of Boris Karloff, an actor and a gentleman. It is one of the strangest tales ever told. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even… Horrify you. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now's your chance to… hmm, well… We warned you!

Welcome to the Boris Karloff Blogathon!

This week, I’ll kick back — as Boris did, pictured here on the set of Frankenstein — and let over 110 of my best friends do all the work! I’ll be busy enough just keeping up and posting links to all the participating blogs.

I’ll be updating links here throughout the day, every day, all week, so keep coming back and be a part of the celebrations. Click around, discover new blogs, enjoy all the posts, and when you see something you like, let the blogger know. Leave a comment!

We’re all in for a good time, so enjoy and, should anyone ask… Tell them "Boris sent me".

First Post: A Special Message from Sara Karloff

First post honors go to Sara Karloff who shares a birthday — today! — with her father.

"What a wonderful Birthday present this weeklong blogathon honoring my father, Boris Karloff is. I know he would be overwhelmed and flattered.

It is thanks to the fans that my Father's legacy has the stature and longevity it does. Without you, the fans and students of film and the terror genre, my Father's career and popularity would not have the iconic status that it does.

Thank you all from our entire family."

— Sara Karloff

Thank you, Sara, for your kind message. This week, bloggers and fans come together to celebrate the life and the extraordinary career of your father, Boris Karloff. Please accept these humble efforts as our gift to you.

Happy Birthday, Sara!

The Candid Karloff

Boris Karloff was in Monster costume and cutting into his surprise-party birthday cake on the set of Son of Frankenstein (seen here with Basil Rathbone, director Rowland V. Lee and Bela Lugosi) when Sara Jane was born. Twenty years later, on November 13, 1958, just 10 day short of another shared birthday, father and daughter appeared together on live TV, when Boris was surprised again, this time as a very reluctant guest of This Is Your Life.

It’s a wonderful document, capturing Karloff in his later years, a beloved movie star with a long, illustrious and still prolific film career, and a familiar and favorite television guest.

As the show starts, you see Karloff, a shy and intensely private man, genuinely surprised and visibly annoyed at being singled out like this. As he warms up, ever the professional, and comfortable among friends, you see his natural humor and easy generosity shining through. When Jack Pierce is introduced, Karloff calls him “the best makeup man in the business”.

As the show closes, young Sara Jane is introduced, and you can see the affection there as they hold hands and beam at the camera.

Watch This Is Your Life: Boris Karloff...

The Boris Karloff Blogathon: It’s Alive!

My Lucha-masked friend Filo Loco is already partying, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Filo literally switched on the Boris Karloff Blogathon when November 23 rolled around six hours ago, Paris time.

Filo has posted a rare interview with Boris by Mike Parry and Harry Nadler, direct from the pages of the Karloff Tribute issue of Castle of Frankenstein, originally published in 1974. Go see, on Deadlicious.

Why not start with Boris Karloff’s last film? Booksteve offers an overview of Karloff’s career, culminating, in the spring of ’68, with four films shot back-to-back in Hollywood for a Mexican studio.

Read The Incredible Invasion, on You’re Only As Good As Your Last Picture.

How’s your German? Here’s another early European contribution from Peter of Six Shooter. First, William Henry Pratt is a short biography of Karloff, and an appreciation of the actor’s unusual turn as a vampire in Mario Bava’s Die drei Gesichter der Furcht — The Three Faces of Fear — known in America as Black Sabbath.

Daniel Geer writes, “Our entire perception and understanding of what made Frankenstein’s Monster who he was is owed to Karloff’s performance”. Read Daniel’s tribute, For the Love of Karloff, on Popcorn Monster.

Daniel also posted trailers to a number of Karloff films, and a Top Ten List of Classic Horror Films.

He nothing common did, or mean, Upon that memorable scene.

So reads the commemorative plaque honoring Boris Karloff at St. Paul’s Church in Covent Gardens. It’s on view, with other stills posted by Diane in celebration of Boris’s birthday, at Wouldn’t You Like to See Something Strange?

Check back often. Loads of links will be added all throughout the day!

Frankensteinian : Tim Burton's Blue Girl

She wears her stitches like permanent jewelry, body mods at once gruesome and delicate. Tim Burton’s Blue Girl appears in drawings, oil paintings and, here, in a polaroid print, Blue Girl with Skull, fleshed out by model Leticia Rogers in a costume by Colleen Atwood. The character would inspire Sally, the rag doll girl created by Dr. Finkelstein in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).

Frankenstein references are common in Tim Burton’s oeuvre. Early student films like The Island of Dr. Argor (1971) and Doctor of Doom (1979) already sample Frankensteinian themes. Frankenweenie (1984), a short made for Walt Disney, is a compact remake of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) with a boy and his dog standing in for Frankenstein and his Monster, a mini-golf windmill, and a poodle Bride. Frankenstein was the obvious template for Edward Scissorhands (1990), and there’s another important windmill scene in Sleepy Hollow (1999).

Beginning this Sunday, November 22, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is holding a comprehensive Tim Burton retrospective. Burton’s art is displayed in drawings, collages, paintings, sculpture and film.

The director pays homage, again, to Whale’s Frankenstein by including it the Lurid Beauty of Monsters film series that accompany the exhibit. And by the way, Frankenweenie is currently in development, to be remade as a feature film.

The MoMA exhibition page, and a wonderful preview site for the Tim Burton Retrospective.

An excellent blog, The Tim Burton Collective.

Countdown to Karloff

Last month, I proposed to host a blogathon devoted to Boris Karloff. In all honesty, I was hoping that as many as 30 or 35 blogs would participate. Now, a few days before the big event, I am very proud, excited and absolutely astounded to announce that we have 100 — ONE HUNDRED! — blogs signed up, with more to come!

All my favorite bloggers are aboard and I’ve already discovered many great new blogs that I’ll be following beyond the blogathon. See for yourself, check the amazing list of Scheduled Participants on the sidebar. We have horror blogs, Halloween, costume and craft blogs, movie blogs and pop culture blogs, art blogs and writer’s blogs. There’s even a sports blog on tap and someone participating on Twitter. And the Boris Karloff Blogathon is an international event, too. There will be posts made in Spanish, German, Danish and Portuguese!

I want to thank all the bloggers who have posted banners and promoted the event. I can report that there is a lot of genuine excitement out there about the upcoming Karloff Blogathon. As an example, check out Scared Silly, where Paul Castiglia is already running Karloff-related posts, counting down the days to Monday, November 23, when the Boris Karloff Blogathon goes live.

Join us right here, next Monday. It’s going to be a Thriller!

The Covers of Frankenstein : Famous Monsters Fearbook 1971

Famous Monsters “Fearbooks” were all-reprint annuals, this one published between regular issues number 87 and 88, in the winter of 1971.

Gleefully hyperbolic cover blurbs were standard for Warren and Ackerman’s Famous Monsters, getting your fanboy heart racing as soon as you caught sight of an issue on the newsstand. Best Issue Ever was used often enough to become a sort of FM mantra. Variations included Most Exciting, Biggest, Special and Super-Special, the ever-popular Collector’s Edition, and an occasional Super Spooktacular!

The portrait of Christopher Lee from 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein was painted by the great Basil Gogos. The same character had previously appeared on a Warren magazine cover in a version executed by Russ Jones. Both covers featured the same solid, fire engine red background for the flayed-faced Monster.

Book: Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos.

Related:
The Covers of Frankenstein: Famous Monsters Strike Back!

Porky's Movie Mystery

With Frankenstein, in 1931, an instant icon was created. The film’s extraordinary Monster was quickly adopted by animation studios as imminently caricaturable, his impossible flat head, neck bolts, dead man’s stare and morbid mobility used as shorthand for all that is otherworldly and menacing.

By the time Porky’s Movie Mystery was released in March 1939, the writers and artists at Leon Schlesinger’s studio, producing animated shorts for Warner Brothers, had already featured The Monster as a Karloffian menace in Porky’s Road Race (1937) and as an improbable Hollywood star in Have You Got Any Castles? (1938). He would appear again, as a frightening robot, in Sniffles and the Bookworm, in December ‘39. In Porky’s Movie Mystery, interestingly, The Monster plays against type.

As the cartoon opens, a newspaper headline announces that movie villains (curiously misspelled on screen) are being quizzed over mysterious goings-on in Hollywood. A chained Frankenstein Monster is grilled by a tough-talking cop. Despite his sporting a row of pointy teeth and enormous, hairy and clawed hands, this Monster is terrified, gnawing his fingernails by running them through his mouth like a typewriter carriage, complete with the sound of a return bell. I wonder how the joke plays today. How old do you have to be to remember typewriters, or to have ever heard a typewriter bell?

The sequence is quickly over, the policeman barking, “Come clean, you blankity-blank monster! Are you The Phantom?” The Phantom in question is glimpsed as a cackling, cloaked figure who, according to a radio bulletin by “Walter Windshield” is “haunting studios in Hollywood, panicking actors, ruining pictures and creating havoc in the film capital!”

Borrowing again from Universal pictures, the mysterious figure is soon revealed to be… The Invisible Man! “They starred me in one picture,” he complains. “Then dropped me!”

Expert help is needed, and the police call on “Mr. Motto” — Porky Pig in Oriental guise — this time lampooning the detective character, Mr. Moto, played by Peter Lorre at 20th Century Fox. Confronting The Phantom, Porky is pinned to a wall and, just as he is about to be hacked with an axe, he pulls out and consults his Ju-Jitsu manual. In the ensuing fight, The Phantom is knocked out, sprayed with “anti-invisible juice” and revealed to be… Well, you’ll have to watch it yourself and see if you can identify the character. The problem with topical humor is that it rarely outlives its specific time frame.

Porky’s Movie Mystery is pretty pedestrian, nowhere near as imaginative and explosively funny as so many of the other Warner cartoons that came out of the run-down bungalow known as Termite Terrace. There’s only one really ingenious gag, a nice visual achieved when the Invisible Man hides by standing in front of movie poster, dressing a swimsuit beauty with the hat, gloves and shoes that he is wearing. Otherwise, the script by Robert Gee is thin on jokes and the action is unmemorable.

Head animator John Carey would move on to comic books, where he made his name drawing Warner, Disney and Hanna-Barbera characters. Producer Robert “Bob” Clampett, who originally designed the Porky Pig character, enjoyed an illustrious if sometimes controversial career in animation, supervising some of Warner’s most crazily inspired cartoons through the Forties and eventually creating Beanie and Cecil for early television in both puppet and animated versions.

Porky’s Movie Mystery may have drawn a few chuckles when it was new, but it hasn’t held up very well. Its last, enduring distinction is a cool cameo by the Frankenstein Monster.

Watch Porky’s Movie Mystery on YouTube.

Related:
Frankenstein’s Hollywood Capers
Frankenstein Meets Mickey Mouse
Frankensteinian: The Snow Man

Hulkenstein

Stan Lee acknowledged the influence of Frankenstein movies on the creation of his green behemoth monster-hero, The Hulk. The reference would be committed to film when the character was translated to live-action television.

In a recent Halloween-time series of posts on the fun, eclectic Baking With Medusa, blogger Micha Michelle explored the connections between the classic Universal Frankensteins and the Bixby/Ferrigno Hulk, complete with scene comparisons.

In the pilot episode, The Incredible Hulk, broadcast on November 7, 1977, the newly minted mint-green monster goes wandering about and comes upon a little girl by a lake, like Karloff’s Monster did in the original 1931 film. The outcome is, thankfully, different: This monster doesn’t drown the child but rather saves her after she falls into the water, but the reference is perfectly clear. Writer, director and series producer Kenneth Johnson has an obvious love for the original material. He has a long list of genre credits, mostly TV, that include The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, V – The Original Series, Alien Nation and An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe starring Vincent Price.

By the way, the mountains on the far shore look tantalizingly familiar. It would be fun to know if the scene was shot at Malibou Lake!

The second episode, A Death in the Family, famous for its scene of The Hulk wrestling a grizzly bear, also has a Frankenstein moment, this one recalling The Monster’s brief friendship with the blind hermit in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The Hulk is given bread and a drink by an old man living in the woods. The scene ends in flames, like the original, but this time the conflagration is provoked by the Hulk spitting cheap booze into the campfire.

The most elaborate Frankenstein connections would roll out in a Season 4 two-parter, The First, written by Andrew Schneider and directed by Frank Orsatti, broadcast on March 6 and 13, in 1981. A fan favorite, the whole episode pays homage to Classic Universal monster movies.

Having heard of another scientist who once transformed into a Hulk-like creature, Bruce Banner goes looking for a cure in a place called Vissaria, like Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man went looking for Dr. Frankenstein in Vasaria in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. There’s a scientist named Clive and an Igor equivalent named Frye. There’s a lady named Elizabeth, and a lawman evoking the Lionel Atwill character in Son of Frankenstein. The show even has angry, torch-bearing villagers.

Direct visual quotes are mostly from The Bride of Frankenstein. There’s a sequence with Bixby operating mad-lab machinery. Levers are pulled, with attendant rooftop effects. In the end, The Hulk battles his Evil Hulk counterpart, played by Dick Durock, who would go on to play The Swamp Thing.

Head over to Baking with Medusa for more details and lots more photo comparisons. With thanks to Micha Michelle, who did a wonderful job tracking down these references.

Hulkenstein on Baking with Medusa:
Part 1, the lake scene.
Part 2, the hermit.
Part 3, Evil Hulk.

The Art of Frankenstein : Adam Chiet

Standing three feet tall, this Frankenstein Monster is stitched together with fur, suede, mohair, gauze, simulated leather and copper wire. His eyes and exposed brain glow in the dark.

Created by Boston-based designer and sculptor Adam Chiet, each figure in this strictly limited edition is meticulously hand-built, detailed and painted to order. The Frankenstein Monster is the first in a proposed “signature series” of custom monster art figures.

Adam, who has been making figures and display art dolls with a horror/fantasy theme for over ten years, also produces one-of-a-kind figures on commission. Check out his gallery which includes classic movie monsters the likes of Dracula, the Mummy, assorted Wolfmen, Mr. Hyde, and a couple of Universal-era Frankensteins.

Adam Chiet’s Frankenstein