The Halloween Candy Bride of Frankenstein

I can’t think of a better, more Halloween-centric image: The Bride, created out of Halloween candy! Look closely; those are M&Ms, Skittles, Kit-Kats and all manner of candy packages serving as color pixels, like a Manet or a Seurat painting in pointillism.

The artist is Eric Millikin — a longtime friend of Frankensteinia —  who has created a gallery of crazy candy-art monsters first revealed on his blog at the Detroit Free Press. Characters include Elvira, Freddy Krueger, Nosferatu and, of course, The Bride’s beau. The illustrations, each one using thousands of candy wrappers, also include a hidden, see-if-you-can-find-it spider.

We’re super-happy to see Eric’s work all over the net this week and featured on such sites as Huffingtonpost and Ellen Degeneres’ Good News blog on Yahoo. Thanks to Eric, everybody is celebrating our favorite holiday with candy, great art, and favorite monsters!

See all the candy-art monsters on Eric Millikin’s Detroit Free Press blog.

Happy Halloween!

The Return of Frankenstein

The Monster casts a tall shadow in an otherwise sparse December 1934 Universal Weekly trade paper ad for The Return of Frankenstein, the working title for a film that would be released as Bride of Frankenstein. No details, no hint of content except to get the word out: Frankenstein was coming back, and James Whale was aboard.

The phenomenal success of the 1931 original had Universal eager for a sequel, but director James Whale wanted no part of it. Several scripts and screen treatments were floated and other directors were considered until Whale finally came around and supervised a brilliant and perverse script written to his specifications. He would oversee all aspects of the production, from casting — with his friends Ernest Thesiger and Elsa Lanchester assisting the returning Colin Clive and Boris Karloff — to sitting in on the orchestra recording of the sumptuous score.

With Bride of Frankenstein, Whale would create his undisputed masterpiece.

The ad plugs Carl Laemmle’s Anniversary Jubilee, and Universal’s patriarch was featured on the cover of this issue. It seemed like papa Laemmle was celebrating something of other every few months, front and center, although his son Julius, aka Carl Jr., was now head of production — if not for much longer. The horror movies did well, but the studio accumulated a series of expensive flops and the Laemmles were bought out in 1936.

Starring Colin Clive

I thought I’d seen all the stills and publicity material from the 1931 Frankenstein until this splendid photo  — marked PD (Publicity Department) # 940 — popped up on Facebook, courtesy of Colin Clive collector Sally Stark.

Wearing jodhpurs and high boots, Colin Clive strikes a dramatic pose on the Frankenstein set. The photographer was probably Roman Freulich. Boris Karloff posed in his Monster outfit for several photos against a similar leaning stonework background.

This was the costume Clive wore — with a coat — in the final chase and windmill scenes of the film. The breeches and boots are those of a horseman, and Clive was an avid if unlucky practitioner. As a young man, he suffered injuries — broken knee and broken leg — from two different riding accidents, cutting short his aspirations for a military career. Then, in 1931, having rushed home to England as soon as Frankenstein wrapped, Clive promptly fell off a horse and broke his hip. Perhaps he was just accident-prone. Kicking off his acting career, Clive was knocked down by a London bus on the very day he opened in the James Whale-directed play, Journey’s End. Come 1935, Clive suffered another injury, perhaps in a fall, just before Bride of Frankenstein started shooting. Playing up Frankenstein’s “convalescence” angle — having been mauled and thrown off the windmill by The Monster — Clive was allowed to do most of his scenes reclining or sitting down.

Related:
Frankenstein: Colin Clive

Frankenstein Hits the Jackpot

Here’s a Halloween-appropriate video combining classic monsters, pop culture and, well, slot machines!

The Monster Jackpot machines rolled out to casinos in the spring of 2012. No idea if they are still operating, but anyone who ever played one of these was treated to a surreal gaming experience featuring “Your Favorite Universal Monsters in One Exciting Slot Game!”. Present are “Frankenstein” and a sashaying Bride, Dracula and Mummy, Wolf Man, a cackling Invisible Man and the Creech from the Black Lagoon. The object of the game is to capture monsters and move up the castle wall, all the way to the big payoff.

Images include videoclips and movie posters from the classics, animated vampire bats, lightning strikes, sizzling labs and peasants wielding torches. The soundtrack features lines from the films, shrieks and Swan Lake from the original Dracula score.

Silly fun.

WMS Gaming’s Monster Jackpot page.

Charlie Chan Meets Frankenstein

After two decades toiling in bit parts and secondary roles, Boris Karloff was propelled to instant stardom with the release of Frankenstein in 1931. A box-office draw on his own, the actor, through most of the Thirties, would still be routinely billed as “Boris ‘Frankenstein’ Karloff”. Even ads for a gangster film, like Behind the Mask or Scarface, tagged Karloff as ‘Frankenstein’. 

In 1936, when 20th Century Fox landed Karloff as guest villain in Charlie Chan at the Opera, the studio gleefully played up their star menace  — the film’s title card reads “Warner Oland VS Boris Karloff” — and went all out with Frankenstein references, even name-checking The Monster in the film itself. Maurice Cass, playing the harried stage manager says, “This opera is going on tonight even if Frankenstein walks in!”.

Karloff plays Gravelle, opera singer and revenge-minded sanitarium escapee. Dressed in a flamboyant Mephisto costume, with cape, lipstick and a cat-eared skullcap, Karloff lip-synchs tunes written by Oscar Levant in a rich baritone provided by Tudor Williams. “Never has Charlie Chan met an opponent like Karloff!” crowed the film’s promotional herald. “Never as he been staggered by the enormity of the crimes known only to the Frankenstein of the Mad House!” 

Newspaper ads exploited the Frankenstein angle: It’s “Boris “Frankenstein” Karloff” in North Carolina’s Davidsonian of January 13, 1937, and an February 5 ad for Schine’s Strand in Lexington, Kentucky, misspells Boris’s name, but bills the film as Charlie Chan Meets ‘Frankenstein’. I wonder if this fooled anyone. Were there any patrons who were disappointed that the famed Oriental detective didn’t actually go up against Karloff with bolts in his neck?

Due, in no small part, to Karloff’s presence, Charlie Chan at the Opera is considered by many to be the best of all the Chan films.

Created by Earl Derr Biggers, Charlie Chan was, ostensibly, a heroic antidote to Yellow Peril enormities and Asian stereotypes. Nevertheless, in the Hollywood series — stretching to an amazing 44 titles over 18 years at Fox and Monogram — Chan was played by Caucasian actors Warner Oland, Sidney Toler and Roland Winters. Asian actors Keye Luke and Victor Sen Young appeared in support, often as comedy relief.

An interesting side-note: Scott Darling, one of the screenwriters for Opera, went on to pen some of the Mr. Wong films — poverty row Chan knockoffs — wherein Karloff played the Oriental sleuth. Darling also scripted The Ghost of Frankenstein (1941), Universal’s fourth Frankenstein film, with Lon Chaney Jr. replacing Karloff as The Monster.

Charlie Chan at the Opera is up on YouTube. The Frankenstein reference comes on at 17:30.

The films of Charlie Chan at the Charlie Chan Family Home.

Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Detroit Riots of 1943

Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man is playing at the Mayfair theater in Detroit. Outside, a car is overturned, ablaze. This is not an accident. It’s June 1943 and the Race Riots are sweeping through the city.

In the early Forties, when the city’s automobile plants switched to wartime production, recruiters scoured the Southern States for manpower, drawing some 300,000 whites and 50,000 blacks to the Motor City. Racial tensions flared as early as 1941, when blacks were settled into newly built housing projects. Cross burnings and violence ensued. The tension reached its fever peak in the spring of 1943 when blacks were promoted at U.S. Rubber, Hudson, and Vickers. White workers walked off the job when blacks were allowed into the Production Department, served as plant guards or were hired as tool-makers. In late May, over 26,000 men paralyzed Packard assembly lines when a handful of black workers were brought onto the factory floor to work alongside whites.

The riots, fueled by spurious claims of violence by either side against the other, ignited on June 20 and roared for three days, until Federal troops restored peace. Blacks bore the brunt of the violence. An investigation revealed that of the 34 people killed, 25 of them were blacks. Of 600 people injured and 1800 arrested, over 75% were African-Americans. A recurring story tells of blacks being pulled off city buses and beaten. Blacks driving their cars were stopped and chased away, their cars demolished and burned.

The Riots made the local papers, but very little information traveled beyond, censored so as to preserve national morale in wartime. At best, a few American newspapers ran short items about brief cases of “labor unrest” in Detroit. It would take decades for the story to be fully revealed.

The Mayfair theater on Woodward Avenue was built as a synagogue in 1902, it’s striking Beaux-Arts dome structure the work of Albert Khan, the “architect of Detroit”. It was transformed into a playhouse and civic theater in 1922 and modified again into a movie house, The Mayfair, in 1930. The building was taken over as a performance space by Wayne State University in 1951 and now serves as the Bonstelle Theater.

The Mayfair went dark on those terrible days of June, 1943. Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the quaint Hollywood horrors within were no match for the real monsters prowling outside.

The Bonstelle Theater on Historic Detroit.

Olsen and Johnson Meet Frankenstein

The Frankenstein Monster creeps up on Olsen and Johnson on their Halloween television show of 1949. It was actually the comedy duo’s second encounter with The Monster.

Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson first teamed up in 1914, touring the Vaudeville circuit, honing their own special brand of chaotic comedy based on fast patter, blackout jokes and sight gags. By the late Twenties, the duo scored radio gigs and appeared in some early Warner talkies, but Hollywood wasn’t quite ready yet for Olsen and Johnson’s patented hysterics. As an example of the team’s inspired lunacy, their segment on Rudy Vallee’s radio program was called The Padded Cell of the Air.

In 1938, the boys opened on Broadway with a relentlessly manic revue entitled Hellzapoppin’, combining jokes and prop gags, wild improv and surrealistic musical numbers, all way over-the-top. It was a sensation, playing over 1000 performances before taking to the road for years to come — with no two shows ever exactly alike.

Hollywood came calling again. Universal tackled Hellzapoppin’ in 1941, inserting movie star cameos and a spectacular musical number by the legendary Slim Gaillard. This being Universal, the Frankenstein Monster also appears, throwing Martha Ray across the set in an elaborate wire gag. Legendary stuntman Dale Van Sickle donned full Monster makeup for the bit. An All-American athlete, Van Sickle became one of Hollywood’s busiest and most respected stuntmen, eventually serving as first president for the Stuntmen’s Association. Tragically, he died in 1977 after a long illness provoked by a movie car crash gone wrong.

It is believed that Van Sickle played The Monster again, spelling for Lon Chaney in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and as one of a tag team of doubles for Bela Lugosi in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943).

According to The Frankenstein Film Sourcebook, screenwriter Edward Cline wrote The Monster into Olsen and Johnson’s next two pictures, Crazy House (1943) and Ghost Catchers (1944), but the gags were dropped in pre-production. It is very unlikely that they were filmed and cut. Still, The Monster wasn’t done with Olsen and Johnson.

In 1949, the boys took their act to the nascent medium of television with Fireball Fun For All, good for 13 one-hour episodes of certified craziness that practically overwhelmed the small screen. The final program, broadcast on October 27, was built on Halloween themes. The last sketch, a haunted house number called 13 Bleak Street, featured creaky floors, howling noises, ghostly appearances and a mummy, then a door opens and our old friend, The Monster, appears. He creeps up on Ole and Chic and asks, “Are you Abbott and Costello?” — “No!” says Chic, “We’re Olsen and Johnson!” Whereupon The Monster shrieks in horror and runs away.

The gag was topical, obviously referencing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the wildly successful comedy hit of 1948. Another neat thing about the Monster cameo is that the actor is wearing an original Don Post over-the-head Frankenstein mask. Introduced just a year earlier, this is very likely the first use of the Frankenstein mask on television.

The Frankenstein rubber mask would prove to be a great substitute to elaborate, time-consuming makeup jobs whenever Franky was needed for a quick gag. It would become downright ubiquitous with the onset of TV Horror Hosts in the late Fifties.

The Halloween episode of Olsen and Johnson’s Fireball Free For All is up on YouTube. The Bleak House sketch kicks in at 41:27, and the Frankenstein Monster appears at 48:57. You can also download the episode from Archive.org.

Related:
Dance Hall Frankenstein, perhaps the first use of the Don Post Frankenstein mask in a movie.
Ole Olsen meets Frankenstein (Glenn Strange).

The Country Bride of Frankenstein

Here’s a perfect Countdown to Halloween musical interlude!

Edna’s Kin, as the name reveals, is a family band. Warren Koontz and sons Daniel and Andrew play roots music — old time, bluegrass, blues and traditional Irish. The Kin, based in Sag Harbor, has enjoyed YouTube success with their folksy version of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man drawing over 90,000 views. Here’s their followup, an original composition called She’s Got Pulchritude, staged as a heartfelt homage to our favorite Bride.

As video director, fiddler Andrew Koontz studied the classic film and pulled together a fun little package featuring castle wall backgrounds, a mad lab, a Karloff cameo and a neat performance by New York actress Megan Larsen who hisses on cue, in requisite black and white.

Kick back and enjoy The Country Bride of Frankenstein!

Edna’s Kin Facebook page.

Band profile on the Sag Harbor Express site.

The Lady and Her Monsters, by Roseanne Montillo

There are really two books within the covers of Roseanne Montillo’s The Lady and Her Monsters. One is an honest, unflinching portrait of Mary Shelley, her life fraught with tragedy. This sobering story may be familiar terrain for most fans of Frankenstein, but the other part of this book, told in parallel, is more spirited. It deals with the “real-life Frankensteins”, the scientists, the vivisectionists and the experimenters who, like Victor Frankenstein, “pursued nature to her hiding-places”. Montillo’s accounts of body-snatchers, resurrectionists and the galvanists who electrified animal and human corpses in sensationalistic, harebrained experiments and macabre attempts at reanimating the dead reads like a ripping yarn.

Tying the two narratives together is Mary’s lover and husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley who, as a student, indulged in his own experiments with the miracle of electricity. His philosophy would inform Mary and he would become the obvious model for the nerve-wracked Victor Frankenstein.

In the end, the galvanists and the experimenters were not direct influences on Mary’s novel — some of the most spectacular experiments catalogued here were performed well after Frankenstein was published — but, rather, Montillo’s book establishes Frankenstein as being squarely of its time. Mary Shelley’s novel sprang from an era when grave robbers plied their dark trade, executions were public events and morbid medical experimentation was often a spectator sport. In her revelatory book, Roseanne Montillo shows how, for its first readers, Frankenstein’s experiments and his artificial man were certainly extraordinary, but somehow plausible.

The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece, by Roseanne Montillo, was published earlier this year by William Morrow, HarperCollins Publishers, New York. 


The Lady and Her Monsters reading guide.

Related:
The Art of Frankenstein: David Plunkert