The Wolf’s Trail – House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula

We’ve come to the part of the 1940s where the old monsters were beginning to run out of steam. With the real horrors of a world war to contend with, genteel gothic horror was looking like kid stuff, and the period settings and invocations of old superstition were out of place in a world driven by science and engineering. The atom age was coming, and soon horror would be dominated by mad science and extraterrestrial menace. At this point, Universal was trying to wring money out of its monsters without spending much. The success of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man showed the way forward: cram a bunch of monsters into a single movie. A “monster rally,” if you will. And so we come to this week’s double-feature, where Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, mad scientists, and hunchbacked assistants are all thrown in together, with diminishing returns. Two houses, both alike in dignity, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula!

 

Curt Siodmak did not write the screenplay for House of Frankenstein, but he’s got a story credit for the movie, so we know he contributed to it at least to some extent. The film definitely has some hallmarks that will be familiar to viewers of the previous Wolfman movies, but it takes a while to get to that, because this is yet another movie of two parts, and in this one, the Wolfman section is the second half. Before we get there, we begin with our anchor and throughline for this film: Karloff.

Boris Karloff was always Universal’s ace in the hole, a versatile horror performer who could make a monster sympathetic, or make a scientist terrifying. The looming figure, the gaunt features, the intense stare…and above all else, there was that voice. Cavernous. Somber. Sepulchral. Whether you’re aware of it or not, Boris Karloff’s voice (or an impression of it) is probably going to be one of the first things you imagine when you think about spooky voices. House of Frankenstein has one thing going for it from the beginning, and he is it. This is not a great movie, nor even a good one, but it does feature some absolutely first-rate Karloff stuff.

The movie’s opening also includes some of Universal’s trademark castellated medieval architecture, in the form of an oppressively grim and shadowy prison where a Dr. Gustav Neimann is imprisoned. Neimann is a disciple of Frankenstein’s work, which is sort of why he’s in prison, and the whole impressively large cell is covered with chalk diagrams because he is still obsessively fixated on two things: perfecting brain transplants, and getting revenge. He has a cell-mate, a simple-minded but very strong hunchbacked fellow by the name of Daniel, very much in the Ygor mold. It seems like a bad idea to lock a mad scientist up with a deformed sociopath, but the jailers have not seen any Universal monster movies, so we must make allowances.

Besides, no one could possibly have predicted that a bolt of lightning would strike the prison and somehow blow a hole in the wall so Dr. Neimann and his sidekick Daniel could just walk right out of there. The odds of that happening must have been extremely slim at best. Also improbable: that just outside the prison there would be the wagon of a traveling show, stuck in the mud, with a traveling showman desperate for help, even if it came from a pair of wild-eyed hermit-bearded men who stumbled out of the woods with an implausible story of how they got there.

The fact that this traveling show includes the certified genuine skeleton of Dracula is just icing on the extraordinary luck cake.

Dr. Neimann wants to go to Vasaria, where Frankenstein’s research may be found, but the showman, Professor Lambini, wants to not do that. Now, in those days identity theft was a lot easier than it is now, and Daniel the hunchback has big ol’ stranglin’ hands, so soon Neimann is freshly shaved, well-dressed, and on his way with his new sideshow wagon, as the new Professor Lampini.

Neimann wants to transplant brains and avenge himself on the people who sent him to prison, preferably simultaneously. Daniel is a simpler man: he just wants to not look like a freak. For most of the film he’s filling the role of the tragically hideous outcast, as previously exemplified by Karloff himself in the Frankenstein films.

Neimann resurrects Dracula  for revenge-related activities by pulling the stake out of his chest, and so we’re introduced to the John Carradine version of Dracula, a bit of an odd duck who only appears in these two House movies. He looks and sounds absolutely nothing like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and he has his own schtick, one that revolves around hypnotizing women with his magic ring and a line of patter about gazing into the void of limbo between life and death. Before getting strangled to death and dumped in a ditch somewhere, the real Professor Lampini claimed to have found this skeleton in the basement of Castle Dracula, which is not where the actual Count Dracula died or was buried, at least not according to the Universal films, so my little fan theory is that Bela was playing Vlad III Draculea, and John Carradine was Vlad’s younger brother Radu the Handsome. I love John Carradine, as all true b-movie fans should, but the shift from Lugosi is jarring, and he is not given much to do. Frankly, I prefer his return to the role in Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula.

Anyway, it turns out murdering people and hypnotizing pretty girls brings on the heat, and so Neimann and Daniel have to book it, dumping Dracula’s body to satisfy their pursuers, who are specifically after the vampire. The Count burns in the sunlight, the hypnotized girl is freed from his curse in the arms of her lover, and the status quo is upheld. The whole thing plays out like a 40-minute abridgement of a Universal monster movie, complete with happy ending, and we never see or care about any of those people ever again.

With the Dracula portion of the proceedings resolved, Neimann and Daniel drive their sideshow wagon on into the next mini-movie: rolling into Vasaria they immediately encounter a Romani caravan, and Daniel is immediately smitten when he sees a young Roma girl with very pretty legs dancing in a manner that displays them to good effect. She’s got beef with the head of the caravan, who has beef with the local constabulary, who in turn have beef with Professor Lampini’s traveling horror show, because the people of Vasaria have straight up had it up to here with monsters.

Dr. Neimann dodges the cops long enough to scope out the ruins of Castle Frankenstein, which was in pretty bad shape even before the torrential deluge from the destroyed dam swept through it at the end of the last movie. What he finds (in addition to a tumbleweed, carrying on Universal’s proud tradition of depicting an Eastern Europe full of flora and fauna from the American Southwest), in an inexplicable ice cavern, is the frozen bodies of the Frankenstein Monster and the Wolf Man. Neimann apparently has seen Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, so he’s already caught up on why these two monsters are frozen in ice underneath Castle Frankenstein, and decides to thaw them out. Finally, finally, we get some Wolf Man up in here.

Larry Talbot has been literally frozen on ice for a while, so it’s not surprising that he’s still exactly where we left him character-wise. A recurring feature of this movie is expository dialogue summarising previous movies, and Talbot contributes by getting out of the ice, reverting to human form, waking up, and immediately launching into an apparently memorized speech about how he’s cursed, wants to die, and can’t. Neimann, unphased, suggests that he can definitely help with the whole lycanthropy situation, if he can get some help finding Frankenstein’s research notes. On the way out of town they also pick up the Roma girl with the legs, Ilonka, who strikes up a friendship with poor Daniel, who is pretty ill-equipped to deal with a pretty woman being nice to him. These days there are subReddits for people like this, but in this vaguely defined past time, he has to be awful in response to rejection all on his own.

So, now we’ve got everybody together, and everybody’s motivations start to clash. Neimann manages to get his hands on the two remaining guys he wants revenge on, and reveals his plan to punish them by putting one guy’s brain inside the Frankenstein Monster, which admittedly does sound pretty rough, and then putting the Wolf Man’s brain in the other guy’s body so that he becomes a werewolf, which just…guys, that plan does not make sense. If you want to make the guy suffer the curse of lycanthropy (and to be clear, Neimann explicitly says this is his goal) then have the Wolfman bite him. If you take that guy’s brain out, and put the Wolfman’s brain in, really you’re just messing with the Wolfman at that point. He also plans on putting the Frankenstein Monster’s brain in the Wolfman’s body and do further experimenting on it, so I have no idea what that he’s planning on doing with that other guy’s brain.

So, that’s Neimann’s deal, and it’s bad news for everybody else. Talbot, of course, does not want his brain to be put in another guy’s body. Daniel doesn’t want the Creature’s brain to go into Talbot’s body, because he called dibs on that one. Ol’ Larry and Ilonka have started digging each other, and one redeeming feature of this movie is the way her cheerful optimistic demeanor plays off of Talbot’s grim world-weariness. When he’s not glumly rattling off exposition, Lon Chaney continues to do some decent work depicting his werewolf as a tormented and increasingly cynical survivor. At this point, he’s a man who’s lived too long, and done too much, but Ilonka seems to bring some life back to him. It’s also rather interesting that she’s Roma; Maleva, Larry’s surrogate mother, is long gone, but we can still see the connection between Talbot and the Romani. Whenever he finds a little bit of fellowship, it’s with those outsiders, who understand his curse, and know what it is to live as an outcast. Ilonka knows what he is, and still loves him.

This is bad news for her, of course.

Inevitably, everything comes to a boil. Talbot wolfs out and kills some more. Neimann does some of the bad science, until Daniel betrays him after getting kicked around once too often. The Creature wakes up ready to rampage. The villagers, who are absolutely sick of this shit by now,  form up in the customary torches-and-pitchforks style. Meanwhile Ilonka, poor Ilonka, comes face to face with the wandering Wolfman, and puts a silver bullet into his chest as he comes at her. The doomed lovers die in each others’ arms which is, honestly, not a bad ending. (Also Neimann and the Monster both sink into quicksand).

These are two people who both know their story can only end one way.

See, here’s the one big thing this movie adds to the mythos: in discussing his condition, Talbot and Ilonka say “a werewolf can only be killed by a silver bullet, fired by the hand of someone who loves him enough to understand.” Now, this movie is underwhelming, but this idea is actually hugely significant. It picks up on the subtext from The Wolf Man‘s ending, where Larry died at the hands of his own father, and it amplifies the tragic romanticism that really gives this stuff that gothic kick. This true love thing is actually hugely influential: when we get to Paul Naschy’s Waldemar Daninsky films, we’ll see it repeatedly. We’ll see it invoked directly by The American Werewolf of London himself, and we’ll see it on TV in the short-lived Universal/BBC series She-Wolf of London. It’s a mirror to what was said in Werewolf of London: “the werewolf instinctively tries to kill the thing it loves best.”

Love and death, inextricably linked, just as man and beast are.

Now, House of Frankenstein was successful enough to warrant one more trip to the well, and next year Universal rolled out House of Dracula, the last (sort of) and weakest (IMHO) of the series. There’s no Karloff this time, he was done with the Universal monsters after he went down into that quicksand last time, and where the last movie played like a clipshow distillation of the franchise’s greatest hits revisited, this one’s more of a muddled rehash.

This time around, Dracula takes center stage again, and it is once again John Carradine’s Dracula, reappearing without even the slightest token effort to justify his survival after getting burned to ash in the last movie. He just shows up, continuing to do his John Carradine Dracula thing, hypnotizing people with his spooky ring, wearing a top hat, turning into a super fake-looking bat…but now he’s looking for a cure for his condition. For those who came in late, his condition is that he’s an evil spirit reanimating the corpse of a man who died accursed, sustaining itself by drinking the blood of the living. To cure this condition, he naturally turns to science.

In Vasaria (or Viseria; consistent spelling is one of the many, many things no one was really keeping tracking of by this point), the “Baron Latos” seeks out a Dr. Edlemann, a man who does vaguely defined science stuff. Edlemann thinks his patient who has a magic ring and turns into a bat is probably suffering from a blood disorder, and prescribes a series of transfusions. Dracula’s up for that, and moves in. With his coffin. That he has to sleep in because he is a supernatural revenant.

I’m going to get it out of the way right here: I do not like this movie, and the reason I dislike it even though I enjoy House of Frankenstein, which is similarly cheap and sloppy, is that I hate trying to come up with rational scientific justifications for inexplicable supernatural horrors. Now, if you want to thread the needle like the Quatermass movies do, that’s one thing, because it is possible to start from a rationalist perspective and get into unexplained mysteries that still must somehow conform to natural law. But to try and walk back the unabashedly supernatural stuff, this late in the game, this half-assedly, makes me nuts.

Anyway, Larry Talbot is back, and while the movie doesn’t specifically address this, it’s safe to say no one in Vasaria is happy to see him again. Also not addressed: why he isn’t dead. He’s alive, he’s still a werewolf, he’s grown an unfortunate mustache at some point, just roll with it because no one cares. He quickly gets himself locked up in jail, because there’s a bad moon on the rise, and even skeptics have to agree that seeing him turn into a wolfman is pretty convincing. Edlemann and his hunchbacked nurse think they can fix him, though, so he’s shipped up to the castle. Edlemann’s theory is that Talbot’s condition is due to an undue cranial pressure on the brain, which can be fixed with surgery, once he gets the fungus he needs to do that. Larry Talbot, perhaps remembering how bad things turned out last time he trusted a scientist with a hunchbacked assistant, or perhaps intuiting that a scientist who thinks doing brain surgery with mushrooms is how you cure a man who physically transforms into a feral man-wolf under the light of the full moon and can’t be killed by anything but silver might be crazy, decides not to stick around for that, and instead gives suicide a try again, jumping off a cliff into the ocean.

Talbot survives, because of course he does, because not even a silver bullet fired by the hand of someone who loves him into his heart can kill him so it’ll take. He ends up in a cave far below Edlemann’s castle. Edlemann searches for him, finds him, finds out why looking for werewolves on a full moon night is a bad idea, is saved by some clouds that cover the moon (and thereby presumably relieve the pressure on Talbot’s brain that makes him transform, this is stupid bullshit that is a thousand times less believable than a magic curse is), and they find the Wolfman’s old sparring partner, the Frankenstein monster.

They also find that the cave is perfect for cultivating the Doctor’s bone-shaping fungus, and is connected directly to his basement by a natural tunnel, so that’s pretty convenient.

Meanwhile, Dracula is unsurprisingly being an asshole, so they have to kill him, yet again, with the old bust-open-the-coffin-and-drag-it-into-sunlight routine. Dracula hates that.

So, the title character is dead, but we still have a lot of movie to get through, which means it’s time for Dr. Edlemann to dose up on Dracula blood, which of course makes him turn evil. He’s halfway between a vampire and Mr. Hyde, but he does manage to do brain surgery on Larry Talbot. After that he goes on a bit of a spree, doing some murder, waking up the Frankenstein Monster, breaking his poor hunchbacked nurse’s neck, and generally being a dick. It falls to Talbot to shoot him dead, then deal with the Creature, who gets trapped under some shelving shortly before the castle burns down and collapses in on him.

And Talbot walks away cured. It’s a bullshit fake-science ending that contradicts so much of what happened in the previous movies, but Larry Talbot genuinely gets a happy ending, and it’s kind of nice.

But it’s still bullshit, and bullshit doesn’t last. A few years later, O.G. Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and Larry Talbot himself will all be back in action, and he’ll be right back at the status quo, because his curse can never, ever end. Of course, that’s all in an Abbott and Costello movie, but the overt comedy picture isn’t really any sillier than this one.

So much for the monster rally films. There is one more mashup from Universal coming, which we’ll talk about more next week, and of course this big crossover idea lives on in other movies, but this is the last serious Universal monster crossover, and it’s a dud. In the sixties and seventies there would be a lot more movies (most of them starring Paul Naschy as Waldemar Daninksy) where werewolves cross paths with vampires, Frankensteins, mummies, Mr. Hydes, etc., and of course in the modern area they rub shoulders with other monsters in countless urban fantasy settings, from the World of Darkness where the Garou and the Kindred wage war* to the Twilight universe where vampires and werewolves sometimes hang out, sometimes fight, and sometimes fall obsessively in love with girls who are disturbingly younger than they are. The Underworld franchise is built around werewolves and vampires duking it out, and Van Helsing stands as a goofy, stupid monument to how much fun it can be to just throw every single monster into a blender and see what happens. This is the true legacy of these movies.

There is just a little more too it, though. The thing about these two movies is that they are, essentially, remixes. They take characters, settings, and story elements from all the previous monster movies and sort of mix them up and throw them together into something non-specific. The shadowy stone vaults of the prison, the caravan wagons, the ruined castles, they stand in for every spooky stone building in these movies. The monsters are rendered generic, and by the end there’s a total rejection of the idea of continuity. These things are boiled down into concepts, simple images that can be thrown together and easily recognized. This is significant because one reason these monsters have so much staying power in the popular consciousness is the way they endure purely as icons. You know what the Frankenstein monster looks like, you know what Boris Karloff sounds like, you know what Larry Talbot’s deal is, you know Dracula turns into a bat when he flaps his cape like wings and he sleeps in a coffin, and you know all these things whether you’ve seen these movies or not. House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula are an essential step on the path that leads to these characters surviving for decades as Saturday morning cartoons, breakfast cereals, Halloween costumes, toys, and t-shirts.

I can’t really make up my mind whether that’s a good thing or not.

Anyway, one thing we can definitely take away from this week’s movies: to kill a werewolf, silver isn’t enough. You have to love that werewolf.

Next week, same time, same place, we’re going to finally wrap up the 1940s, looking at the last two English-language werewolf movies made in that decade. They’re both Universal films, and one is legendary in its own right, while the other is…really not. Next week: The She-Wolf of London and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein!

*Ask me about my Get of Fenris Philodox who’s the alpha of the most dangerous pack in the Pacific Northwest, and about his massive Glaive whose crossguard is inlaid with fourteen pairs of vampire fangs taken as trophies from the Sabbat.