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!

 

The October Country Report #3: Todd Browning’s Dracula

Darkness sprawls across the land, the midnight hour is close at hand, and here in the October Country we celebrate coming one step closer to Halloween. Tonight is a very special night, for having set the stage with the Lon Chaney classics that set the cornerstone, now at last we come to the film that laid the foundation for two decades of iconic monster domination, the film that revolutionized the horror genre and introduced the film world to one of its most iconic stars: tonight, we watch Dracula!