FILM CHRONICLE
REFLECTIONS ON HORROR MOVIES
Although horror movies have recently been enjoying a vogue,
they have always been perennial supporting features among Grade B
and C fare. The popularity of the form is no doubt partly explained
by
its ability to engage the spectator's feelings without making any serio
demand on his mind. In addition, however, horror movies covert!
embody certain underground assumptions about science which reflee
popular opinions.
The horror movies I am mainly concerned with I have divided
in
three major categories: Mad Doctor, Atomic Beast and Interplane
Monster. They do not exhaust all the types but they each contain
essential characters, the Scientist and the Monster, towards whom
attitudes of the movies are in a revealing state of change.
The Mad Doctor series
is
by far the most long lived of the th
It suffered a temporary decline in the Forties when Frankenstein, Dr
la, and the Wolfman (along with their countless offspring) were
f
loaned out as straight men to Abbott and Costello and then set
to graze in the parched pastures of the cheap all-night movie hou
but it has recently demonstrated its durability in a group of Eng'
remakes and a Teen-age Monster craze. These films find their roots·
certain European folk myths. Dracula was inspired by an ancient Bal
superstition about vampires, the Werewolf is a Middle European
f
myth recorded, among other places, in the Breton
lais
of Marie
France, and even Frankenstein, though out of Mary Shelley
by
Gothic tradition, has a medieval prototype in the Golem, a monster
Jews fashioned from clay and earth to free them from oppression.
spirit of these films is still medieval, combining a vulgar religiosity .
folk superstitions. Superstition now, however, has been crudely t
ferred from magic and alchemy to creative science, itself a form
magic to the untutored mind. The devil of the Vampire and Were
myths, who turned human beings into baser animals, today has
come a scientist, and the metamorphosis is given a technical name-it
a "regression" into an earlier state of evolution. The alchemist
devil-conjuring scholar, Dr. Faustus, gives way to Dr. Frankenstein,
