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Early Days Productions: 1930's Horror Films Last updated 09/19/2010
"Frankenstein" (1931) is a horror film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and adapted from the play by Peggy Webling which in turn is based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley. The film stars Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff, and features Dwight Frye and Edward van Sloan. The Webling play was adapted by John L. Balderston and the screenplay written by Francis Edward Faragoh and Garrett Fort with uncredited contributions from Robert Florey and John Russell. The make-up artist was Jack Pierce. Karloff would return to the wearing of the makeup and to the role of the Monster one last time in the TV show Route 66 in the early 1960s. Edited from Wikipedia.
"Dracula" (1931) is a horror film directed by Tod Browning and starring Béla Lugosi as the title character. The film was produced by Universal and is based on the novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker. The eerie speech pattern of Lugosi's Dracula was said to have resulted from the fact that Lugosi did not speak English, and therefore had to learn and speak his lines phonetically. This is a bit of an urban legend. While it was true Lugosi did not speak English at the time of his first English-language play in 1919 and had learned his lines to that play in this manner, by the time of "Dracula" Lugosi spoke English as well as he ever would. Lugosi's speech pattern would be imitated countless times by other Dracula portrayers, most often in an exaggerated or comical way.Edited from Wikipedia.
"The Mummy" (1932) is a horror film from Universal Studios directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff as a revived ancient Egyptian priest. The movie also features Zita Johann, David Manners and Edward Van Sloan. Unlike Frankenstein and Dracula, and other, later Universal horror films, this film had no sequels, but rather was semi-remade in the 1940's b-film The Mummy's Hand (1940), and its sequels, The Mummy's Tomb (1942), The Mummy's Ghost (1944), The Mummy's Curse (1944), which were later spoofed in 1950's Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. These focus on the mummy Kharis. The Mummy's Hand recycled footage from the original film for use in the telling of Kharis' origins; Karloff is clearly visible in several of these recycled scenes, but he is not credited. Edited from Wikipedia.
"The Invisible Man" (1933) is a science fiction film based on H. G. Wells' novel "The Invisible Man", published in 1897. The film was directed by James Whale and stars Claude Rains, (in his first American screen appearance), and Gloria Stuart. It is considered one of the great Universal Horror films of the 1930s, and spawned a number of sequels, plus many spinoffs using the idea of an "invisible man" that were largely unrelated to Wells' original story. In his first American screen appearance, Rains portrayed the Invisible Man (Dr. Jack Griffin) mostly as a disembodied voice. Rains is only shown clearly for a brief time at the end of the film, spending most of his on-screen time covered by bandages.Edited from Wikipedia.
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931) is a American horror film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March. The film is an adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the Robert Louis Stevenson tale of a man who takes a potion which turns him from a mild-mannered man of science into a crude homicidal maniac. The secret of the astonishing transformation scenes was not revealed for decades (Mamoulian himself revealed it in a volume of interviews with Hollywood directors published under the title The Celluloid Muse). A series of colored filters matching the make-up was used, enabling the make-up applied in contrasting colours, to be gradually exposed or made invisible. The change in color was not visible on the black-and-white film.Edited from Wikipedia.
