Hump-Day Harangue: Whither the Horror Movie Icon?

Vault dwellers, allow me to take you back to an earlier time in the history of our fair genre. Go ahead and hop in the Delorean--just watch your head on the door, I don't know what genius designed it that way, but what are you gonna do? Anyway, we're headed back to a simpler, more innocent time, when horror was dominated my living legends, by giants who walked among us and filled our minds with delicious nightmares, fusing their very personae with the essence of the genre itself. This is the age of the horror icon.

Our first stop is the 1920s, when a brilliant actor and makeup artist by the name of Lon Chaney became horror's first bona fide movie star. After his star faded and the industry entered the age of sound, Universal gave us the likes of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon's baby boy to continue the tradition, populating the terror landscape with a platoon of unforgettable movie monsters. In later decades, the likes of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and of course, the one and only Vincent Price ensured that the cult of the horror icon remained undead and well.

But then something happened. Something changed with the onset of what we now call the "modern era" of horror. For the benefit of creating a handy cutoff point, let's say that from the 1980s onward, the phenomenon of the horror movie icon suffered a swift decline. Sure, there were still actors making their living in the horror genre. But icons? In the sense of the folks mentioned above? Hardly.

Who have we been given over the course of the past 30 years to match the majesty of the likes of Karloff, Price, Cushing, et al? I ask this as an honest question. Am I, as I have sometimes been a accused of being, a horror snob? Forgive me if the Kane Hodders of the world just don't do it for me. I'll never get tired of looking at pictures of him pretending to choke people at horror conventions, but honestly, he's a stuntman in a hockey mask. A buoy with arms could've played Jason Voorhees. Robert Englund? A delight as Freddy Krueger, to be sure, but beyond that? A merely amusing character actor who would've remained best known as the "good alien" on V had it not been for that hat-wearing son of 100 maniacs.

Who else do we have? Doug Bradley? Tony Todd? Linda Blair? Maybe Brad Dourif comes close... I may be off-base here, but while these are all actors who have done a fine job crafting specific characters, I think even they would agree that they don't quite belong ranked in the category of the immortal legends of yesteryear mentioned earlier. Quite literally, they don't seem to make 'em like that anymore.

So what happened? What is it about modern horror that seems to inherently discourage the notion of the horror icon? Perhaps it is the stress on realism, the need to downplay the more obvious elements of showmanship and bombast that once played a larger role in genre entertainment. I firmly believe that horror films of the golden and silver ages of the 1920s-1960s were more "personality"-driven then they are today. Hell, I'd say that movies in general were more personality-driven back then, for better or for worse. Those larger-than-life figures have a hard time carving out their niches when the funner, "Famous Monsters of Filmland" approach to horror has come to be considered passe.

Quite frankly, these days, when we talk about horror film icons, it's easier to use the term to refer to directors than actors. After all, the true visionaries of horror these days, the names and personalities most closely linked to the genre in the minds of fans, are those of the likes of Dario Argento, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, George Romero, et al, rather than the actors who appear in front of the camera. This is a shift that has certainly occurred within the past 40 years, no question about it. But unfortunately, directors are more visionaries than personalities for the most part, so in the end it's a very different dynamic.

I'm not trying to say that the supernatural horror film has completely given way in the face of reality-based horror--far from it. There still remains more than enough room for monsters and entities of all shape and form, but whether we're talking serial killer flicks or zombie movies, there's a greater stress on realism, and I feel that realism, while it has its pluses, is decidedly the enemy of the horror film icon. There are standout characters, but for the most part, the actors who play them are linked pretty much 90% to one role alone. For the most part, Gunnar Hansen is Leatherface. Warwick Davis is Leprechaun. Clint Howard is the Ice Cream Man. Ahem, ok that one was a stretch, but you get the point.

They may have been before my time for the most part, but I miss those genuine, transcendent icons. Those individuals who literally embodied horror, and who in many ways towered over it. I hope we get to see more rise to that level one day. If they're out there, and I'm just not giving them their due, please put me in my place, by all means...

The Many Faces of Lon Chaney

Anita Page 1910-2008

There are very, very few major pre-World War II movie stars still around, let alone silent movie stars. But yesterday, we lost one of the most popular American actresses of the late 1920s, when Anita Page passed away at age 98. In recent years, she had made a low key return to the screen, acting in a bunch of horror B-movies in her 80s and 90s.

She was born Anita Pomares in Flushing, Queens, but went Hollywood early, breaking into movies as a teenager toward the end of the silent era. Most notable among her early pictures was While the City Sleeps, in which she was the leading lady of none other than the king of the silents, Lon Chaney Sr. When sound movies came in at the end of the decade, she went right along with it, starring in the early musical The Broadway Melody, as well as the rare Buster Keaton talkies Free & Easy and Sidewalks of New York.

Although not well remembered today, at the height of her popularity in 1929, she received some 10,000 fan letters per week--second only to Greta Garbo--and was actively pursued by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. But her time at the top did not last long. According to her own statements later in life, the reason for her abrupt and early retirement in the mid 1930s was her refusal to abide by the notorious "casting couch" system employed by some studio heads at the time.

Aside from one role in the 1960s, Page stayed in retirement for 60 years. Amazingly, she was bit by the acting bug again at the age of 86, when she started discovering that she still had a following among early film aficionados. Over the past dozen years, she took to appearing in primarily low-budget, low-profile productions. Among these were Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood and The Crawling Brain, abysmal trash to which she lent more class than was deserved in supporting roles. Due out later this year, her last movie was Frankenstein Rising, in which she plays Elizabeth Frankenstein.

"I am so honored," she recently said. "I sign autographs and the people are so kind. This is one of the most wonderful moments of my career, and to experience it at this time in my life, and at my age, I never would have dreamed."

Here's to you, doll. In the parlance of the day, you were the cat's pajamas.

* For more on Anita Page, check out my other blog, Standard of the Day.

Has London After Midnight Been Found??

I'm hesitant to report on this, but on the chance that it might be the real deal, I felt compelled to spread the word. Someone out there is claiming to have actually discovered an honest-to-goodness print of the 1927 Lon Chaney vampire film London After Midnight--perhaps the most notorious lost film of all time.

Believed lost in a 1967 warehouse fire, the movie was supposedly found in a massive MGM warehouse under its British release title of The Hypnotist. A gentleman calling himself Sid Terror has posted the entire exhaustive tale on The Horror Drunx message board, where he claims to have first come across it ten years ago.

According to Mr. Terror, his pleas that something be done about it fell on deaf ears amongst ignorant studio execs. Then, in 2004, he got in touch with someone else who had allegedly spotted the exact same print. He then goes on to say that the print has been lost again, since the warehouse he originally found it in has been sold, and the old nitrate prints were transferred to several different holding locations.

A lot of people are doubtful, and for a number of reasons. Firstly, this wouldn't be the first time a hoax was perpetrated in which someone claimed to have found this movie. Also, one would think that if this guy--who claims to be a rabid film buff--really did find the thing a full ten years ago, he wouldn't have waited until now to post the story on some message board.

Nevertheless, the story made its way to the "Head Geek" himself, Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News, who is now fully championing Terror's cause, and calling for someone within Time-Warner to do something about it. Thickening the plot further, Harry went on to post a correspondence today from a trusted source who corroborates the story.

Can it be? Is London After Midnight--the "holy grail" of horror films--close to seeing the light of day for the first time in 80 years? Time will tell, I suppose. In the meantime, judge for yourself.

Cagney's Chaney Sees the Light of Day After a Decade

I thought I'd point out today that James Cagney's excellent Lon Chaney biopic The Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) is being released to DVD tomorrow. The late Cagney classic has been out of circulation since 1998, when it was initially released at the dawning of the digital video age. Since then, it's become very hard to come by, so if you've never seen it, nows your chance.

Although in my opinion the finest leading man of the Hollywood studio era, Cagney grew weary of the endless gangster roles he was so damn good at. And so this project was close to his heart, a chance to stretch his acting chops and show moviegoers all he could do. Some balk at the schmaltziness and general whitewashing of Chaney's career (par for the course for most biopics at the time), but for my money this is one of Cagney's best performances, and that covers a lot of ground.

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Well, I don't know about you folks, but I've been spending most of the night on YouTube immersed in the national treasure that was George Carlin. It's become cliche when a public figure passes to say that the world will be a little emptier without them, but in this rare case it is literally and irrefutably true. We've really lost something here--one of the greatest humorists in American history, in point of fact. Carlin was scheduled to receive the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor this November, and I don't think it's any stretch at all to imagine that ol' Sam Clemens would be damn proud of George Carlin and his body of work. Enjoy:

Lon Chaney Shall Not Die

Today The Vault of Horror marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of the great Lon Chaney Sr. How fitting indeed that April Fool's Day would be the birthday of Hollywood's greatest illusionist.

Born Leonidas Frank Chaney on April 1, 1883, he would go on to become the single greatest celebrity of the silent film era, with only Charles Chaplin being a possible exception. He was best known for his incredible skill with makeup--so much so that he even wrote an entry on the subject for the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Always doing his own work, Chaney was able to dramatically transform himself for a wide variety of roles, most memorably including Fagin in Oliver Twist (1922), Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Prof. Echo in The Unholy Three (1925), Erik in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Alonzo the Armless in The Unknown (1927), Prof. Edward C. Burke in London After Midnight (1927) and Tito Beppi in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928). In those early days of movie makeup, Chaney suffered greatly under painful applications, and even lost some of his vision due to his work on The Hunchback Of Notre Dame.

Many have attributed his fascination with unusual, often deformed roles to the fact that he grew up the son of parents who were both deaf and a mother who was an invalid. His ability to communicate so effectively without words and under heavy makeup might also be attributed to this.

His career was confined almost entirely to the silents, and in fact he made only one talkie, a 1930 remake of The Unholy Three, in which he performed the voices of five different characters. He was in line to portray Dracula in Tod Browning's 1931 production when he became ill with lung cancer brought on by heavy smoking and aggravated by a piece of artificial snow that became accidentally lodged in his throat while working on his final silent film, Thunder (1929). Lon Chaney passed away on August 26, 1930 at the age of 47.

Although known primarily for his work in horror, Chaney was also an accomplished dramatic stage actor, as well as a gifted comedian, dancer and singer. He was played by James Cagney in a 1957 biopic, The Man of a Thousand Faces. His son, born Creighton Chaney but using the screen name Lon Chaney Jr., became a prominent horror actor in his own right, but never quite escaped the awesome shadow of his legendary father.

(Special thanks for the animated GIF go to LonChaney.com, the family's official website.)

The Silent Dead: A History of Horror Movies, Part 1

For as long as humans have been sophisticated enough to desire entertainment, we've had an innate fascination with being horrified. Perhaps the last vestigal remants of the "fight or flight" instinct give us this visceral thrill, which we can enjoy freely with the knowledge that what we are seeing is not real.
As ingrained as the love of being scared is in the human psyche, it's suprising that horror took a while to establish itself as a major genre in the motion picture business. In the earliest days of the movies, they were not very common, particularly in America, where religious groups still held great sway over public opinion.
At the beginning of the industry, it was in Europe that horror films first took root. Pioneering French filmmaker Georges Melies (best known for 1902's A Trip to the Moon) is credited with creating the earliest examples with his two short films, The House of the Devil (1896) and The Cave of the Demons (1898).
At the start of the 20th century, the epicenter of the motion picture biz was in Germany, and horror pictures were no different. A wave of Expressionistic films emerged there in the '10s and '20s, the impact of which continues to be felt to this day. Chief among them were Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920), Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and of course, F.W. Murnau's 1922 masterpiece, Nosferatu--the first of countless Dracula adaptations.
Meanwhile, in the States, it was actually Thomas Edison, who had invented motion picture technology in the first place, whose production company put out what may be America's first horror movie and the first in another long tradition, 1910's short film Frankenstein.
In Hollywood, the 1920s produced the first horror movie megastar, the one and only Lon Chaney. Known as "The Man of a Thousand Faces," Chaney achieved notoriety in large part due to his uncanny ability to transform himself through make-up. Chief among his notable roles are The Monster (1925), lost film London After Midnight (1927) and his iconic turn in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), which gave rise to Universal's classic monster movie series the following decade.
The end of the 1920s saw the rise of a revolution in filmmaking thanks to arguably the greatest innovation the industry has ever seen: sound. The effects would be profound, and horror movies would lead the way.
Other major releases:

• Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde (1920)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

Soon to come: Part 2 - Gods and Monsters