Horror Diary: Entry One
(Or: The Monster Walks, The Corpse Vanishes, The Woman Faints)
I’m sorry to say it, but if you’re reading this, it’s already too late to save me.
See this?
It’s a box set stuffed to the brim with fifty classic horror movies. Most of them are very old, and I seriously doubt that more than a few of them are classics. But I’ve become possessed with the desire to find out, so I’m going to lock myself in a dark room and watch them all, one by one, in order to see which ones are still scary and suspenseful today. Who knows, maybe I’ll discover a new Halloween classic! That is… if I survive.
Good thing I’ll have you following along with me. Right?
Well, no need to linger on the negatives. Let’s get going, before either of us decides to back out.
The first movie I picked, entirely at random, is 1932’s The Monster Walks. This one is about as B-Movie as you can get; it’s filmed entirely in one house, populated with actors giving their most board-stiff performances, and riddled with the kind of tropes and cliches that had to have been hard to take seriously even back then. It’s about an hour long, but feels at least four times that. The knowledge that people in the 1930s willingly sat through this makes me both respect and fear the degree of patience they must have possessed.
Starring Rex Lease as Dr. Ted Clayton and Vera Reynolds as his fiancee Ruth, the story begins immediately after Ruth’s father has died. At the reading of the will, it’s found that Ruth is set to inhabit her late father’s fortune… that is, unless she should DIE before collecting it! What follows is about forty-five minutes’ worth of attempts to murder Ruth, while her fiance paces up and down the halls and wonders why on earth anyone would have cause to murder her! None of it’s especially interesting, and by far the actor with the most passion and charisma on display is the chimp Ruth’s father keeps locked up in the basement to conduct his vaguely defined Weird Science Experiments on.
Although, even the presence of a cute little chimp can’t save this bore, because it uses the animal as a means to crack some pretty horrid racial jokes. The only non-white character in the film is Exodus, Dr. Clayton’s black driver/manservant. While Exodus (played by prolific early screen actor Willie Best, who is credited as “Sleep ‘n Eat” while the white actors get to use names meant for human beings) isn’t a total minstrel show caricature, I have a nauseating feeling that’s what the filmmakers were going for and were held back from by their own incompetence alone. When another character tells Exodus about Darwin’s theory of evolution, he asks if that means he and the chimp are related. He is told yes, it does, and promptly says something along the lines of, “I had a grand-pappy who looked a bit like him! He wasn’t quite so active, though.”
Yep, that’s how the movie ends. That’s the moment they decide to leave us with. And yes, I’m paraphrasing, because there’s no way I’m going to voluntarily listen to the line again in order to check. Sorry.
Before we move on to the second film of the evening, I’d like to give you an alternate reading of this film, just to wash the bad taste out. See, thanks to my copious powers of film analysis, I’ve realized that The Monster Walks is actually a statement against the sexual mores of the early 1930s. Many of the problems in the film, namely the two major attempts to murder Ruth, occur because she and her fiance sleep in different bedrooms. If they had been sharing a bed, the attempted killings would have been thwarted much more quickly; the film is obviously a damning critique of the early-to-mid 20th century entertainment industry’s obsession with refusing to even hint that a couple might be sleeping together. Why would such a progressive message be coming from a movie so disgustingly racist? That’s a question I can’t answer, friend.
Let’s move on, shall we? The next classic horror picture I selected is The Corpse Vanishes, a film from 1942 starring Bela Lugosi. Lugosi plays Dr. George Lorenz, a mad horticulturist of sorts who sedates and kidnaps young brides on their wedding days in order to use their precious blood to keep his aging wife young and beautiful. I’m not sure why he couldn’t just kidnap young women on, say, normal days, when the whole city wasn’t on the lookout for a bride-snatcher, but he seems to have a system going that works pretty well. Intrepid reporter Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters) sets out to confront the doctor, believing a variety of orchids he’s cultivated is being used to knock out the brides. Not to spoil anything, but… she’s right.
While it’s nothing phenomenal, this movie was such a breath of fresh air compared to the last one that I can’t help but like it a little. There’s even some semblance of cinematic technique on display — unlike The Monster Walks, it wasn’t filmed entirely in five-minute-long static shots with the camera practically across the street from the actors. The story’s thin and hokey, sure, but the simple fact that the actors are actually trying makes a world of difference. Walters especially gives it her all as Patricia, and the results are good; Pat is a determined heroine who chases the big story with intelligence and verve. Of course, she gets married at the end of the film and immediately quits her job as a rising star reporter, because her devotion to a sorta-handsome doctor she met two days ago is just worth it!
The movies for today’s entry taught me two very important things about women, at least back in the 30s and 40s. They can’t do more than one thing at a time, like “be married” and “work,” and they also fainted constantly. At the slightest shock, they just collapsed, preferably into the arms of a steely-eyed, strong-jawed MAN. This happened in both films, numerous times! Ruth I can understand, since she was actively being murdered at the time, but Pat seems like she’d have a stronger constitution than that. I’ve never seen a woman faint, personally, so I don’t know what’s changed since then. Did we start putting fluoride in the water? Did we take it out? Whatever it is, we ought to keep up the good work.
That’s all for this entry. Time for me to go subject myself to more of these movies so that I can keep the horror diary going. I hope you’ll come back and read more, because I have a feeling that the worst is yet to come…
I leave you, for now, with the ranking system I intend to use. I’m going to keep a running top five best movies I come across, and I’ll also decide which is the absolute worst. That job is easy this time:
- The Corpse Vanishes
WORST OF THEM ALL: The Monster Walks
Until next time, faithful readers!
-E
