Universal Studios redefined horror, says DONALD CLARKE
YOU WAIT an age for an animated family horror film and then three come along at once. The oddest phenomenon of the season has been the arrival in rapid succession of ParaNorman (kid fights zombie Puritans), Hotel Transylvania (kid frets about being Dracula’s daughter) and Frankenweenie (kid reanimates his dead dog).
That last one, though it opens last, can be seen as the daddy
of the bunch. The picture finds Tim Burton, master of pre-emo gothic, expanding a short he made for Disney in 1984. All the key elements of the genre were
in place with the earlier piece: a jokey morbidity, an affection for juvenile oddness and, most conspicuously, an obsession with the iconography of classic Universal Studios horror.
It’s a very strange situation.
On a recent trip to Dublin, Chris Butler, writer and director of ParaNorman, told this correspondent that, to put some distance between himself and Burton, he drew as much influence from 1970s Italian shockers as he did from those untouchable Hollywood films
of the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, the kids are still being fed nostalgia for an era that they can’t even remember from its second or third recycling.
Burton, though no spring chicken, was born a quarter of century after Elsa Lanchester screeched frantically at Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein. He first saw the films as an eccentric child on TV. Ever-so-slightly younger Universal horror addicts, such as Mark Gattis, co-creator of the TV series The League of Gentlemen, caught them via ITV screenings on Friday nights in the 1970s.
Gattis’s TV work and Burton’s movies are summoning up nostalgia for (somewhat appropriately) the reanimation of Universal’s output during the golden years of television. Already slightly creaky, notably less bloody than Hammer’s remakes, pictures such as Tod Browning’s Dracula, James Whale’s Frankenstein and Karl Freund’s The Mummy still energised us with dusty gothic charm. The references in our trio of animations offer an expressway to childhood for several generations of middle-class maniacs.
But won’t somebody please think of the children! What do they care that the protagonist’s neighbour in Frankenweenie ends up with Elsa Lanchester’s haircut? It has been a long time since broadcast TV bothered to show older films at a reasonable hour (and by “older” we mean made before 1980). Today’s kids are no more likely to be familiar with Bride of Frankenstein than they are with the dramas of Sophocles.
For all that, both and Hotel Transylvania (see review, page 13) and ParaNorman have proved to be significant hits in the US.
Here’s the thing. The Universal films of the depression years were so effective that they came to redefine the mythology of horror. The Frankenstein monster, though Mary Shelley would be surprised, has a square head sided by prominent bolts. No Eastern European gypsy ever suggested that a silver bullet could kill a vampire, but Universal made it so. The studio was the Brothers Grimm of its genre.
Kids know the monsters look this way. But precious few of them know why.
