Ten Days of Terror!: The Devil-Doll

Film: The Devil-Doll
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

In The Bride of Frankenstein, there’s a section where we learn that the doctor that Frankenstein has thrown in with is obsessed with making tiny people. Tod Browning might have taken a page out of the screenplay for The Devil-Doll, a film that is virtually entirely based on the idea of miniature people doing bad things. There are a surprising number of films that feature this idea to the point that there’s a Wikipedia page devoted to films that feature miniature people.

The Devil-Doll starts with a prison break. Marcel (Henry B. Walthall), a mad scientist and Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore) escape from Devil’s Island. Marcel wishes to get back to his wife and experimentation while Lavond is looking for revenge. A former banker, he was convicted of robbing his own bank and killing a night watchman, and has served 17 years of a life sentence. However, Lavond is innocent; his partners Coulvet (Robert Greig), Matin (Pedro de Cordoba), and Radin (Arthur Hohl) framed him after stealing the money themselves.

A New Definition of "Disarming"

Film: The Unknown
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I’m finding it difficult to explain The Unknown. Oh, it’s not going to be a difficult film to summarize; I’m having a difficult time explaining its existence. If nothing else, it’s evidence that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The Unknown contains the sort of plot that seems beyond a 1927 audience, and yet here is the film, proof that such a bizarre and disturbing idea can find an audience in what we tend to regularly assume is a more Puritanical past.

The action takes place in a circus where one of the headline attractions is Alonzo the Armless (Lon Chaney). Despite having no arms, Alonzo is a trick shooter and knife thrower, performing these tasks with his feet. His target when it comes to trick shooting and knife throwing is Nanon (Joan Crawford), who is also the daughter of the circus’s owner. Alonzo is madly in love with Nanon, as is Malabar (Norman Kerry), the circus’s strongman. Nanon seems to return some of Malabar’s affections, but she has her own phobia to deal with. She has been grabbed and pawed by so many men in her past that she has become terrified of men’s arms and hands, making Alonzo sort of the perfect man for her.

Except for the fact that Alonzo has a secret to keep. He actually still has his arms. In fact, he’s got a little extra in that department; on his left hand, he has a double thumb. He hides his arms because as the circus travels around the country, he performs robberies and burglaries, not worrying about leaving fingerprints. Only his assistant Cojo (John George) knows that Alonzo still has his arms. Things change during a confrontation with Antonio Zanzi (Nick De Ruiz), Nanon’s father and the man who runs the circus. He warns Alonzo away from his daughter, and discovers the man’s arms. Desperate, Alonzo kills him. Nanon sees the crime, but not the face of the killer. She does, however, see his double thumb.

Cojo alerts Alonzo to his reality rather than his fantasy of life with Nanon. Should he become intimate with the girl, she will discover his arms. More importantly, she’ll discover his double thumb. Alonzo, desperate, makes a terrible decision, and this is where things really start to get disturbing. He contacts a doctor over whom he has blackmail evidence. In exchange for his continued silence, Alonzo has his arms amputated. This destroys any evidence of his crimes, eliminates any connection between him and Zanzi’s murder, and also makes him truly Nanon’s ideal man. But during his convalescence, Nanon has overcome her fear and has fallen for the brawny arms of Malabar. This sets up the terrible and inevitable conclusion.

Put simply, Lon Chaney is the reason to see this film and the reason this film exists. Malabar’s role could have been easily handled by any broad-chested man with a winning smile. Nanon’s role needed only a pretty face and a good figure, both of which Joan Crawford possessed in 1927. It’s Chaney who makes this film work, though. Initially, it is through his incredible ability at costuming, hiding his arms and acting like a man without them (although many of the tricks were evidently performed by a true double amputee hiding on the set). As the film progresses, though, Chaney’s expressive face carries the rest of the film. There is really no need for actual dialogue to understand the incredible torment of Alonzo, particularly at the moment he realizes that he has cut off his arms for nothing.

If anything really disappoints in this film, it is the length. I expected a film of about an hour’s length; The Unknown actually clocks in at fewer than 50 minutes. It’s incredibly compact, and while it does not feel like something is missing, it feels fairly insubstantial in some way. There should be more here. I’d like to see some of the crimes that Alonzo commits—these could be demonstrated by showing them to us rather than simply having Cojo tell us about the crimes. The strangeness of the story could very easily handle another half an hour or more. Alonzo is an interesting enough character that I’d like more insight into his character.

Lon Chaney has a reputation of playing monsters—Quasimodo, Erik the Phantom, and others. Alonzo the Armless fits into this pattern, too. Because of this, Chaney is thought of more as a horror actor out for thrills and chills. The Unknown as well as many of his other films serves as very real evidence that the man could truly act, create characters that are both terrible and vulnerable, and make an audience feel his character’s pain.

Why to watch The Unknown: Lon Chaney. You need no other reason.
Why not to watch: Just as it starts to get interesting, it ends.

Gooble Gobble, Gooble Gobble

Film: Freaks
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I love a good horror movie, but I don’t always have the strongest of stomachs, which is something of a quandary. Medical stuff really bothers me intensely. I have a tendency to recoil from witnessing medical procedures, needles, and similar things. Human physical oddities cause me to react in much the same way, which makes it very strange indeed that I really like Tod Browning’s Freaks.

Freaks is not the earliest film designed to shock its viewers, but as far as I know, it’s one of the first with no other real purpose in mind. Films like Un Chien Andalou were as much artistic statements as films with an eye toward making people rear back in horror. Freaks, though, is all about that gasp of shock and fear.

The story is a simple one, and told in the past tense around the “home” of a circus freak. We are told by the sideshow barker that the freak in question was once a beautiful woman who had an act as a trapeze artist, and we then see the story in question.

Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) is the woman in question, a great beauty of the circus world. She is adored from afar by Hans (Harry Earles), a midget, who is seriously one of the smallest human beings ever to live. Frieda (Daisy Earles, actually Harry Earles’s sister in real life), of an equal stature with Hans, is engaged to Hans despite his obsession with Cleopatra.

Love seems to be in the air at the circus—the strongman Hercules (Henry Victor) has booted animal trainer Venus (Leila Hyams) out of his trailer; she encounters the clown Phroso (Wallace Ford), who shows some interest in her. Another clown named Roscoe (Roscoe Ates) with a stuttering problem is marrying one half of the conjoined twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton). Hercules invites himself into Cleopatra’s trailer, and the two become a private item, although there’s quite a bit of suspicion among the freaks.

Cleopatra plays up Hans’s obsession with her, and she decides that she’s more than a little interested in him when it turns out that Hans has come into a good deal of money. He reneges on his engagement with Frieda and proposes to Cleopatra. She agrees, hoping to marry him, kill him, and get his money, which she’ll use to run away with Hercules. The freaks (and there are many—a bearded lady, a human skeleton, a bird woman, an couple of armless women, some pinheads, a guy who’s body stops mid-torso, and a guy with no arms or legs, and at least two other midgets) start to realize that something is amiss when the attempt to bring Cleopatra into the their fold and she rejects them. This scene is perhaps the most famous in the film. One of the midgets (Angelo Rossitto) starts a chant and pours booze into a large loving cup. As the freaks chant “Gooble gobble, we accept her, one of us, one of us” each one drinks in turn from the cup until they offer it to Cleopatra herself. She screams, calls them freaks, and throws the booze on the poor circus performers.

Cleopatra goes ahead with her plot to poison her diminutive husband, and then comes the revenge of the freaks in one of the weirdest and most disturbing scenes ever filmed. There is something horrible about seeing a man with no arms and no legs crawling forward with a knife in his teeth that spins my guts. And then I think about it for a second, and I wonder how he’s going to use that knife if he manages to catch up with someone.

Browning endured a lot of criticism in making this film because he used actual circus freaks for many of the roles—the freaks here are not make up, but actual circus performers. For what it’s worth, it’s pretty evident that many of the performers in this film are not actual actors. It’s pretty poorly acted in general, although the non-actors certainly try their best. It’s a bit hard to watch in that sense.

And yet, there is something really compelling about this movie. It’s such a lurid tale and so luridly told that it almost forces itself to be watched. Freaks is not a great movie by any measure, but it is absolutely a film that needs to be watched for how strange it is. This film is so creepy and wrong, so horribly twisted, that it plays out like a train wreck. It’s awful to see, but you can’t look away from it. This is especially true of the confrontation of Cleopatra and the freaks.

Freaks is a hard movie to classify. I’m calling it horror because it’s no comedy and it’s too strange to be a drama. It’s not traditional horror in any sense of the word, but a deeper sort of horror, the sort that required a twisted mind like Browning’s to create.

Why to watch Freaks: Mainstream shock cinema in its earliest form.
Why not to watch: If you are squicked out by circus freaks, prepare for an hour or more of severe squicking.

Children of the Night

Film: Dracula (1931), Dracula (a.k.a. Horror of Dracula, 1958)
Format: DVD from Lockport Public Library through interlibrary loan (1931), DVD from Bettendorf Public Library through interlibrary loan (1958), both on big ol’ television.


Some movies, despite being made over and over again, are still worth watching in their original screen version. Dracula, the 1931 variety, was not the first vampire film made, but it was one of the first, and one of the first talkies if not the first vampire talkies. It is regarded as a classic, and well it should be. The vast majority of vampire legends, myths, and ideas come from this source.

Before today, the last time I saw this movie was about as ideal a situation as one could imagine. A local theater managed to get an original print of the film from Universal and displayed it on the big screen as a midnight show. The big television is nice, of course, but little compares to seeing this film on a big screen as it was originally intended.

The story is one that virtually everyone knows. A count named Dracula (Bela Lugosi) from Transylvania is actually a vampire. Looking for new worlds to conquer, or at least a different flavor of A-positive, he arranges to move himself to London with the assistance of a man named Renfield (Dwight Frye). Dracula turns Renfield into a crazed servant, and moves into a ruined abbey in the heart of London.

Here he preys on the closest victims he can: Lucy (Frances Dade) and Mina Seward (Helen Chandler). Mina lives with her father, Doctor Seward (Herbert Bunston), and is wooed by her suitor, John Harker (David Manners). Seward runs a sanitarium, which happens to abut the abbey possessed by Dracula. Consulting at the asylum is Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), who is quickly convinced that the sudden rash of mysterious deaths in London is due to the presence of a vampire, and he suspects Dracula.

Dracula’s lusts are initially for Lucy, but they switch quickly to the lovely Mina, who Dracula would like to turn into his new bride. Her father, Van Helsing, and John especially do their best to protect her, but this is not easy considering that their opponent has been alive for centuries and has all of the power of the undead behind him.

It’s worth noting that the film is considerably different from Bram Stoker’s original book. The biggest switch comes right at the start—in the novel, it is John Harker who travels to Transylvania, not Renfield. Additionally, he, Mina, and Van Helsing pursue Dracula back to his home on the mainland and confront him in his own castle. Much of the reason for the changes is that this film is not an adaptation of the novel itself, but of the stage play based on the novel.

As such, very little happens in the film. What could have been shown in film easily isn’t, because the film is adapting the stage performance, and in fact the film does look considerably like a stage play. The marks on Mina’s neck, for instance, are never shown, although they certainly could have been. At one point, the John looks out the window at a wolf running across the lawn. We don’t see the wolf—we see only John looking at the wolf, as happened in the stage play. Similarly, very little is shown otherwise as well—Dracula certainly bites his victims, but we never see him get any closer than six inches or so from a victim’s neck.

Dracula has lost its ability to frighten an audience except for the very timid or the very young in this day of modern audiences used to seeing splayed bodies, sprays of blood, and viscera. While it no longer can frighten, it is still worth watching. Among other things, Dracula is the film that made a name for Bela Lugosi, and arguably is the film he never overcame for the rest of his life. The same could be true for the underrated Dwight Frye, who gives a masterful performance as Renfield. Frye went on to play the hunchbacked lab assistant in Frankenstein, and was thus typecast as a lunatic and weirdo for the rest of his acting life. Here, he switches from the edge of sanity to far beyond the pale, back and forth, chewing the scenery as if the film were created in the silent era.

What’s surprising to me is how quickly the film moves despite the fact that so little happens. It seems almost immediate that Mina and John are sitting on the terrace with Mina coquettishly making a play for John’s bared neck. If anything in the film approaches the scary, it is Mina’s eyes going wide at the sight of the man’s neck ripe for the biting.

Still great, even with the fact that the terrace is obviously an indoor stage and the wires are evident on the flapping bats.














In what might be called the original gritty reboot, the Hammer Films version of the Dracula story, most commonly known as Horror of Dracula places the great Christopher Lee in the role of the devious count. Like the 1931 version, this film plays fast and loose with the original Stoker story, but in very different ways. For instance, we get Harker (John Van Eyssen) traveling to Dracula’s castle and killing one of Dracula’s brides quite quickly.

However, as a significant change in Dracula lore, Harker’s fiancée is Lucy, not Mina. Unlike the book, Harker has traveled to the castle to destroy Dracula, and also succeeds in getting himself bitten rather quickly as well. Additionally, rather than meeting up in London and traveling together, Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) simply shows up in the area with Dracula’s castle and arrives (one hopes) in time to save Harker. However, as Van Helsing arrives at the castle, we find Harker has been transformed into a creature of the night, and Van Helsing quickly dispatches him.

It’s an odd decision. Equally odd is the presence of a new hero, Arthur (Michael Gough), who is married to Mina and is the brother of Lucy. This may have been done for copyright reasons, not with Stoker’s novel which was likely in the public domain by this point, but with the original Universal film.

Hammer Films made their name mainly as a horror house in the 1950s and 1960s. There were a number of reasons for this. Part was in the securing of some respectable and marketable actors like Cushing, and eventually, Lee. Christopher Lee made a career for himself in vampire films starting with this film, and he became an international star because of the popularity of this movie. It’s odd to hear him speak, because his voice in this film is considerably different from the measured baritone with which he speaks these days.

Another key word in the Hammer lexicon was gore. While not all of the taboos were gone by 1958, enough of them were that director Terence Fisher showed quite a lot more here than in previous vampire films. Hammer was known for plenty of blood, and there’re a few spare gallons here. It becomes evident that this is a different style of vampire movie when we see Lee burst into a room, wild-eyed and with blood dripping down his chin. In short, unlike the Universal version, we can expect to see puncture wounds on the necks this time, as well as some actual biting.

Another point in Hammer Films is that the sets looked quite a bit more lavish than they really were. Hammer became known for this sort of signature style of filled sets that looked like a million despite costing a small fraction.

While Cushing is the one who propels the movie along as Van Helsing, it is Lee who is the real center of the film as Dracula. There is little exotic about Lee in the sense that Lugosi was exotic, but there is much more real appeal for the filmgoer watching the movie. Lee is perhaps the original sexy vampire, one who carries a natural magnetism beyond what a vampire is granted by the script. When he is on screen, it is nearly impossible to look anywhere else.

Which film is better? It’s hard to say. The two tell similar stories, but are so remarkably different throughout that it is much like comparing two works that are far less similar. Universal’s classic is not scary, but is incredibly influential, a place where horror filmmaking owes many debts. Hammer’s version of the tale is far more graphic and still has the possibility of giving many a viewer the creeps if not truly scaring them. It too had significant influence on the films that came after.

For a modern audience, Horror of Dracula is more easily received. As for me, I can’t pick one over the other.

It’s worth saying this, though—I for one was happy to see a couple of vampire movies that involved real vampires. Vampires are creatures of undeath that exist to destroy and feed on the living. That’s it. Seeing a vampire become romantically involved with a human is not unlike seeing a human become romantically involved with a hamburger. Vampires should be heartless and terrible, and while appealing because it helps them lure their victims, vampires want to eat. They don’t sparkle in the sunlight or suck their cheeks in and tilt their heads to look tragically sexy. The modern vampire has lost its ability to be frightening or even threatening, and that’s a damn shame. Vampires should be cool the way any movie monster is cool, and not romantic daydream fodder for pudgy pre-teen girls.

Why to watch Dracula: Despite its age, it is still powerful and wondrous.
Why not to watch: It’s no longer capable of scaring anyone older than 8.

Why to watch Horror of Dracula: A more graphic, interesting take on Stoker’s novel.
Why not to watch: Lee should be in it more.