Hollywood's Pre-Code Horrors 1931-1934

Introduction

On March 31, 1930, the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) formally swore to adhere to the newly established Production Code. The MPPDA had been established in December 1921, in the wake of scandals that threatened the motion picture industry’s public standing. The purpose of the MPPDA was to carefully monitor upcoming films to ensure that they were morally acceptable to the public. The MPPDA thus prevented the U.S. government from policing the films. In order to mollify the government, the organization appointed U.S. Postmaster General Will Hays as its head.

With the conversion of motion pictures from silents to talkies in the late 1920s, the MPPDA fretted about potentially-offensive dialogue. The Production Code intended to strengthen a 1927 edict on taboo subjects including nudity, drug abuse, and sexual perversion. But for the next four years, the Code did not rigidly enforce its guidelines, despite protests from the Legion of Decency and other religious groups. Finally on July 1, 1934, the MPPDA caved in and invigorated the Production Code.

Before that, Hollywood created outrageous films brimming with salaciousness and brutality. Even the cartoons pushed the boundaries of propriety, particularly Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons. In defying the Code, the film producers were simply catering to American box office patrons. Some filmgoers were straitlaced, particularly in the Bible Belt, but others, especially in the big cities, were not easily shocked. They savored the raciness provided by novels and stage shows; they expected films to provide the same. Since the Great Depression plagued the movie business, the producers were desperate to keep afloat. If violent and sexy films remained profitable, they would continue to make them.

It was in this relatively-permissible environment that the American horror genre originated. Horror films did not immediately spring up and flood the cinemas. Universal bought the rights to the successful Broadway play Dracula, based on Bram Stoker’s vampire novel. If the film did poorly at the box office, the studio would not have bothered making other horror films. But it not only was a hit, but it made a new star out of Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor, in the title role. The studio hoped lightning would strike again with another chiller, Frankenstein. This adaptation of Mary Shelley’s man-made monster saga made more money than Dracula and created another star, English thespian Boris Karloff, who played the monster. The verdict was in — the public enjoyed being frightened.

In the following years before the Code was enforced, Universal produced more chillers and launched another actor to stardom, Claude Rains. Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), United Artists, Warner Brothers, and RKO jumped on the horror bandwagon. Even Majestic, a minor, low-budget studio, produced a horror film. Lugosi and Karloff capitalized on their new macabre personas in some of these films. The distinguished English stage actor Lionel Atwill became typecast as a bogeyman, and screen beauty Fay Wray became typecast as a scream queen. Even actors who never were pigeonholed in chillers made vivid impressions in the chillers they did appear in, like Fredric March and Charles Laughton. The films were also important stepping stones for rising stars like Myrna Loy and Carole Lombard. (Although both actresses were unhappy with these assignments.)

How did filmmakers utilize these films’ grisly potential? Certainly the films’ premises seemed grisly. Not only did they focus on imaginary creatures like resurrected mummies and scientific fabrications like invisible maniacs, they also explored warped behavior like necrophilia and sexual sadism. In truth, some movies did exploit the bloodcurdling concepts to the hilt. In fact, MGM’s Freaks and Paramount’s Murders in the Zoo went too far, tarnishing their box office prospects. Other movies handled the shocks delicately. Universal’s filmmakers tended to restrain the shocks, either out of concern of negative feedback (as was the case of its first horror film Dracula) or to deliver the chills with subtlety (as was the case of The Mummy). Not surprisingly, the tamer shockers provoked less controversy than the wilder ones.

The filmmakers didn’t only take advantage of the lax Production Code to indulge in sex and violence. They also provided sharp social commentaries. For instance, Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Old Dark House took satirical stabs at religion. The Most Dangerous Game, unlike its literary source, denounced the sport of hunting. The films touched on unpleasant realities like drug addiction and police brutality. Many of them alluded to the Great Depression. In King Kong, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) accepts an offer to participate in a risky film project on an uncharted island because she is penniless and starving. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) creates a formula that makes him The Invisible Man, hoping his scientific innovation will be his escape route out of poverty. Not all of the social commentaries were enlightening and constructive. The Mask of Fu Manchu explicitly pandered to White Americans’ anti-Oriental prejudices. It didn’t so much indoctrinate this bigotry as it reflected it. This was an undeniable if reprehensible aspect of Depression-era society.

While the filmmakers supplied their horrors with jolts and insight, they tried to provide them with likable and relatable characters. Comic relief figures often appeared in them to provide box office patrons a respite. Occasionally the hero or heroine who challenged the fiend was humorous, like Lee Tracy as a wisecracking reporter in Doctor X and Glenda Farrell in a distaff version of the role in Mystery of the Wax Museum. Even the funny characters were given outrageous material in these pre-Code horrors, consisting of suggestive jokes. These films also had sweet romantic duos who would live happily ever after the villain was vanquished. In such films as Dracula, White Zombie, and The Mummy, the villain would threaten to take the heroine away from her lover.

Occasionally when the scenarists adapted literary properties to the screen, they even softened the monsters. Robert Louis Stevenson’s egoistic Dr. Jekyll became an idealistic if misguided scientist in Rouben Mamoulian’s film version. H.G. Wells’ invisible chemist Griffin, who was unfeeling and unscrupulous even before he dematerialized, became a kind person whose invisibility formula made him criminally insane in James Whale’s film version. They were also given romantic interests who recognized their fundamental goodness and grieved for them when they went astray.

The pre-Code horrors released between 1931 and 1934 were a varied lot, not only in aesthetic quality, but in audience reactions. Some films like King Kong and The Invisible Man were big hits, while others like Freaks and The Island of Lost Souls lost money. This book devotes each chapter to one of them, from Dracula (1931) to The Black Cat (1934). The author intends to examine each film in the context of the period it was made. Issues with censors during production and after release will be discussed. Contemporary critical and audience reactions will also be cited. The author will also explain how each film reflects the times when they were made. This work makes no pretense in being the definite authority on pre-Code horror film history, but it tries to inform the readers how the laxly-enforced Production Code shaped these chillers, most which are considered classics today. The author also hopes to entertain the readers with anecdotes and critiques, perhaps encouraging them to see them for the first time or to see them again.

King Kong’s sequel, Son of Kong, released the same year as the original, has been excluded from this book. Although the follow-up has horrific elements, it is not a full-fledged horror film. The titular creature isn’t supposed to be frightening, just comical and lovable. Regrettably, one full-fledged pre-Code horror is unavailable for reappraisal. The original English-language version of RKO’s The Monkey’s Paw (1933), based on W.W. Jacobs’s macabre tale, is still missing. A French-dubbed version is supposed to exist, but even if it was accessible to the public, the author could not fully evaluate the film’s merits on the basis of this print. Hollywood’s pre-Code horrors should not only be judged by their visual qualities but by their dialogue as well. As previously noted, these films provided naughty innuendo. The actors would also deliver their lines suggestively, particularly Lionel Atwill. His salacious thesping cannot be fully appreciated in any foreign language version dubbed by any other actor. The Old Dark House and Mystery of the Wax Museum were once considered lost, but now original prints are available to the public. Hopefully, an original print of The Monkey’s Paw will be unearthed in the future. Considering the fact that 1930s films were composed of the highly flammable nitrate, we should be grateful that all of Hollywood’s other pre-Code horrors remain intact.

Dracula (1931)

Released February 12, 1931; A Universal Picture; Director: Tod Browning; Producer: Carl Laemmle, Jr.; Associate Producer: E.M. Asher; Screenplay: Garrett Fort, based on Bram Stoker’s novel and Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston’s play; Scenario Supervisor: Charles A. Logue; Director of Photography: Karl Freund; Art Director: Charles B. Hall; Editor: Milton Carruth; Supervising Editor: Maurice Pivar; Photographic Effects: Frank J. Booth; Music Conductor: Heinz Roemheld; Makeup: Jack P. Pierce; 75 minutes.

Cast: Bela Lugosi (Dracula), Helen Chandler (Mina Seward), David Manners (Jonathan Harker), Dwight Frye (Renfield), Edward Van Sloan (Professor Van Helsing), Herbert Bunston (Dr. Seward), Frances Dade (Lucy Weston), Joan Standing (The Maid), Charles Gerrard (Martin), Moon Carroll (Briggs), Josephine Velez (Grace), Michael Visaroff (Innkeeper), Carla Laemmle, Nicholas Bela, Donald Murphy (Coach Passengers), Tod Browning (Harbor Master).

SYNOPSIS: British businessman Renfield leaves England for Transylvania to arrange a lease of the Carfax Abbey in England for the nobleman Count Dracula. But the Count, a centuries-old vampire, attacks Renfield and makes him a slave who sustains himself on the blood of small animals. With Renfield in tow, Dracula sails for England, where nobody knows he’s a vampire. Once the Count is there, he immediately starts attacking London’s inhabitants. Meanwhile, British authorities find the obviously-insane Renfield and commit him to a sanitarium run by one Dr. Seward. Dracula is attracted to Seward’s daughter, Mina, and starts drinking her blood to turn her into a vampire. The Dutch vampire expert Professor Van Helsing arrives in England to foil the Count’s scheme. After a battle of wits between Van Helsing and Dracula, the professor destroys the vampire by putting a stake in his heart. Mina is freed from the Count’s spell and is reunited with her fiancé, Jonathan Harker.

When the British studio Hammer released its splashy version of Bram Stoker’s novel in 1958, the film’s blunt goriness and sensuality made Universal’s 1931 version seem tame. Today, the average filmgoer, accustomed to far bloodier and raunchier horrors, wouldn’t find the 1931 version the least bit shocking. Of all the pre-Code chillers examined in this book, this film is the mildest. How could this relatively-innocuous work initiate the horror genre in Hollywood?

To understand Dracula’s huge impact on American filmgoers when it was first released, one should look at the movie industry in the early 1930s. Throughout the silent and early talkie eras, very few films were true horrors. There were spooky elements in a lot of mysteries, but these alleged ghosts and demons were explained away as the crafty ruses of mere mortals. Some grotesque creatures, particularly those played by Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, capered across the screen. But few of them were supernatural creatures or human-made monstrosities; they were ordinary people who looked extraordinarily ugly, like Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), or else they masqueraded as otherworldly creatures, like the detective hero disguised as a vampire in London After Midnight (1927). There were several adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But as frightening as Mr. Hyde could be, particularly as portrayed by John Barrymore in Paramount’s 1920 version, he was just the outward manifestation of Dr. Jekyll’s dark side, not an otherworldly or artificial being.

Universal may have never brought Dracula to the screen had it not been a Broadway hit in the 1920s. Carl Laemmle, Sr., the venerable head of Universal, initially objected to purchasing the rights to the vampire story. He recoiled at the idea of producing a film about a supernatural, bloodsucking fiend. But another studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had profited from a glut of Lon Chaney shockers directed by Tod Browning, considered acquiring the property for their star. Repulsed as Laemmle was with Dracula’s theme, he saw its box office potential. He didn’t want any rival studio to profit from the vampire story. With the enthusiastic support of his son Carl, Jr., Universal’s General Manager, he secured a deal with Stoker’s widow and the play’s authors. Tod Browning was hired as director. Chaney, having starred in the studio’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, was expected to play the title role.

On August 26, 1930, the Man of a Thousand Faces died of bronchial cancer. After Universal considered a few actors for the starring role, they finally settled on Bela Lugosi, who had played the part on Broadway and on a cross-country tour. The studio fretted over whether or not the Production Code would approve of a story of an honest-to-goodness monster. Universal was determined to placate the censors, assuring them that Dracula was a tale of horror and mystery, with love theme for relief. After examining copies of the book and play, the Production Code head Jason S. Joy gave the studio his approval. The Code did not forbid films about genuine supernatural creatures like vampires. There was no controversy about them because Hollywood hadn’t yet made any such films.

Although the Production Code gave Universal the green light, the studio tinkered with the play’s spicy elements. On stage, Dracula passionately kissed his potential female victim on the lips; in the film, he daintily kisses her hand. The studio felt that unsophisticated cinemagoers would find a bloodsucking vampire sufficiently overwhelming; an overtly amorous one would be too much. Carl, Jr. objected to the screenplay’s depiction of Dracula’s attack on Renfield: Dracula should go only for women and not men. This segment was filmed anyway.

When Dracula was released, Universal’s publicity department would exploit the vampire’s sex appeal. Its sales line was The Strangest Passion the World Has Ever Known. Advertisements across the country played up the vampire’s allure for women. A poster at the Strand Theatre in Louisville depicted Bela Lugosi hovering over Frances Dade (playing Lucy, a lovely victim) with the proclamation Beware of the Kiss of Dracula — the Caress that Burns like a Flame of Fire! Another Dracula ad at the Capitol Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, was a cartoon of a voluptuous woman staring up at Lugosi’s image above the title, as if worshipping the God of Sex, as horror scholar Gregory William Mank has written.

Lugosi had already titillated female spectators as the Count on stage. In an interview with Motion Picture Magazine, published in January 1931, a month before the film’s release, Bela explained:

"When I was playing Dracula on the stage, my audiences were women. Women. There were men, too. Escorts the women had brought with them. For reasons only their dark subconscious knew. In order to establish a subtle sex intimacy. Contact. In order to cling to and feel the sensuous thrill of protection. Men did not come of their own volition. Women did. Came — and knew an ecstasy dragged from the depths of unspeakable things. Came — and then came back again. And again.

"Women wrote me letters. Ah, what letters women wrote me. Young girls. Women from seventeen to