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wo of Hollywood's most enduring legends were created simultaneously 170 years ago in a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva, as viewers to this Sundays The South Bank Show, on ITV, will learn. Confined indoors by torrential rain at the Villa Diodati, were Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife-to-be, Mary, nearly 19, Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori, physician and amateur writer. We will each write a ghost story,' suggested Byron. And the unexpected winner of this ghoulish game was Mary, who imagined Frankenstein. Polidori wrote a fragment that was expanded and published anonymously a few years later as The Vampyre, an influence on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. The immortality of these terrifying tales is mainly due to their transmigration from book into movie into myth. Although Frankenstein had been the subject of a Thomas Edison one-reeler in 1910, and Dracula had inspired the great 1922 German silent film Nosferatu, the most powerful and indelible images of the gruesome twosome on the collective consciousness were those of Universal Studios' cycle of horror films in the Thirties. Depression-hit audiences not only escaped into an endless string of musicals, but achieved catharsis for their anxieties by living through nightmares on screen. However, the Hollywood versions of the 19th-century originals took such liberties with the stories that they must have sent their respective authors spinning in their crypts. Mary Shelley — she was to marry Shelley the following December — clearly put something of her husband, who had experimented with electricity. into the scientist who creates the monster. The man-made creature, a misunderstood outsider like Byron, is described by Victor Frankenstein thus: 'His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. His hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing, his teeth of pearly
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The South Bank Show: Sunday, ITV
Ghouls on top
victim of his own film persona. giving interviews while lying in a coffin, and being buried wrapped in his Dracula cloak after dying from the after-effects of drug-addiction, in 1956. Each era has seen the Monster and the Vampire in different ways. In the Forties, Hollywood decided to play the creature for laughs. Like captive beasts being taunted through the bars, Karloff and Lugosi submitted to being stooges for Abbott and Costello, The East Side Kids. Danny Kaye and Old Mother Riley. And the youth craze of the Fifties produced I
W as a Teenage Frankenstein (1957). Bela Lugosi (with Dwight Frye) as 'Dracula' (1931) and Max Schreck, the vampire in the 1922 silent film W osferatu', helped to found a dynasty of dread.
Horror got the comic treatment from Fred Gwynne, above, in The Munsters' on TV and from George Hamilton and Susan Saint James in the 1979 film 'Love at First Bite',
Just good fiends: Elsa Lanchester and Boris K arloff in `Bride of Frankenstein' (1935).
whiteness.' He also becomes educated to the point of reading Milton and Goethe. A far cry from the hideous, monosyllabic monster as conceived in the 1931 movie. Make-up artist Jack Pierce's transformation of Boris Karloff (born William Henry Pratt in Dulwich, London) was so special that Universal copyrighted it. Pierce made Karloff 18in taller, 651b heavier, and had his legs painfully stiffened by steel struts. He gave Karloff long dangling arms, a square head, concave brow, heavy eyelids and scars, with bolts jutting from each side of the neck. Yet Karloff portrayed a vulnerable, anguished colossus, who was repulsive and destructive at the same time. The
scene in which he and a little girl float flowers on a pond, before he kills her, is genuinely moving. In the sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Karloff induces pity when taking refuge in the cottage of a blind hermit who is unaware of his guest's distorted figure. The she-monster, played by Elsa Lanchester in a punk hair-do, screams when confronted by the he-monster for whom she was created. No wonder he blows the laboratory to
pieces in his frustration! Not so much sympathy or compassion was elicited for the dark, pallid, lupine Bela Lugosi in the 1931 Dracula. His piercing eyes and heavy, deliberate Hungarian accent — 'I-amDracu-la' were his first words — sent a chill down the spine. Nevertheless, the strong sexual undertones of this bloodthirsty, necrophiliac saga gained Lugosi a female following as great as any romantic screen idol. Sadly, he became
Somehow the characters survived these mockeries, thanks largely to their resurrection by Hammer Films in Britain in the late Fifties and Sixties. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee managed to freeze the blood very effectively in their interpretations of Baron Frankenstein, the Monster and Count Dracula in profitable chillers, shot in gory colour, that gave a more violent slant to the tales, with stakes being driven through hearts. In the same period, TV audiences chuckled at The Munsters, in which Fred Gwynne, in the famous Karloff make-up, is the personification of gentleness. And Roman Polanski's 1967 film, The
Fearless Vampire Killers, includes a gay and a Jewish vampire. When the latter (Alfie Bass) is faced with a crucifix, he exclaims, 'Boy, have you got the wrong vampire!' Just as one felt the world needed another Frankenstein or Dracula like a hole in the neck, along came a maelstrom of monsters in the Seventies. The civil rights movement led to Blacula (1972) and Blackenstein (1974), pop artist Andy Warhol produced his own quirky 3D versions, and Love at First Bite (1979) had handsome George Hamilton, complete with Lugosi accent, as the ladykilling aristocratic vampire biting into the Big Apple. And in Mel Brooks' 1974 parody, Y oung Frankenstein, the Monster (Peter Boyle), in top hat and tails, sings and dances
Puttin' on the Ritz.' Ronald Bergen 7-13 February 1987 TVTIMES