“Poor Bela” was a phrase you would hear or read in regard to Bela Lugosi. His on-screen rival Boris Karloff once used it. It referred to the declining fortunes of the great star of Dracula (1931), whose film career sank to the depths of Monogram, PRC and Ed Wood, and who voluntarily checked himself into a hospital for treatment of drug addiction. This was considered shocking and humiliating in 1955. Today, it would be called heroic. In seeking help—negative publicity be damned—Lugosi was ahead of his time.
The actor’s filmography in his final decade has also proven to be a magnet for judgment. It has been called sparse and spotty. But this, too, is up for debate. Lugosi’s return to the role of Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) was nothing less than a triumph. His work in two oddball comedies that playfully exploited his legacy—Mother Riley Meets the Vampire and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (both 1952)—put the actor’s immaculate comic timing on display. His TV work evinced a pro who was in there pitching, trying to keep up with the times even as his looks and health were fading.
As for Lugosi’s “serious” horror movies of the period, there were but two. He was a glorified extra in his final film, the all-star (albeit, old-hat) horror flick The Black Sleep (1956). But in Wood’s Bride of the Monster (1955), as inept and laughable as the film is at times, Lugosi is positively galvanized. He’s past his prime, certainly, but giving everything he has left.
FAR FROM HOME
Lugosi (1882–1956) was born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in the city of Lugos in Hungary (now part of Romania). He left home at 12 and worked mines and railroads while pursuing his dream to become an actor. At age 20, Lugosi made his stage debut in Budapest, before going on to play roles as varied as Romeo and Jesus. During World War I, he joined
the Austro-Hungarian Army, but was wounded on at least two occasions, resulting in his discharge. Lugosi starred in his first movie, Leoni Leo (1917), but his days in his home country were numbered. Following the war, Lugosi joined a revolutionary movement which was thwarted, necessitating his flight from Hungary. (“I found myself on the wrong side,” he told an interviewer in 1931.)
In Berlin, Lugosi was cast in a precursor to his career in horror: Der Januskopf (1920), a Jekyll and Hyde adaptation starring Conrad Veidt and directed by FW Murnau. (This was two years before Murnau made the Dracula harbinger Nosferatu.) Landing in New York in 1921, Lugosi won political asylum and forged a stage career, learning his earliest English-language roles phonetically. (He became a naturalized US citizen in 1931.)
In 1927, Lugosi landed the part that would define his career: the title bloodsucker in the Broadway debut of Dracula. (A stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel previously played in England.) Lugosi got raves for his unique portrayal, which was the first to imbue Dracula with sexual magnetism.
Yet when Universal Pictures acquired the property, the studio made overtures to Veidt, Lon Chaney Sr. and several other actors, but not Lugosi. Following Chaney’s death from throat cancer in 1930, Lugosi campaigned for the role and prevailed. The unknown (in America, at least) actor starred in Tod Browning’s film, Universal’s highest grosser that year.
“I am Dracula,” was his first line in the film. The actor couldn’t have known how prophetic those three little words were. For the rest of his film career, Lugosi regularly played “the bogeyman”—fiends, mad scientists or vampires, often in his Dracula drag: Slicked-back hair, long black cape, red lips. Among Lugosi’s best remembered horror roles are Dr. Mirakle in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), Murder Legendre in White Zombie (1932), Vitus Werdegast in The Black Cat (1934), Count Mora in Mark of the Vampire (1935), and Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (1939). Lugosi was also, it cannot be denied, in a lot of dreck. He made nine movies for low-rent Monogram Pictures, which Lugosi-philes affectionately call “the Monogram Nine.” Some shoddy films from this period: The Devil Bat (1940), Bowery at Midnight (1942), The Corpse Vanishes (1942), The Ape Man (1943), Voodoo Man (1944)... I could go on.
Lugosi took the role of the Frankenstein monster, neck bolts and all, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). It has often been called another milestone in his downward slide, since he famously turned down the role back in 1931 owing to the heavy makeup and dearth of dialogue.
UNIVERSAL COMEBACK
Lugosi was hungry for work at the time UniversalInternational was casting Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. But pride in his legacy as Dracula was a stronger factor behind his campaign to reprise the Count in the horror comedy. History repeated itself: Universal didn’t want him at first, but Lugosi won, and nailed, his signature role in the film directed by Charles Barton. Though the makeup team led by Bud Westmore laid it on thick—pure white face powder, darkened lips, jetblack hair—Lugosi looked magnificent as Dracula. Plus, he was in good company alongside Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man and Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein monster (called “Franky” by Lou Costello). The script wisely played the monsters straight, leaving the comedy to Bud Abbott and Costello.
Lugosi’s son, Bela Lugosi Jr. (born 1938), visited the A&CMF set wearing his military school uniform.
“The principal actors treated me very nicely,” he told me in 1993. “I had my picture taken with all of them. On the set, I was surprised to see that they had actually hired comedians to walk around and crack jokes and cut up. Because the set was so dark and somber, they had to keep everyone’s spirits up. So they would joke around.” Added Bela Jr. with a laugh: “They even tried to joke around with my dad.”
Did he laugh because his father was such a serious person? “No, he had a good sense of humor,” Bela Jr. came back. “But he had a lot of respect on the set, too. So it was sort of like teasing the king, you know? But he was a good sport about things.
By the mid-1930s it could be said Universal Pictures was on the verge of very serious trouble, with the studio facing worrying financial difficulties. Around the mid-1920s they had enjoyed a couple of notable hits, but as the end of the decade beckoned, the bank balance was beginning to run low.
Then in 1931, when it appeared they were teetering on the edge, the company released a film adaptation of the most famous horror novel of the day, Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi, this feature would become a landmark in cinematic history. It wasn’t long before Universal followed with Frankenstein, which also proved to be an incredible success.
Now with a winning formula on their hands, they released a succession of reasonably successful horror movies through 1935. It was then Universal learned to their cost, the goose that had only recently laid the golden egg was starting to run dry. One of its big movies for that year, The Raven, directed by Lew
Landers, was censored by the British government, which had banned the screening of any kind of horror movie for a two-year period. With a market as large as Britain closed to its monster movies, the studio had to put its vampire brethren on hold; if only for a short while. Burdened by ever-mounting debts, Universal returned to the idea of producing a sequel to the film that just a few years before had been their savior, Dracula
The idea for this follow-up had been in development since 1932. To get the wheels in motion, the studio had called upon John Balderston, Dracula’s screenwriter, with a view to him creating a sequel based on Dracula’s Guest, a Bram Stoker story published a couple of years after his death. Some consider this short story to have been a draft for a chapter from the novel Dracula, one Stoker later withdrew, while others are equally forthright in their view it was always intended as a narration in its own right.
Unfortunately, Balderston’s script failed to convince the executives. They didn’t like it for two reasons. First, it contained
Defnitive Dracula THE TAKE
by Barry Forshaw
Which actor—and which studio— produced the most memorable filmic take on Bram Stoker’s immortal (in every sense) Dracula? The 1931 Hollywood film version of Dracula (directed by Todd Browning and starring, of course, the largerthan-life Bela Lugosi), has a residue of what is left of the original novel, and the Hungarian on the vampire count is certainly distinctive, although highly theatrical line readings do not wear well in the 21stcentury. It is the superior UK-made version made several decades later (with Christopher Lee as a notably more sophisticated—and sexually attractive—Dracula) which now demands attention—along with several (although not all) of its successors from the same company. As an aside, it should be noted that a few bars of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake under the title (as inappropriately
utilized by Universal in its inaugural version) now seem a curious choice, compared to the grinding dissonances of James Bernard’s brass-based score for Hammer that heralded the appearance of Lee’s vampire count.
The Gothic elements of the opening scenes set in the Carpathian Mountains suggest that an element of justice might be done to Stoker’s original, not to mention the production design of Dracula’s splendidly dilapidated castle (with its wandering armadillos), but the more prosaic orientation of the London scenes are deadeningly redolent of the proscenium arch of the play from which the film is adapted. Ironically, the constraints of the Bray studio locales for the later Dracula are used far more creatively, even though budgetary restrictions meant that Lee’s Count never reaches London.
The key problem for modern audiences, inevitably, is
Bela Lugosi’s eye-rolling, outrageously camp Dracula. The actor, while undoubtedly charismatic, betrays his phonetic learning of the lines (the Hungarian Lugosi’s English was never secure, even at the end of his career) by some truly bizarre emphases and articulations which are more likely to prompt mirth today than shudders of dread. What’s more, the latent eroticism of the count’s nocturnal activities is left largely inert and may really only be read in the gaps in which the count is presented. This first film Dracula (leaving aside the unauthorized version Nosferatu) is, these days, more of a fascinating curio than a fully realized piece of Gothic cinema—that phenomenon was to arrive with a more distinguished film made in 1958.
In many ways, Terence Fisher’s film of Dracula (from an economical screenplay by Jimmy Sangster) is not only one of the most perfectly constructed films made by the studio, it is also an encapsulation of just how these filmmakers conflated the various elements to make their cinematic invention function so well. The way in which the frustration of these budgetary constraints occasioned a level of inspiration in Fisher and his colleagues, not only concealed the paucity of their resources, but also made a positive virtue of such penny-pinching.
Blood and sex
But just how well did the filmmakers understand the real implications of the Hammer version of Dracula, in which the vampiric count is no longer presented as the distinctly monstrous creature of the Browning Bela Lugosi version, but (in Christopher Lee’s mesmeric interpretation) as an elegant, dangerously attractive and cultivated figure with immense erotic appeal? However little his character is inclined to (or, for that matter, able to— who knows?) indulge in familiar sexual activity, it’s rather a displaced metaphor
for the same—and a displacement, what’s more, which has a concomitant libidinous charge more insidious than any more conventional sexual presentation would be. Certainly, the actor who played the part claims to have been unaware in advance of the erotic effect his playing of the character would have, and has since insisted that he was greatly surprised at the matinee idol-type following his bloodsucking monster swiftly acquired.
Curiously, the censorship problems that plagued British horror films during their heyday (in the late 1950s and 1960s) were commonly directed at their more sanguinary aspects, although various censors were customarily disturbed by what they perceived as an alarming association between sex and violence.
John Trevelyan of the British Board of Film Censors (with whom Hammer was to have many battles, both amicable and acrimonious) was worried by this particular conjunction, but not as much as one of Trevelyan’s successors, James Ferman, who decided that “blood on breasts” (needless to say, a standard image in Hammer films) was a trigger for rapists, and Ferman routinely attempted to excise such images. But the more deepseated eroticism of the earlier Hammer films (such as Dracula) appeared to go over the heads of—or at least be (tacitly?) ignored by—the censors. The erotic submission to the vampire count by his female victims in their various states of undress was self-evident, such as Melissa Stribling’s clearly sexual surrender in Fisher’s film, an image foregrounded in the posters. Inevitably, of course, the clearly expressed sadomasochism and dominance/submission of the relationships between
The daughter of eminent British television stars Richard Beckinsale and Judy Loe, Kate Beckinsale is one of the most beautiful action heroines on the horror scene. She starred in such genre movies as Haunted (based on the James Herbert novel), Van Helsing, Whiteout, Total Recall (2012), and Click. But she’s best known for dressing up in a black leather catsuit in the role of Selene, the Death Dealer in the cult Underworld film saga (Underworld, Underworld: Evolution, Underworld: Awakening, and 2016’s Underworld: Blood Wars). Shortly after making Blood Wars, she chatted about her recent combat experience.
Lynn: What is it about your journey in this film that really jumped out at you and said that this Underworld was worth bringing to theaters?
Kate: I love the stuff that goes on. There’s a lot for the character in this movie. She has stuff happen to her that hasn’t happened before and, you know, we have a lot of new cast. It feels like a
very different universe and world this time.
This is the fourth film where you’re playing Selene. How do you envision Selene’s story eventually ending?
I don’t know! I envisioned it coming to an end after the first one. I never really planned on doing four movies playing the same character. And it’s an amazing privilege because there aren’t that many girls that get the opportunity to be in a long-running franchise, especially an original story. I’m very happy about that but it’s not something that was always out of my comfort zone.
Do you think this is the last Underworld, or if you got another good script, would you be interested in returning for more?
No idea. Can’t possibly answer [laughs]. I’ve always said “Not” but I think I’ve cried wolf a few too many times to properly answer that question.
It’s a female-led franchise, but now you finally have a female
VAMPIRE VISAGES IN VINTAGE COMICS & PULPS
by Michael Bonesteel
The same ghost story competition that gave birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) also produced Lord Byron’s “Fragment of Novel” (1819)— an unfinished vampire tale. After Byron dismissed the yarn as being unworthy of further attention, his physician John Polidori took it up as the basis for his novel The Vampyre (1819), which was at first erroneously published under Byron’s authorship, then later attributed to Polidori. His titular
character, Lord Ruthven (pronounced “Rivven”) of Scotland, bore an uncanny resemblance to the darkly alluring, moody, and philandering Byron himself. Thus, the modern myth of the vampire was cast in the guise of a cultured gentleman: Elegant, charismatic, seductive, and deadly—but as yet not quite undead.
From 1845 to 1847, lurid British “penny blood” publisher Edward Lloyd printed an enormously popular 220-chapter saga titled Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood by Malcolm
Rymer & Thomas Peckett Prest, which introduced a different sort of entity—the vampire as bestial fiend. Here we have an animalistic and even corpse-like depiction of the vampire that is more inhuman than human, more ghoul than refined lord. This primitive creature recalls the earlier shape-shifting vampire/ werewolf legends of Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman folklore which may have been based upon derogatory perceptions of shamanic practitioners worldwide who—psychically if not physically—transformed themselves into totemic spirit animals such as wolves and bats.
Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu created the first significant female vampire in his 1872 novella Carmilla. A quarter century later, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) combined the qualities observed in Ruthven and Varney into a complex hybrid—a diabolical monster camouflaged within a beguiling Byronic exterior. Stoker further fleshed out the female vampire archetype with his personification of Dracula’s brides.
Having set the backdrop for this sojourn with the undead, come with us now, as we take a deep dive into the vampire’s rich lineage to see it evolve through pulp magazine illustrations and the artwork of the Golden, Silver, and Bronze ages of comic books.
The Byronic Vampire
In The Vampyre, Polidori described Lord Ruthven’s face as having a “dead grey eye” and a “deadly hue.” And yet “its form and outline were beautiful” and “caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him.” There is no mention of pointed teeth or sharp canines. And although at this stage he has not acquired many of the vampiric trappings that would later be associated
with him, he does feed on the blood of women, possess some superhuman powers, and may reanimate himself any number of times. Subsequent retellings by other 19th century authors and playwrights added more lore to Ruthven’s story, including the ability to disappear and reappear, sprout wings and fly, as well as engendering new female vampires.
Early 19th century depictions of Ruthven portray him in traditional attire, from Scottish kilts to evening clothes. The most accurate portrait might be that of Lord Byron himself, since Polidori patterned Ruthven after the dashing young poet. Curiously, the vampire that most resembled Ruthven in the 20th century was Bela Lugosi’s characterization derived from Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston’s 1927 theatrical production of Dracula, which Lugosi reprised in Tod Browning’s groundbreaking 1931 movie. According to scholar Michael McGlasson, Lugosi’s cleaned-up and defanged Drac was a makeover of the silent film’s bestial vampires like Max Schreck in Nosferatu (1922) and Lon Chaney in London After Midnight (1927). Lugosi’s revamped vampire was closer to Polidori’s Lord Ruthven than Stoker’s conception of Dracula, not to mention Rhymer/Prest’s Varney.
Pulp fiction magazines such as Weird Tales and Strange Tales often showcased the Byronic vampire. HW Wesso’s cover painting for Hugh B. Cave’s “Murgunstrumm” in Strange Tales for January 1933 spotlights two greentinged pasty-faced vampires in tuxedos.
A painted cover by Margaret Brundage portraying Thorp McClusky’s “Loot of the Vampire” for Weird Tales (June 1936) pictures a fetching blonde in the clutches of another well-dressed and distinguished-looking blood sucker. In an uncredited Virgil Finlay interior line
drawing, the stippling is so dense and the reproduction quality so murky, it is difficult to discern any noticeable sharp teeth. The only indication of something horrifically amiss occurs in Part 2 of that series (Weird Tales, July 1936) which discloses a skull in the vampire’s mirror reflection.
The staid Byronic vampire remained in evidence throughout the comics of the early 1950s, despite the conspicuous excesses of pre-Comics Code Authority horror titles. Warren Kremer’s artistry on the cover of The Beyond #2 (Jan. 1951) features a pale and baleful vampire with an extreme widow’s peak rising out of coffin. He’s dressed in a stage magician’s dapper blue suit and red cape. While the Stan Lee scripted “Burton’s Blood!” reveals a vampire who survives an atomic war for Menace #2 (April 1953), Bill Everett’s prescient pencils and inks lent Burton an odd similarity to the future WOR-TV horror movie host Zacherley of the late 1950s.
Gene Fawcette’s boyishly handsome Dracula, possibly inked by Vince Alascia for the cover of Eerie #12 (Aug. 1953), bares his elongated canines in such an affable smile that his Byronic assets tend to outweigh his sharp
teeth and claws. Fawcette’s very different rendition of him in the opening interior splash panel, however, is serious, somber, and older. He’s scowling with just a hint of hungry fangs, and hovering with several bats—perhaps his three wives—over Jonathan Harker’s stagecoach arriving at Castle Dracula.
Almost a decade later Max Elkan’s refined figure fronting Dell Comics’ Dracula (Oct.-Dec. 1962) bears the hallmarks of a digest paperback cover. It too features two discreet fangs against the interior blackness between Dracula’s parted lips as he stares lustily at the comatose lady in his arms.
Both Alascia’s and Elkan’s Byronic vampires are transitioning into Stoker’s hybrid combo, although both are a little coy about it. After issuing that single issue in 1962, Dell did not return to the series until 1966, at which point Drac was reconceived as a ludicrous Silver Age superhero wearing a navy blue unitard. Because Dell felt itself to be its own impeccable judge and jury, it never adhered to the Comics Code. Thus Dell and an offshoot company, Gold Key, felt entitled to issue horror comics in the 1960s like Dracula, Frankenstein, Dark Shadows, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, and Twilight Zone years before the Code relaxed in 1971.
By virtue of its publications being in a magazine format, Warren Publishing also dodged the Code. It entered the space age by featuring vampires on or from other planets. Vampirella hailed from the planet Draculon, rarely ever divulging her canines (more about Vampi coming up) while Gray Morrow’s ink-washed vampire Remick in “Blood of Krylon!” scripted by Archie Goodwin (Creepy #7, 1966) was an amiable Byronic daemon with a fangless grin who emigrated to fresh worlds when human blood on Earth became scarce.
The Bestial Vampire
Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest provided the following details regarding Sir Francis Varney’s appearance in the mid-19th century. He was “tall and gaunt,” and his face was “perfectly white—perfectly bloodless. The eyes look like
Avampire who draws his bloodlust from Big Pharma. Another who settles in sunny, small-town California. Still another who teaches a college night class in occult arts. All three fanged fiends stray long and far from the fog-strewn forests of Transylvania.
Filmmakers Arnold Laven, Jules V. Levy, and Arthur Gardner met in 1943 while making training films for the Army Air Force. After their discharge in 1945, they decided to venture into feature films with their own independent production company. Levy-GardnerLaven Productions (LGL) was formed in 1951, cranking out low-budget noirs like Without Warning (1952), Vice Squad (1953), and Down Three Dark Streets (1954). UCLA Theater Arts graduate Pat Fielder, a lifelong horror fan, began working for the group as a production
assistant and convinced them to let her script some scare-fests for the burgeoning monster movie market. Her first two efforts for LGL were the monstrous mollusks of The Monster That Challenged the World, double-featured with the highly unusual The Vampire (both 1957).
Directed by former Universal Studios editor Paul Landres, The Vampire stars veteran stage and screen actor John Beal as Paul Beecher, a kindly and popular small-town doctor who lives with his devoted preteen daughter Betsy (Lydia Reed). He’s asked to investigate the death of a colleague whose research into “primitive instincts” resulted in a pill made from the blood of vampire bats. Beecher pockets a bottle of the pills for analysis,
but when he asks Betsy to hand him his migraine medicine, she accidentally gives him the wrong bottle. Those toxic tablets turn Beecher into a ravening monster whose deadly bite carries a disease that kills his victims and slowly dissolves their corpses. The pills are also addictive: Beecher desperately needs them to remain human and hide his Hyde-like alter ego. His secret is ultimately revealed to both his comely nurse (Coleen Gray) and the local sheriff (Kenneth Tobey).
Landres’ direction keeps things moving while maintaining a constant state of suspense. The Vampire clocks in at a brisk 75 minutes and none of it is wasted. The tension builds largely due to Landres’ deliberate pacing and Beal’s understated performance, endowed with a mounting sense of dread and horror as he slowly discovers what he’s become and his inability to control it. It’s a finely-honed, modulated portrayal. Reminiscent of the phalanx of actors who assayed cinema’s Jekyll-Hyde adaptations, Beal also conveys both pathos and
Looking Back on the Strange History of Director Tom Holland’s “Fright Night” in NOW Comics
By Ryan Vandergriff
IN THE BEGINNING
On August 2, 1985, Columbia Pictures unleashed upon an unsuspecting moviegoing populace a most unusual horror film called Fright Night. Part love letter to the old Hammer vampire movies with an equal dose of humor thrown in for good measure, Fright Night was director Tom Holland’s ode not only to the stakes and crucifix genre,
but also an affectionate tip of the hat to the Alfred Hitchcock directed Rear Window based upon Cornell Woolrich’s short story “It Had to Be Murder.” Audiences turned out in droves to check out the story of a teenage boy named Charley Brewster (a charming and impossibly young William Ragsdale) whose new next-door neighbor Jerry Dandrige (Oscar-nominated Chris Sarandon) just happens to be a vampire. Faster than you can say “Christopher Lee,” Charley enlists the aid of an on-the-way-out
television horror movie host and faded big screen horror movie icon Peter Vincent (deftly and heartbreakingly essayed by an on-point Roddy McDowall) to do away with this bloodsucker who threatens not only his best friend (a scene-stealing Stephen Geoffreys), but also his best girl (Amanda Bearse of Married... With Children fame) and the entire blessed metropolitan area. It’s tough being a teenager, isn’t it?
Fright Night was a box-office hit when it landed at mall multiplexes in the summer of ’85, and it wasn’t too long before the drumbeat for a sequel began to emerge. The two principal leads from the original film—Ragsdale and McDowall—quickly enlisted for its 1988 New Century/Vista Tommy Lee Wallacehelmed follow-up, Fright Night Part II. With Columbia—as well as original writer and director Tom Holland and several key cast members from the first film—now out of the picture, publicity and getting the word out about the upcoming sequel was critical. Enter NOW Comics, a little upstart comic book publisher run by Tony Caputo out of Chicago, Illinois and the soon-to-be home of the Fright Night Universe. Caputo and Co. wanted to add an ongoing monthly featuring the characters from the first film in continuing adventures, reasoning not irrationally that the release of the sequel would shine even more light on the fledgling title and their up-and-coming company. The mensches over at New Century/Vista obviously saw some merit in such cross-pollination between film and comics, and quicker than you could utter the words “Back, spawn of Satan!” a license had been secured: NOW Comics was officially in the Fright Night business. In the February 1988 edition of the in-house trade fanzine NOW Comics News (Volume Two, Issue Three for all you completists), aficionados of Charley Brewster and Peter Vincent were greeted with the thunderous front-and-center headline “NOW TO PUBLISH “FRIGHT NIGHT” MONTHLY COMIC!”
“NOW will produce the regular monthly adventures of Peter Vincent and Charley Brewster, the Vampire Killers of the ’90s,” an obviously forward-thinking and enthusiastic Tony Caputo announced to readers of NOW Comics. “The movie has mystery, adventure, humor, and wonderful special effects. After reading the script for the sequel, there is no doubt that Fright Night II will be even more successful.”
In that same article, Caputo ticked off the qualities of the comic series which were set to align with those of Holland’s film: Intrigue, action, “and wonderful special effects.”
“The book will have the same feel as the movies,” revealed the Big Wheel of NOW. “Suspenseful, with a touch of humor. It’s a book that will appeal to many people, not just comic collectors.”
Pressed for specifics by his in-house reporter, Caputo revealed that he had read the script for the forthcoming Fright Night Part II, proclaiming it to be a film that would surpass the original at the all-important box-office.
That bit of hopeful yet murky prognostication to the side, avid fans of Fright Night were given their first real hints as to specifics about the upcoming ongoing comic book. For instance, it was revealed that the adaptation of the first film was slotted in for a one-shot prestige format comic, separate from the main series itself with the series proper kicking off with an adaptation of Fright Night Part II. That done-in-one of the original film would ship on July 15, 1988, with plans calling for a wraparound cover from artist Tony Akins of NOW Comics Rust fame. The regular monthly title would emerge from its coffin the following month. There was method to Caputo’s creative madness, at least in theory: “We’re releasing the adaptation of the original movie to coincide with the release of the sequel in July,” explained Caputo to NOW Comics News
In anticipation of the upcoming series, NOW began launching a one-page ad in many of its current comics (Caputo by this time had a healthy stable of books all jockeying for public attention from his fledgling company, including the likes of Speed Racer, Racer-X, Ralph Snart Adventures, Astro Boy, The Terminator, and The Real Ghostbusters). The ad was as simple as it was effective: Against a pitch-black background, the image of a set of serious vampiric choppers menacingly invited readers to “Have a nice day.” Underneath that imposing illustration was the legend “FRIGHT NIGHT: THE MOVIE. THE SEQUEL. THE REGULAR MONTHLY COMIC,” followed by the promise of “THIS SUMMER.”
So much for the best laid plans of mice, men and comic book publishers:
For the vampire brethren, cinema at the beginning of the 1970s picked up where the ’60s had left off, with a succession of leathern winged chillers. Horror was definitely en vogue, but with so much competition and the withdrawal of their American financial backers, the most celebrated of these fearsome film producers, Hammer Film Productions, observed a downturn in their fortunes, and with them, so faded the vampire from the big screen. Thankfully, it wasn’t quite the end for this heinous band of bloodsuckers.
George A. Romero’s unique take on the vampire, Martin, had plenty of people talking upon its release in 1977, with Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, John Badham’s romantic horror Dracula, and of course Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot, all vying for the horror buff’s attention during 1979, keeping the undead very much alive. Alas, for all their efforts it appeared the vampire was about to be laid to rest, for with the dawn of a new decade, the grisly slasher was now ascendant.
Given the quality in each of these presentations, the vampire breed should have been readied to continue in its terrorizing of theaters across the globe, but it has been argued Love at First Bite, also from 1979, had driven a stake deep into the once pulsing heart of the genre. Its jocular shenanigans certainly
didn’t amuse those who held the vampire close to their hearts. Consequently, for the next few years the vampire remained dormant, lost in the ice-cold embrace of its velvet lined coffin.
It wasn’t until 1983 the seals on these caskets were once again pried open. This unholy event may well have passed unnoticed, for many of the commentators of the day chose to overlook Tony Scott’s stylish directorial debut The Hunger (1983), preferring to beat the drum in praise of his subsequent box office hits, among them Top Gun (1986), Beverley Hills Cop (1987), and Enemy of the State (1998). If I’m being frank, The Hunger wasn’t about to put the vampire film back on the map, not by any stretch of the imagination, but Northumberland born Tony, the brother of Ridley Scott, unwittingly created a film set to become a cult favorite, one that was to make even the most ardent disciples of vampire lore rethink their desire to consort with this age old pestilence.
Bloodthirsty Curiosity
While John Badham’s Dracula (1979) had romanticized their deathly charm, Tony ventured a little further in eliciting the eroticism suggested in so many of Hammer’s encounters with these long dead creatures. This bloodthirsty curiosity would attract
MONSTERS I HAVE KNOWN AND PAINTED
by Will Murray
Alot of toys press my nostalgic hot buttons, but none hit the sweet spot better than Aurora’s monster model kits of the early 1960s. You remember them. They came in long thin cardboard boxes with moody box art. Inside, the mono-colored pieces lay waiting to be trimmed, sanded, glued and painted with Testor’s enamel paint. Or if you were like impatient me, hastily glued together and painted. Trimming occurred after the fact. Sanding, never.
The kits cost a whole buck, with a penny change. Today, that’s nothing. Back then, it constituted a whole week’s allowance. Not something a ten yearold spent lightly.
Aurora’s classic kits were a product of the television revival of the Universal monster films in the late ’50s. They kicked off a wave of Monstermania that
ran from the debut of Famous Monsters of Filmland in 1958 to the tail end of the 1960s. My introduction to this stuff was through a local TV program called Creature Feature, hosted by a tiny squeaky-voiced spaceman puppet called Feep, who was basically a sock puppet with a light-bulb head.
Lumbering Monster
The first kit the Aurora Plastics Company produced was the most famous and probably most popular of all time, Frankenstein. It was also the simplest kit. Frankie walking on his own grave. No frills. No creepy pets. Just a lumbering version of the Boris Karloff Frankenstein monster, striding away from a headstone on which was chiseled: Frankenstein. It sold like crazy when it was released early in 1962.
I don’t honestly remember the first
time I laid eyes on an Aurora monster kit, but it was probably in 1962. I do know it was in a dingy mom-and-pop 5-cent store called Burrell’s in my native Boston. It was run by an aging couple. At one side, you could buy anything from can openers to foundation garments. I walked past all that ordinary adult stuff to the glass case in the back where you could pick out penny candies or buy gum cards. I remember the first gum cards I bought there in 1961, Leaf Brands’ Spook Theatre, also known as Spook Talk. They featured Universal monster stills with humorous captions and ghostly—some would say ghastly—gags printed on the back. I bought them with every spare nickel I could dredge up, but never managed to capture every card.
You might say the Leaf monster gum cards were the gateway addiction that led to all the rest. For in the back corner of Burrell’s, strategically placed near the candy case, was the toy department. Cheap toys, mostly. Tin junk made in Japan—a sure sign of low quality back then—and some better made toys that were overpriced by comparison with the big department stores.
Nestled among this array were the model kits. Cars. Planes. Warships. None of that stuff appealed to my youthful imagination. It was the monsters who called to me. After all, thanks to those gum cards and Creature Feature, we had already been introduced.
Sibling Rivalry
If I had been an only child, it would have been so simple. But I had a younger brother Dan who also loved monsters. He beat me to the Frankenstein kit. I could have killed him, because we shared a bedroom. Once he had that critter assembled and painted and displayed on the old walnut desk we shared, it was
forever off-limits to me, purchase-wise.
Don’t think some family rule commanded me not to buy a Frankenstein model of my very own. It didn’t work that way. Danny beat me to it, fair and square. I could not match him with another Frankenstein, painted my way. No, I had to best him to the next monster, if not trump him with a better monster. This was an unspoken rule between brothers. The same one that stipulated he could not buy any comic book I collected. He could read mine, sure. But two copies of The Incredible Hulk #4 were not allowed under the same roof.
As it happened, Aurora started cranking out monster kits at a rate of two or three a year. Pretty fast for a humble plastics company that also produced cars and aircraft. But too slow for us. So I grabbed the Dracula kit the next time I had a spare buck and no new comic books to buy.
Frank Drake was not alone that bleak night in 1972 when he chose to claim his inheritance: a vast, crumbling, European edifice shrouded in pitch darkness. Glimpses of it appeared only when lightning would tear gashes in the thick storm clouds. At that time, it was home only to legends, not to mention hungry bats, furtive spiders, and other, lower creatures. Or so he thought. With him was his girl friend Jeannie and his pal Clifton, neither of whom would stand by Frank for long. Clifton had found a cloaked skeleton with a wooden stake driven through its rib cage. He removed that stake, and in so doing destroyed his life and Jeannie’s. For he had foolishly unleashed a centuries-old evil upon the world, and committed his friend Frank to a life of relentless horror, as he would every month thereafter try to end a monstrosity from his own family’s past. They had disturbed the Tomb of Dracula.
No, Frank was not alone then. Aside from Clifton and Jeannie, there were others there that night. Writer Gerry Conway, plotter Roy Thomas, and artist Gene Colan were present, documenting the Lord of Vampires’ return, and recording the resumption of his
remorseless attack on humanity. And behind them? There lurked Stan Lee and the spectacular Spider-Man.
Since its inception in the 1950s, the Comics Code Authority ruled on what publishers could feature in their own titles. In addition to all manner of what they saw as depravity, they also forbade the depiction of pure supernatural terrors, which meant that while kaiju-like creatures could crush whole cities, nosferatu, werewolves, zombies and other abominations could not appear, much less take even a drop of blood. But following Stan Lee’s decision to publish Amazing Spider-Man #96-98, which contained an anti-drug use storyline, without their okay, the Authority’s grip on the industry loosened on the use of a number of taboo subjects, including occult occurrences.
The Vampire Returns
While horror was finding a new place on bookshelves and movie theaters with the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, Marvel began raising up things they dared not touch before. In Amazing Spider-Man #101, Morbius, a scientist who foolishly experimented on himself, became a living vampire. Man-Thing appeared just once in May 1971 in Savage Tales and then wouldn’t be seen again for over a year. Werewolf by Night debuted in the tryout book Marvel Spotlight in February 1972, but Tomb of Dracula launched as its own title just two months later.
Colan was determined to be involved almost from the
More often than not, those wellmeaning parents who scrutinized junior’s comic book reading, would have turned a blind eye to much of Ace’s portfolio of terror. Even among modern day collectors, their comics have never been considered the most horrific from that macabre phase of comic book publishing. As innocuous as they may have seemed, Ace weren’t to escape the defamatory comments of Dr. Fredric Wertham in his damning tome Seduction of the Innocent, where he cited the extreme degree of violence in one particular story the company had only recently cooked up, The Beyond
#27’s “Strange Potion of Dr. Lorch”(July 1954). In their defense, the brutality in this Jekyll and Hyde inspired tale wasn’t quite as incessant as the good doctor made out, but the same could not be said of the numerous confrontations with the vampire ilk in the pages of its companion title Web of Mystery. As will shortly be revealed, Web of Mystery may have escaped the acrimony directed at so many of its nefarious companions on sale at that time, but given some of the outrageous content in these pages, how it managed to avoid the eagle-eyed probing of the anti-comic book crusaders is beyond belief.
While a menagerie of supernatural manifestations menaced the covers of this title, the vampire was never once among them, although its presence was evident in more than a dozen of the stories in its 28 issue run. As early as the Summer of 1950, its ghastly countenance cast a shadow over Challenge of the Unknown #6 in “Villa of the Vampire” (September 1950), later reprinted in Web of Mystery #19 (July 1953). In this, the company’s first venture into the dark side—albeit a one-off—Lin Streeter set the standard for Ace’s vampire kin, adorning this frightful beast with a pair of huge leathern wings. As can be seen here, there was a provocative element to this splash, one that would inveigle its way into more than a few of these tales. On this showing, the damsel in distress was observed lying prostrate before this ungodly creature, fated to succumb to its vile intent. This intent would become the harbinger for the depravity to follow.
Rancorous Fangs
A few months later, this iniquity emerged from the shadows in the debut of Web of Mystery, cover-dated February 1951. While Marty Rose, or Martin Thrall, as he was referred to in the tale “Venom of the Vampires,” produced little in the way of comic book art,
the malevolence he evoked in this foul creature was overwhelming. Those fangs may well have been the inspiration for Hammer’s Dracula (1958); indeed, there are few displays of such rancor found anywhere in the comic books of the period. As for those wings, there was no question this viperous monstrosity had long since given up its humanity. Soon after, this malfeasance was observed hanging high up in the roof of a cave, a possible precursor to The Lost Boys, of 36 years hence.
As these vampiric tales took shape, it became apparent both Marty’s depiction of this depraved breed and Lin Streeter’s creation for “Villa of the Vampire” were the blueprint for the company’s vampire. George Appel made ample use of this schema when he rendered “Legacy of the Accursed” for Web of Mystery #2 (April 1951). Those characteristic wings were again unfurled, this time over a Scottish castle, where any kind of mirror was curiously forbidden.
The prolific Lin Streeter returned a few issues later with “Vengeance Weaves a Tapestry” for the fifth issue of Web of Mystery (October 1951), set in the depths
of a castle of Westphalian construct. There was considerable emphasis placed on the vampire’s enormous bat-like wings, with references to its superhuman strength, yet it was the depiction of an age-old torture chamber of the most sadistic order that had the more mature reader wondering: Was this really suitable for a child?
No Ordinary Woman
Maybe this outing had raised an eyebrow too many, for it would be another few months before one of this deathly breed was again given leave to enter these pages. The reader’s patience was rewarded with Ace regular Louis Zansky’s “Vampire Bride” in Web of Mystery #9, dated May 1952. For the first time in an
Ace vampire story, their young audience was introduced to the charm of a femme fatale, her allure doubtlessly enkindling the wrath of those taking a stance against these troublesome comics. From the outset her sensuality was oh so evident; she was no ordinary woman. Louis’ use of shadow would work to exacerbate the perturbation in this short piece, as this delicious temptress attired in the tightest of black satin gowns called upon everything at her disposal to seduce her husband coupled with those in attendance. This salacious theme was promptly pursued in issue #10’s “Weird Bells of Wozzeck” (June 1952), illustrated by the up-and-coming Bill Molno. When a vampiress was unwittingly revived following the removal of a dagger from the lid of her casket, carnage inevitably ensued. Maybe this tale was scripted
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VAMPIRES! We examine the career of BELA LUGOSI, feast on Universal’s classic Dracula’s Daughter, view Blood of Dracula’s Castle, MARV WOLFMAN discusses his Tomb of Dracula comic (with artwork from GENE COLAN, TOM PALMER and GIL KANE), plus the roots of comic book vampires, Underworld’s KATE BECKINSALE, vampire toys, Hammer’s legion of the undead, and The Return of Dracula and Grave of the Vampire!
