Pre-Code Hollywood - Horror and Science Fiction

Horror and Science Fiction

Unlike silent era sex and crime pictures, silent horror movies, despite being produced in the hundreds, were never a major concern for censors or civic leaders. When sound horror films were released however, they quickly caused controversy. Sound provided "atmospheric music and sound effects, creepy-voiced macabre dialogue and a liberal dose of blood-curdling screams" which intensified its effects on audiences, and consequently on moral crusaders. The Hays Code did not mention gruesomeness, and Pre-Code filmmakers took advantage of this oversight. However, state boards usually had no set guidelines, and could object to any material they found indecent. Although films such as Frankenstein and Freaks caused controversy when they were released, they had already been re-cut to comply with censors.

Comprising the nascent motion picture genres of horror and science fiction (sci-fi), the nightmare picture provoked individual psychological terror in its horror incarnations, while embodying group sociological terror in its science fiction manifestations. The two main types of Pre-Code horror pictures were the single monster movie, and films where masses of hideous beasts rose up and attacked their betters. Frankenstein and Freaks exemplified both genres.

The Pre-Code horror cycle was similar to many Pre-Code cycles in that its boom was motivated by financial necessity. Universal in particular buoyed itself with the production of horror hits such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein, then followed those successes up with Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Mummy (1932), and The Old Dark House (1932). Other major studios responded with their own productions. Much like the crime film cycle however, the intense boom of the horror cycle was ephemeral, and had fallen off at the box office by the end of the Pre-Code era.

At the beginning of Frankenstein, Dr. Henry Frankenstein, and his faithful, moronic assistant Fritz are excavating graves for human body parts. Frankenstein sends Fritz to the local college to acquire a fresh brain. After dropping the only normal brain on the ground, Fritz leaves the college with an abnormal one. Meanwhile, Frankenstein's "insane ambition to create life" worries his fiancée, Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), and his close friends. To allay their fears, and prove to them he is not insane, Frankenstein shows them his science project—a sewn together corpse lying on a medical slab, covered by a cloth—and asks them to watch him "endow it with life". Raising the monster upwards, the extending slab reaches the sky through a hole in the roof, and the monster is struck by lightning. Endowed with life by the magical electricity, it twitches its arm, at which point Dr. Frankenstein deliriously screams, "It's alive! It's alive!" The creature begins walking out of its cell in the next scene, and Fritz, upset that his position as the doctor's freak companion may be usurped, torments the monster by waving a torch at it. After the monster kills Fritz, Frankenstein has second thoughts about his creation and instructs a medical colleague to euthanize it. His conscience clear, Frankenstein prepares to marry his fiancée in a lavish ceremony. The monster lives however, and after escaping captivity, it meets a little girl. The girl is throwing flowers into a lake and watching them float. Convinced that pretty things float, he throws her into the lake where she drowns. The creature then arrives at the doctor's house, and in an act of revenge abducts and kills the doctor's fiancée. The entire town, pitchforks and torches in hand, search for the monster that has absconded with the doctor. Finding them at a windmill, the doctor escapes, and the villagers burn the creature to death. While Joy declared Dracula "quite satisfactory from the standpoint of the Code" before it was released, and the film had little trouble reaching theaters, Frankenstein was a different story. New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts removed the drowning scene and lines that referenced Dr. Frankenstein's God complex. Kansas in particular objected to the film. The state's censor board requested the cutting of 32 scenes, which if removed, would have halved the length of the film.

Paramount's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) played to the Freudian theories popular with the audience of its time. Fredric March played the split personality title character. Jekyll represented the composed super-ego, and Hyde the lecherous id. Miriam Hopkins's coquettish prostitute sexually teases March's Jekyll character early in the film by showing her parts of her legs and bosom. Joy felt the scene had been "dragged in simply to titillate the audience." Hyde coerces her with the threat of violence into becoming his paramour and beats her when she attempts to stop seeing him. She is contrasted with his wholesome fiancée (Rose Hobart), whose chaste nature dissatisfies March's baser alter ego. Employing adventurous first person camera techniques, and a high brow background—Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the source novella—the film is considered the "most honored of the Pre-Code horror films." March won the Academy Award for best actor for his performance, a rarity for a performer in a horror movie. Many of the graphic scenes between Hyde and Ivy were cut by local censors because of their suggestiveness. Sex was intimately tied to horror in many Pre-Code horror movies. In Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale which has little in common with the source material, Bela Lugosi plays a mad scientist who tortures and kills women trying to mix human blood with ape blood during his experiments. His prized experiment, an intelligent ape named Erik, breaks into a woman's second floor apartment through her window and rapes her.

In Freaks director Tod Browning of Dracula fame helms a picture that depicts a traveling circus populated by a group of deformed carnival freaks. Browning populated the movie with actual carnival sideshow performers including "midgets, dwarfs, hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, and, most awful, the armless and legless man billed as the "living torso"." There is also a group of Pinheads, who are fortunate in that they are not mentally capable enough to understand that they disgust people. The freaks are the victim of the story with a circus strongman Hercules and a beautiful high-wire artist Cleopatra, the villains. Cleopatra intends to marry and then poison Hans, a midget who has inherited a fortune and is enamored with her. At a dinner celebrating their union, one of the freaks dances on the table and they chant "gooble-gobble, gobble, gobble, one of us, one of us, now she is like one of us." Disgusted, Cleopatra insults Hans and makes out with Hercules in front of him. When the freaks discover her plot, they exact revenge by mutilating Cleopatra into a freak. Although circus freaks were common in the early 1930s, the film was their first depiction on screen. Browning took care to linger over shots of the deformed, disabled performers with long takes of them including one of the "living torso" lighting a match and then a cigarette with his mouth. The film was accompanied by a sensational marketing campaign that asked sexual questions such as "Do the Siamese Twins make love?", "What sex is the half-man half-woman?", and "Can a full grown woman truly love a midget?" Surprisingly, given its reaction to Frankenstein, the state of Kansas objected to nothing in Freaks. Other states such as Georgia however, were repulsed by the film and it was not shown in many locales. The film later became a cult classic spurred by midnight movie showings, however, on its original release, it was a box-office bomb.

In Island of Lost Souls (1932), an adaptation of H. G. Wells science fiction novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Charles Laughton plays yet another mad scientist with a God complex. Laughton, as Moreau, creates a mad scientist's island paradise; an unmonitored haven where he is free to create a race of man-beasts and a beast-woman, Lota, which he wants to mate with a normal human male. A castaway lands on his island, providing him an opportunity to see how far his science experiment, the barely clothed, attractive Lota, has come. The castaway discovers Moreau vivisecting one of the beast-men and attempts to leave the island. He runs into the camp of the man-beasts and Moreau beats them back with a whip. The film ends with Lota dead, the castaway rescued, and the man-beasts chanting, "Are we not men?" as they attack and then vivisect Moreau. The film has been described as "a rich man's Freaks" due to its esteemed source material. Wells, however, despised the movie for its lurid excesses. It was rejected by 14 local censor boards in the United States, and considered "against nature" in Great Britain and banned there until 1958.