Universals

It was on television that I met them.The Universal monsters.The entire run of films from Dracula to The Creature Walks among Us had been shot, printed, and screened before I was born.In other words, I’m a late monster boomer.By the time I was old enough to handle monster movies, they were on television and my early memories of them are tinged with the nostalgia that accompanies what seemed like better times, although each era is about equally difficult.When I saw James L. Neibaur’s The Monster Movies of Universal Studios I knew I had to read it.Neibaur goes through all the films in the series, chronologically, encapsulating the Draculas, Frankenstein’s monsters, mummies, invisible men and women, wolf-men, and the gill-man.As I child I never watched them systematically, being subject to television schedules, among other things.

Not understanding studios or business, and certainly not copyright, I never understood why other favorites such as Jekyll and Hyde, the phantom of the opera, and various assorted ghosts and ghouls weren’t part of the collection.Nevertheless, this study in discrete, brief chapters, treats the official canon reasonably well.The line between religion and monsters is sometimes crossed in these movies, which gets at an underlying theme of my own interest—how horror and religion interact—but that’s not Neibaur’s purpose.That dynamic is, however, the driving force behind my two most recent books.A tie-in to the paranormal may also be found there.

As I dropped off some promotional material for Holy Horror at an area bookstore recently, the events manager revealed her interest in the paranormal.In my mental schematic, it’s wedged in there between monsters—which are fictional—and religion, the antithesis of fiction for most people.What do we do with ghosts and others that don’t fit into the neat lines of a theology that draw a stark line between the supernatural and human?Universal’s monsters sometimes ran into problems with the Production Code for stepping over that line.Of course, the Universal monsters are pretty tame in comparison with today’s fare.Still, they were the monsters who showed, in many ways, what it was to be human.Neibaur isn’t going for an in-depth analysis here, and his treatment is readily readable by anyone interested in revisiting the monsters of yesteryear.Some of the descriptions reminded me of movies from my childhood that I’d forgotten.It is pleasant to relive them for a few moments while the real monsters in the real world lurk not far from my door.