WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE TRANSYLVANIA TWIST? [420]

“Dracula, Frankenstein – and Friends!” was a 1977 season in which BBC Two broadcast the classic series of horror films made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s and 40s. Starting with Bela Lugosi in “Dracula” and Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein”, they ran in double bills on Saturday nights, handy for people who invested in the first home video recorders. These films had appeared on various ITV regions in the previous decade, but this season appears to be their first showing on the BBC, following appearances of the later Hammer horror films like “Dracula: Prince of Darkness” with Christopher Lee.

Interestingly, “Dracula, Frankenstein – and Friends!” was broadcast from the seemingly unseasonable month of July, through to September, ahead of the BBC's own "Count Dracula", one of the most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's novel. This time is bookended by the premiere of George Lucas’s “Star Wars” in the United States (on 25th May) and in the UK (on 27^th December). Much like Nirvana reshaped the rock music mainstream with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, “Star Wars” seemed to wash away the “monster madness” that cemented the imagery of Universal’s characters in general popular entertainment for children as much as for adults. From then, science fiction fantasy would be dominant in popular culture, except at Halloween, and whenever an individual work, like “Hotel Transylvania”, can break through.

I am fortunate to live surrounded by Gothic imagery: skulls, candlesticks, heads from marble statues, ivy and (fake) deer’s heads. Our land line phone is shaped as a chrome skull. A previous video of mine confirms we have bats circling our back garden. Of course, the gothic literary and arts tradition on which both Universal and Hammer drew for its film series – in both cases a niche and specialty for each studio, before the idea of film franchises took hold – is centuries old, but it is a tradition not limited to a certain time of the year.

Decades of familiarity of Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula and the flat-headed Frankenstein’s monster made the Universal monsters, and legally distinguishable variations of thereof, into family fare such as the coincidentally concurrent “The Addams Family” and “The Munsters” of 1964-66, and of Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash” of 1960, of which the later album is best described as non-essential, even if you will hear the “Transylvania Twist”. Add into this the preponderance of monster imagery in food aimed at children, such as Smith's Crisps’ original Horror Bags, followed by Monster Munch, Wall’s Dracula ice lolly, and Count Chocula breakfast cereal, and it was clear how embedded in the culture this imagery truly was.

Of course, it is still pervasive, but only in the run-up to Halloween, which in the United States appears to be from July, in the run-up to when Halloween begins the period known as “the Holidays”. The UK is catching up, Guy Fawkes Night having become meaningless over the decades, and however much Halloween is an appropriation of Celtic, British and Christian tradition imposed as American mass culture, I approved of its imposition. The more we see of it, the more its imagery becomes part of the mainstream again.

IT WAS A GRAVEYARD SMASH [254]

"Nosferatu," a German horror film directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau in 1921, may now only receive a "PG" rating from the British Board of Film Classification, but I still problems watching it. Count Orlok's unnatural features and movement, the shadows, and the sense of foreboding may now only be advised as "mild threat" by the BBFC, but their cumulative effects beat the jump scares of a flash of red, a spray of blood, or a hunk of flesh.

Meanwhile, auteur theory, centralising a film’s director as the prime creative force in its making, is just as pervasive in film culture as horror movie tropes, making artists out of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and even its proponents, like Jean-Luc Godard. The critic Pauline Kael saw through it, preferring to look at each film individually, through the collective effort of everyone that made it: “The auteur theory is an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence, that period when masculinity looked so great and important.”

I only mention auteur theory because I can only assume this is why F.W. Murnau’s skull is still missing from his grave. It remains unknown who broke into it in July 2015, but wax found at the site suggest candles were used in some sort of ritual. I assume the grave has now been sealed by the cemetery, as this was being considered due to previous break-ins – Murnau’s brothers, buried in the same plot, were untouched. The prevalence of auteur theory in how people discuss film still does not mean that Murnau, still revered for “Der Leitze Mann” and “Sunrise,” is entirely responsible for “Nosferatu” as we know it - it’s a bit like saying Wes Craven made “A Nightmare on Elm Street” because he was a psychopath.

"Nosferatu" was deliberately designed to be an occult, supernatural film by its producer and distributor, not the director. Prana Film planned many similar films, had an occult mail order catalogue as a side business. Its co-founder, Albin Grau, a German version of Aleister Crowley, was also the production designer, filling props and backgrounds with occult symbols. Prana Film went into bankruptcy after the release of "Nosferatu," infamously an unauthorised adaptation of “Dracula,” in order to avoid the copyright infringement lawsuits from Bram Stoker's estate.

Before “Nosferatu,” Murnau had already directed one film about a fractured personality, that was also an unauthorised adaptation of a British novel - "Der Janus-Kopf" (1920), starring Conrad Veidt and Bela Lugosi, was based on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson. This film is now lost, but we know the it formed part of the wave of German Expressionist films trying to examine the forces that German society found in itself following the First World War, leading to films like Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, Paul Wegener & Carl Boese’s “The Golem: How He Came Into The World” and Fritz Lang’s “Dr. Mabuse the Gambler” and “Metropolis.”

However, no-one used the power of German Expressionist cinema to disrupt the graves of those directors, or that of Albin Grau.