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Aug 27 08 2:50 AM
True, Craig, horror began coming to America just in time, though Alucard and Kharis had their very Old World connections, and Kharis tended to have a high priest nearby with tana juice at the ready. Alucard brought his casket along with him, complete with native soil. These guys were like Nazi spies! The sort of un-Unis, the Lewtons, stressed Old World customs, whatever the setting, only ripping loose, so to speak, in the last two with Karloff, which, though set in the UK, had no zombies, leopard men or cat people. Of the few American horrors from the 50's, pre-Castle, House Of Wax is refreshingly American and a sort of period piece if not quite a costume picture, with Vincent Price maybe channeling Laird Cregar a bit with his mad sculptor; a madman, yes, but a sympathetic one. Alas, the film didn't start a trend toward American period horror, unless one counts the Corman Poe cycle with Price that began in 1960, but that seemed to be riding the Hammer wave, emboldened perhaps by the success of the Castle flicks. Of the films you mentioned, I've only only seen Frankenstein 1970 once, decades ago, and found it somewhat of a letdown, as it felt more like genteel sci-fi than a continuation of the earlier horror cycle, had few shocks or thrills. The Fred Sears The Werewolf is excellent all-round. Time has been exceedingly kind to it. There was a thread about it a while back here so I won't linger over it except to say that the man to wolf aspect is the result of science gone bad, not something passed on by another werewolf, as in the Chaney flicks, so it too has that sci-fi vibe, walks a fine line between horror and the mainstream sci-fi of the period. Science often figured in the few 50's horrors, not in the mad scientist Frankenstein sense but in a more up to date way. To return, briefly, to my thesis, I do think that it holds up in so far as much of the later horror of the 50's was made in the wake of the demystification of Europe, which is to say it ramped up the science aspect of horror (rational, American), sought to escape from the curses of old, the foggy graveyards, into something more "accessible", with film-makers seeming to look for new ways of making horror work, with an occasional nod to the past, such as The Black Sleep,--yet more science, even with its old-timers cast--and Ulmer's engagingly retro feeling Daghter Of Dr. Jekyll, which at times feels like a tip of the hat to the Universals, Ulmer-style.
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