I can’t be the only one who’s noticed an influx of Universal horror adaptations lately – years after the Dark Universe failed to take off.
In the course of a few short years, we’ll have Lisa Frankenstein, Poor Things, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Bride of Frankenstein on one hand, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Abigail (a remake of Dracula’s Daughter), Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Story and Robert Egger’s Nosferatu on the other. And that’s not counting the ‘official’ adaptations from Leigh Whannel, like 2020’s The Invisible Man or the upcoming Wolf Man. Classic horror is in, baby!
After the pandemic, I began to wonder what the next phase of horror would look like. Horror movies, as pretentious film fans such as myself will tell you, often reflect the anxieties of its society. And a global pandemic brought a lot of anxieties. While we had Host use the lockdown as a backdrop, and Pearl reference a pandemic past, we had yet to see where horror is heading. But it should’t be surprising that Hollywood is looking backwards, to a time where horror helped them out of a bind.
Hollywood Gothic, my most recent read, outlines the writing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the tumultuous paths it took into being adapted: as a stage play, as an unauthorized German film, and then as the classic Bela Lugosi film we oft associate with the character. In that, we learn a little bit about Carl Laemmle Jr., the Universial studios executive often cited as bringing about the birth of American horror films.
Laemmle Jr. was the son of Universal’s founder, and was disrespected by his peers as a ‘nepo hire’ long before the nepo baby discourse took off. But Junior, as he was called, ended up making a mark by ruthlessly pursuing the rights to Dracula. Bram Stoker’s novel was a successful stage play in London and New York (starring Lugosi), and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu had made money oversees. He know that Dracula could be a hit for the studio at a time they desperately needed one: the Great Depression was keeping Americans out of the movie theatre and most studios were losing money.
Dracula hit theatres in 1931 and brought in around $700,000 (in 1930s money!) for the studio. Junior immediately tried to replicate the success with Frankenstein, then The Mummy, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein. These movies are essentially what kept Universal studios afloat during a tough period in the industry. RKO and Paramount both went into bankruptcy in 1933, and while Universal was losing money, it was better off than most of its competitors.
And now, post-pandemic, we find ourselves in a similar situation. We are teetering on the edge of a recession, movie theatres are in danger of going bust, and Hollywood is making monster movies.