JL: The visual effects and those vivid Technicolor colors still hold up.
JD: Plus it was written on the level of a ten year-old. It’s fabulous! I saw Invaders From Mars[William Cameron Menzies, 1953] and then Forbidden Planet[Fred M. Wilcox, 1956] when they came out. If you saved up enough Quaker Oats box–tops you could get into that for free…
JL: You’re only five years older than I am and it makes such a difference to the films you actually saw in a movie theater.
JD: It makes a tremendous difference, because from ’53 to ’58 were a kind of golden years for science fiction movies.
JL: I saw The 7th Voyage of Sinbad[Nathan H. Juran] at the Crest Theater on Westwood Boulevard in 1958. But those other films I saw on television in black and white.
JD: Well, that was the beginning for you, but I had already been watching sci-fi and horror films for a long time at the movies. They were marketed to kids. You’d maybe have one friend, or two, who liked monster movies, but you really didn’t know many people who liked them, so you felt a little isolated. But when you went to the supermarket and you saw Famous Monsters of Filmlandmagazine on the shelf next to Lady’s Home Journal, you realized: “My God, there must be other people like me out there!” I spent years writing letters to Famous Monsters, trying to get my name in it. If you could get your name in it, you were immortal! I wrote letters about everything: all the movies I’d seen, who were my favorite monsters, whatever.
I finally got to the point where I wrote about the worstmovies I’d ever seen. It was published in the magazine as an article titled “Dante’s Inferno!” And when Forrest J Ackerman sent me the magazine, annotated with “Go, Joe! Go!” it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. I was 12 or 13. Then I read the article and, of course, he’d completely re-written it. He used words like “symbiotic”—things I didn’t even understand. But nonetheless, I felt like, “Wow! I’m part of a community.” There was this feeling of solidarity with other kids like me. Now there are online fan communities, but there wasn’t anything like that then. If you wanted to find out about a movie, you had only the TV guide. If you went to the library, the movie books were very scholarly and serious and not interesting to kids. The great boon of Famous Monsterswas that it got people interested in film history.
JL: Yeah, it had articles not just about actors, but on writers, directors, technicians… like Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Jack Pierce, Fritz Lang, Tod Browning, Lon Chaney, Richard Matheson, James Whale, and on and on.
JD: Famous Monsters of Filmlandput all those disparate strands together in a way comprehensible to kids.
JL: Most horror magazines and websites now are just about maiming and killing. People are really into gore!
JD: It’s all spectacle. It’s pure, transgressive spectacle. It involves the same kinds of emotions that the Romans experienced when the Christians were thrown to the lions. Except in movies, it’s safe, we’re not really killing anybody. Now extreme gore is an accepted part of the way films are made. If you have a gory death scene, you can build a whole film around it, like The Final Destination[David R. Ellis, 2009].
People are so jaded. They’ve seen every plot, they’ve seen every twist, they’ve seen every gore effect. They’ve seen it all! And there are many things competing for their attention now that didn’t exist when we were growing up. Plus, they know nothing about film; they know nothing about film history. They don’t know who Jimmy Stewart was! They don’t know!
JL: It kind of freaks me out.
JD: And you say, “How ignorant of them,” but the fact is, in order to know about something you have to see it! The Marx Brothers—who are they? Laurel and Hardy? Nobody programs them. People don’t want to see them.
JL: My kids grew up with all the old movies, so I was so shocked when my daughter brought a bunch of girls home for a sleepover and she wanted to put The Women[George Cukor, 1939] on for them. The girls refused to watch it because it was in black and white! It was very upsetting to me.
JD: The Marx Brothers, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and all that kind of stuff is only going to be kept alive in universities. They are no longer part of popular culture. This stuff runs only on cable or satellite. It’s considered niche programming.
JL: Why do you think that so many vampire, werewolf, and zombie movies are now being made?
JD: It’s an astonishment to me—particularly because I was loyal to the genre when people thought it was trash, and now it has become mainstream. The fact is that the motion picture industry has become a glorified B-movie factory. Nowadays, the studios mine all the old, low-budget serials and monster titles, give them massive budgets, and cast them with big stars.
JL: Well, that’s directly because of Spielberg and Lucas!
JD: Exactly! But there was a moment during the Jawsand Star Warsperiod in the ’70s, when it seemed like movies were going to grow up. Look at what the studios made in those decades. But now it’s like the suits realized: “Wait a minute! We can just make fantasy films with no content and they will all show up all over the world! So now it’s all elves and Lord of the Rings, special effects in Transformers… it’s non-content film. Films that aren’t aboutanything.
JL: Gremlins[Joe Dante, 1984] was a case where there was a new fantasy film with a political subtext. And the wonderful malevolence of the Gremlins was so subversive! And Gremlins 2: The New Batch[Joe Dante, 1990] had some brilliant stuff in it. I saw that movie a hundred times—because my son Max adored it. But there are extraordinary moments in that. Really funny, brilliant, and dark…
Okay, enough about you. Let’s talk about some specific monsters: The Mummy.
JD: The bromide about the Mummy was that you just need to walk away, and if you walked fast, you could get away from him. But when I was a kid, even though he was slow, he always got his victims. So it seemed to me that he had this magical power.
JL: And vampires?
JD: They’re back. And now they’re sexy and young, and they’re…
JL: Mormon!
JD: Absolutely, the whole appeal of the Twilightthing is that they can’t have sex. It’s the abstinence thing—that’s why parents are saying: “You should see these Twilightmovies; they’re really good!”
JL: So summing up, do you have any thoughts about why it is we like monsters?
JD: They’re sources of melodrama; they’re dangerous; they make people run in fear; they decimate; they kill; they do all the things that a bomb does. Maybe it’s an embracing of death that starts at an early age. But basically, monsters do bad things and usually cause lots of death and heartache. Monsters are metaphors. Godzilla is a perfect example. Here is atomic war come to life, to be visited upon the people of Japan. That would be a good game: Name the monster movie and then the metaphor!
Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein and Dwight Frye as his assistant Fritz in Frankenstein[James Whale, 1931].
MAD SCIENTISTS
Scientific curiosity is the bedrock of progress. Sometimes, however, scientific research can be harmful to those conducting it; Madame Curie almost certainly died from the effects of the very radioactivity she discovered.
In Die, Monster, Die![Daniel Haller, 1965], Boris Karloff’s work with a radioactive meteor in the cellar of his house has catastrophic consequences for his entire family. In The Invisible Man[James Whale, 1933], Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) is driven mad by the injections of “Monocane,” a drug he has discovered that makes him invisible. And woe to poor Dr. Jekyll, whose research into what we now call psychopharmacology releases his inner, murderous personality, his alter ego Mr. Hyde. Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) learns too late the power of the technology of the lost race of Krell in Forbidden Planet[Fred M. Wilcox, 1956] when it unleashes his subconscious thoughts as a living creature of pure energy. The terrifying Monster from the Id is only seen in outline when it is being blasted by lasers. This memorable and fearsome monster was animated by Joshua Meador, on loan to MGM from the Walt Disney Studios.