Monster Mayhem! It's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man

Bela Lugosi as the Monster.

The surprising popularity of 1942's The Ghost of Frankenstein (not one of my faves) left Universal Studios in a quandary. It wanted to make a sequel, but its staff writers felt that the Frankenstein Monster had nowhere to go. Desperation sometimes results in inspiration and thus was born the idea of pairing the Frankenstein Monster with the Wolf Man. It was a clever premise that would extend the Universal monster movies for another decade.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) opens with a splendidly atmospheric scene in which two grave robbers break into the Talbot Family crypt in order to rob the corpse of Larry Talbot. When they open his stone casket, they find Larry's body covered in wolf bane. I don't know about you, but that would have sent me packing in a hurry--especially with a full moon in the night sky. But the inept grave robbers hang around until Larry reaches up and grabs one of them.

Maria Ouspenskaya and Lon Chaney, Jr.

When we next see Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.), he is very much alive. He gradually realizes that he survived his "death" four years earlier (depicted in The Wolf Man) and must therefore be immortal. Larry seeks out the gypsy Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya), who has heard of a "great doctor" that may be able to help Larry find the peaceful sleep of death.

Larry finds the Monster in ice.

Alas, their journey to Vasaria proves fruitless when they learn that Dr. Frankenstein is dead. When Larry, as the Wolf Man, kills a young village woman, the townspeople pursue the vicious "wolf." As Larry the lyncanthrope evades the angry mob, he falls into a hidden chamber. The next morning, he discovers the Frankenstein Monster (Bela Lugosi) encased in ice and frees it. With the Monster's help, he tries to find Frankenstein's diaries and--he hopes--the secret to his own death.

It's hard to assess Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man because the Universal brass had the film cut before its release. In Curt Siodmak's original screenplay, the Monster could speak (as he could at the end of Ghost of Frankenstein). In his book The Dead That Walk, Leslie Halliwell includes some of the missing dialogue:

MONSTER: I can't see you. I'm blind, I'm sick. Once I had the strength of a hundred men. If Dr. Frankenstein were alive, he'd give it back to me...so I could live forever.

TALBOT: Do you know what happened?

MONSTER: I fell into the stream when the village people burned the house down. I lost consciousness. When I woke, I was frozen in the ice.

TALBOT: Buried alive. I know, I know...

MONSTER: Dr. Frankenstein created my body to be immortal. His son gave me a new brain, a clever brain. I will rule the world forever if we can find the formula that can give me back my strength. I will never die.

TALBOT: But I want to die. If you wanted to die, what would you do?

MONSTER: I would look for Dr. Frankenstein's diary. He knew the secret of immortality. He knew the secret of death.

This missing scene is a very illuminating one. First, it explains why the Monster walks with his arms outstretched awkwardly (he's blind!). It also clarifies why the Monster can be seen mouthing dialogue silently in the film (he was actually conversing with Larry). Finally, it explains why the creature would so willingly lead Talbot to the secret location of Dr. Frankenstein's papers.

The Monster disrupts the festival.

Without this key scene, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is a perplexing film at times. The middle portion also lumbers along awkwardly much like the Monster. Still, there are three marvelous scenes: the aforementioned grave robbing sequence, the Monster's sudden appearance in Vasaria during the Festival of the New Wine, and the climatic fight. Granted, it's clearly a stunt double--not Bela--as the Monster during the big showdown. Also, I can't imagine the Wolf Man surviving this face-off (his strategy seems to consist of climbing up on lab equipment and jumping on the Monster).

Director Roy William Neill was Universal's best "B" movie director and, while his pacing may be off this time, he creates a visually hypnotic world of blacks, grays, and white. The cemetery, with its eternally blowing leaves and whistling winds, is like a gothic painting come to life.

Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf Man.

Chaney is his usual self as the Wolf Man (and that's not a bad thing). Bela is miscast as the Monster; one can even spot his facial features through the makeup. Patric Knowles, Ilona Massey, Dennis Hoey, Dwight Frye, and Lionel Atwill make a solid supporting cast. I would've like to have seen more of Maria Ouspenskaya (cinema's best gypsy) and it's too bad Atwill played a mayor and not the one-armed prefect from Son of Frankenstein (1939).

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was a big hit and spawned two immediate sequels with even more monsters: House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). After a short rest, the Universal monsters returned in the 1950s to face off against their biggest adversaries yet: Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

31 Days of Halloween (Bonus 2nd Feature!): It's a Monster Smackdown in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Universal Studios dominated the horror film genre. If I had to pick one film most representative of its output, it’d be Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Certainly, Universal made better and more upscale horror films in the 1930s (e.g., Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) and early 1940s (e.g., The Wolf Man), but the majority of its horror harvest consisted of B-films and the best of the bunch was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

The film opens with a rare (for the time) pre-title sequence in which two gravediggers invade the Talbot family crypt in search of riches. When they open Larry Talbot’s grave, they discover a well-preserved corpse covered in wolfbane. This affords one of the poor chaps the opportunity to recite the “even a man who is pure in heart” poem from The Wolf Man. He is barely finished when a hand emerges from the coffin and grabs him. The other gravedigger makes a quick exit, we hear a scream, a dropped lantern starts a fire, and credits roll.

Unfortunately freed from his peaceful “slumber”, werewolf Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr., of course) goes in search of someone who can destroy him…permanently. Leaving a trail of fatal wolf attacks in his wake, he tracks down Maleva the gypsy woman (the always wonderful Maria Ouspenkaya), the mother of the werewolf who bit him. Maleva says she “knows a man who has the power to help him” and so the two of them head for Vasaria in search of Dr. Frankenstein. Alas, the poor doctor is dead…but his monstrous creation is not. Before long, the poor residents of Vasaria find themselves coping with a newly-arrived werewolf as well as the return of the Frankenstein Monster!

The joy of this film is its assembly of familiar trappings and performers. Lionel Atwill, the prefect in Son of Frankenstein, plays the mayor of Vasaria. Dennis Hooey, who was Inspector Lestrade in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series, plays essentially the same character here. The horde of angry villagers, a staple in many of the films, goes hunting for the Wolf Man after he kills a young woman. The Monster lumbers into town to spoil a lively Ocktoberfest celebration. And a young doctor, with the best of intentions, can’t resist the urge to see the Frankenstein Monster “at its full power.”

The only major flaw in this enjoyable horror affair is the Monster. Bela Lugosi has taken much criticism for his flat performance, which consists mostly of walking around with stiff arms outstretched awkwardly and growling. To Bela’s defense, the Monster is supposed to be blind, which was explained in a famous excised conversation between the Monster and Talbot (yes, the Monster was supposed to talk!). Even with the blindness explained, I still don’t think Bela could have brought the conviction to the role that Boris Karloff did. But, in all honestly, the Monster is not a fully-realized character in this film—not as he was in the first three Frankenstein films.

The bottom line is that Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man has no pretensions of being a classic monster movie. Its goal is to entertain and it certainly achieves that. It was also surprisingly successful and influential. It inspired Universal to assemble even more monsters for House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. And one could say that it provided future filmmakers with the formula for revising a horror franchise—just add another monster, as was done in King Kong vs. Godzilla, Alien vs. Predator, and Freddy vs. Jason.