30's American Horror Part Five

THE MONSTER WALKS
(1932)
Dir - Frank R. Strayer
Overall: WOOF

This miserably boring old dark house outing The Monster Walks was a minimally budgeted one from forgotten Poverty Row studio Mayfair Pictures.  It is essentially sixty-three minutes of a handful of characters slowly walking into rooms and asking if everybody is absolutely sure that an ape cannot get out of its cage, only to then slowly walk into other rooms and ask if everybody is absolutely sure that an ape cannot get out of its cage.  The fact that the "ape" in question is actually a chimpanzee proves that they could not even get that detail right.  There are also some sprinklings of hilariously racist, zero-laughs humor that has dated about as well as anything else unintentionally offensive from the Pre-Code Hollywood era.  The title is misleading, the plot a poor man's, minimal effort version of The Cat in the Canary, the cast all dreadfully dull and uninspired, and not a single murder or macabre bit whatsoever transpires until the movie has less than twenty-minutes left in it.  A top to bottom waste of time in every detail.

MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM
(1933)
Dir - Michael Curtiz
Overall: GOOD

One of if not the last existing film to be made with Technicolor's ill-fated, two-color process, Mystery of the Wax Museum once again united director Michael Curtiz, actors Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, set designer Anton Grot, and a handful of other cast and crew members who had all participated in the previous year's Doctor X.  As far as the actual "mystery" element of the story is concerned, it is rather unsuspenseful as Atwill's Ivan Igor is clearly the mad fiend behind all of the murders everyone is running around trying to solve, even to those who have not seen the more famous, Vincent Price, horror career making remake House of Wax twenty years later.  In spite of its lack of proper dramatic tension though, it still succeeds due to Curtiz' occasionally stylish direction, lack of distracting dramatic music, and clever and quippy dialog which is delivered in a particularly amusing fashion by the unofficial main protagonist in Glenda Farrell's wise-cracking news reporter.  While comparatively low on frights or gruesomeness, the finale delivers enough close, nasty calls to forgive it and the inevitable unveiling of Atwill's deformity is sufficiently heart-racing.

BLACK MOON
(1934)
Dir - Roy William Neill
Overall: GOOD

Helmed by Irish-born Roy William Neill who would go on to direct nearly all of Universal's Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce-stared Sherlock Holmes films, Black Moon is a typical pre-Code semi-horror outing where themes of child murder sit right at home with racial stereotypes that have aged as poorly as one would expect.  Based off of Clements Ripley's short story of the same name, the voodoo premise that pits primitive natives, (who are all black), against the compassionate, white heroes can easily be seen as a bit eyebrow-raising in a modern climate, but this was hardly the only cinematic offender of such a narrative backdrop with others coming before and after it.  The film does not really pack any punches, but Neill takes his time presenting every set piece in a mostly low-key fashion, singling out the eyes of some of the characters in expressive lighting and even getting a bit creative with some of the camera movements at times, particularly during a tense sequence where people are being gassed-out of their hiding place.  Fay Wray is also on board yet again, proving that studios were rather hellbent on making her the premier scream queen for at least that decade.

30's American Horror Part Four

THE VAMPIRE BAT
(1933)
Dir - Frank R. Strayer
Overall: MEH

Once again bringing scream queen Fay Wray together with Lionel Atwill, the resulting The Vampire Bat is an exasperatingly boring B-effort from Poverty Row studio Majestic Pictures.  While much of the other cast is strong and recognizable with Melvyn Douglas, (Ninotchka), as the hero and Dwight Fry playing yet another variation of Renfield to the point of plagiarism, bit players go through the motions and Maude Eburne makes for a dull substitute to Una O'Connor's hysterical elderly woman from Universal's The Invisible Man released the same year.  Even though it is barely over an hour in length, the film drags throughout almost all of its set pieces and the reveal of Atwill's evil scientist's intentions seems lazily baffling.  Something to do with hypnotism, creating life and fill in the blanks whatever.  Frank R. Strayer, (who made a quaint handful of conservatively budgeted horror films throughout the nineteen-thirties as well as a dozen Blondie! movies almost in a row), brings hardly anything conceptually interesting to the table besides a few slow, shadowy shots right out of Universal's landmark monster movies , plus some unfunny closeups of a dog waking up a fainted woman.  So besides having another one of Fry's typecast performances, it is entirely skipable.

SUPERNATURAL
(1933)
Dir - Victor Halperin
Overall: MEH

Victor Halperin's follow-up to the better known White Zombie is an interesting yet ultimately lackadaisical, em, supernatural outing from Paramount.  Supernatural has screwball comedy vixen Carole Lombard in an against-type role where she spends all of about ten minutes looking sad and saying practically nothing.  Some of the ideas surrounding a person's evil consciousness being able to go on possessing people is adequate footing as far as a premise goes, but any otherworldly elements are kind of haphazardly portrayed.  It is a problem that the script really does not seem to have any idea what to do with any of its parts.  Most of the would-be spooky bits are revealed to be part of faux seances from the get-go, so there is no real mileage gotten out of eerie voices from beyond the grave or a dead guy's face appearing in a dark room when we know from the outset that it is all staged.  When legit curious things do transpire like the wind blowing papers around, faces being shown either as a visual call-back for the audience to something that happened earlier, or Lombard actually getting possessed and then not anymore, it seems sloppy and rushed conceptually.

MANIAC
(1934)
Dir - Dwain Esper
Overall: WOOF

Exploitation hack Dwain Esper's Maniac, (or Sex Maniac as it has also been known), has a solid anti-classic reputation for reasons that almost immediately become apparent when viewing it.  While it inevitably drags at times since such overall incompetence naturally bleeds into its pacing, for the most part it is a ridiculously bizarre hoot.  Well, it is a hoot if you are in the mood for cluelessly over the top performances, an incoherent structure and "plot", characters giving exaggerated speeches when no one is within earshot to hear them, (often while looking exactly at the camera), a completely gratuitous scene of obnoxious women hanging out in their underwear, another one of two women beating the shit out of each other for no reason, stock footage of Häxan superimposed, and pretentious psychiatric text interrupting most scenes in possibly a pathetic attempt to legitimize the entire movie as having some sort of educational merit.  For further cinematic torture, Esper would also make the hilariously titled Marihuana: The Devil's Weed two years later, proving that his remarkably awful filmmaking abilities were no fluke.

30's American Horror Part Three

DOCTOR X
(1932)
Dir - Michael Curtiz
Overall: MEH

The first of three pairings with Lionel Atwill and original scream queen Fay Wray, (as well as the English thespian's first time working under Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz), was the curious Doctor X.  As a pre-code, old dark house, mad scientist mash-up that also fuses clumsy comedy and was shot in two-color Technicolor, it has many of the early trappings of mystery thrillers of the day, namely German Expressionism inspired cinematics, no thematic music, a forced monster make-up design, nonsensical scientific gobbledygook, a damsel in distress, a clumsy, wise-ass hero, and more adult oriented themes that would quickly be done away with once the Motion Picture Production Code got enforced.  It is occasionally fun yes, but that is primarily due to its ridiculousness.  The humor is more dated than funny, the dialog rather preposterous, the details surrounding Atwill's title character's experiments are laughably implausible yet taken very seriously, as is the final murderer reveal.  Curtiz' stylized direction and use of Polish art director Anton Grot's sets give the film an interesting look though that is made all the more so by it being in color, as the medium would resort back to standard black and white for most B-movie type fare for the next several decades.

MURDERS IN THE ZOO
(1933)
Dir - A. Edward Sutherland
Overall: MEH

Not one of the more noteworthy 1930's efforts from Paramount that was convincingly enough billed as a horror film, Murders in the Zoo is tonally, rather a mess.  Though it is not always necessary, any sort of horror movie star power is pretty nil here with just Lionel Atwill, (Mystery of the Wax Museum, Son of Frankenstein), on board and not even given top billing at that. That title goes to Charles Ruggles who is about as funny as he is menacing and he tries not at all to be the latter while trying far too hard to be the former.  This provides Zoo with its biggest blunder as half of the screen time is dedicated to Ruggles stumbling around like a buffoon while Atwill enacts his jealousy in the most grisly of manners.  There are a few still startling moments here that deserve some recognition, (the best of which is found in the movie's opening scene), but overall the very pedestrian plot does not lend itself well to the clashes in comedy and the thriller aspects at play.  It is certainly not all together forgettable though, but it is a botched effort all the same.

REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES
(1936)
Dir - Victor Halperin
Overall: WOOF

This borderline terrible, quasi-sequel to White Zombie, (with director Victor Halperin returning), is as dull and dumbed down a follow-up as has ever been produced.  With Bela Lugosi nowhere to be found, (and in all honestly, there hardly would have been anything engaging for him to do here anyway), we are left with B-level actors, B-level directing, and a sub-par script with embarrassing dialog.  Revolt of the Zombies does live up to its title by the end, but the zombies in question are just normal looking foreigners who stand motionless except for one that kills a single secondary character, (Roy D'Arcy making as poor a Lugosi stand-in as any).  In fact there are no macabre visuals at all save leftover footage of Lugosi's eyes from White Zombie and the most "memorable" shot in the film is a never-ending one where two characters walk through a swamp with laughably bad rear projection behind them.  It is all too easy to check out of the lame story where somebody uses mind control because he is in love with a woman who married someone else and the lack of any remote chemistry anywhere on set could not be more noticeable.

30s Horror Shorts

IL CUORE RIVELATORE
(1934)
Dir - Alberto Mondadori
Overall: MEH

This silent, avant-garde Edgar Allan Poe adaptation from Alberto Mondadori, (who only directed two films, both shorts), was not even the only one based off The Tell Tale Heart to be released that year, another also existing from Belfast-born Brian Desmond Hurst which became the first talkie version of the story.  This one is a bit perplexing in both presentation and the complete lack of information circulating about it.  Filmed in a rather ramshackle single room with a particularly mobile camera, featuring one actor with a fake eye that is so off-putting that it looks like he is wearing a mask, plus another character who hallucinates seeing said eye floating around in the air, his cup, and dinner plate, it is all played out with no music, sound, or even intertitles.  So it is a strange experience to say the least.

IL CASO VALDEMAR
(1936)
Dir - Gianni Hoepli/Ubaldo Magnaghi
Overall: GOOD

Made by two independent filmmakers Gianni Hoepli and Ubaldo Magnaghi, (each of whom have no other entries as directorial efforts), Il caso Valdemar is based off Edgar Allan Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and represents the first ever film interpretation of the story.  While it meanders a bit in the middle with a series of nuns entering and leaving rooms while looking sad and concerned, these scenes as well as the entire short are stylistically engaging with many closeups, odd angles and the like, all combined with the lack of dialog making it a compelling enough bit of avant-garde movie-making.  The main point of interest though comes at the end with a very surprising amount of gore, the likes of which would not be regularly scene again in genre or really any other cinema for a number of decades.

HIDE AND SHRIEK
(1938)
Dir - Gordon Douglas
Overall: GOOD

The last Our Gang short produced by creator Hal Roach before MGM would continue the series without him for another six years, Hide and Shriek finds Alfalfa running his own private detective office, enlisting Buckwheat and Porky as chief operatives, and ultimately getting themselves temporarily trapped in an as yet to be opened haunted house attraction.  As one could guess, nothing here is remotely frightening, but the ghoulish amusement ride they struggle to escape is cleverly designed with a recorded voice over fiendishly encouraging them to get caught on a treadmill, have skeletons descend from the sky to play a creepy organ, and get stuck on a bench heading towards a spinning seesaw.  It is not the most gut-busting ten minutes ever caught on celluloid, but it is harmless fun nonetheless.

WE WANT OUR MUMMY
(1939)
Dir - Del Lord
Overall: GOOD

While it is the thirty-seventh entry in their most famous Columbia period and first to evoke a significant enough horror theme, We Want Our Mummy is not necessarily one of the strongest Three Stooges shorts.  It is the usual gag of Moe, Larry, and especially Curly being hired as idiots, running around and hitting each other, some bad guys being up to something, the end.  That said, the Stooges at the peak of their powers never produced lackluster results and there are enough predictable site gags, puns, and legendary violence from the trio on display, (as well as Curly's endlessly great dog-barking faces), to not make it any kind of waste.  Far as Stooges history goes, this was also the first film of theirs to use the sliding strings version of "Three Blind Mice", which would become the group's theme song for the next four years.

30's Animated Horror Shorts

SPOOKS
(1930)
Dir - Walter Lantz
Overall: GOOD

As oddly baffling as any cartoon in the medium's near-infantile age, Spooks is one of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit ones produced by Walter Lantz Productions after Walt Disney and his producer Charles Mintz split, (Disney being the character's co-creator along with Ub Iwerks).  The amiable departure between the two allowed Mintz to eventually work with Universal and Carl Laemmle, Spooks being the eighth Oswald cartoon released there.  Problematic to explain, there is a phantom guy trying to win over a cat who is auditioning for a singing gig in an auditorium, with various other Halloween-esque imagery haphazardly thrown in as well as flatulence, risque site-gags, characters seeping through floorboards like liquid, a Lon Chaney moment, and all ending on a completely random dad joke as out of place as anything else that happens.  Drugs folks, drugs.

WOT A NIGHT
(1931)
Dir - John Foster/George Stallings
Overall: MEH

Before there was Tom and Jerry there was, well, Tom and Jerry.  Produced by another New York City based company Van Beuren Studios and distributed through RKO, a comparatively small number of cartoons featuring the characters were made in just shy of a two year period before being rebranded as Dick and Larry as not to be confused with that lovable and violent cat and mouse duo that would emerge the following decade.  The pair's first short Wot a Night has a cloud demon who plays a castle like an organ, a whistling skeleton taking a bath, a group of singing skeletons in black face, and the title characters running around with their rib cages exposed at the end.  It is a hodgepodge to be sure, but an interesting enough one for cartoon scholars all the same.

THE PEANUT VENDOR
(1933)
Dir - Len Lye
Overall: MEH

Fitting snugly in the unintentionally "guh-yah!" type of creepy, The Peanut Vendor was made by New Zealand experimental artist Len Lye, (though there is some confusion circulating that it was a David Fleischer production with there being an entry in his studio's Screen Songs series with the same title).  Intended as a mere prototype to achieve funding for future stop-motion animations which never came to pass, it has since been made available to the public from a 16mm transfer allegedly done in the 1980s.  In any event, it is innocent enough in construction, featuring a monkey singing and dancing to the Red Nichols' 1931 jazz single.  Yet the monkey in question has startling googly eyes, overly-long arms and a tail, and his jerky motions and perpetual grin all to the tune of such cheerful music makes it just a bit nightmarish to say the least.

THE MASCOT
(1933)
Dir - Ladislas Starevich
Overall: GOOD

Two versions exist currently of Ladislas Starevich/Władysław Starewicz' The Mascot, (aka The Devil's Ball), the butchered, twenty-five minute cut made by distributors in 1934 unfortunately being the most commonly available compared to the original forty minute one that has been restored as Fetiche 33-12 in 2012.  Even in its incomplete form, it is still a startlingly well done and dreadfully imaginative work from one of the most influential stop-motion animators of all time.  The first in a series of films featuring an adorable toy dog named Fétiche, (Duffy in the English dubbed version), it begins innocently enough with him simply wanting to locate a fresh orange for his creator's daughter, only to find himself in a supernatural junkyard where Satan and various other characters are the causes or recipients of devilish mischief.  The edited version makes these tone shifts seem more abrupt than they originally where, but they also give it more of an avant-garde feel which is certainly beneficial.

THE MAGIC MUMMY
(1933)
Dir - John Foster/George Stallings
Overall: MEH

Returning to the not-cat-and-mouse Tom and Jerry, The Magic Mummy was the second of the duo's shorts made by Van Beuren Studios in 1933 and one of the last overall cartoons to feature them.  Equipped with an odd opening of an entire police force singing and dancing to a jovial jazz tune, (sung by two very overweight, effeminate officers for some reason), it gets even stranger as the title characters investigate an underground lair where a society of skeletons kidnap mummies who either are or are turned into beautiful, singing maidens that perform in a giant theater for their amusement.  It gets points for being rather daft, but definitely feels out of date with none of the humor coming off as anything except lame and kinda vanilla.  Skeletons must have been easier to animate than one would think though due to the huge abundance of cartoons of the day that relied on them.

THE CASE OF THE STUTTERING PIG
(1937)
Dir - Frank Tashlin
Overall: MEH

This early Porky Pig short from Warner Bros. was made during the Leon Schlesinger-produced run, a period which introduced the character two years prior in I Haven't Got a Hat.  The Case of the Stuttering Pig is a parody of the Perry Mason film The Case of the Stuttering Biship, (also by Warner Bros.), and is one of the earliest Looney Tunes' to featuring a horror element.  A fiendish lawyer, (what a stretch), takes a Jekyll and Hyde potion clearly labeled for convenience to turn into a towering monster, all with the master plan of kidnapping Porky and his family who have just inherited their dead uncle's fortune.  There is some slightly amusing forth wall-breaking, but it still pales in comparison overall to future Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies that would put practically all other comedy cartoons of their day to shame.

Fleischer Studios Animated Horror

SWING YOU SINNERS!
(1930)
Dir - The Fleischer Brothers
Overall: GOOD

The most famous horror entry in the New York-based, Fleischer Brothers Talkartoons catalog which produced forty-two shorts in a mere three year period was Swing You Sinners!.  A surreal musical with enough dark elements to warrant its reputation, it was based somewhat on the song "Sing, You Sinners" by W. Franke Harling and Sam Coslow, here with slightly reworked lyrics.  Betty Boop's frequent love interest Bimbo, (even though he is a dog and ergo not human, but that is neither here nor there), finds himself trapped in a graveyard come to life where every tombstone, ghost, and vaguely sinister looking monster begins chasing him around and notifying him that his "time is up" and hell most certainly awaits.  The fact that it wraps up without any lighthearted payoff the way Disney most likely would have handled it sets it apart as a more glum, supernatural cartoon from the early sound era.

BIMBO'S INITIATION
(1931)
Dir - Dave Fleischer
Overall: GOOD

Bimbo back into more mischief in another odd smorgasbord of dangerous set pieces, Bimbo's Initiation finds the Fleischer Studios trademark dog being pursued in an underground bizarro world by vaguely racists looking ghosts with melted candles on their heads.  The strangeness does not stop there.  Lauded as one of the most surreal cartoons from the studio or indeed from any during the era, creepy and/or disturbing visuals like skeletons, axe murdering machines, animated flames, and an overall fascination with characters butts certainly makes the whole experience more weird than horrifying.  This is enhanced ever more so by the jovial music that accompanies it from beginning to end.  The outcome is equally puzzling with a barrage of dog-eared Betty Boops showing up, but by that point, eh, why not?

BETTY BOOP'S HALLOWE'EN PARTY
(1933)
Dir - Dave Fleischer
Overall: GOOD

This straight-forward entry in the Betty Boop series and penultimate one released that year, (oddly enough, four days AFTER Halloween), Betty Boop's Hallowe'en Party is exactly what the title proclaims.  With every character perpetually bobbing along to the musical soundtrack and Betty herself busting into "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing", (which what that has to do with All Hallows Eve is anybody's guess), it is a buoyant presentation to be sure.  Inventive moments like cans of cat and witch paint being able to provide perfect wall decor, a cow that punches holes in all the jack-o'-lanterns, and a bunch of ghosts terrorizing a party-crashing gorilla all make for a lot of innocent fun.  Nothing unwholesome going on here, just mildly spooky, festive fare.

SHIVER ME TIMBERS!
(1934)
Dir - Dave Fleischer/Willard Bowsky
Overall: GOOD

Moving from Bimbo and Betty Boop onto Fleischer Studios' other major and possibly most enduring property Popeye the Sailor, Shiver Me Timbers! was the twelfth cartoon ever produced featuring the spinach-eating, squinty-eyed sailor man.  He, Olive Oyl, and Wimpy stumble across a ghost ship on a beach which quickly sends them off on rocky waters and ghosts, skeletons, and other poltergeist like activity messes with them for six-odd minutes before Popeye punches everybody to extra death.  It is the usual concept of every Popeye cartoon where he is never once afraid of anything and his sidekicks never once are NOT afraid of everything.  Plus there are some clever gags providing enough hoots, like Olive Oyl falling into flour and then getting confused as looking like one of the ghosts.

COBWEB HOTEL
(1936)
Dir - Dave Fleischer
Overall: GOOD

This one being a part of Fleischer Studios' self-explanatory Color Classics series which ran from 1934 to 1941, Cobweb Hotel is not horror in the conventional sense of having ghosts, goblins, or spooky visuals presented in any kind of fun, haunted house manner.  Yet it does have a inventive premise of a hoax hotel run by a spider who uses it to keep his fly guests captive against their will.  It is presented in a disturbing enough manner as to qualify as macabre, with the aforementioned insidious spider gleefully singing about his establishment while helpless flies are shown struggling in vein to get free.  The fact that the spider's voice is almost annoyingly raspy and breathing makes the whole ordeal even more creepy.  Just desserts are served though so it all ends up a happily every after affair.

Disney Mickey Mouse Series Horror

THE HAUNTED HOUSE
(1929)
Dir - Walt Disney
Overall: GOOD

The fourteenth cartoon produced in the Mickey Mouse series and first to be in the horror camp, The Haunted House is a typical early entry for the studio with Walt Disney himself providing Mickey's voice and yet another syncing of music to animation as their Silly Symphony shorts likewise utilized.  It has the same initial Disney collaborators of Walt, animator Ub Iwerks, and composer Carl Stalling and in fact, animation is lifted right out of The Skeleton Dance and placed here, that very same dance just taking place indoors this time.  The Disney musical trademarks do not stop there just by the simple fact that the undead are once again more concerned with having a jamboree than scaring anyone as they cannot stop using each other's back bones, rib cages, and butt bones as musical instruments.

THE GORILLA MYSTERY
(1930)
Dir - Burt Gillet
Overall: MEH

It is a bit of stretch to consider The Gorilla Mystery as something to warrant any interest from strict horror fans.  A parody of the 1925 stage play The Gorilla which was made twice cinematically already by the time this one came around, the large, threatening primate in question growls right at the screen and kidnaps Minnie Mouse, a kidnapping which does take place while her and Mickey are on the phone playing piano to one each other since you have to have joyful music thrown in there somewhere.  Yet it is hardly played for even any infantile frights.  All the same, the film is still considered one of the horror-esque ones in the Mickey Mouse series so here we are.  There is really not much else to it besides being a half musical and half cat and mouse chase resulting in the gorilla tripping in a rope, the end.

THE MAD DOCTOR
(1933)
Dir - David Hand
Overall: GOOD

The first appearance of Disney's Mad Doctor or Doctor XXX character was appropriately titled The Mad Doctor, the second in the Mickey Mouse series released for 1933.  The appropriate, frightening be it playful tone is maintained throughout as Mickey suffers a nightmare, (spoilers), where the evil doctor of the title kidnaps Pluto and has a whole Gothic abode equipped with any number of spooky traps and of course, lots of skeletons that come to life.  Though this time it is strictly horror business as no musical bust-outs occur.  Animation is lifted from the Silly Symphony Egyptian Melodies and the supernaturally self-locking front door gag is brought back from The Haunted House, which likewise found Mickey trapped in a creepy ole mansion against his wishes.

PLUTO'S JUDGEMENT DAY
(1935)
Dir - David Hand
Overall: GOOD

By 1935, cartoons in the Mickey Mouse series had begun being produced in Technicolor and the first that could be classified as a horror entry since then was Pluto's Judgement Day, one that as you could logically guess primary focuses on Mickey's pet dog instead.  We get to witness another nightmare, this time being Pluto's as he is lured to a hellish, underworld court where singing cats put him on trial for chasing them while wearing red, devilish robes and poking him with pitchforks.  Pluto's ultimate comeuppance steers just shy of being too gruesome for children as he is held over a burning fire while strapped helplessly to a bottomless chair that leaves his rear end exposed for easier flame access, waking up and kissing Mickey's pet cat in a bath proving that he has learned his lesson.  It is a solid enough, diabolical ride until then though.

LONESOME GHOSTS
(1937)
Dir - Burt Gillet
Overall: GOOD

Released three days after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Lonesome Ghosts has also been seen in retrospect as a possible inspiration for Ghostbusters and even features the line of dialog, "I ain't scared of no ghost!" so, close enough.  As famous as any of the studio's horror cartoons and featured in the 1977 Halloween themed episode of The Wonderful World of Disney amongst many other compilations, Lonesome Ghosts has all the appropriate fun and spooky eye and ear candy present with a dilapidated haunted house, reverberated ghost voices, and ominous music.  Donald Duck's voice is still impossible to understand, which was nothing new though.  It endures quite well and even though it is still too kid-friendly to compare to the far more humorous cartoons produced by MGM and Warner Bros., it can easily rank as the best single Disney short at least with a horror theme.

Disney Silly Symphonies Horror

THE SKELETON DANCE
(1929)
Dir - Walt Disney
Overall: GOOD

The opening installment in what would become the Silly Symphony series of short films either produced or also directed by Walt Disney himself, (as the first few were), The Skeleton Dance was conceived of by his friend, composer Carl Stalling whose concept was to specifically meld animation with music and in this case have it be a bunch of happy skeletons dancing in a graveyard.  The imagery here represents some of the earliest and most iconic animated horror every produced, besides just representing the birthplace of Disney's own enduring mark on the genre.  Fun, spooky, wonderfully, (and primarily), animated by Ub Iwerks, it is essential viewing for any fan of such lightheaded yet macabre visuals and a quintessential template for all future musical cartoons that would follow in the series.

HELL'S BELLS
(1929)
Dir - Walt Disney/Ub Iwerks
Overall: GOOD

Another early and well-regarded Silly Symphony entry once again animated and by some sources therefore also directed by Ub Iwerks along with Walt Disney himself, Hell's Bells features Satan embarking on unholy festivities with his evil minions.  These include giant spiders, bats, a demon cow, snake monsters, a three-headed dog who he also feeds a demon to, and one such demon who leads the Dark One on a chase that ultimately gets the latter fully engulfed by grabbing fire hands.  While it is technically more gruesome than some of Disney's other shorts simply by taking place in such a fantastical, hellish abyss as opposed to just utilized witches or ghosts getting into shenanigans, it is still played for giggles.  Certainly by today's standards nearly a century later at least, it is only slightly less kid friendly as anything else by the studio.

THE CAT'S NIGHTMARE
(1931)
Dir - Wilfred Jackson
Overall: GOOD

Originally released as The Cat's Nightmare with The Cat's Out existing as a possible working title on an existing vault print, this one is rather self explanatory as a cat gets kicked out of his human's house for the night only to have a series of misfortunes befall him before the rooster crows and the sun rises again.  The fact that many of these unpleasant instances seem to be hallucinatory gives the filmmakers even more liberties in indulging in some fun, uncanny imagery such as a scarecrow presumably coming to life and dancing, a series of crows, spiders, owls and even some spooky trees terrorizing our unlucky feline, and a scary bat getting to bust a move at one point.  Wildfred Jackson would go on to direct Peter Pan, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Lady in the Tramp as well as the "A Night on Bald Mountain" in Fantasia, arguably the overall finest animated horror segment ever produced.

EGYPTIAN MELODIES
(1931)
Dir - Wilfred Jackson
Overall: GOOD

A year before Universal dropped one of the greatest horror films of any kind with The Mummy, Walt Disney tackled similar terrain by producing the spooky enough Egyptian Melodies.  There is no evil curse or anything, but things are still more creepy at the beginning when a curious spider ventures into an Egyptian tomb that is dark and foreboding.  By the time we get inside however, it is mostly fun and games again as a couple of mummies do a similar dance as the graveyard skeletons did in The Skeleton Dance and then the ancient hieroglyphics come to life in an increasingly excitable fashion.   The animation itself is as fluid as always and this one once again has Wilfred Jackson and composer Frank Churchill working together, the later who would pen "Heigh-Ho" and "Whistle While You Work" amongst others for the hugely famous studio.

BABES IN THE WOODS
(1932)
Dir - Burt Gillett
Overall: GOOD

Fusing the British folktale of the same name with elements of Hansel and Gretel, as well as an original element of a friendly gnome village that swoops in for the rescue, Babes in the Woods was another handled by Burt Gillett who would direct a number of notable Disney shorts throughout his career.  One of the first Silly Symphonies to be produced in Technicolor while simultaneously being the last to use Pat Powers' Cinephone sound recording system, it features a cackling witch that successfully lures a number of hapless children to her house made out of candy only to transform them into any number of furry, slimy, or otherwise unpleasant beasts for her amusement.  Being a Disney cartoon of course, it reworks the type of Brothers Grimm nastiness that the source material has with everyone smiling and dancing in the end, though not before it gets a little hair-rasing first.

Lon Chaney Horror

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME
(1923)
Dir - Wallace Worsley
Overall: GOOD

Spending years as a character actor in multitudes of shorts and feature-length films, The Hunchback of Notre Dame was the staring vehicle that propelled Lon Chaney into a money-making name.  Speaking of money, Universal spent a great deal adapting the Victor Hugo novel of the same name, constructing enormous sets, making thousands of costumes, and utilizing hundreds of extras.  Though the movie has very few traces of anything horror related and even turns the camera deliberately away from all of the acts of violence, Chaney's Quasimodo became his first iconic "monster" character and one of the many elaborate make-up jobs of his career.  Contorting his body, morphing his cheekbones, using a glass eye, and carrying a heavy, rubber hump on his back, his transformation is a captivating one even if his screen time is relatively short compared to the main melodrama between the beggars, gypsies, and royal aristocrats of 1482 Paris.  The film feels its length at times, but it is also fitting to the grand presentation to go big or go home.  Any fans of Chaney's work cannot go wrong in starting here.

THE MONSTER
(1925)
Dir - Ronald West
Overall: MEH

Made independently by director Roland West though later distributed by MGM, The Monster is a misleading, top-billed vehicle for Lon Chaney who only shows up for a handful of minutes, nearly all of which are in the final moments of the final act.  Chaney is more hammy than menacing and plays one of the first in what would become stereotypical, "inmates running the asylum" mad scientist type characters in horror cinema.  Not that he does a bad job of course, but there is just so little of him to go around and so little for him to do besides smile manically and make a few gestures in a white surgeons gown.  The film has not aged well anywhere else either.  It is primarily a comedy, but the running gags are lame and the main cast, (since let's face it, Chaney is a support player at best), is mostly unmemorable, save for Johnny Arthur who does an adequate job as an aspiring, wimpy detective that no one takes seriously who of course comes out on top.  The story is a dragging snore though and easily one of the least interesting, early old dark house movies that meanders around lame set pieces and barely has anything funny or creepy thrown in to wake up the audience.

THE UNKNOWN
(1927)
Dir - Tod Browning
Overall: GREAT

One of the strongest overall performances from Lon Chaney and possibly the best existing collaboration between he and Tod Browning was the mad carnival, doomed romance thriller The Unknown.  Though some early scenes are still presumably lost forever, (which ends up clocking the whole film in at a mere fifty-so minutes), nothing feels rushed even as things escalate rather quickly.  Working with the real life, armless performance artist Paul Desmuke who provided the actor's elaborate feet stunts, Chaney is fascinatingly tortured and unhinged as the circus performer Alonzo, bringing both uncomfortable menace and pity to his every scene.  A young, completely unrecognizable Joan Crawford is also a plus for any classic Hollywood cinefile and her silent, reved-up proclamation of how much she hates hands provides a good, unintended chuckle.  With Browning also providing the story, it is very much an auteur work for the director whose fascination with the life of the circus and its freaks works as well if not better here than it does in the more notorious and well known actual Freaks which he would make five years later.  Outside of perhaps The Phantom of the Opera, this could easily stand as Chaney's most fascinating if not best movie.