In the Year of our Lord 2016, you can’t take a step without tripping over some movie studio’s new shared universe epic. Marvel’s phase one films proved it could be done, and modern Hollywood’s paralyzing fear of deviation from proven formulae ensured that it would be done for the forseeable future. Every major studio wants their own celluloid sandbox to play in; aside from Marvel, Disney is also making Star Wars side stories, and Warner Bros. continues to shit the bed in slow motion with their own superhero films. Despite this recent bout of follow-the-leader, though, Marvel missed inventing the concept of the shared cinematic universe by, oh, about ⅔ of a century. Fittingly enough, Universal Studios pioneered the concept with 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which established that their cycle of gothic horror films shared more than an aesthetic. Not only did the Universal Monsters™ set a precedent re: shared continuities, but they also wove those disparate threads together to create a unique pop cultural tapestry that has become a sub-genre all its own.
A Pre-History of Horror
Although Universal had been making horror films back into the silent days — the costume epics of Lon Chaney Sr., for example — it’s generally accepted that the first entry into the capital-H Universal Horror canon was Dracula (1931), followed immediately by Frankenstein (also 1931). These films combined gothic horror tropes with a cinematic sensibility heavily influenced by German expressionism, and Universal would attempt a number of companion films with varying degrees of success.
There would be sequels — most notably Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936), but these films expanded on existing stories, but did nothing to establish a larger mythos. For more than a decade, the Universal Monsters were united thematically and by studio copyright, and not much else. As far as we could tell, there were no vampires in the world inhabited by Henry Frankenstein and his creations, and Dracula never had to contend with werewolves.
That separation makes sense from a folkloric perspective. Vampires were a preoccupation in some regions, with witches and werewolves filling the same niche in others; there were very few communities that actively feared more than one kind of monster. After all, they were originally cultural bogeys that spoke to the specific fears and anxieties of the communities that imagined them, and those terrified peasants had no idea that their nightmares would someday be fodder for a movie studio that realized that monsters equaled money. In drawing from so many different traditions homogenizing them for 20th century Americans, Universal created new versions of these monsters that could occupy the same cultural space without appearing incongruous.
A Fateful Meeting
On March 5th, 1943, Frankenstein met the Wolf Man. They didn’t exactly get along, but their onscreen disagreement wasn’t exactly an epic battle. Frankenstein did a lot of groaning and waving his arms, while Wolf Man squatted nearby, snarling. The good news is that while Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man pioneered the disappointingly inconclusive crossover fight, it also invented the movie crossover writ large. For our purposes, though, it established that the links between Universal’s monster franchises were more than thematic, that their monsters inhabited the same fictional world.
When Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man turned out to be a hit, the studio decided to respond by adding Dracula to the mix for House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). These films were increasingly silly, climaxing with actual, literal slapstick in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), but they established character dynamics between the monsters that would survive through decades of pastiche and parody.
Larry Talbot, the human form of the Wolf Man, developed something of a personal rivalry with Dracula, an animosity that has no basis in folklore or literature but survives in modern pop culture. The concept of some inborn enmity between vampires and werewolves has figured prominently in countless latter day horror stories, from CGI crapfests like Van Helsing and the Underworld franchise to romantic melodramas like True Blood and the Twilight saga. Even the recent horror mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows features a rather petulant rivalry between the vampire protagonists and a gang of polite lycanthropes who strive to be “werewolves, not swearwolves.”
These films also created the larger world these monsters existed in, a region they call “Vasaria.” It’s a bizarre European never-land with British gentry, Slavic peasantry, antebellum Austro-Hungarian police, and Romani around every corner. The temporal setting is also a little wonky; it’s simultaneously the Middle Ages and 1943, with horse-drawn carriages rolling past dieselpunk laboratories hidden within ancient castles. Vasaria formed the template for the popular idea of Transylvania as the land of monsters, not just Dracula’s hometown. Frankenstein took place in Switzerland and Germany, but Gene Wilder got off at Transylvania Station, you know?
The Monster Mash
The final films of the original cycle brought the classic monsters into the same continuity, but the horror revival of the 1960s galvanized them into an inseparable pantheon. The original run of Universal films were packaged and sold to television as Shock Theater, and it was then that the Universal marketing machine began to actively promote the monsters as a discrete brand. In 1963, Aurora Plastics began to produce a well-loved series of model kits of the entire gang that adorned the bedrooms of countless teens and tweens across America. A year earlier, rock and roll journeyman Bobby Pickett re-branded himself “Boris” and brought The Monster Mash into the world.
The mythoi of the Universal Monsters are so inextricably interwoven that today, stories bringing the band back together are more common than solo tales. Think about it: For every Dracula: Untold, there are (literally) two Hotel Transylvanias. We’ve already covered Mad Monster Party? at length, and let us never forget the pure magic that is The Monster Squad. These movies generally include all or most of the classic monsters, even when it doesn’t make sense; Monster Squad has the Amazonian-ass Gill-Man surfacing in a middle-American swamp to hang out with Dracula. Objectively, it makes zero sense that these characters would have any common goals — or even be able to communicate — but such is the strength of Universal’s pop cultural influence.
On television, the dark gods were recast as a parody of the American sitcom family on The Munsters. They became the stars of a kids’ Saturday morning sitcom in Groovie Goolies, and their speculative pets did in Monster Tails. And, I daren’t shit you, there have been two separate cartoons about the monsters fighting crime as costumed superheroes.
The Monsters March On
Even though the Universal Monsters are very much a product of the 20th century, their legacy shows no signs of continuing. Relatively traditional depictions of the monsters have shown up repeatedly within The Sims franchise; players can choose to have all manner of undead share not just a universe, but an attractive split-level. Meanwhile, the Darkstalkers series puts the dark gods into a Street Fighter-style tournament (Anakaris 4 life). On television, Penny Dreadful does its best to bring the classic monsters into a more cohesive timeline and setting.
Most tantalizingly, Universal seems to think that their ticket to today’s shared cinematic universe party was purchased way back in 1943. 2014’s aggressively alright Dracula Untold was the first in a series of new horror films, apparently culminating in an Avengers-style team-up somewhere in the 2020’s. Those monsters, man. You can put them down, but they won’t stay that way for long.
Oh, and Wolf Man’s got nards.
