ALL THE WAY HOMUNCULUS

Happy Halloween Eve!

Your Humble Narrator got to spend a jolly hour-&-a-half Saturday evening talking scary movies on KTAR's Jay Lawrence Show, along with Phoenix Film Critics Society President David Ramsey. Among the callers, The Exorcist won the poll as scariest movie ever by about a half-dozen votes.

In honor of the day, let's do a bonus monster: The time has come, I think, to officially acknowledge one of the very greatest of all time...

Halloween Bonus Monster-of-the-Week: ...Boris Karloff’s incarnation of The Frankenstein Monster…

Karloff played the role just three times, in Universal’s original 1931 version, which The Kid & I watched the other day, & in the first two sequels, The Bride of Frankenstein—the only one in which he speaks as the character—& Son of Frankenstein (decades later he donned the makeup again, for an episode of the TV series Route 66). But his poignant, entirely sympathetic performances set a standard for acting in horror movies that has rarely been equaled, & probably never surpassed.

Not that Karloff's was the only worthy interpretation of the character. At 11:45 a.m. (MST) tomorrow is another fine Frankie: Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein. Lee’s makeup...

...more closely resembles the description of the character in Shelley’s novel, although, like Karloff, he doesn’t speak at all, much less spout high Miltonic rhetoric, like the book’s Monster.

Here, by the way, is a superb portrait of Lee's Monster, drawn as a teenager by Ed Naha, the veteran writer of & on horror: