FRANKENMONTH

Happy My Favorite Month everybody! The month of sanctioned spooky fun and, here in Arizona, a gradually waning inferno is blessedly upon us again.

The Wife did her usual fine job of bringing macabre festivity to Hacienda del Moorhead:

MeTV's old-school classicist Svengoolie favors us with a Franken-Fest throughout the month...

...kicking off tonight with 1948's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, with its wonderful animated bat transformations, Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf man, Glenn Strange as the Monster, and the great Bela Lugosi, excellent in his final screen turn as Dracula. It wraps up on Halloween Eve with the 1965 rib-tickler Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster.

Your Humble Narrator is a lifelong fan of ol' Frankie myself; a few years ago I did a "listicle" for New Times online about the strangest versions of Frankenstein. Since then I might have added this can of ginger ale...

...meant to promote one of the Hotel Transylvania sequels, in which the monster looks like a member of a boyband.

Anyway, a safe and happy October to us all, and many happy returns.

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: