The science behind the Hollywood monster series

The classic movies have brought Frankenstein, Vampire, Mummy, … to the right touch of fear and psychosocial trauma.

The laboratory where Frankenstein’s monster was born in the movie released in 1931. Photo: Universal Studios Licensing LLC. On a stormy, rainy night, the mad scientist is trying to revive an inanimate monster he created by piecing together parts of an exhumed corpse. After receiving a high-voltage electric shock, it suddenly moved its long, bony fingers and raised one arm. “It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!” shouted the doctor. It was a memorable scene in the Universal Pictures film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s horror novel Frankenstein (or The Modern Prometheus) (first published 1818), starring Mary Shelley. by Vladimir Karloff as the monster. The work became a blockbuster at the box office when it hit the public’s taste for horror cinema, and paved the way for Universal to release a series of iconic monster movies later, including The Mummy (Mummy), Dracula (Vampire), Creature from the Back Lagoon (Creature from the Black Lagoon), … Whether emerging from the swamp, lying in an Egyptian stone coffin or patched up like Frankenstein, … all these monsters are the product of fascination (and sometimes even fear). ) of the community towards science. More than just the creative work of the design and makeup team, the knowledge (which may still be limited) about amphibians, mummification, anatomy … has been borrowed to bring to mind. aghast. Frankenstein movie poster. Photo: Universal Studios Licensing LLC. Shelley was only 18 years old when she wrote Frankenstein while on vacation in Lake Geneva. A special lover of science, she often attends lectures to keep up to date with new trends and research, including the relatively new field of electrophysiology. She was very interested in the work of 18th-century Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, whose initial experiments showed that electric currents could cause (dead) frog legs to twitch, and then used it as inspiration for Dr. Frankenstein. It was also during this period that scientists began to learn about the nature of resuscitation techniques—sometimes bringing back a person thought to have drowned by manipulating air into their trachea and squeezing their abdomen. Shelly’s own mother had experienced such an emergency when she jumped off the Putney Bridge on the Thames, two years before she was born. More than a century later, Universal adapted her novel into a Frankenstein movie, and then released another monster classic: The Mummy (1932) – also starring Boris Karloff as the monk Imhotep, a master of mummification; The film tells the story of a soul punished by being buried alive and accidentally released to return to earth to cause chaos. Before that, in 1922, a team led by British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb of the famous King Tutankhamun, which has remained a mystery for 3,000 years. The event ignited the curiosity and imagination of millions around the world, and sparked a passion for ancient Egypt – decades after the original release of The Mummy. “Monsters have always been a mixture of conscious and unconscious fear.” – Leo Braudy, author of Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds , Witches, Vampires, Mummy and other monsters of the Natural and Supernatural worlds) commented. For example, the fear of vampire bites in the movie Dracula (released in 1931) was based on Bram Stoker’s medieval horror novel (published 1897) and the play Dracula ( performed in 1924) by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. Vampire legends existed for hundreds of years before Stoker published the novel, but researchers believe it was deadly mid-19th-century epidemics like cholera and tuberculosis that inspired and spread vampire myths. “In the absence of science, vampire theory is easy to accept. If someone gets TB and spreads it to other family members, they’ll blame the vampires instead of the bacteria.” — Sarah Crawford, longtime curator at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles , identify. In the movie Creature From the Black Lagoon (released in 1954), designer Milicent Patrick did a lot of research on prehistoric animals and sea creatures to shape the vision for the character “Gill-Man”. She is especially fascinated by the illustrations of reptiles and amphibians that lived about 400 million years ago on Earth. Director Jack Arnold drew inspiration for Gill-Man from the story of the long-extinct coelacanth and thought to be the ancestor of land animals, with unusual fins (which look like like limbs) allowing it to crawl from the ocean to the land. The connection between the sea and land animals, along with the story that the producer heard at a dinner party about a half-human, half-fish creature living in the Amazon River, … all have been brought into creation by Patrick. Figure. Designer Milicent Patrick sketched the sea monster Gill-Man in Creature from the Back Lagoon. Photo: Universal Studios Licensing LLC. Science has not only inspired characters on screen, but has also led to technical experiments and inventions in the field of filmmaking. While staging Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, designer Kenneth Strickfaden – who spent many years as an electrician – devised techniques to simulate ball lightning and electrical discharges. And artist Jack Pierce – the head of Universal’s makeup department – spent eight hours with Karloff on The Mummy, using a mixture made of fuller’s earth and more than 150 feet of ice. gauze. It was the science behind Hollywood’s iconic monsters that made the movies of this golden age even more “horrifying”. In terms of perception, perhaps most viewers know those creatures do not exist. But the thrill and excitement of watching the dramas on the screen made them think, What if they really existed? “Horror movies have been continuously produced, more than any other genre. Because they (monsters and horror things) are, to a certain extent, born within our selves, and as such can never fail,” Braudy said.