1:18:05
These are very charged images
1:18:07
that the Universal horror film,
probably intuitively, adopted for its own.
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Frankenstein's laboratory, with its secret
dungeons, is one huge, hidden hell.
1:18:17
The lower vaults of Castle Dracula, with
their living-dead psychosexual impulses.
1:18:21
And Carfax Abbey cellar, from which
the salvaged lovers ascend a staircase
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into a stream of sunlight
at the story's end.
1:18:30
Son of Frankenstein invokes
the literal burning pit,
1:18:33
with its sulphurous brimstone.
1:18:35
In Son of Dracula, Count Alucard rises
from the black depths of a slimy bog.
1:18:41
In The Black Cat, a satanic mass
is conducted below stairs. And so on.
1:18:48
The archetypal flow of Leroux's narrative
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made for the most logical and satisfying
deployment of these elements.
1:18:54
Lubin and his writers were smart men
who observed the rituals,
1:18:58
and fashioned them
within conventional narrative.
1:19:01
The same visuals and many of
the same icons recur poetically with force
1:19:06
in Jean Cocteau's adaptation
of Beauty and the Beast.
1:19:10
The mirror, the beast, the dark rooms,
1:19:13
the ascent into the beast's lair,
the absent father.
1:19:16
As Carlos Clarens observed,
"Cocteau knew the value of his symbols,
1:19:20
where the director of the 1925 Phantom,
Rupert Julian, did not."
1:19:25
Lubin, too, and his writers,
knew the value of their symbols,
1:19:29
but they deployed them in the confines
of commercial Hollywood narrative.
1:19:35
It is never explained how a 5'6",
1:19:38
50-year-old musician with bad arthritis
1:19:41
is able to lug a concert grand, several
large oak chairs and a dining table
1:19:46
down five stories on slippery
stone staircases around a black lake
1:19:51
that has about a 3 foot walkway around it.
1:19:54
But then again, it is a fairy tale.