♪
[Campbell] It's probably very cathartic why horror works.
It takes you to the edge of life.
It's one of the few genres that can get an audience
to react viscerally.
That's all horror is.
These six kids are gonna die, one by one.
Maybe one schmo will make it to the end.
But it's all life and death.
[Englund] For over a century, horror films have been
an essential part of American culture.
They have thrilled us. They have entertained us.
And they have also exorcised our collective demons.
The horror genre has always reflected our shared fears
and anxieties.
People-- they want to be scared.
They're coming to get you, Barbara.
[screams]
[Blum] The world is always throwing up new terrors
that we can turn into horror movies.
[Englund] Blumhouse's Compendium of Horror examines
how those films have held a mirror up to society
and allowed us to experience and purge our national fears
in the shared experience of cinema.
The scariest fucking thing.
[man] We wanted Blair Witch to come from a place
of that primal motivation.
Really get under your skin and really scare you.
[Englund] From the brutality of war
to national financial disasters,
foreign or alien threats,
uncomfortable challenges to the social fabric,
to the struggle for progress,
all these cultural shifts and movements
have manifested in our collective fears.
They have inspired horror's greatest filmmakers
and resulted in the creation of some of the most
terrifying and unforgettable films of all time.
[woman screams]
Invasion of the Body Snatchers--
one of the most disturbing movies ever made.
I was not ready for it.
[man #2] Of course, Leatherface was terrifying.
He was just this awful, faceless entity
that was in this house killing teenagers.
We've got no money, but we scare the hell out of you.
They don't make that movie,
I don't get inspired to make mine.
I came up with the title Friday the 13th,
and I took out a big ad in Variety.
"The most terrifying film ever made-- Friday the 13th."
And I didn't have anything.
Nightmare on Elm Street. It's so simple.
Somebody that terrorizes you in your dreams.
And if he gets to you, you die.
Sleep kills.
[Bell] Horror fans-- they want to be scared.
[audience gasping]
Anybody with a video camera can make a horror film.
There's a certain dedication to it that no other genre has.
They wanted to [Blows raspberry] bump it up and like,
"Whoa, did you see that?"
[Blum] The communal experience of screaming together
in a dark theater
is an experience that draws us back again and again.
Big old monster walks in the room, we all jump.
Aah!
Fear and fun are co-mingled.
And the audience gets to sit and scream and yell
and come out of the theater unharmed at the end.
♪
[Nicotero] My folks are big movie buffs.
So we saw everything.
For me, as a kid, I was fascinated with monsters.
I was just absolutely enthralled with Frankenstein,
The Wolf Man,
Dracula,
all the Universal monster movies.
I was kind of the weird kid in high school.
I was into monsters
and I was into all this kind of strange stuff
back before nerds or geeky people
that loved this kind of stuff were embraced.
There was one guy that I hung out with,
and we saw every movie together.
But other than that, people were just-- didn't get it.
I got it.
♪
I am Dracula.
[wolf howls]
[Blum] The most iconic horror characters
come from the best imaginations,
but also, they come from the culture.
Dracula.
the Creature from the Black Lagoon...
- [chainsaw revs] - ...Leatherface,
Jason,
Michael Myers,
Freddy,
Candyman,
Pennywise,
and Red in Us...
Little girl,
run!
...are all uniquely American monsters.
Sometimes, the divide between the real world
and a horror movie is a very, very thin line.
[Englund] The birth of the American horror experience
dates back nearly 100 years.
In the wake of World War I,
German artists created seminal horror films
that echoed societal fears overwhelming the population.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu
were dark and disturbing stories
that expressed audiences' shared sense of dread.
The idea that audiences would embrace unsettling films
which allowed them to experience and purge those fears
quickly caught on in America.
[Roosevelt] The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
[Nicotero] The '20s and '30s were a really interesting time
for the United States with post-World War I.
They needed escapist.
They needed something to get away to.
[reporter] More than 70 million people in the United States
go to the movies each week.
Horror films function as, like, a mirror of society.
They're gonna reflect whatever is going on.
So whatever political, whatever national trauma,
whatever wartime we are seeing,
we're gonna see horror reflect what's going on.
Good day, Herr Baron.
Well, what do you want?
If it's trouble, go away. I've trouble enough.
Oh, there's no trouble, sir.
What do you mean, no trouble?
There's nothing but trouble.
[Englund] America and the rest of the world
were barely recovering from the horrors of World War I
when a new threat was unleashed--
the terror of financial catastrophe
in the form of the Great Depression.
It's interesting. In tough times, horror thrives.
The monsters of the era of right around the Depression
were relatable to all of us.
There's pathos in these characters.
[wood creaks]
[eerie laughter echoes]
♪
[Blum] The 1930s saw the birth of the American horror movie.
Carl Laemmle Jr., son of Carl Laemmle
who founded Universal, made a big bet on horror,
and his instincts were right.
He put together adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein.
[Englund] Before Dracula and Frankenstein
became iconic movie monsters,
Carl Laemmle Jr. had to find a way
to make these large-scale, ambitious films
in the midst of financial hardship.
The stock-market crash of 1929 devastated the global economy
and decimated movie budgets.
But nothing-- nothing could kill the pictures.
Carl Laemmle Jr. found a workaround by optioning plays
that were easily adapted into film scripts.
With these ready-made stories in hand,
Laemmle tapped directors with dark sensibilities.
Laemmle recognized that audiences wanted horror movies
to purge their fears now more than ever,
and he tasked his directors to fulfill that vision.
But they needed the perfect leading men
to bring the monsters to life.
[Blum] He hired James Whale to direct Frankenstein
and Tod Browning to direct Dracula.
[Hendrix] Tod Browning, the director,
as a kid, worked in carnivals,
and one of his shticks was he was the living corpse.
He would get buried alive for hours at a time
and then dug up, sometimes overnight.
And so he was someone who was very acquainted
with living death and being in a coffin.
Director James Whale was a World War I vet.
He spent a lot of his war in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
He was a tremendously troubled individual.
Carl Laemmle Jr.--
he also approved casting Bela Lugosi
and Boris Karloff in those films.
[Lugosi] Frankenstein.
[Karloff] Dracula.
And those actors are still synonymous with 1930s horror.
Dracula and Frankenstein, which really do kind of become
an embodiment of society
where it is these very wealthy people in these castles.
But the castles are all crumbling.
And the townsfolk are all down below, struggling.
Castle Dracula?
Yes. That's where I'm going.
No, you mustn't go there.
And this is what we see in Dracula.
[Englund] In 1931,
the world was introduced to the first Universal monster.
I bid you welcome.
[Englund] The sinister Count Dracula.
Ouch!
Oh, it's nothing serious.
Just a small cut from that paperclip.
It's just a scratch.
[Kusama] The notion of Dracula as a character
is that he is an eternal evil.
To die, to be really dead-- that must be glorious.
He's someone who takes great pleasure in the victimization
of mostly female victims.
He has a sadistic love affair
with other people's pain and humiliation.
♪
Bela Lugosi's Dracula is very revolutionary for me
in that he's the one Universal monster
that's not tormented at what he is.
He's actually enjoying himself as best he can and go, "Well,
since whatever can't be remedied must be endured.
And if I have to endure it, I may as well enjoy it."
Excuse me. Count Dracula, Professor Van Helsing.
A most distinguished scientist whose name we know.
Even in the wild Transylvania.
[Carpenter] Bela Lugosi--
he was kind of an evil Rudolph Valentino.
He was originally written
as an aristocrat back in the old days.
For one who has not lived even a single lifetime,
you are a wise man.
Slicked-back hair, and he was all-- got the girls.
You see, I am 30 years here in America.
And eight months ago, I was called to come to England
to revive the American version of Dracula.
Doesn't Dracula ever end for you?
No, no. Dracula will never end.
[Williamson] I always was scared of Dracula
because there was something very sensuous about him.
He was the most sexual of our sort of monsters.
It's, you know, the power of seduction,
the power of the danger.
You know, he is there to either kiss or kill you,
and you don't know which.
And in the moment, you don't really care.
Come here.
Come...
here.
[Oswalt] I think the reason sex is so connected to Dracula
and to vampires
is that a lot of people's kink
is being completely dominated and drained
and used up as someone else's fuel.
There's something really kind of beautiful about that.
[Kusama] There's something about the notion of the vampire.
The thing that, in this case, literally sucks your blood
but, in other ways, can get in your head,
can change you from the inside out.
Can make you a version of the monster he is.
No, master, please.
Please don't ask me to do that.
That, to me, says a lot
about the corrupting power of power.
[Englund] In the wake of the Great Depression,
Americans were angry
at the corrupt and selfish wealthy class
that they blamed for the economic crash
that left 12 million Americans without work.
A staggering 12,000 jobs were lost every day.
Over 20,000 Americans committed suicide.
And Hollywood delivered them a monster fit for the times.
The money-sucking upper class was personified
by the handsome and wealthy, bloodsucking nobleman
feeding on his less fortunate victims.
[Williamson] Dracula resonated with a lot of people
because here comes this man who's just sucking the life
out of us, and I think
[chuckles] people living in that time felt like
life was sucking the life out of them.
Everyone was thirsty and hungry for food,
so they understood the need for blood.
[Englund] Dracula was an overnight success,
selling 50,000 tickets
within days of its opening in New York.
[man] Here is Bela Lugosi, the screen's numbere vampire
who's decided to pay back some of that blood
that he's borrowed.
I can't help thinking what a perfect payoff
it would be if Dracula Lugosi,
after all the jugular veins he's tapped,
should be found too anemic to donate blood.
[Englund] The success of Dracula gave Universal confidence
to greenlight its next monster movie, Frankenstein...
based on a play and inspired by Mary Shelley's novel from 1818.
The brain you stole fits the brain of a dead man,
waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands.
With my own hands.
♪
It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!
[Turek] Imagine being in a movie theater, seeing Boris Karloff
lumber out of the dark for the first time.
You know, they do that great cut
where it just goes boom, boom-- right into his face.
It's so scary.
There's something very taboo
about a mad scientist screaming about playing God.
There was that moment, too, that was always cut,
where Frankenstein meets a little girl
who's picking flowers and throwing them into the lake.
Would you like one of my flowers?
See how mine floats?
- [grunts] - No, you're hurting me!
No!
And then it all suddenly cut to
her dad carrying her corpse through the village.
[Nicotero] There is something scary about
something that is unstoppable and...
Maria-- she's drowned.
♪
...and pursues you...
[screams]
...and is relentless.
[screams]
And that's what I kind of love about it.
[grunting]
[Englund] For audiences in 1931,
Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he pieced together
were another potent symbol
of the relentless evil that had ruined their lives
through war and financial hardship.
Frankenstein really created the text for horror
for many decades.
[Halberstam] Basically, every era remakes Frankenstein.
Back into the closet. Back, back.
Back, back, back, back, back!
[Turek] They were there to lay the foundation for what works.
Dr. Frankenstein, I presume.
♪
[growls]
Frankenstein is a story about a mad scientist
whose greatest dream is to create life.
And he does so by cobbling together a body,
galvanizing that body with the use of a lightning storm.
Child's Play.
- Hi. I'm Chucky. Wanna play? - [screams]
The Chucky films are Frankenstein movies...
about a doll that comes to life after the warehouse
that the doll is stored in is struck by lightning.
[glass shatters]
That's a Frankenstein myth.
I said talk to me, damn it,
or else I'm gonna throw you in the fire.
I mean, look at Michael Myers.
Michael Myers is the perfect example.
You can't stop him. You can't kill him.
[Carpenter] Michael Myers was written as a blank.
He had no defining characteristics, really.
He had no face.
It was a thing without a face.
Almost a force of nature, as opposed to a human being.
[grunting]
You can draw a direct line from Frankenstein's monster
to Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
[chain saw revving]
Frankenstein's monster is always terrified,
jumping at the light, at fire.
He's tormented by the other characters.
And there's a scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
where Leatherface is genuinely frightened and agitated
that why are so many people coming into his house.
[screams]
You actually kind of feel bad for him in a weird way
because he's frightened.
[Turek] Because we're all rooting
for the Frankenstein monster
who's pulled into this world and abandoned,
and we all feel bad for him.
[Englund] Like Dracula, Frankenstein also told a tale
of elites unleashing a horror on the masses.
In this case, a scientist who wanted to play God.
It was the perfect allegory for a traumatized America
still reeling from facing its own monsters--
the First World War, financial disaster,
and the prospect of another global conflict on the horizon.
The movie struck a chord.
[Hendrix] Frankenstein became a huge, huge hit,
because I think it tapped into a lot of these fears.
Frankenstein-- it's almost like an autobiography
by director James Whale.
It is a cry for help.
James Whale.
He was a war veteran who saw a lot of combat.
He had a hard time sleeping without being drunk
or doped up on pills.
These things haunted him.
He talked a lot about suicide.
He didn't like water, yet he had a swimming pool
and would ultimately kill himself with that swimming pool,
almost like he had the instrument
for his own self-destruction there at his house,
waiting until he was ready for it.
[McKendry] Universal saw the success
of Dracula and Frankenstein.
They hit, and they exploded.
And so in the 1930s, that's what we see is Universal
owns the game with these movie monsters.
And with that, they keep just churning them out
as fast as they can.
♪
[shouts]
[screams]
♪
[screams]
Stop where you are.
♪
[man] Oh, no!
No!
Inspector Crow, District Police.
- Smoke. - [grunts]
[woman] What strange-looking country.
[man screaming]
♪
[Campbell] I saw The Mummy on television.
I was pretty familiar with all of the Universal monsters
because they did the best job selling them.
I mean, they had the package.
If you wanted horror, it was Universal.
They treated their genre seriously.
I told you not to disturb me.
[Englund] The Invisible Man,
adapted from H.G. Wells' horror novel of the same name.
There must be a way back.
[Englund] After Frankenstein,
audiences were hungry for more monster movies.
Only, this time,
the monster literally was the mad scientist himself.
A scientist playing dangerously with nature.
An arrogant, elite doctor, indulging his dark impulses
and, as a result, unleashing horror
on an unsuspecting and innocent public.
You're crazy to know who I am, aren't you?
All right, I'll show you.
There's a souvenir for you, and one for you.
I'll show you who I am and what I am.
[laughing maniacally]
Look. He's all eaten away.
[The Invisible Man] How do you like that, eh?
[laughing]
[Nicotero] Ironically, the most effective killer
of every Universal monster is the Invisible Man.
[train horn blares]
Invisible Man, like, derails a train.
[people screaming]
And the entire train goes off a cliff.
It kills a whole trainload full of people.
And basically, he's the one that's not a monster.
He's the one that's a human being,
which I always find fascinating.
[The Invisible Man] Thank God for the fire. Sit down.
Unless you want me to knock your brains out.
Sit down!
You're frightened out of your wits, aren't you?
[Dickerson] When I was growing up...
[The Invisible Man] Oh, it's no good talking like this.
...there was a show that used to come on,
I think it was Friday nights and Saturday nights,
called Shock Theater.
And that's when I first saw the old Universal horror films.
Frankenstein, Dracula,
The Invisible Man,
The Wolf Man.
Yeah, I loved The Wolf Man.
[woman screams]
Larry Talbot, man.
Talbot Castle, Mr. Larry.
You know, he was just so cool.
[Englund] The Wolf Man gave us yet another monster
who represented audiences' fear of the unknown events
that continued to upend their lives.
The Wolf Man was the monster
who could not control his own actions.
It was in the Wolf Man's nature to kill.
Go ahead and shoot before he bites you.
A monster too many could relate to.
It shows the wolf in the pentagram.
- The sign of the werewolf. - Werewolf? What's that?
Oh, that's a human being who, at certain times of the year,
changes into a wolf.
[woman screams]
♪
Sir John!
- Master Larry, what happened? - He was bitten by a wolf.
- A wolf? - Yes.
Nonsense. Haven't been wolves around here for years.
Where did all this happen?
By the marsh. That woman came to help.
[Oswalt] The main thing that the Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man
did was, if you're gonna do a werewolf movie,
you'd better have the transformation scene,
and it better be something amazing.
♪
[growling]
[Oswalt] That is the sizzle.
[screaming]
[growling]
So that became the standard for a long time.
♪
[Carpenter] The Wolf Man is a really interesting monster.
He's completely innocent of anything.
Richardson was killed last night. The gravedigger.
The tracks lead up to this house.
Footprints?
No. Animal tracks. A wolf.
He got bitten by a werewolf.
What the hell, man?
You killed the wolf.
Well, there's no crime in that, is there?
Bela became a wolf.
- And you killed him. - You're insane.
I tell you, I killed a wolf. A plain, ordinary wolf.
[Carpenter] It's unbelievably depressing.
It's like what was going on in the culture at the time.
Hell, I'm out of a job. Why?
Why am I a werewolf?
And it's-- you know, it's tragic.
[woman] Your suffering is over.
Now you will find peace for eternity.
♪
[Turek] And then there was kind of, like, another wave.
There was another boom, and you saw movies like
the Universal classic movie-monster sequels.
[Englund] Bride of Frankenstein is considered by many
to be a perfect sequel.
It picks up where Frankenstein left off,
scaring audiences with its tale of unnatural monsters
threatening the world around them...
and ups the ante with spectacular
and unnerving effects
unlike any that were seen at the time.
I think Bride of Frankenstein is one of the best films,
period.
Baron Frankenstein.
- What do you want? - We must work together.
Bride of Frankenstein is super interesting
because it's modeled on a piece from the Mary Shelley story.
[Henry] I give you the monster.
Frankenstein, the scientist,
decides he should make a mate for his monster.
Oh, I thought I was alone.
You make man like me?
No.
Woman. Friend for you.
[The Monster] Woman. Friend.
Why?
James Whale takes up Mary Shelley's lost plot
and brings it to life.
Isn't it amazing, Henry?
[Oswalt] Bride of Frankenstein is genuinely frightening
when you realize what a scientist wants to do
is to make a world of gods and monsters.
To a new world of gods and monsters.
Universal Horror really nailed the idea of the monster
is never really the evil perpetrator.
- [grunting ] - [man] Keep still!
If anything, they're the biggest
and most frightened victim in the film.
- [hammering] - Oh!
I'd hate to find him under my bed at night.
Bride of Frankenstein is amazing.
It is a feminist film without ever even realizing
that it is a feminist film.
[machine powering up]
[electricity crackling]
We see this woman who has been created for the sole purpose
of being a mate for this monster.
She's alive. Alive!
The bride of Frankenstein.
♪
But once she's born to light, she looks at him and she's like,
"Nah, I'm not into that."
[grunts]
[screams]
"This is not what I want. I don't want to do this."
So we're seeing this beautiful feminist reaction in a movie
that no one really kind of perceived it being in.
[screams]
She hate me.
Get away from that lever. You'll blow us all to atoms.
[Elizabeth] Henry! Undo the door!
[Henry] But I can't leave them.
Yes, go. You live.
You stay.
We belong dead.
[hissing]
It's the most nihilistic ending.
♪
[Turek] Universal making those movies
gave all the other studios permission to go,
"Horror movies are lucrative."
It gave, like, you know,
Paramount the right to go make a slate of horror movies.
Give MGM the right to go make some films.
It's like the landscape just opened up.
♪
[Blum] After he directed Dracula,
Tod Browning went on to make Freaks.
An incredibly important, unique early horror movie.
[Englund] Freaks was based on the short story Spurs,
written by American horror author Tod Robbins.
Director Tod Browning, regarded as the Edgar Allan Poe of film,
had worked for a traveling carnival
and urged MGM to secure the rights
to a story some considered grotesque,
thus putting his reputation on the line.
[all] ♪ We accept her, we accept her ♪
♪ Gooble, gobble, gooble, gobble ♪
♪ One of us, one of us
When looked at through the lens of the Great Depression,
Freaks is about the class struggle.
The supposedly normal characters,
Cleopatra and Hercules,
have disdain for the people that make their carnival possible.
The so-called freaks are the working man.
♪ Gooble, gobble, gooble, gobble ♪
No!
Dirty!
Slimy!
Freaks!
Freaks! Freaks!
Get out of here!
[Bress] Freaks disturbed me.
[Hercules] Get out. You heard her! Get out!
[laughing]
And I think it did it in a way that was probably
really advanced for its time.
And a lot of that, I'm sure, had to do with the casting.
[Blum] The cast of Freaks was groundbreaking--
putting people on screen who'd never been seen
in movies before.
[Bress] I mean, it really felt like, "Oh, wow,
we're hearkening back to a time where creepiness
and exploitation was acceptable
and thrived upon."
Watching it, I found myself kind of like,
"This is a little bit more than exploitation.
There's actual story going on with a lot of layers to it."
[Blum] Freaks follows a trapeze artist who joins a group
of carnival sideshow performers
with a plan to murder a little person
in the troupe for his inheritance.
[Turek] Any horror filmmaker wants to set out
to give you a level of discomfort.
[thunder rumbling]
Make you confront feelings that you don't normally confront.
Sometimes when you're a horror fan,
you have to listen a little deeper
than what people automatically lead with,
which is, "This movie's exploitive."
In the end, it becomes this kind of, like, revenge movie,
almost in a way like I Spit on Your Grave.
[screams]
[Turek] It's a rape revenge film.
[sobs]
[choking]
These movies are that window into the darkness of the world.
[McKendry] At the same time,
Freaks came out in a time period
where we're having people return from war.
[Man] Terrible was the price to be paid.
A million men laid dead.
Hospitals coped with the unending flow of wounded.
Plenty of soldiers came back with whatever had happened
to them-- their injuries-- and felt less than.
They felt marginalized. They felt they didn't fit in.
They weren't worthy anymore.
They weren't the high school quarterback they were
when they left.
They're not just externally injured.
They're internally injured.
And nobody knows about it, and nobody ever talked about it.
And then along comes a movie like Freaks, where...
they can identify with these people
that are being marginalized and looked down on
and just don't make the cut anymore.
And they're the heroes.
[McKendry] We are actually seeing
these body horrors firsthand
of people coming over, missing limbs,
and so seeing it up on screen in an almost exploitive manner,
no one really knew what to do with it.
[Blum] Freaks was also a film
that when MGM initially test screened it,
there are anecdotes that people got up and ran out.
They didn't just leave.
They literally ran out of the theater.
There was a backlash to that.
[Englund] After the test screening,
MGM removed more than 30 minutes of footage
from Tod Browning's original cut.
Despite the changes,
Freaks was not a commercial success
and was outright banned in some places.
With its failure at the box office
and the controversy surrounding it,
the film essentially ended Tod Browning's career.
Although it is now in the National Film Registry,
at the time of its release,
Freaks was a prime example of why the Hays Code
was enacted just a few years earlier.
[Halberstam] At the time,
people did not know what kind of impact
the cinema might have on the mass audiences
who were all going to see the same material.
So the question is, would people be so mesmerized
by what they saw in the cinema
that they would immediately go out and mimic what they saw?
And if so, was there a responsibility
within the community of filmmaking
to regulate what was shown?
[reporter] Hollywood, the glamour capital of the world.
Hollywood reaches far, carrying its cargo of dreams
to almost every city and village in America.
♪ Clean as a whistle, fresh as a daisy ♪
♪ Brand-new, clean through
♪ On my way just wearing that smile of mine ♪
[Hendrix] The Hays Code was this reaction
by the film industry to police themselves
before the government started policing them.
[Man] Things got so hot in the movies
that the reputable producers signed up Will Hays
at 100 grand a year to clean up the picture business
and yet keep the busybodies off the industry's neck.
Pre-Code movies had cocaine use, drinking, wild partying.
Pretty racy stuff that maybe wasn't quite nudity
but was getting awful close.
[woman] I'm ready now.
[McKendry] They looked at Hollywood and said,
"All of the questionable stuff that you've been
doing for years, we're done with that."
And they really started to regulate
not just things like violence or murder or nudity on screen,
but also morality.
- [Hendrix] Crime must not pay. - [laughs]
You cannot show sexual intercourse.
You can't show drug use.
I mean, really specific stuff that you could not do.
And that steamrolled all the joy out of movies for a while.
There were many ways in which filmmakers figured out
how to circumvent the rules
and the regulations of the Hays Code,
and that was to eschew realism for the supernatural
or the extraordinary, the fantastical.
[Wilson] A lot of the studios pulled back
from doing overt horror
because they felt that people had enough death
and destruction in their lives.
You know, you can't depict violence,
and it puts a damper on horror.
What you do get is very psychological horror.
You get Val Lewton and his whole stable
of psychological thrillers like Cat People.
He kind of reinvents horror to be this more subtle genre.
[McKendry] Cat People is incredibly groundbreaking
and has a lot to say about what it means to be a female.
It explores a lot of kind of marriage basis,
like, our ground rock of society,
like what does marriage mean?
What does it mean to be in love with someone?
[Englund] The studio RKO
gave director Val Lewton the title Cat People
and told him, "Develop a film around it."
[Blum] Cat People is about a fashion illustrator
obsessed with the idea that she is descended
from an ancient tribe of cat people
who turn into panthers when they're aroused.
[Englund] While it didn't claw its way to success at the time,
Cat People did fulfill the Hays Code edict
to ensure the audience is always aware that
in the battle of good versus evil,
evil is always wrong.
The film did this, in part, by illustrating one of society's
most notoriously dangerous temptations--
female sexuality.
Cat People is also one of the pioneers
of what we know in horror as the jump scare.
[growling]
[Turek] But like all things, you know,
there's times that horror boom started to wane a little bit.
You weren't getting really beautiful works of art
that, like, Val Lewton was creating.
[Englund] With Hitler on the rise
and the threat of another World War
creating tremendous stress in people's lives,
the great release that horror provided
was on the decline.
We started getting more tepid scary movies.
Some were just incredibly awful.
[woman] How can you defile this sacred house
with the body of that evil man, that servant of the devil?
This house is full of it-- something evil.
Evil? Yes, it's you.
[screams]
[Nicotero] At that particular time,
Universal had sort of been cycling through their monsters.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
And then it was House of Frankenstein.
Don't go this way. Quicksand. Quicksand.
They shouldn't have come here.
[Nicotero] And then House of Dracula.
[woman screams]
They were getting a little fatigued.
They didn't know what to do with those monsters after a while.
[Roosevelt] Yesterday, the United States of America
was suddenly deliberately attacked.
[Englund] With America's entry into World War II,
vampires, werewolves, and man-made monsters
like Frankenstein and Invisible Man--
well, they had run their course.
The audiences were engrossed in a new kind of horror.
Realities of war.
[Turek] People are seeing stories unfold on a big screen
with sound in black and white
and seeing things they had never seen before.
[Nicotero] People were genuinely afraid.
They were afraid because now there was nowhere safe.
They couldn't just go into their bedroom and slam the door shut
and be safe from the monster.
Because the monster could get through the wall.
It's hard to know where the true monsters are.
It's sort of like they're everywhere you look.
[Truman] A short time ago,
an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.
The atomic bomb kind of changed everything.
Changed people's world view, perspectives.
I think people were just like, "Okay, you know what?
There is clearly a greater force at work here
and bigger things to be afraid of."
♪
"Not only do we have to worry about World Wars,
but there is another threat."
[screeching]
Holy shit. [laughs]
♪
[roars]