Economic instability that fueled radical political divisions during the 1920s was more than just the catalyst for Universal Studios to become a Hollywood powerhouse and the home of monsters and horror. It also created the stage and set the tone and message audiences would hear. Americans experienced the most explosive economic growth and then the rapid decline of that boom in just a few years. The Great Depression was well underway by the time Bela Lugosi played the urbane vampire in 1931, and it is easy to forget that America was a country whose values were defined by fear of a Bolshevik uprising and demonizations of Eastern Europeans who were blamed for spreading anti-capitalist views in the minds of Americans either enjoying or fighting the good times. The Universal Studios Horror Films of 1930s – led by Count Dracula both figuratively as well as literally – are a metaphorical reflection of that fear.
David Skal describes this period in American History as the “Great Abyss,” a period when many Americans were overcome with fear and bitterness in conjunction with a desperate desire for relief. The search for someone to blame was driven by the desire for relief. In the 1920s, the government launched a crackdown to give the people what they desired. Americans got what they wanted as long as they ignored the fact that “targeting people to be deported based on beliefs” was in violation of the First Amendment. The Palmer Raids responded and exacerbated fears about foreign influences on American democracy and the free enterprise system by shipping immigrants who were deemed dangerous to American life. David Niles’ letter, sent two years earlier, was a warning to studios not to begin production on films that deal with socialism and labor.
Dracula (1931) by Universal Studios is an example of xenophobia, a corrosive form of racism. The fictional scapegoat, the aristocratic Transylvanian Count with the ability to transform men into zombies who will do anything for him and to sexualize girls so that they are no longer dependent on their male partners and have only eyes for the man with an exotic accent is a reflection of xenophobia at its worst. Lugosi’s acting is so cultivated that he doesn’t even have to say a single word. His every nuance is enough to evoke the social terror that Stoker is trying to instill with his character. Beware of how you treat him, otherwise you will be dealing with me.
Tod, James, and Karl Freund along with the writers who wrote the scripts of the films they made, worked together in the 1930s to create a theme series of movies that actively, but not necessarily explicitly, sought out to continue demonizing foreign outsiders and making them something to fear and suspect. Their tales of vampires and mad scientists, as well as mummies and reanimated monsters, helped to evoke in the mind of the film-going public the days when outsiders who were not American citizens had to be shipped away to preserve free enterprise and democracy. Universal’s first horror wave includes The Wolf Man. However, it was released more than a decade earlier. One thing, however, remained constant. Hollywood still used monster films to warn Americans about foreigners ten years later, as U.S. troops were preparing to go to these foreign countries. In the 1930s, horror films were made to scare Americans away from foreigners who might destroy their way of life. By the 1940s the fear was gone and monsters did not come in the form of Dracula. Lawrence Talbot, for example, was a brave American who went abroad to fight the monsters and avoid becoming a part of them.
Works Cited
No change is needed.
Finan, Christopher M. A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America. Boston: Beacon, 2007.
Nasaw, David. Going Out: Rise and fall of public amusements. Basic Books published a book in 1993 based in New York.
Skal, David J. The Monster Show: a Cultural History of Horror. Norton, 1993, published in New York.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. Maud Ellmann. Oxford University Press, 1998.
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