Horror In The 1940s

Films Of The DecadeDuring the beginning of the 1940s World War II was raging. With this came an effect on the horror industry.

With Horror banned in Britain, America took over the horror genre. Soon Hollywood began to develop multiple horrors as a way to amuse the domestic audience. Universal took hold of the genre at first and began developing several films.

However it wasn’t just the number of films that were effected by war, the type of film also was impacted. The 40’s saw multiple creature and primal animal films released, bringing in creatures like Frankenstein, Werewolf's and Cat People.

During the 40’s wolves became a key icon of horror. This was mainly to do with the war and the idea that Nazi’s were often references as Wolves by Hitler himself. Adolf in old German even means noble wolf. The “One of his favourite tunes came from a Walt Disney movie. Often and absent-mindedly he whistled "Who's Afraid of The big Bad Wolf?" —an animal, it will be recalled, who wanted to eat people up and blow their houses down."—p27 The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler Robert G.L. Waite (Da Capo Press 1993)

The imagery he used caught on in not-so-flattering ways. Propagandists of the period habitually depicted him as the Big Bad Wolf of fairy tales. It seemed the wolf represented the predators lurking in the corners of public consciousness. It's therefore no surprise that Universal, home of the iconic monsters of the 1930s, picked the Wolf as a go-to figure of menace for the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The Wolf Man (1941)This Universal film really began the Hollywood trope of Werewolf films. Bringing together the ideas of silver bullets, full moons and several other elements into one film which would later become iconic tropes to the werewolf culture. The Wolf Man is one of three top-tier Universal Studios monsters without a direct literary source.It was written by Curt Siodmak, a man who had fled the Nazi’s himself in 1937.The story follows Larry Talbot who returns to his ancestral home from America, only to become infected by a bite from a gypsy. With a starry cast including Claude Raines, and spectacular makeup and special effects, the picture was a big hit.

Cat People (1942)Soon Universal began to drop in the Horror market and RKO took over developing the film ‘Cat People’ in 1942. This film was classed as a psychological thriller and took a different take than the one that ‘The Wolf man’ had taken.  It was a great success, earning $4M (off a $134k original budget) and was followed by The Curse of the Cat People in 1944The plot concerns a young lady unwilling to give in to passion for fear that she may be a Cat Person, which is to say someone who turns into a large and rather dangerous cat when inflamed by passion or anger. The film focused on women, showcasing them as dangerous. This related to how they were treated after the war. Many women lost the jobs they were employed in during the war when the men came home. This film made women feel powerful again.

However after these successes it switched from A to B pictures, and focussed on increasingly silly sequels to the big franchises: Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula and The Mummy. With films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein it crammed its monsters together, on the basis that if one monster is scary, four must be four times as scary. Like so many franchises, it got tired, less artful and more cynical and soon the iconic monsters created became less terrifying and more comical.