Many actors spanned the silents to sound, some with great success than others. Some had careers so all-encompassing, Lillian Gish comes to mind, that it’s hard to even fathom an actor today going through the same amount of period adjustment. But the one who had the most impact on me when I was young was Boris Karloff. When I was a kid, viewing old horror movies was something each weekend brought without fail. No Saturday ever went by, it seemed, without my local station running an old Universal or Hammer movie in the afternoon, especially in the fall. The star of many of those movies was Boris Karloff and he connected the past to the present in several ways as my film knowledge expanded.
Seeing a movie like Frankenstein for the first time is a memorable event no matter how old you are but when you’re but a kid, it’s more than that. It’s an event that changes you. For one thing, you discover if you are or are not a horror fan. I discovered I was. And I wanted more of it. Seeing Dracula and The Wolf Man and The Mummy on those Saturday afternoons, as well as the updated Hammer versions, gave me a full appreciation for the form. And the one actor who seemed to connect the past and the present was Karloff. The Hammer movies had Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and they were all in color. I could still see Cushing and Lee in current movies in the seventies and so they felt like contemporary actors, not classic ones like Karloff and Lugosi and Chaney. But unlike Lugosi and Chaney, there was Karloff making movies with Jack Nicholson for Roger Corman. There he was starring in a late sixties movie directed by Peter Bogdanovich, an underrated effort called Targets that still doesn’t get enough airplay (and, sadly, is not on the schedule today). He was even providing the narration for my favorite Dr. Seuss animated short on tv, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And yet, he had also been acting in movies in the silent period and the people he’d worked with were long gone. But there he was, Karloff, alive and going strong.
He even had his own television show, like Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling. I didn’t know the level of Karloff’s involvement in Thriller (or, at the time, Hitchcock’s in Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Serling’s in The Twilight Zone) but I assumed as a kid that he ran the whole thing. His presence was astounding and each intro and outro were, to me, always more interesting than the show itself. I loved Karloff’s voice more than anything and those sunken eyes that pierced right through you.
It was as I got older that I really appreciated how tremendous a talent he was. In fact, considering how much I loved his voice it’s quite amazing that two of his greatest performances, as the monster in Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, barely use it at all and when they do, it sounds nothing like the Karloff voice we’re used to. But he also gave great performances in The Body Snatcher, The Black Room, and Targets.
As good as those movies are, and they are, I really love some of the later work with Corman, especially The Raven, teamed up with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Hazel Court, and Jack Nicholson. It’s silly and lends itself to comedic histrionics but that’s part of the charm for me. I also unabashedly love Die, Monster, Die (aka, Monster of Terror), directed rather flatly by Daniel Haller, even though I cannot defend it as a very good movie because, well, it’s not. But I love the small town in the beginning and I love the old house. And I love Karloff, the way he looks and sounds, as he wheels around the house projecting menace and doom at every turn.
Boris Karloff never got an Oscar nomination, not even for The Body Snatcher, but who cares? He got to work with James Whale, Bela Lugosi, Roger Corman, Mario Bava, Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price, Myrna Loy, and about a hundred others of note, from the silents all the way to the end of the sixties. He had a great voice, a great face, and a great talent for using both in remarkable ways. And he connected horror’s cinematic past with its present for me in a way no one else did. I’ve written him up here enough for any regular reader to know he’s a favorite so I feel pretty damn lucky that his day fell on mine. As Summer Under the Stars winds down, I’m glad some time was carved out for Karloff, before we start carving up pumpkins in anticipation of that time of year when Karloff’s magic truly shines all night long.