THE WATCHDOG BARKS I AM WRITING this editorial on May 7, 2004—the opening day of Universal’s new monster rally, VAN HELSING. There has
been an extraordinary amount of negative advance press—one critic comparing it to being stabbed re- peatedly in the eye for over two hours, another lik- ening it to a sustained assault. Of course, there is no controversy without an opposing opinion, but I have yet to read a single championing appraisal. The closest thing I have seen to an expression of enthusiasm appeared on the AOL Classic Hor- ror Boards, where VW contributor Gary L. Prange
posted: “I’m looking forward to seeing VAN HELSING... Sure, I know parts will make me wince and there may be things I hate. I may even walk out of there thinking the whole thing is a pile of crap. But those are my boys up there on the screen and, goddam it, I’m gonna go support ’em.” Gary’s feelings may sound like “Transylvania— Love It or Leave It,” but I find them more pro- found than that. He feels obliged to support the
film, even if his instincts tell him that VAN HELSING is likely to be overproduced crap, be- cause he fears that not putting his money where his interests usually are will send the wrong message to Universal. The release of VAN HELSING has already had one worthwhile result, in that Universal have is- sued new deluxe box sets of their three main classic horror franchises: “Legacy Collections” for Dracula, Frankenstein and The Wolfman, along with a special gift set containing all three box sets and decorative mini-busts of the three monsters— one of the coolest things to come along in Monsterdom since the early 1960s. In addition to bringing the best-known films in these series back
to DVD, these sets include the DVD debuts of WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935), HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945) and SHE-WOLF OF LONDON
(1946)—and just enough VAN HELSING piggy- backing to drive the purists crazy.
But purity is relative. I’ve been working part- time on a new novel that occupies the same uni- verse as Bram Stoker’s so I’ve gotten to know that book inside and out over the past few years. When my copy of DRACULA—THE LEGACY
COLLECTION arrived, the first thing I did was to load up Tod Browning’s 1931 classic for another viewing. To my complete surprise, I found the film—for the first time in my life—a big disap- pointment... because, in my mind, the book now supersedes the film. The novel is dense with ad- venture and mystery and unspeakable horror, but the movie (based, I know, on the stage play) is very slow, full of lame humor and clueless geog- raphy, and redeemed almost exclusively by its art direction and the performances of Bela Lugosi, Dwight Frye, Helen Chandler and Edward van Sloan. It also reinvents characters like Renfield and Dr. Seward with a free-handedness that seems, to me, arrogant and disrespectful. If you go back and read the reviews DRACULA received upon its first release, you’ll see that horror films began to garner their reputation as a second-class art form precisely because critics resented that filmmakers thought they knew enough to throw away the book. Of course, James Whale threw Mary Shelley away too, but the films he and Browning made have since become classics in their own right—our classics.
I’m not against films like VAN HELSING in
theory; I’m a big fan of Fred Dekker’s THE MON- STER SQUAD (1987), whose heart was in the right place—and also in a progressive place. Anyone who loved THE MONSTER SQUAD was prepared to discover a whole backlog of similar movies from earlier eras. What worries me about VAN HELSING is that it may break too cleanly with tradition and some deservedly classic characters. If any young- ster sees and loves VAN HELSING and decides to read Stoker (which they’ll have to figure out for themselves, since Stoker is acknowledged nowhere onscreen), the novel may disappoint them because Van Helsing isn’t a stud with a crossbow, but a rumpled eccentric whose perculiarites mask the smarts that lead the sexier characters to triumph. He’s a bit like Columbo with a stake—and the name’s Abe, not Gabe.
It will be interesting to see how VAN HELSING assumes its place in horror film history. Until then, we can take some comfort in the fact that, no matter how much things change, they stay pretty much the same.
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Tim Lucas 3
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