Vampire (1943), for instance, director Lew Sanders borrowed heavily from Universal’s conventions by teaming Bela Lugosi, as a vampire, with a werewolf (albeit one of the saddest-looking ones you’ll ever see), while The Soul of a Monster explores the more internalized style of horror that Lewton made fa- mous. Not surprisingly, the studio – then best known for releasing Three Stooges shorts and Frank Capra’s screwball comedies such as It Happened One Night (1934) – never really mastered the horror film, and The Soul of a Monster, with its slow pacing and heavy religious overtones, which worked to greater ef- fect in Warner Bros’ The Walking Dead (1936), is no exception. But what does make this film more
than a footnote in ’40s horror is that its antagonist, although an emissary of the Big Guy below, is female. Women playing principal roles in horror films was not new, but they almost always played vic- tims. For example, Gloria Holden in Uni-
Wicked Feminine Wiles
THE SOUL OF A MONSTER (1944) Starring Rose Hobart, George Macready and Jim Bannon
Directed by Will Jason Written by Edward Dein Columbia
If your distress call is answered by a woman
whose shoulder pads are broader than Lon Chaney’s, don’t answer the door. Such a lesson is learned by Anne Winson
(Jeanne Bates) in The Soul of a Monster, now available through Sony’s Columbia Screen Clas- sics by Request on the company’s website. While her husband George (George Macready) lies on his deathbed suffering from a mysterious ailment, Anne’s call to God for salvation goes unanswered. Naturally, she turns to the Devil, who sends Lilyan Gregg (Rose Hobart), an owly, pale stranger in black. After being revived by the stranger, George
goes back to work, but all is not well in this role-reversed Faustian bargain. Despite once being a prominent and beloved surgeon – made painfully obvious by the spinning newspapers during the film’s opening sequence – he is now behaving badly. He hates his dog, he’s being lured around by a strange voice and doesn’t seem to bleed when his colleague, fellow sur- geon Roger Vance (Jim Bannon, who would have been played by Lon Chaney Jr. had this been an Inner Sanctum serial from Universal),
RM 05 R E I S S U E S
accidentally cuts him with a pair of scissors. Unlike in the Val Lewton films at RKO, the char-
acter’s psychological health is never called into question here. All parties involved realize that the vampish Lilyan – who, despite her ethereal dis- position, lives in a rather middle-class apartment – is to blame for George’s erratic behaviour. Under the control of Lilyan, George soon turns
on his friends. In one of the film’s only suspense- ful scenes, he follows Vance along a darkened street armed with an ice pick and the requisite malicious in- tent, while the score, by the prolific Mischa Bakaleinikoff (20 Million Miles to Earth, The Giant Claw) builds to a haunting, ear- perking crescendo of strings similar to the adagio in Wo- jchiech Kilar’s score for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) – a definite highlight. Eventually it’s up to Anne to battle Lilyan for George’s soul. In the world of classic horror,
the 1940s belonged to Val Lew- ton, whose psychological thrillers such as Cat People (1942) and Isle of the Dead (1945) moved the genre forward, while Universal, the stalwart of the 1930s, carried its monster-driven formula into the World War II era. Squeezed between these two titans was Columbia Pictures, whose horror output, although minimal, falls narratively somewhere in the middle. In The Return of the
versal’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936) wants to be rid of the family curse, while Simone Simon’s Irena Reed in the aforementioned Cat People, depending on your viewpoint, is afflicted with a psychiatric disorder. Here, Hobart’s icy performance as the domi-
nant Lilyan is one for the books. Undoubtedly in- spired by Joan Crawford (Hobart’s hairstyle mimics the one popularized by the actress in the early ’40s, with a slight devil-horn lock thrown in for good measure) and the femme fatales appearing in contemporaneous film noir, she is devoid of emotion and her scenes are framed in a way that makes her look down upon the other charac- ters, enhancing her matriar- chal, controlling nature. (She was no stranger to horror, ei- ther, having appeared in Para- mount’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and The Mad Ghoul at Univer- sal.) Writer Edward Dein also
penned Calling Dr. Death for Universal’s mediocre Inner Sanctum. If The Soul of a Monster had been part of that series of films, it may have stood out as one of its best, but ultimately, it’s not surpris- ing that this simply plotted 61-minute film with an interesting look at genre gender roles has been mostly forgotten.
ERIC VEILLETTE
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