Monsters and Matinees: The Classic Connection of Warner Bros., Big Bugs and Hammer Horror

The classic marriage of Warner Bros., Big Bugs and Hammer Horror

Gangster films, innovative musicals, hard-nosed detective films and woman-centric dramas. Also Porky Pig, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny and Batman. This is a distinct and diverse group of genres and characters that are part of Warner Bros.’s 100-year history.

A word you can’t find in this impressive list? horror.

Sure, the studio has produced films as notable as The Exorcist And The glowin addition to one of my favorites, the teen vampire movie The Lost Boys. But as a fan of classic horror films, I missed the connection to Warner Bros. and the Golden Age of Hollywood.

I found it not in the number of classic horror films Warner Bros. has made, but in its unique influence on the genre through innovation, the popular Big Bug films of the 1950s, and spreading the gospel of Hammer horror.

let me explain. It aptly started with a movie called The Terror.

Journey to Terror

Warner Bros. was officially founded in 1923 and a four-legged actor named Rin-Tin-Tin quickly made it to stardom. But in 1926 Warner Bros. ran into financial difficulties and was considered a second-rate studio behind Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and William Fox. So it did what it was meant to do throughout its history: it took a big risk with the technology. In 1927, moviegoers watched the studio’s “silent film.” The jazz singer were shocked – and thrilled – when Al Jolson uttered the first few words heard in the film:“Wait a minute, wait a minute. You haven’t heard anything yet.”

The following year, Warner Bros. released the industry’s first voice-only film Lights of New York. Two months later came the terror, A horror film in which guests at a British country inn are being pursued by a murderer known as “Terror”. The film is based on Edgar Wallace’s 1927 play of the same name and starred May McAvoy and Edward Everett Horton.

what does The Terror What’s special about Warner Bros. is that it was the studio’s first horror film. What makes it so important in film history is that it was the first horror film to use sound.

This use of clay resulted in immense profits for Lights of New York And The Terror This allowed Warner Bros. to acquire the Stanley Theater chain and a controlling interest in First National Pictures. It was now a major Hollywood player alongside the big boys.

After acquiring First National, the studio’s first film was silent drama/comedy The haunted house (1928). As the title suggests, this was an early entry into the popular old dark house mystery genre. Thelma Todd and Larry Kent starred in the story of heirs who are drawn into a mansion for the reading of the will. The movie had that wonderful horror mix of a mad scientist, secret rooms and wacky characters. Directed by Benjamin Christensen, who is best known for haxan (1922), a documentary/feature film tracing the history of witchcraft and still shown today.

From sound to visual progress

Warner Bros. then turned its attention to color innovation. Doctor X (1932) was the first horror film to be shot entirely in color using the two-tone Technicolor process. (The film was also shot in black and white, as many people saw.) The film’s talented creative trio – actors Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray and director Michael Curtiz – returned Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). It was the last film to be shot in two-tone Technicolor by a major studio before the technology transitioned to the glorious three-tone Technicolor used by Warner Bros. in films like… The Adventures of Robin Hood. As awesome as that is, the two-strip process had a unique subdued beauty that existed Doctor X And Mystery of the Wax Museum an atmospheric atmosphere that sets the tone in a horror film.

Both were pre-Code films that went beyond murder and explored themes of rape, pornography and cannibalism. Doctor X She also had a dash of humor thanks to Lee Tracy as a reporter investigating murders that took place under the full moon. Several suspects are being investigated at a nearby medical academy led by Doctor Xavier (Atwill), where we also meet his beautiful little daughter Joanne (Wray).

In secret of the wax museum, Atwill is a talented sculptor who was disfigured in a waxwork museum his partner set on fire for insurance money. More than a decade later, he reemerges with a new museum inhabited by his beautiful wax figures, which seem uncomfortably real. A 1933 review by Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times called the film “too ghastly for consolation,” which I take as high praise.

Horror fans will recognize the same story in the fantastic 1953 Warner Bros. film wax house starring Vincent Price as Atwill. In keeping with the Warner Bros. philosophy of bringing modern advances to audiences, it was the first film to be produced in 3D by a major studio. Even watching the film at home today, we can single out scenes shot with 3D impact in mind, such as the bouncing paddle ball.

films are seen

In addition to producing films, studios distribute films, and sometimes for other studios, as Warner Bros. did in its contribution to classic horror.

Beast of 20,000 Fathoms (1953) is a major horror and science fiction film. It brought stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen out of the shadows and into the spotlight. It was also the first film about atomic creatures, with Harryhausen’s impressive fictional Rhedosaurus awakened by atomic bomb tests and setting off to terrorize the East Coast.

With the help of the major distributors of Warner Bros., animal from 20,000 threads became a surprise financial success and helped spawn two popular horror genres: the giant monster/nuclear test tag team (which includes Godzilla films, which are still part of the WB repertoire) and big bug films. Because if a rampaging dinosaur were popular with audiences, wouldn’t multiple giant ants be even better? That’s what Warner Bros thought.

In Them!, James Arness and James Whitmore led the charge against giant ants terrorizing the country. It became the highest-grossing film of 1954 for Warner Bros., but the studio didn’t continue that trend, instead focusing on Cinemascope films like King Richard and the Crusaders And A star Is Born. Luckily, other studios followed Warner Bros.’s example and jumped on the big bandwagon, bringing us classics like It came from beneath the sea The Giant Behemoth and Tarantula. .

[To read more about big-bug movies, see my Classic Movie Hub column:All bug-eyed over big-bug movies.

Hammer films

The studio’s influence on film history when it came to
distributing the work of other students didn’t stop there.

We think of Hammer Films for its delectable array of horror
movies in the 1950s and beyond. But without the help of U.S. studios including
Warner Bros., American audiences may never have seen these films or at the very
least, seen enough of them to make the House of Hammer the horror giant it is
in film history.

At least nine U.S. studios were involved with distributing Hammer films including Columbia, Universal, United Artists, MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros.

A huge moment in the partnership between Warner Bros. and Hammer was the worldwide distribution in 1957 of the Christopher Lee-Peter Cushing film The Curse of Frankenstein. It changed everything for Hammer as author Howard Maxford sums up in his book Hammer, House of Horror:

“Warner would also give Frankenstein the kind of
promotional campaign Hammer could only dream of affording. Consequently, when
the film opened at the Warner Bros. Theatre in London’s West End on May 2,
1957, the lines stretched round the block, despite an almost universally
hostile reaction from the press,” Maxford writes.

While the U.S. studios helped get Hammer out to the world, it remained a tumultuous time of feast or famine when it came to this support. In 1968, Hammer was without a U.S. distributor and again facing financial problems. The timely merger that created Warner Bros.-Seven Arts saved the day starting with Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), the fourth in Hammer’s Dracula series.

Though that merger only last about two years, Warner Bros. distributed and even produced more films for Hammer. Other films included Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), Moon Zero Two (1969), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Crescendo (1970), and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), The Satanic Rights of Dracula (1973) and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974).

However, Warner Brothers also held the rights to these films and was, to say the least, very slow in putting them on home video. Even then, the movies were released without any bonus material. That’s one reason for the 2018 documentary Hammer Horror: The Warner Brothers Years which traces the important relationship between Warner and Hammer from the brief, but important, period of 1968 to 1974, while also giving fans the interviews and background information they craved.

In retrospect

Warner Bros. may not have produced a large number of classic horror films, but when it did, it was with creativity and innovation. And at the very least, this big-bug film fan is grateful for Them! and all the oversized creatures that followed.

– Toni Ruberto for Classic Movie Hub

You
can read all of Toni’s Monsters and Matinees articles here.

Toni Ruberto, born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., is an editor and writer at The Buffalo News. She shares her love for classic movies in her blog, Watching Forever and is a member of the Classic Movie Blog Association. Toni was the president of the former Buffalo chapter of TCM Backlot and the offshoot group, Buffalo Classic Movie Buffs. She is proud to have put Buffalo and its glorious old movie palaces in the spotlight as the inaugural winner of the TCM in Your Hometown contest. You can find Toni on Twitter at @toniruberto.