The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social Landscape (review)

In an article published in College Literature in the fall of 2007, Steffen Hantke observes that recent research on the horror film betrays the “anxiety” experienced by scholars who sense that the horror film may still need to be defended as a worthwhile object of study. It is all the more refreshing, then, when an academic like Reynold Humphries shows us why these films are worth a closer look because of the issues with which they grapple. In The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social Landscape, Humphries analyzes horror films from this period through multiple lenses, considering how they deal with social, sexual, economic, and historical issues. He looks at how these films were received by the Production Code Administration, the trade press, and newspapers at the time and considers how these films portray incest, homosexuality, and bisexuality. He demonstrates how both mad scientists and monsters in these films represent communism and capitalism simultaneously and examines how these films deal with historical events, including World War I, World War II, and the stock market crash of 1929.

There are at least three major strengths in Humphries’ text. The first is his consideration of the extratextual material surrounding these films (e.g., the Production Code Administration file, the trade press, publicity materials) in chapters 1 and 2. In addition to looking at how social, sexual, economic, and historical issues play out in the films he considers, Humphries demonstrates how these issues play out in reviews at the time. The reviews he includes in chapter 1 suggest that class conflict caused reviewers to draw distinctions between the educated classes and the “mob” as they predicted who would enjoy these horror films and why (3). In chapter 2, it is both amusing and instructive to see how gender lines were drawn in reviews regarding spectator response to these films. According to the reviews, “[w]omen fainted” in response to these films, whereas men simply “turn[ed] pale” or found themselves “baffled” (qtd. on 57). The distinction between male and female responses to these horror films raises questions about how accurate this distinction was and why and to what end it was made.

A second strength is the author’s rigorous analysis of the films themselves from multiple angles, multiple times throughout the book. In chapter 2, where Humphries analyzes “the representation of love and sexuality in the films of the period” (55), he considers how Fu Manchu’s and his daughter’s sexuality are presented as ambiguous and how their own relationship is presented as incestuous in The Mask of Fu Manchu (Brabin, 1932). He then returns to this film in chapter 4—where he analyzes these films through the lens of history—and focuses on a scene in which the Eastern Other, represented by the coolies, is shown looking in on British explorers as they excavate the tomb of Genghis Khan (210). He demonstrates how in this scene colonialism is shown to be a process in which the colonizer relegates the colonized to a place in which the latter is an outsider looking in on his or her own country (210). Humphries completes similarly thorough analyses of other films throughout the book, such as Frankenstein (Whale, 1931), Murders in the Rue Morgue (Florey, 1931), and The Most Dangerous Game (Schoedsack and Pichel, 1932).

The third strength is the author’s questioning of how opposing elements (heterosexuality and homosexuality, capitalism and communism) play out in individual characters. His focus on ambiguity pays off, especially in his intriguing analysis of the film King Kong (Schoedsack, 1933) in chapter 2. Humphries asks why the ape in the film is presumed to be male, pointing out that only the film’s title, but no one in the diegetic world of the film, refers to the ape as “King Kong” (84). The author suggests that Kong forges a relationship with the Ann Darrow character in the film not because the ape is male...