The big, bad count of this winter’s Nosferatu goes by Orlok, but you know his real name. (The estate of Bram Stoker sure did back in the 1920s, when they sued F.W. Murnau for copyright infringement.) And though the title character of Wolf Man isn’t Lawrence Talbot, he hails from the same lycanthropic lineage that had Lon Chaney Jr. howling at the full moon. Depending on where you live, and if you hurry, you can go to the movies right now and see both Dracula and the Wolfman on the big screen once again. What a time to be alive or undead!
These two movies, both from Universal (or at least its art-house subsidiary, Focus Features), are merely the start of a classic monster mash in the making. Later this year, we’ll get not one but two new versions of Frankenstein — a musical with Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, and a lavish Guillermo del Toro adaptation starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. Meanwhile, James Wan, our reigning mogul of multiplex spookiness, has his eyes on more icons from the house Dracula built: He’s said to be directing a reboot of Creature from the Black Lagoon and producing the latest attempt to crack the sarcophagus of The Mummy.
The Universal Monsters, in other words, are having a moment. Not since Pepsi made them the unlikely stars of a 1990s advertising campaign — nearly turning Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff into beyond-the-grave spokesmonsters for Doritos — have the most famous fiends of filmland enjoyed such a renaissance of visibility. What this bumper crop of creature- (and Creature-) related projects also represents is a rebound from one of the failed franchise master plans of the last decade. Soft box office for Wolf Man aside, we’re seeing a resurrection in the making. The Dark Universe is dead. Long live the Dark Universe!
If a thousand social media jokes don’t ring a bell, the Dark Universe was Universal’s short-lived plan to give its roster of Golden Age beasties the Avengers treatment via a series of movies that would reunite them all on screen. This aborted, Marvel-biting attempt to build a new franchise from old intellectual property is best remembered today for the prematurity of its splashy roll-out: Overly confident in the audience’s thirst to see a bunch of Hollywood monsters hobnob, Universal put the cart before the horse-drawn carriage and commissioned a now-infamous photoshoot for Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Sofia Boutella, and Russell Crowe. That publicity still, and the official tweet promoting it, outlived the plan by several years.
It wasn’t such an out-there idea, though. You could say Universal beat Marvel to the whole “shared universe” thing by nearly a century. In the 1940s, the studio collided its legendary monsters in movies like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, and House of Dracula… before pitting them against Abbott and Costello at the jokey end of that era. Over the decades that followed, Universal would revive this crossover fun — getting the gang back together for the Goonies crowd in 1987’s The Monster Squad, sending them after Hugh Jackman’s Van Helsing in the junky 2004 blockbuster that bore his name.
Last decade’s Dark Universe sputtered out for possibly the same reason that a Van Helsing series did: It began on a bum note. Or two, actually. Before Cruise’s misbegotten The Mummy put a nail in the coffin, the lavish Luke Evans origin story Dracula Untold gave the Dark Universe its first false start. These were forgettable action distractions that audiences ignored. You can’t launch a cinematic universe with a flop. You need an Iron Man-sized hit to whet appetites for more.
The Dark Universe died before it really got started. But you can’t keep a good monster down. From the grave of that failure has risen a new line of vehicles for Universal’s veteran fright class. The studio bounced back quickly from The Mummy (and the line of interconnected sequels it promised) with a scary standalone: Leigh Whannell’s sharply suspenseful take on The Invisible Man, which rebooted the most canonically scummy of Universal Monsters for a new era in a much smarter way. There’s no groundwork for future entries in that movie, no Nick Fury figure teasing a new world of gods and monsters. The Invisible Man confirmed that audiences would plunk down for old-school scares without the promise of a bigger saga uniting them.
In the years since, Universal has shown no interest in trying to play malevolent matchmaker again (beyond the recent announcement that they’d be reviving the “Dark Universe” brand for a theme park event). Instead, the company has experimented with self-contained vehicles for its terror troupe. Dracula, in particular, has been busy the last few years. Before Nosferatu scored a genuine hit for the bloodsucker under his German alias, Universal rolled out two novel spins on Stoker’s novel in the same year: a glib action-comedy for beleaguered familiar Renfield, and a feature-length dramatization of one chapter of the book, affectionately nicknamed Dracula on a Boat by a bunch of keyboard wiseacres who didn’t take that voyage.
Neither Demeter nor Renfield were successes. Nor was last month’s Wolf Man, a disappointing follow-up to The Invisible Man from Whannell. No matter. Universal (or other studios, like Warner Bros. and Netflix, who are bankrolling those modern takes on The Modern Prometheus, which will open later this year) can afford to muck with the monster mold and roll the dice a few times when not devoting a Marvel-sized budget to these fearsome attractions. After all, horror need not cost a fortune to draw a crowd. Fur, fake fangs, and neck bolts come relatively cheap. And when you’re not trying to engineer a star-studded, multi-entry, record-breaking franchise, there’s no great loss in one film failing. Shake it off and try again.
The Dark Universe’s miscalculation was thinking that some of cinema’s oldest villains needed to be superheroes. That was a square peg in a round hole. There’s a way to adapt these monsters for a new generation without turning them into something they’re not. The Invisible Man, which brought the translucent menace into a new era of tech-bro misogyny, handily demonstrated as much. And in the popularity of Nosferatu, a rather deliberately old-fashioned slab of gothic horror, one can see the durability of the original Universal Monster appeal — a scariness that maybe never goes entirely out of fashion, probably because it channels deeper fears of death, disease, and carnality. Nosferatu’s healthy box office is proof that Dracula can still sell tickets, provided he’s allowed to be his horny self.
The Count and his Old Hollywood labelmates always come back for another bite. Pepsi partnership aside, they’re more like the Coca-Cola Classic of horror: dependable, unimprovable, and immune to changing tastes. Hammer, the venerated British production house, revived the whole gang in the 1960s — a much more successful Dark Universe, made across the pond from the studio system that made stars out of the lot. And the early 1990s offered a bumper crop of lavish remakes and reimaginings, directed by big names like Francis Ford Coppola and Kenneth Branagh, and featuring big stars like Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson. Half a century after their heyday, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man were suddenly box-office players again. We’re overdue for the cycle to repeat.
But will we ever see the Universal Monsters together again? Will Frankenstein once more meet the Wolf Man? Will Dracula reopen his house to some famed frenemies from the studio payroll? Oh, probably — the shared universe concept isn’t dead, even if the Dark Universe is. In the meantime, it’s enough to have so many of these ghouls back in theaters or on their way. Hell, come autumn, we might even get a chance to do a double feature of dueling Frankensteins, a true Barbenheimer-grade event for viewers of a certain spooky persuasion. Who needs a Dark Universe when multiple Transylvanian terrors are coming to a theater near you?
Nosferatu and Wolf Man are now playing in select theaters. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.