Universal Monsters 101In the 1920s, Universal Studios enjoyed some of its greatest successes with movies featuring monsters, murder, and the macabre; but it was nothing like what happened in the ’30s, when Universal produced a string of horror pictures that were international hits and helped codify how some perennially popular monsters should look, sound, and behave. Take Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula: There had been film and stage adaptations of Dracula before (including F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized 1922 classic Nosferatu). But just as Stoker’s book synthesized several existing stories and pieces of historical folklore, the Carl Laemmle Jr.-produced movie Dracula took from the best of the 1927 Broadway play and the earlier films, with cameraman Karl Freund (who according to some reports directed much of the movie when Browning grew bored) using expressionistic effects to highlight the monster’s ...
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