Serial Irony
Every Halloween I’m always reminded of an irony I notice back when I was researching my articles on horror elements in serials. The irony was two part. Part one was that while most of Hollywood stopped making horror films after 1936 due to an unofficial ban going into effect from lost revenue on oversea sales, most notably Universal’s income from England, which had blacklisted horror films (all of this is discussed in detail in the book Universal Horrors), yet serial producers continued to inject their products with horror elements during the two years the ban lasted. The second irony is that while Universal had been the leader in horror feature films, did not insert any horror elements into their serials, With the exception of Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938) which featured a witch queen, and most frightening, the Clay People.
Sam Katzman’s Victory Pictures did a spooky throwback serial Blake of Scotland Yard (1936) that was filled with some old fashion scares, much like their previous one with Lugosi, Shadow of Chinatown (1936). Columbia showed they could put out fairly decent horror laced serials with the ghostly apparition of The Scarlet Pirate in Secret of Treasure Island (1938).
But it was Republic that proved they were the kings of horror serials. Starting with Dick Tracy (1937); which featured a brain altered henchman, a hunch backed mad scientist and a villain who appears to be disfigured; the Thrill Factory pumped out three more serials during the two year ban with heavy horror elements. SOS Coastguard (1937) was similar to Dick Tracy with a mad scientist, this time played by the great Bela Lugosi, and a brain altered and disfigured henchman. The Fighting Devil Dogs (1938) was another reworking of Dick Tracy as it featured another hunch backed mad scientist, again played by John Picorri and a masked mystery villain who can electrocute people, voiced by Stanley Andrews, who played the villain in Dick Tracy. Lastly there was Hawk of the Wilderness (1938), which had no plot elements lifted from Dick Tracy, and was for the first ten chapters a standard jungle thriller. But along comes Chapter Eleven and suddenly the heroes are stalked and some killed by a wolf headed apparition through an eerie series of cave tunnels.
After the ban was lifted serial producers continued putting scary moments in their product, even Universal. After 1946 and Universal’s second horror cycle was put to rest, serials kept up the horror, like Republic’s The Black Widow (1947) who killed people with a mechanical spider hidden in the back of a chair, and Columbia’s Batman and Robin (1949) which featured a villain who can turn invisible, kept things going while Republic’s King of the Rocketmen (1949) laid the template for the sci-fi horror serials of the fifties (the ground work which was ironically laid by Republic’s Martian invasion serial The Purple Monster Strikes (1945)).
