Japan's Vengeful Spirits, Part II: Yotsuya Kaidan

She has become one of the most recognizable archetypes of modern horror: the creepy, pale girl with long, stringy black hair who is pursuing her relentless quest for revenge. Her main introduction to the West has been through Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror films, like The Ring and The Grudge. Her pedigree goes back much further, to the Kabuki stage of the Edo Period. Now known by other names, her original form was Oiwa, the vengeful spirit of Yotsuya Kaidan.

Tsuruya Nanboku IV crafted this violent tale of infidelity and revenge in 1825 and rarely has it strayed from the Japanese popular consciousness. It is one of the oft-most retold and refilmed kaidan, or ghost stories, in the Japanese cultural repertoire, having worked its way through the zeitgeist to echo through other stories and characters. It's so potent that whenever the Kabuki drama is performed, actors attend the shrine of the historical Oiwa to appease her spirit so that it does not curse them.

This historical Oiwa, who died in 1636 and is buried at Myogyo-ji Temple in the Yotsuya district of Tokyo, is regarded as an exemplar of fidelity. Such prominence was given to her first because her father Tamiya Iemon was the vassal of the mighty shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa. Secondly, she was renowned for her religious devotion, locals believing that it was this devotion that brought success to her family. Thirdly, she was a loyal and true wife to Iemon's adopted son Isaemon. Besides actors set to perform Yotsuya Kaidan, many people patronize Myogyo-ji and the adjacent Oiwa Inari Shrine to receive blessings for a long and happy marriage or success in business and entertainment ventures.

Nanboku combined the legends of Oiwa with a pair of grisly murders that etched themselves into the memories of Edo's populist classes. One involved a pair of servants who killed their masters, and the second a man's concubine who was caught with her own lover. Both were nailed to a wooden door. In addition to drawing from such lurid sources, his next move was to take the ghost story out of the temples and homes of the aristocrats, placing it in the same working class districts as kabuki's patrons. It marked a new generation of horror story in the Land of the Rising Sun.

This new play was grafted into perhaps the most popular kabuki play of all time: the Chushingura, or 47 Ronin. In the Chushingura, a group of samurai take on the dishonour of becoming ronin - or masterless, wandering samurai - in order to act out a lengthy revenge on the man who orchestrated their master's unjust dishonouring and subsequent suicide. It is widely regarded as something of Japan's national epic. Performed simultaneously as a double-feature, Yotsuya Kaidan assigns to one of the ronin the identity of Tamiya Iemon, and unlike his compatriots or his real life counterpart, he is most definitely a disreputable character.

In the play, Iemon is married to Oiwa, much to the chagrin of her father. Enraged by his constant belittling and demands that the two separate, Iemon secretly murders him. At the same time, a snivelling miscreant named Naosuke murders a man that he believes is the samurai husband of Oiwa's sister Osode. Oiwa's family has fallen on hard times and Osode has been engaged in prostitution to carry them through. Nevertheless, she continually rebuffed Naosuke, who became obsessed. Catching each other, Iemon and Naosuke pledge confidence. Their plan is to tell the two sisters that they will stop at nothing to find the killers, and in so doing gain their affection.

Iemon is a man of unruly passions and no sooner does he marry and have a child with Oiwa than his heart begins to turn. It helps that the new object of his lust is the daughter of a wealthy merchant and that she reciprocates his interest. They hatch a plan to disfigure Oiwa with a poison administered as a medicine to her postpartum illness. Iemon can no longer look upon her and arranges to have her raped so that he can appear to have justifiable cause for divorce. The plot backfires when the rapist confesses and an enraged Oiwa pursues him with a sword. In the scuffle, Oiwa ends up slicing open her own neck. Her hair disheveled and falling out, her right eye grotesquely inflamed, betrayed by her husband and dying in a pool of her own blood, Oiwa curses Iemon with a grudge.

To dispose of her body, Iemon has her and the corpse of a servant he killed nailed to a door and sent down the river. His alibi is that he caught them together and slayed them both, as was his right. The horrific deeds done, Iemon goes to wed the young mistress. However, in the midst of passion, Oiwa's grudge begins. Mistaking her for Oiwa, Iemon slays his bride and proceeds to slaughter her family. All he sees is the ghostly image of Oiwa mocking him. Fleeing, he takes to the countryside. As he fishes for eel along the riverbanks, the very same door washes ashore to torment him.

Iemon escapes to a temple retreat high in the snowy mountains. Meanwhile, Naosuke finally pressures Osode to consummate their marriage. No sooner is the deed done than Osode's husband tracks them down... It was not him that Naosuke killed on that poorly lit night, but his former master! Furthermore, it is revealed that Osode is actually the younger sister of Naosuke who was adopted into Oiwa's family. The shame is too great for her to bear and she kills herself. Likewise is the weight of all this evil too much for Naosuke and he follows her, but not before confessing to everything done by him and Iemon. Now it is Osode's husband who pledges a living grudge against the ronin.

The mountain retreat offers no security for Iemon. The hauntings intensify, causing his mind to snap. His most loyal accomplices who came with him begin to die off in mysterious ways. A lantern burns brightly until it is transformed into Oiwa herself. He is a sweating, panicked, unhinged shadow of his former self when Osode's husband finds him. They duel and Iemon loses... Cut down as much out of pity as of vengeance.

A lengthy excerpt of a 1956 televised performance of the kabuki play
dramatizing the death of Oiwa and her first appearances as a ghost.

Yotsuya Kaidan was a smash success that not only captured the anxieties of its age, but has lent itself to numerous interpretations that have allowed it to endure to the present. It is still one of the most popular plays in the kabuki repertoire, due to the story but also in no small part to the special effects. Kabuki theatre was at such a stage of sophistication in the Edo Period that elaborate effects with trapdoors and special props gave life to this story of the dead. When a poisoned Oiwa is combing out her hair, extra hair was pushed up through the floorboards to simulate its loss. Oiwa literally pops out of a lantern in the final act with a quick release harness system. One of the most virtuoso performances is the scene on the riverbank with the door. The same actor portrays both Oiwa and the murdered servant, and he must quickly alternate between roles as the door is flipped back and forth. These effects also account for much of the infamous “curse” befalling actors who do not properly propitiate the spirit at her shrine. Such complex effects leave plenty of opportunity for accidents to happen.

The door scene, excerpted from a more recent kabuki performance.

The play was quickly translated to film, demonstrating it durability and aptitude for reinterpretation. The first version was in 1912, with another three versions made during the silent era. By 1937 that number was up to 18. The 1949 version turned Oiwa into a psychological phenomenon, a manifestation of Iemon's guilty conscience. Another version was made in 1956, and the first colour version in 1959 by Shintoho Studios. The latter is widely considered to be the finest film version of the story. Daiei Studios also released their own version of Yotsuya Kaidan in 1959. 

Shintoho's 1959 adaptation in full.

Trailer for Daiei's 1959 verison.

Shintoho was a breakaway from Toho Studios, most renowned for their Godzilla franchise. Yet Toho began their life producing jidaigeki (historical dramas) and continued to produce them during the heyday of giant monster movies. in 1962, Toho released their version of Chushingura, followed in 1965 by Yotsuya Kaidan (released internationally as Illusion of Blood). The most recent theatrical version was 1994's Crest of Betrayal, which more consciously blended Yotsuya Kaidan and Chushingura together. 

After a 1981 episode of the anime series Kao Meijin Theater, Yotsuya Kaidan was also adapted into anime form as the first four episodes of the series Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales. This rendition is particularly interesting (in addition to being highly accessible) because it frames the story with a narration by the play's writer, Tsuruya Nanboku IV, who wonders if his writing made the curse real.

Clip from the 1982 version produced by Fuji TV.

Real or not, Yotsuya Kaidan is one of the most potent and enduring stories of modern Japanese culture. This story of blood and betrayal reaches beyond itself to permeate the iconography of Japanese horror and has even curled it tendrils across the oceans.

Universal's Old Dark House Mysteries

Universal Studios were most famous for their moody tales of midnight monsters, supernatural ghouls, and science gone awry: Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and his Bride, the Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man. A large number of Universal's classic monster films, however, did not involve a monster at all... At least not a supernatural one. Some of their most celebrated were based very loosely on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, including Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Black Cat (1934). There were also the Inner Sanctum Mysteries of the 1940's: a series of six murder mysteries starring Lon Chaney Jr. based on the eponymous radio show. Another informal sub-genre within the non-supernatural mysteries developed, known by its most famous entry, the "Old Dark House" movie.  

The Haunted House by Segundo de Chomón

The Haunted House is a delightful little trick film by Spanish pioneer of effects films, Segundo de Chomón. Coming out the same year as his better-known The Electric Hotel, here de Chomón reverts to full-on fantasy without the scientific glosses, placing his characters inside a truly haunted house.

The Tragedy of H.P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is rightly heralded as one of the greatest horror writers of all time, if not the greatest. His lurid prose hinted at indescribable terrors lurking beyond human comprehension, tapping into the fundamental existential angst of modern society. In the wake of the Great War, when the optimism of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras was inexorably shattered in the blasphemies of flesh wrent and consumed by industrial warfare, Lovecraft invented a pantheon of unfathomably monstrous, blasphemous gods who saw humans as mere food for their march through vast cosmic space, if they thought of humankind at all. Though not overtly successful during his lifetime, Lovecraft's nihilistic post-war view of life came to resonate with society imagining itself spiralling ever more and more towards meaninglessness. Yet, no matter how hard he railed against it, meaning is inescapable.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Beast in the Cave

H.P. Lovecraft's work is most accurately understood in its post-World War One milieu. In fiction, the optimism of Scientific Romances and the notions of good and evil in Gothic Horror had largely gone extinct in the conflagration that seized the world in its most devastating mechanized war to date. Horror would be given a reprieve on the silver screen with the Universal Studios series of Gothic monster movies that lasted up to the Second World War, but Lovecraft was ahead of the game on the sense of cosmic nihilism that would pervade much of the 20th century.

Nevertheless, Lovecraft began his writing career prior to the First World War. Though not published until 1918, The Beast in the Cave was drafted in 1905 when Lovecraft was only 14 years old. In it, we already see the nascent themes that he would explore in his literary career. A visitor to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, now a national park, gets separated from his tour group. In the darkness of the subterranean depths, terror seizes upon him as he hears the fall of footsteps drawing close. A young Lovecraft explores his powers of description leading up to the kind of shock ending that he would become known for.

Without further ado, we present the complete text of The Beast in the Cave...

The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis

The Monster of Lake LaMetrie is an early Weird Western tale and one of the earliest extant examples of truly Weird Fiction applied to the Western, rather than "merely" inputting a scientific or supernatural concept. Published in Pearson's Magazine in September 1899, this short story by Wardon Allan Curtis, it is subtitled as Being the narration of James McLennegan, M.D., Ph.D. and is framed as the extracts from a diary sent to Professor Wilhelm G. Breyfogle, University of Taychobera, from McLennegan by way of Captain Arthur W. Fairchild of the US Army. 

McLennegan, being a scientist and having heard of strange occurrences in Lake LaMetrie, takes trip up to these high Wyoming regions with his constitutionally ill friend Edward Framingham. On McLennegan's part, the appeal is a phenomenon of bubbling and broiling at intervals in the lake's middle, after which are found odd specimens of plant and animal washed ashore. The plants are those that might only be found today in coal fossil deposits. The fish populating the lake are bony ganoid types long-extinct. Framingham, an intelligent and astute person with a scientific mind, is admittedly more interested in the fishing and the rarefied air in which he hopes to find relief from his dyspepsia.

There is little rest to be had after McLennegan makes his great discovery. A flitting at his elbow causes him to lash out with his machete, nearly severing the head of a massive Elasmosaurus. It rose, he believes, during the particularly violent flooding and broiling of the night before and confirms for him the suspicion that the lake is somehow connected to the primordial interior of the earth. Nevertheless, he now has one dead Elasmosaurus in danger of lashing out in its death throes, so he removes it brain for study.

The shock comes when he finds the beast still alive days later. It is lying on the beach where he dissected it, but it is still breathing and, furthermore, the wound in its head is healing. So durable and primitive is this marine reptile's physiology that it may very well survive the removal of its brain! Another happenstance pulls this experiment into Frankenstein territories: Framingham, overcome with his worst bout of fever yet, attempts to kill himself with a slash across the neck. He only partially succeeds, for his body will die but his brain lives yet. Given a living Elasmosaur body without a brain and a man's brain with a dying body, McLennegan does the only logical thing.

What follows is a brief but surreal exploration of Victorian anxieties about evolution and the distance between the human intellect and bestial instinct. The Monster of Lake LaMetrie is also a provocative metaphor for the uncivilized character of Western expansionism. Though the Wild West was not so wild as legend makes out - the most deaths any one town saw during the whole settlement era was five, and the year of the Gunfight at the OK Corral was Tombstone's bloodiest ever with a deathtoll of three - it was still a rough and unforgiving existence. It could take the brightest minds and, as though transplanting them into a prehistoric monster, preoccupy them with the basest needs of survival. That is until the civilizing powers of the government and the military pacify the landscape.

Without further ado, Wardon Allan Curtis' The Monster of Lake LaMetrie as it appeared in Pearson's Magazine... Click on each page for a larger version.

Red Dead Redemption's Weird Western World

The original Red Dead Redemption, released in 2010 by Rockstar Games for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, is considered by many to be a high-water mark in video gaming. Following the "open world" format of Rockstar's infamous Grand Theft Auto series, the mean streets of major modern metropoli were replaced with the Wild West of Italian cinema. Furthermore, the chain of events was given the compelling story of John Marston, a former outlaw who is forced to hunt down his old gang members across Mexico and the fictional State of New Austin after the government takes his family hostage. The game became a perfect example of the growing propensity for video games to transcend film as the art form of the 21st century. Beautifully rendered environments coupled with engaging storytelling and characters that literally involve the player for hours upon hours of entertainment. 

Red Dead Redemption release trailer.

Advances in technology have meant that no video game is truly complete. Indeed, the "day one update" phenomena has shown that most games aren't even fully debugged and ready to run when they are sold. But where there is extra money to make, downloadable content (DLC) is soon to follow. Picking up before Red Dead Redemption's epilogue, the Undead Nightmare DLC (2010) throws a supernatural curve into Marston's settled life. Just when he thought his family was safe, both his wife and son succumb to a zombie plague breaking out across the frontier. Naturally, it is up to the former outlaw to solve a mystery going back to ancient Aztec worship of the Sun. 

Along the way, Marston encounters even more strangeness. As the world is ripped asunder by a zombie apocalypse, the Four Horsemen's steeds roam the Earth. Marston has the option of taming War, Famine, Pestilence and Death, each with their own unique effects on the brain-eating hordes. Somewhere out there in the wilds is also a unicorn that trails a rainbow behind it as you ride. Joining him are jackalope and chupacabra, and a pathos-inspiring episode with Sasquatch. A new mythology for the zombies does not exactly utilize the creature's largely forgotten origins in Voodoo shamanism, but does draw the modern metaphor of cosmic nihilism and urban distress further back in that direction.  

Undead Nightmare trailer.

Undead Nightmare was criticized from some quarters upon its release, as a number of fans of the original game felt that it undermined Red Dead Redemption's realism to jump on the zombie bandwagon. On the one hand, this realism is overstated: the West was not nearly as wild and bloodthirsty as cinema has made it out to be. Red Dead is an interactive Western movie, pulling tropes and archetypes from Hollywood's gunslingers. A truly realistic Western game would involve an unrelenting tedium of plowing land, driving cattle, and months-long bounty hunts. Violent and gritty does not equate to realistic, and it's surprising to learn that anyone has thought that way since the 1990's. Rockstar already sacrificed realism for an entertaining product.

Apparently those critics were a minor voice, because the more recently released prequel Red Dead Redemption II (2018) for Xbox One and Playstation 4 goes much further in integrating elements of the Weird Western into their otherwise more realistic game. In this installment set in 1899, 13 years before Red Dead Redemption, you play Arthur Morgan, the enforcer of John Martson's old gang. After a robbery gone wrong, the gang is on the lam and trekking across the American landscape to avoid Pinkertons and bounty hunters. We see the gang both at the height of its power and through its fall into madness, despair, and death. 

Red Dead Redemption II release trailer.

The game pushes beyond the tropes of the Spaghetti Western to be a much more realistic take on true Western life. Opportunities for fastpaced, bloodthirsty gunplay are further between and resource management becomes a much more significant part of the game. You have to watch out for the well-being of the camp, your horse, and your character, meaning there is more hunting, crafting, bathing, feeding, and brushing going on. The world of Red Dead Redemption II is much more fully and beautifully realized as well. Its sprawling map is a microcosom of the United States, with regions identifiable to actual parts of the country. The city of Saint Denis is a stand-in for New Orleans, surrounded by bayous and neighbouring the red earth of the post-Civil War American South. North is "Roanoke", replicating the Appalachians and Hudson Valley. To the West are ranges of mountains reflecting the Sierra Nevadas and Canadian Rocky Mountains. Tucked in the midst of the mountains is a small tribute to the geyser basins of Yellowstone. In the middle of the map is the eerily accurate "Heartlands" that look exactly like what one would see driving through the grasslands and badlands of the prairies. New Austin returns as the equivalent of Texas.

Throughout this immense world are a plethora of sights and strangers that get weirder and weirder as the game progresses. The original game had its share of odd characters, eccentrics mostly. The only clearly supernatural figure in Red Dead Redemption was the mysterious Stranger, an unkillable, top-hatted gentleman who appears to know everything about John Marston's past... and future. It was a statement by him that provided the seed for Red Dead Redemption II's precipitating incident. Yet he is poorly defined and there is much speculation as to whether he is God, or Satan, or something else entirely. Much like the stranger in the Clint Eastwood film High Plains Drifter (1973), there are hints as to who this Stranger could be, but overall he is an encounter with the Unknown beyond human ken.

Compilation of scenes with the Stranger.

By contrast,  Red Dead Redemption II goes balls to the wall nuts at times. Extraterrestrial visitors appear at least three times in the sky, first above the ruined shack of a Heaven's Gate-style suicide cult. A ghost in the swamps outside Saint Denis eternally relives her tragic tale of lost love and suicide. Speaking of Saint Denis, what would a proxy of New Orleans be without a vampire? Sasquatch bones can be sighted in a mountain cave, a horrific Moreauesque experiment can be found in a deserted house, high in the hills is a witch's hovel with a cauldron brewing, and human sacrifices by pagan cults dot the landscape, as do ancient fossils, Viking burials, pirate wrecks, and crashed flying machines. A side mission has you searching for mysterious rock carvings of Zeppelins and atomic bomb explosions for a man who looks and talks like he is from the 1920's. Another mission has you performing tasks for a Tesla-like genius, culminating in the discovery of an automaton that looks like a cross between Boilerplate and Bender. 
The following videos by LegacyKillaHD showcase some the various Easter eggs and where to find them, though (more) spoilers ahead for those waiting to find them for themselves...

Vincent Price, Roger Corman, and Edgar Allan Poe

By the early 1950's, Universal Studios had largely given up on its tradition of Gothic horror films. Arguably the last of the line was 1948's Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, the greatest of the horror-comedies but nevertheless a farce on the petrified iconography of their classic monsters. Universal's immediate future belonged to Atomic Age Sci-Fi, including the last great monster, The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954. The following year, Universal went to colour with This Island Earth, but by 1960 these sorts of "genre" offerings were naught but schlocky drive-in movie fare.

Yet at just that same time, hideous things were brewing in England. Hammer Films began production of their own line of horror films that were widely seen as inheriting Universal's mantle. Produced in colour and staring legendary actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, films like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Horror of Dracula and The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Mummy (1959), and The Brides of Dracula (1960) proved that there was still interest in well-made, well-acted, well-scripted Gothic horror films. At the time, American International Pictures was a low-grade B-movie house that was known for giving minuscule shooting schedules and shoestring budgets to films like I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Teenage Cave Man (1958), High School Hellcats (1958), and Reform School Girl (1957). However, when one of their most prolific and reliable directors, Roger Corman, approached them to make their own series of Hammer-style horror films, they gave him the green light. Not only that, but they upped his budget and gave him a whole 15 days to shoot his first, on the gamble that this was just the sort of thing that would raise AIP's standing, not to mention their profit margins.

As source material, Corman deviated from the tradition of European writers to go with an American original: Edgar Allan Poe. Richard Matheson, one of the greatest horror writers that ever lived, supplied the script based on Poe's 1839 story The Fall of the House of Usher. Then came the inspired choice to cast Vincent Price as Roderick Usher. To this point, Price was already an established actor with 20 years experience and over 80 roles in his filmography. He originally entered the craft as a dramatic character actor who took on a number of historical dramas, then transitioning into Noir thrillers for a while. In the Fifties he really began his career in horror, in such films as House of Wax (1953), The Fly (1958) and Return of the Fly (1959), The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler (both 1959). Over the course of his career, less than a third of Price's films were horror, but they were the ones with the most enduring popularity. By the 1980's, he was guest-starring on The Muppet Show and doing voice-overs for Michael Jackson's Thriller as an all-time horror icon. This was due in no small part to AIP's "Poe Cycle." Together, they created House of Usher (1960) and charted a new course in American horror film.

Fall of the House of Usher: the 1928 Silent Films

Amidst his bibliography of classic tales, The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Edgar Allan Poe's best known and most frequently adapted. First published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in September of 1839, it is a masterful Gothic short story about a sinister house and its woe-begotten inhabitants. Poe's narrator introduces us to Roderick and Madeline Usher, last in the long line of the Usher family.... A venerable clan beset with the maladies of aristocracy: physical, mental, and moral degeneracies. Madeline is seen but once before her apparent death by cataleptic seizure. It is Roderick who must live with the constant deterioration of his body and spirit within the confines of the oppressive manor that imprisons him. The titular house is a bleak one, crumbling from centuries of mold and decay in an unrelentingly melancholy swamp. Such visually and psychologically arresting subject matter begs for cinematic adaptation. The Fall of the House of Usher has been brought to film over a dozen times, not counting crypto-adaptations like Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak (2015). Perhaps the best known of these is the 1960 version directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price, which kicked off an entire series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. The earliest were two films released in the same year of the silent era, one in France and the other in the United States. 

W.W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw

Over a century of film adaptations and countless parodies, including no less than The Simpsons, have inured many to the truly chilling effects of W.W. Jacobs' short story The Monkey's Paw. Originally published in 1902 as part of the anthology The Lady of the Barge, this story of wishes gone awry is exceedingly short yet concentrated in its potency.

Behold the monkey's paw! Illustration by Maurice Gruffenhagen.

Universal Studios' Dracula

It practically goes without saying that the landscape of cinema history would be radically different had the classic, 1931 version of Dracula never been produced, or been as successful as it was. The film catapulted Bela Lugosi to fame and precipitated Boris Karloff's Frankenstein later that same year, beginning a 30-year legacy of Horror, Thriller and Science Fiction began at Universal Studios. It also cemented the image of the undead lord as a darkly seductive Hungarian in a dinner suit.

Given its seminal status, Dracula provides a clinic in what makes those creaky old Universal films so wonderful. What is it hiding in those shadows on monochrome celluloid that resonates so deeply with viewers, now almost 80 years on? In the North American horror tradition pre-1960, the horror and blood isn't necessarily the point of the horror film. The exploits of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr., and Vincent Price are not merely a parade of "mixed up faces", as Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest J. Ackerman summed up the mainstream view of horror. Instead, through these films, we but up against the wonder and mysticism of the sublime in all its overwhelming, humbling, astonishing, horrifying glory.

The Sublimity of the Universal Studios Monsters

Nothing is so efficacious for horror as the bygone monochrome of the truly silver screen. Only black-and-white held deep enough shadows for monsters to lurk. From within fog-choked forests, immense alpine passes, ancient tombs, and ruined castles, they bid us welcome, show us what it means to trespass in the realms of God, embroil us in the cosmic battle over the human soul, and did it with unparalleled glamour.   
And nobody did it quite as well as Universal Studios. The films of the German Expressionists were beautiful in their artistic, European fashion, and they went on to fuel Universal's own horror pictures. Other films and filmmakers rose to the occasion - White Zombie with Bela Lugosi, Island of Lost Souls with Charles Laughton, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Fredric March, and even the times Mickey Mouse tussled with skeleton dancers and mad doctors - But none matched Universal for sheer output, enjoyment and quality. Hailing from the Silent Era to the Atomic Age, the legacy of the Universal Studios Monsters endures to this day.