When it comes to the sacred art of compiling Halloween movie lists, you can’t do it up proper unless you have a certain respect for the classics. I’m not talking about about atomic age sci-fi fare like The Incredible Shrinking Man, I’m talking old-school, Golden Age of Hollywood style, pre-movie ratings board horror. Back when the idea of talking in your movies was still an impressive bit of movie magic and you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting some gothic architecture. Yessir, even if Universal was about the only major player in the monster movie game at the time, and they earned that spot by a steady stream of hits. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera, movies that have captured the hearts and minds of generations of people.
Well, the good ones did at least, pretty sure no one was inspired by the three shitty Mummy sequels.
The Raven, directed by Lew Landers under the name Louis Friedlander, is what you might call a B-level Universal classic. Released in 1935, the film acts a kind of companion piece to The Black Cat, which was released a year earlier. Both films starred Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, two men who had already become horror icons with the release of Dracula and Frankenstein at the dawn of the decade, with Karloff as the villain in The Black Cat and Lugosi taking the spot in The Raven. It’s worth noting though that even in The Raven, where Lugosi was the primary character, Karloff still received top billing despite having a far less important role. A precursor to the way their careers went, perhaps.
Anyway, in the film Lugosi plays the enigmatically foreign Dr. Vollin, a gifted surgeon and a huge fan of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Such a fan in fact that he has actually made working reproductions of several torture devices featured in Poe’s work, including the titular pendulum. Which would just make him a rather creepy but otherwise harmless recluse on any other day, but when he’s pushed to save the life of the beautiful Jean Thatcher, things change. A simple infatuation with Jean soon gives way to obsession, and obsession to a sadistic madness, as Vollin plots wicked schemes against those who would dare to stand against his ambition. Boris Karloff stars as Edward Bateman, a criminal looking for a new identity who is given a hideous new form by Vollin. I know, Karloff as a hulking, deformed, but ultimately sympathetic being would never work in a movie, but it’s fine.
Compared to later movies in the genre and even some of its peers, The Raven seems like an incredibly simplistic and inconsequential film, and that’s because it is. Characters that just barely manage to be one-dimensional, a plot that wraps itself up in a neat little bow in less than an hour, little to no violence (despite being a movie centering around torture devices), and only ones to actually die are the bad guys (again, despite this being a movie centered around torture devices). The inclusion of Boris Karloff also does nothing for the film aside from drawing in a couple more moviegoers into this cinematic antlion pit, considering he could have been just as easily replaced by Tor Johnson and nothing would have changed. I know that I probably have different expectations than a movie fan of the 1930s, and having Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the same film was probably mind-blowing, but how much is it really worth seeing Karloff do a less interesting version of something that he’s already done? Especially with the implication in the billing and marketing being that Karloff is an important figure in the film. Anything to sell a ticket.
Still, there is a certain appeal in seeing Lugosi chew the scenery and acting like a loon, and if that’s enough of a reason for you then by all means watch The Raven. Those just getting their feet wet in old-school horror however, Universal and otherwise, will probably have a ways to go before they need to add this one to their watch queue. Hell, it’s not even a sure thing for movies that are based on the works of Poe, as it’s competing with 2012’s The Raven starring John Cusack and 1953’s The Raven starring Vincent Price and Peter Lorre, which just so happens to have starred Boris Karloff as well. Who knew Poespoitation movies were such a lucrative genre?
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