Where to Start with Boris Karloff
There are a handful of icons of the first half-century of horror filmmaking, each unforgettable monsters played by talented performers who absolutely understood and over-delivered on their assignments. As the biggest name of the Universal Horror Cycle beginning in 1931 and running until the 1950s, Boris Karloff became best known for playing monsters, but who could’ve guessed in the beginning that his career would go down that path?
Born William Pratt in England in 1887, the man who would become Karloff began his acting career on stage in Canada. He primarily made his living as a labourer while he trod the boards before traveling to California to be part of the incoming moving picture phenomenon, where he played numerous small roles often as none-white characters due his relatively dark skin passed down from his father’s half-Indian heritage.
Director Howard Hawks essentially discovered Karloff’s arresting screen presence when he cast him in The Criminal Code in 1930, and so the hard-working Brit was finally given a substantial screen role by the time he had already turned 40. Then, after over a decade in the industry, he met fellow British expat James Whale who saw the actor’s potential to transform and to inspire both terror and sympathy in audiences – a new Lon Chaney.
While Universal’s other big horror star, Bela Lugosi, was limited by his heavy accent post-Dracula, Boris Karloff was highly sought after, proved to be fairly versatile, and continued to see success on stage and screens big and small over the following two decades, though seldom outside of genre fare.
With over 170 film credits to his name spanning five decades, and some of the most instantly recognisable, iconic monsters in pop culture under his belt, where should you start? Read on for The Film Magazine’s recommendation for Where to Start with Boris Karloff.
1. Frankenstein (1931)
It’s incredible that the film that made Boris Karloff a star listed the Monster as being played by “?” in the opening credits to retain the mystique. After Dracula star and soon-to-be rival of Karloff, Bela Lugosi, turned down the role, Universal hired the British bit part player who, under Jack Pierce’s ingenious makeup and with James Whale’s astute direction, ended up birthing an icon. He would soon go on to be the studio’s most bankable star and far eclipse his Hungarian rival.
Loosely adapting Mary Shelley’s revolutionary sci-fi horror novel of the same name, we follow Dr Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his experiments to artificially create life in a Central European castle. A combination of dead men given life by channelled lightning, the monster (Karloff) escapes and in his confusion causes havoc in the nearby town, prompting Frankenstein and a mob to give chase and hunt him down.
Universal’s Frankenstein, and the seismic impact it had on the imagination of many lovers of horror movies and monsters in particular, would have been considerably lessened without Karloff’s emotionally intelligent choices as a performer here. If you were being true to Shelley’s original novel, Dr Frankenstein’s creation is mistreated, yes, but is also intelligent, devious, verbose and wrathful. Karloff plays it almost entirely through his body language as a curious, abused and confused 7-foot child.
The very first time we see him, Karloff inspires our pity. The Monster laboriously backs into a room and slowly turns, director James Whale having the camera zoom in to his sunken-cheeked, heavy-lidded face in a shock reveal. But he is then immediately entranced by light shining through the roof, ineffectually reaching for it before Frankenstein’s cruel minion Fritz (Dwight Frye) begins to torment him simply for existing. In a controversial and heavily edited scene later in the film, the Monster makes a sweet connection with a little girl (Marilyn Harris) throwing daisies in a lake, but unable to fathom how the real world works he throws the girl into the water to her death when the flowers run out, running off horrified when he realises his mistake. Karloff plays the towering monstrosity as the ultimate innocent, a creature that was never meant to be given life but was nonetheless thrown into a world that will never accept him. We understand that it is only natural he lashes out in an act of self-preservation.
Karloff would play the Monster for Universal twice more in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein (where he gave him a voice for the first time) and 1939’s Son of Frankenstein (where he was inexplicably silent once more), and none of the subsequent inhabitants of the makeup would come close to his nuance when he vacated the role. He also brought Imhotep to unnatural life in The Mummy (1932), also playing his sinister human avatar Ardath Bey; he was the shambling mute butler Morgan in The Old Dark House (1932) before moving on to RKO and Columbia.
2. The Body Snatcher (1945)
Just as Karloff was able to impart unexpected humanity into monsters, he could also play dastardly, irredeemable villains with aplomb. Cabman by day, graverobber by night, John Gray is probably Karloff’s best outright baddie.
Arguably nobody working in the 1940s was better at stretching a budget than producer Val Lewton. His string of hits with sensationalist titles and striking, but crucially cheap, visuals from directors such as Jacques Tourneur really left their mark.
Robert Wise directs this adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson short story set in 19th Century Edinburgh, which was in turn inspired by the real criminals Burke and Hare. John Gray (Karloff) illegally supplies professor Dr “Toddy” MacFarlane (Henry Daniell) with cadavers for dissection by his anatomy students. When the good doctor refuses to perform a risky operation on a paralysed child’s spine without a body to test the procedure on, Gray commits murder to supply him with his next subject. When MacFarlane tries to get out of their arrangement, the snatcher threatens to reveal the doctor’s own dark past, setting an even darker series of events into motion.
After his time with Universal came to an end (he would return to co-star with Abbott and Costello in the early 1950s), Karloff worked with several other studios on pretty similar fare. For Columbia he played morally opposite aristocratic twin brothers in The Black Room (1935), for Monogram he played pulp detective character Mr Wong in a series of films, and for RKO he worked with Val Lewton on several gothic B-pictures, the best of which is probably this one.
The amount of fun Karloff is clearly having in The Body Snatcher, with his gimlet grin, veiled threats, and casual attitude to anything amoral, is positively infectious, particularly when he is so abject to everyone else’s repressed and buttoned-up behaviours in this Victorian-era tale. It’s also amusing to see the man who previously inhabited the Frankenstein makeup is the one supplying the dead the bodies for the scientist this time (for completely academic purposes of course). In case you hadn’t guessed yet, this is a seriously macabre movie that only gets darker as the minutes pass by, and was only not considered obscene in the mid-40s because most of the horror happens offscreen or in convenient shadows.
It must’ve been particularly galling for Lugosi here in his final co-starring role with Karloff, witnessing his co-star create such a memorably detestable antagonist while he was relegated to a thankless minor role as a servant, though Karloff was reportedly very supportive of him as health problems impacted his ability to perform even a few scenes coherently. Here, Karloff got to show his range and his ability to be charming and compelling despite inhabiting a morally bereft human far more monstrous than anything created through elaborate makeup.
3. Targets (1968)
Karloff’s last decade was not easy, with his career far from its heyday and daily battles with a myriad of physical health problems stemming from being a lifelong smoker and linked to injuries sustained as a labourer, but his fans who had grown up on the black and white ghoulish pictures stayed loyal to him. As such, the up-and-coming cinephile director Peter Bogdanovic was about to give him one last great role with Targets.
A psychotic killer with a rifle (Tim O’Kelly) begins a reign of terror against random passers-by in California. Meanwhile, resentful and faded horror star Byron Orlok (Karloff) is persuaded by a young filmmaker (Bogdanovic) to make a final publicity appearance at a drive-in theatre before he retires. It is here that the parallel storylines converge in particularly brutal fashion.
Using archive footage of Karloff from the cheap and fast Roger Corman film The Terror (1963), a film made on the same sets as and within days of Gothic comedy The Raven, the film serves as a self-aware postscript of the star’s career in the genre that made him famous. The link to Corman, who not only mentored Bogdanovic but contractually obligated Karloff to appear in another film for him, adds another meta layer for avid fans to appreciate.
The film shoot for Targets was fast and loose, almost guerrilla-style due to budgetary limitations not allowing for filming permits to be purchased, but this manic energy is carried through to a tense and understandably controversial thriller inspired by real-life mass shooting incidents. It’s the kind of visceral, naturalistic film that you could see having just as much impact if it were released today, perhaps only needing an update on the kind of jaded star caught up in the violence. One of Karloff’s final performances as Byron Orlok is rightly acclaimed as among his very best; well-judged, poignant and funny without being overly reverential. In short, a class act.
Karloff always claimed to be grateful to still be acting in movies even if he came to be typecast – though he did get to play a handful of heroes and distinguished, kindly old men here and there, he may have wanted a more varied filmography to look back on. His career as a recognisable star may have lasted a lot longer than Bela Lugosi’s, but perhaps that was because he did not seem that picky. Unlike his character Orlok, he had not grown bitter and wasn’t looking to retire unless his declining health forced him to do so (as it happens he completed all of his projects in 1968 before passing away the following year). And, in fact, he was getting to play some of the most interesting roles of his career in the twilight of his life, from Mario Bava’s spooky anthology Black Sabbath to Michael Reeves’ swinging sixties black magic horror The Sorcerers, and Targets as the ultimate thrilling career retrospective.
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Boris Karloff died in 1969, leaving five films made in 1968 to be released posthumously. Few actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood had such a consistent career in the industry or became as indelibly associated with the development of the iconography of an entire genre. Horror fans remember him for Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, countless mad scientists, sorcerers and sinister occultists, even the odd good guy, all brought to life by his unforgettable face, controlled body language, intense eyes and lisping delivery that could either be sinister or comforting and ultimately made him a true icon. With the chameleonic Lon Chaney dying far before his time, Karloff became the elder statesman of horror actors and co-starred with, and gave his blessings to, the next generation of genre stars to inhabit the kinds of roles he had made famous, from Basil Rathbone and Lon Chaney Jr to Vincent Price and Christopher Lee.
