Apart from their gothic horrors, however, Universal had a very respectable line of contemporary Horror films, usually shot for a fraction of the “A” level Monster pictures, and set in modern-day surroundings. Beginning in 1934, with Edgar Ulmer’s The Black Cat, some of the studio’s most entertaining efforts were these “B” pictures.

    In fact, The Black Cat, shot for a third of the budget of the previous year’s The Invisible Man, was in my opinion the far superior film, and became the studio’s highest-grossing film of 1934. Notable primarily for being the first screen pairing of Universal’s twin terrors, Karloff and Lugosi, it established forever each actor’s place in the pantheon of Horror icons—with Bela always taking second billing to Boris.

    Karloff and Lugosi would appear in two more Universal “B’s” prior to Carl Laemmle losing control of the studio in 1936. The new ownership had no taste for the previous regime’s Horrors, and ceased all production of Horror films. Until, that is, financial dire straits forced them to reconsider all options. In 1938, a re-release of 1931’s Dracula and Frankenstein, on a double-bill, had audiences lining up, and provided enough cash to put the studio on stable footing. It also spurred Universal’s new head of Production to put Horror films back on the slate, beginning with 1939’s Son of Frankenstein.

    Shortly thereafter the studio put their B-Horrors back into production, beginning with 1940’s Black Friday, a blend of Horror and Science-Fiction, cast in a Crime melodrama-type plot. Though Bela Lugosi received second billing, after Boris Karloff, Lugosi’s role amounted to little more than a bit part, with Stanley Ridges playing the dual supporting role of Professor George Kingsley and Gangster Red Cannon. Karloff, as Dr. Ernest Sovac, implants part of Cannon’s brain in the skull of his best friend Kingsley, after a collision with the gangster’s getaway vehicle kills Cannon and leaves the professor near death. This causes Kingsley to have a split personality, with Red Cannon’s mind taking control of the meek educator. He then seeks vengeance on the man he believes betrayed him, a fellow criminal named Marnay (Lugosi).

    While Black Friday underperformed expectations, that was due primarily to poor casting, with each of the stars being the absolute worst choices for their roles. It did nothing to dampen the studio’s new-found enthusiasm for genre films, however, and 1940 was a very busy year for Universal’s Horror department. No fewer than five Horror films were released by the studio that year, the most since 1935. Three of these would be low-budget sequels to the studio’s classic Horror films, The Mummy and The Invisible Man.

    1941 would also see the release of five Horror films from Universal, two of which would launch the Horror career of Universal’s most prolific Horror icon—Creighton “Lon” Chaney. One, of course, is the film that created Universal’s dominant Monster of the 1940s—The Wolf-Man. The other was one of the cheapest of the studio’s B’s, after The Mummy’s Hand (which came in at a penny-pinching $80,000)—Man-Made Monster. Shot on a budget of $86,000, it served to introduce Universal’s audiences to Lon Chaney, whose performance was deemed good enough to earn the actor a long-term contract from the studio. Double-billed with Man-Made Monster was my personal favorite of Universal’s 1940s B-pictures, Horror Island. Produced for a slightly less miserly $93,000, and starring Dick Foran and Peggy Moran in their second pairing in less than a year (the first being the aforementioned The Mummy’s Hand), Horror Island was a standard, “Old Dark House”-style thriller. A cinematic cliché from beginning to end, it nevertheless is a fun, entertaining, if none too frightening little picture.

    One more B-movie would come from Universal in 1941, The Black Cat. Apart from the title the film bore no relation to the 1934 Universal classic, owing far more to a pair of comedic creepfests Paramount released in 1939 and ’40, both starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. The first was a remake of Universal’s 1927 silent classic, The Cat and the Canary. The second was The Ghost Breakers, based on a stage play first performed in 1909. Both films were well-written and well-executed, with scares and laughs a-plenty. They were both also A-pictures produced by a major studio, with budgets to match. Universal wanted to cash in on their success, without the expense.

    Still, they would spend more on their two efforts at mixing Horror and Comedy that year than any of their straight Horror films, with the possible exception of The Wolf-Man. The Black Cat was the first such effort, starring Broderick Crawford, Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, and, in a minor role, a young Alan Ladd. The comedy was mainly hit-or-miss, with the best bit coming when Crawford responds to Rathbone’s character stating that the case is solved with the line, “look who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes,” while the scares were mostly misses. For a $176,000 investment (only $4,000 less than that of The Wolf-Man), the best that can be said of the 1941 version of The Black Cat is that it possessed an excellent cast—that was utterly wasted in this lackluster production.

    The studio’s second Horror-Comedy of 1941 was anything but lackluster. Hold That Ghost was a vehicle for the studio’s newest sensations, the comedy duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Production began immediately after their first picture (as headliners), Buck Privates, wrapped up, under the working title Oh, Charlie! Budgeted at $190,000, production had barely gotten underway when the initial box-office numbers for Buck Privates began coming in. When Universal realized the scope of the hit they had, they suspended production on Oh, Charlie!, and rushed another Abbott & Costello service picture into production, In the Navy. Production on the first picture resumed in June, 1941 with a new title—Hold That Ghost—and Bud and Lou firmly established as the studio’s biggest box-office draws.

    By 1942, the Universal film factory was in full swing, with several parallel “assembly lines” running, as it were. First were their A-level films, though their budgets never reflected that status—the iconic franchise Monsters, three of which had sequels released that year. Similarly, one must recognize the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films as another line that, while not strictly Horror films, certainly had as much claim to the name as films like Horror Island or The Black Cat. They were certainly as profitable as the Monsters, if not more so, and two entries in that long-running series were released that year.

    And then there were the “Bs.” As the quality of the headline Monster pictures steadily declined, it became more and more difficult to distinguish the two. At the major studios, the difference in budgets between “A” and “B” productions could be several hundred thousand dollars. At Universal, there was little or no difference, and it began to show; at least, in the A-pictures. Conversely, the worse the A-pictures became, the better the “Bs” looked in comparison. Night Monster, released in 1942, had, despite multiple character and story problems, production values that were the equal of the “As” of the period.

    By 1943, the Universal Horrors had entered their final decline. The last gasp of the “B” Horror films was the Inner Sanctum series of movies, based on a popular radio program of the same name. Starring Lon Chaney, these were more melodramatic thrillers than Horror films, though Chaney’s presence was enough to establish their genre credentials. Produced for less than $150,000 each, the six film in the series—Calling Dr. Death, Weird Woman, Dead Man’s Eyes, The Frozen Ghost, Strange Confession, and Pillow of Death—were weakly scripted and poorly acted films, especially the various characters played by Chaney, all of whom were uncharacteristically weak-willed, confused, and easily manipulated.

    The series was profitable despite its lack of quality, a statement that holds true for most of Universal’s films from this period. This pattern would continue until the end of the Golden Age, both for the Horror film and Universal Studios, at the close of the Second World War. During the first half of the 1940s, the imaginary horrors on the silver screen helped people forget the true horrors taking place half a world away, if only for a brief time. With the war’s end, millions of men returned from faraway battlegrounds, in no mood to revisit horrors, real or imagined.

    For men who had survived Guadalcanal, Monte Cassino, Bastogne, and Leyte Gulf, they had seen too much, lived through too much, to care much about vampires, werewolves, and the other monsters that had sprung from the Universal soundstages. Comedy was now king at Universal, and, much as they had been in 1937, the Monsters were put back into storage—to await the next time they would be called upon to bolster the studio’s shaky finances.