The Screengrab

Bela Lugosi, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)



Depending who you ask (specifically if one of the people you ask is Bela Lugosi’s son, and the other is Tim Burton), Ed Wood, Jr. was either a talentless, exploitive vulture or a scrappy independent filmmaker who befriended Lugosi late in life and (inadvertently) made him relevant to a whole new audience of younger fans through cult classics like Glen or Glenda? and Bride of the Monster, climaxing with Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning portrayal of the actor in 1994’s Ed Wood. Either way, though, Plan 9 From Outer Space was hardly the most dignified send-off for a Hungarian film and theater legend and one of the best known international movie stars of the 1930s. For one thing, Lugosi only appears onscreen for a few minutes of the so-called “worst movie of all time” (a designation Screengrab’s own Scott Von Doviak would undoubtedly challenge), but the posthumous “performance” (culled from stock footage) isn’t even listed as an official film performance on the actor’s Internet Movie Database page, possibly because it was completed by a chiropractor.

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You may not know who Jack P. Pierce was, but if you've seen or even heard about the Famous Monsters of Filmland that made millions of dollars for Universal Studios in the 1930s, you know his work.  Pierce, a Greek immigrant who ended up in Hollywood more or less by accident, was the head of the makeup department at Universal Studios from 1928 until 1947, and crafted, on conjunction with stars like Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, some of the most memorable creatures in cinema history. In the days before CGI or even most photographic effects as we know them today, Pierce worked with theatrical equipment, padding, chemicals toxic by today's standards, and inventive use of costumes to create the visual hook of characters like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Ygor, Frankenstein,  the Wolf Man, and the Mummy.

When Universal merged with International after WWII, Pierce fell on ill fortune, and, after several decades working on television and for low-budget big-screen productions, he died in 1968, little-remembered outside of the people who had the good fortune to work with him.  Still, anyone who played such an integral part in defining one of Hollywood's most famous and fertile periods wasn't going to stay forgotten for long.  A DVD documentary about him was recently released focusing on his horror work; the motion picture industry's Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Union has named their lifetime acheivement award for him; and his hands, which crafted so many terrifyingly familiar faces, are featured on an American postage stamp, transforming Boris Karloff into Frankenstein's monster.

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Some actors who have had success playing Dracula, such as Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, have gone through periods where they must have wondered if they'd ever get the chance to play anything else. Max Shreck, who starred in the first (unauthorized) film adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated 1922 silent horror poem Nosferatu, shook off the role easily in life, but posterity has boiled his career down to this one role. Shreck, who worked in the German theater and was part of Max Reinhardt's company in Berlin before making his film debut 1920 and died of a heart attack in 1936, when he was only 56 years old. Because he left behind no other film work as important as Nosferatu--his follow-up collaboration with Murnau, a comedy called Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs, was a bomb--and because he appeared in Nosferatu in a grotesque, rodent-like make-up that rendered his features unrecogniable, the passage of time has given Shreck the reputation of a man of mystery. The 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, starring John Malkovich as Murnau, was a darkly comic fantasy in which it was revealed that "Shreck" was an actual vampire (played by Willem Dafoe) that the director had brought in to lend his authenticity to the role. It was rooted in a film-scholar in-joke that went back decades.

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Described like that, how could Steve Buscemi not love being interviewed by the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone?  He somehow finds a way, in what turns out to be an informative feature, but not much of an interview. A tight-lipped Buscemi takes particular issue with Hattenstone’s characterization of his characters as losers — losing they may be, he says, "but they are also people who are not interested in being in the race." — Leonard Pierce

"Bela Lugosi!" Richard Pryor used to exclaim during his stand-up act. "I bet that guy got some weird fan mail." Indeed he did, but there's now a popular, if arguable, point of faith among some horror fans that nobody thought vampires were sexy until Christopher Lee first draped a cape around his six-foot-five-inch frame and started sinking his teeth into his demure co-stars' necks in the the 1958 Horror of Dracula. (It was his first time playing the Count but his second job for the British horror factory Hammer Studios; a year earlier, he played the monster opposite his frequent co-star Peter Cushing's mad scientist in The Curse of Frankenstein.) In the Guardian, Matthew Sweet discusses Lee, Hammer, and how their version of the classic bloodsucker fits into the vampire filmography. "Lee's performance convinced a generation of scholars that Dracula was a book about sex, and not about vampires." I'm not sure that it can't be a book about both, but Lee definitely put his stamp on the character; he went on the play him in six other Hammer films, as well as sending the character up in a cameo in the 1970 The Magic Christian. By the end, in the 1974 The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the studio, "looking for new ways to revive flagging public interest in fanged Transylvanians, had transplanted Dracula to the fag end of swinging London, where he hung out with a gang of hippie bikers — slaves of the dark side, of pot and of their taste in afghan casualwear." — Phil Nugent