Polygon’s horror fans are back with the annual Halloween Countdown, a 31-day run of short recommendations for the best movies, shows, TV episodes, and online specials to stream for the Halloween season. Tune in every day for a new recommendation, and find the entire calendar here.
Though Universal Pictures’ horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s popularized a series of now-iconic monsters, 1931’s Frankenstein also followed its gothic-novel source material in clarifying that sometimes, the real wrongdoing isn’t committed by a horrific creature of the night. Sometimes it’s the work of a doctor who’s gone mad with goth-science power. Two non-Universal horror movies from this period make for a particularly entertaining double feature for fans of monsters and/or mad science: Doctor X from 1932, and Mad Love from 1935.
Doctor X — which gets a name-drop in the chorus of The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s opening number — brought together a number of big Hollywood names before they did their most famous work. Lionel Atwill went on to become a regular in Universal’s Frankenstein movies. Fay Wray appears here two years before she became one of the screamingest scream queens ever in the original King Kong. And they’re directed by Michael Curtiz, who went on to make The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce, and no less than Casablanca, among other movies.
Doctor X isn’t nearly so classy as Curtiz’s canonized classics, but the transgression is glorious: This movie was made before the MPAA and before the production codes that prohibited subjects like cannibalism, sexual voyeurism, flesh-mining, and brain-stabbing. It was also produced in the two-strip Technicolor process, an early form of color cinematography which gives the movie otherworldly greenish and pinkish tints that suggest a world like ours, but heightened and off.
And seen today, after decades of Universal’s wolf-men, invisible men, and so on, Doctor X’s murder-mystery plot plays even more like a clever monster-movie feint. A series of gruesome cannibalistic murders taking place under a full moon sounds like the work of a fearsome monster. But suspects led by Dr. Xavier (Atwill) are nonetheless assembled for an investigation, involving perverse recreations of the murder scenes.
Mad Love is less of a mystery: Any film starring Peter Lorre makes it easy to guess who the guilty party might be. When protagonist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) loses his hands in an accident, he turns to Dr. Gogol (Lorre), who unfortunately becomes obsessed with Stephen’s wife Yvonne (Frances Drake). Gogol performs a hand transplant on poor Stephen, giving him the mitts of a knife-throwing maniac, in hopes of stealing Yvonne away.
Mad Love isn’t as manic as the man-versus-hand slapstick of Evil Dead 2, but it has some of that devilish weirdness, benefiting mightily from the sheer quantity of Lorre scenes. Both these movies are weirder and creepier than most of the Frankenstein sequels, and they excel in the same area as the best Universal Monster entries: blurring the line between monster and man, in these cases with a medical degree thrown into the mix.
Where to watch: Both movies are available to rent or buy through Amazon or Apple. Mad Love is available to stream for free at Fawesome, but bewaaaaaarrrrre a squashed, incorrect aspect ratio!
