The Professional Development of Horror Films

Carl Laemmle Jr. was a professional. Development of the film industry was he wanted and what he accomplished. He was a large part of why the movie industry produces so many horror films today. He provided the way for the Wolfman, for the Phantom, for Dracula, and for the many terrors that still lie steeping at the bottom of the collective consciousness in the United States today, and parts of the world too. Wherever there is a ghostly sheet tacked up with some crooked nails and a projector, the oldest would do€, there can be fright.

The initial major horror picture he had a hand in concocting was  The Man Who Laughs , a picture about a boy carved with a permanent grin in face. In fact, it was his idea for Universal Studios to start making horror films, the same studio he would later inherit from his father at a young and tender age. The film starred Conrad Veidt and Mary Philbin, who would later go on to star as the beautiful Christine Dubois to the Phantom of Lon Cheney. It actually reconnected Veidt and German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni. Previously the two had made together a film called Waxworks. Veidt had to wear a painful prosthetic piece developed for him. Originally, the part Veidt had as the tortured man who laughs, was to go to Lon Cheney but due to contractual obligations, Cheney had to drop out.

Carl Laemmle didn’t have to go through the chutes and ladders to become the head of the studio. He looped around being an executive. Training was never to be a part of his career. But from the decision he made to start marketing horror films, it is clear he was above the kind of training others today in the film industry could benefit from. Where did his idea to start up a horror franchise originate? The horrors of WWII. People could not confront the sons and fathers and brothers who came back from the war with the kind of deformities that Frankenstein and Eric the Phantom and Gwynplaine the laughing man represented on the screens. Laemmle was just smart enough to provide them with a voice.