Editorials
Hidden Treasures: Rediscovering the Horror-Comedy Gems of Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard
1939 is often called Hollywood’s Greatest Year, and it is indisputable that a huge number of America’s greatest classics were produced in that single year. A usually ignored element of that greatness is that 1939 was also the year that Hollywood resumed production on horror films after a two-year pause. In late 1936 two major factors led to the practical death of the genre: the Laemmle family, of whom Carl Laemmle’s, Jr. was horror’s greatest advocate, lost control of Universal and the British Board of Censors began enforcing the “H” certificate, which for all practical purposes banned horror for its target audience in Britain. The loss of this lucrative market combined with dropping box-office receipts and mounting pressure from American religious groups, Hollywood saw no reason to continue producing horror. The phrase “horror is dead” has often been thrown around over the decades but in 1937 and 38, it was actually true.
Then in 1938, Emil Umann (surely one of horror’s great unsung heroes) of the Regina theater in Beverly Hills programed a triple feature of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Son of Kong (quickly dropping the third film to add more showings) and business boomed proving to Hollywood that horror was still in demand. In 1939, Universal broke its horror silence with the release of Son of Frankenstein. Paramount, who had also been an important voice in horror in the early thirties, opted for a different track, combining a remake of a classic silent horror film with one of its most popular comedic actors, Bob Hope, and teaming him with a rising star, Paulette Goddard. The pair appeared in two horror comedies together, The Cat and the Canary in 1939 and The Ghost Breakers in 1940. Though usually overshadowed by the string of Abbott and Costello meet the Monsters movies produced by Universal in the late forties and fifties, these films all but invented the horror-comedy as we know it.
Of course, humor had been in horror movies before, James Whale was particularly adept at this, but The Cat and the Canary is something different, combining the laughs and chills in a way that had not been seen before. It begins at an old, crumbling mansion on the Louisiana bayou where a group of relatives gather to hear the reading of Cyrus Canby Norman’s will at midnight on the tenth anniversary of his death. If that sounds cliché that is entirely the point. Hope’s character of actor Wally Campbell even points out that it is. “Midnight, the alligators…the heirs, and the family lawyer all gathering to hear the reading of the will. It reminds me of a lot of the melodramas and murder mysteries I played in.” And there are many more tropes than that including the old spinster housekeeper who believes the house is haunted, a portrait with the eyes cut out through which the villain observes the heroine, secret passageways behind bookcases, cobweb-filled cellars, a treasure hunt, an escaped maniac from a local asylum, and a couple murders here and there. The difference is that the characters in the movie know they are clichés and use them to their advantage. In fact, The Cat and the Canary is one of the first self-referential horror films—it was “meta” almost sixty years before Scream.
The story of The Cat and the Canary had been around for quite some time by 1939. It began life as a play by John Willard in 1922 and had already been made into two films, the first in 1927 under the original title, and in 1930 as The Cat Creeps (not to be confused with the 1946 film that is something else entirely), and was remade once again in 1978. Most versions of the story are straightforward murder mystery/horror stories, which is one of the reasons why the 1939 film is so special. One of the elements that makes the film brilliant is that most of the characters and situations are serious, and only Hope is the comic foil.
‘The Cat and the Canary’
The visual style is very much in line with classic horror films and director Elliot Nugent seems to be taking his cues from great horror directors who came before like F.W. Murnau and James Whale. The film is absolutely dripping with the kind of atmosphere horror fans would expect and the scares are genuine. I would argue that these two films are more frightening than in the brilliant Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which leans much more toward the comedy. In The Cat and the Canary there are huge stakes and real danger involved. The killer takes out two people and very nearly a third. Also, there is never a moment to disprove the ghosts the housekeeper Miss Lu (Gale Sondergaard) believes in, a dead body drops out of a passageway, and shadows creep and crawl over the walls like the vines and moss that cover the outside of the Norman mansion.
Bob Hope is then dropped into this scenario and offers a performance that in itself balances realism, fear, and humor. Wally Campbell is a classic scaredy-cat that pretends to be a heroic lead, a tradition that would carry on in more exaggerated forms with actors like Jerry Lewis and Don Knotts, and in characters like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Campbell even draws attention to this fact with the line “I always joke when I’m scared. I kind of kid myself into being brave.” He is also a voice for the audience, pointing the clichés out to his fellow characters before the audience can groan at them, thereby subverting the tropes and keeping the mystery engaging. Again, a similar idea to Randy (Jamie Kennedy) in the Scream films. Hope even has something of a “straight man” in several scenes in the character of Cicily (Nydia Westman) who sets up several punchlines for the comedian. “Don’t big empty houses scare you?” she asks. “Not me, I used to be in Vaudeville,” comes his quick response. Another great exchange as the two are making their way into the darkened cellar is “Do you believe in reincarnation? You know, that dead people come back?” she asks. “You mean like Republicans?” he quips.
In the film’s vein of commenting on its own plot, just as Hope asks where his leading lady is, she enters—Joyce Norman, played by Paulette Goddard. At the time, Goddard was best known as Charlie Chaplin’s co-star in Modern Times (1936) and as his wife in real life. She also starred in George Cukor’s The Women earlier in 1939 and would go on to co-star in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator the following year. In The Cat and the Canary, she is a classic leading lady of the thirties—beautiful, sometimes in distress, but more often modern, self-possessed, and perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Though Hope is not the classically handsome leading man, the two have an undeniable chemistry and it is believable that they would fall for each other in the world of the film. Her role is not particularly comedic, but the audience is easily won over by her considerable warmth and charm.
‘The Ghost Breakers’
Hope and Goddard were reunited for The Ghost Breakers the next year. Despite its title and trailer featuring “Chief Exterminator” Bob Hope behind a desk full of phones answering one with “Ghost Breakers. You make ‘em, we shake ‘em,” bears practically no resemblance to the Ghostbusters films. In it, Mary Carter (Goddard) has inherited a supposedly haunted mansion off the coast of Cuba. Hope plays Lawrence “Larry” Lawrence (“my middle name is Lawrence too. My folks had no imagination.”), a radio personality who runs afoul of some gangsters and stows away in Mary’s trunk on the ship to Cuba along with his valet, Alex (Willie Best). Once in the Cuban mansion, the three of them meet up with zombies, ghosts, and voodoo curses. The sequences in the house are most effective, filled with plenty of laughs but also genuine chills. The comic timing between Hope and Best is impeccable, rivaling the best comedy teams of the age. However, the film is marred by some of the racial attitudes and stereotypes of the voodoo religion of the time which make portions of the film difficult to watch. This is unfortunate considering how truly brilliant much of the film is.
The success of these films led to one more pairing of the two stars in Nothing but the Truth in 1941, a comedy without any horror elements in the mix. It is often said that horror and comedy are perhaps the hardest genres to do well and doing them well at the same time is nearly impossible. In the history of film there is Abbott and Costello, Joe Dante, John Landis, Sam Raimi, and a handful of others that have really been able to pull off truly great horror comedies. Unfortunately, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers have too often been overlooked for their ingenuity and influence (the latter with some reason) but are worthy of being rediscovered 85 years after their release. Fortunately, they are more available now than they have been with Blu-ray releases available through Kino and on some streaming platforms.
There is a sequence in The Cat and the Canary in which Hope and Goddard follow a series of clues to discover a diamond necklace, the true Norman family treasure, hidden away in a secret compartment. Finding hidden gems among the dust and cobwebs is a bit what a movie lover feels discovering new favorites. I had that feeling discovering these treasures, and what a joy they were to find. There have been very few masters of the horror-comedy subgenre, either in front of or behind the camera, but Hope and Goddard deserve to be mentioned alongside the greats.
‘The Ghost Breakers’
In Bride of Frankenstein, Dr. Pretorius, played by the inimitable Ernest Thesiger, raises his glass and proposes a toast to Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein—“to a new world of Gods and Monsters.” I invite you to join me in exploring this world, focusing on horror films from the dawn of the Universal Monster movies in 1931 to the collapse of the studio system and the rise of the new Hollywood rebels in the late 1960’s. With this period as our focus, and occasional ventures beyond, we will explore this magnificent world of classic horror. So, I raise my glass to you and invite you to join me in the toast.
Stephen King is an interesting follow on the site formerly known as Twitter. When not posting about politics or his latest literary find, he’s ranting about the state of the world and making observations that position him as a sort of elder statesman in the horror community. A recent tweet by the Master of Horror mentions a bygone era of salacious magazines that harkens back to his early career: “Hey, do you guys remember that supermarket tabloid that used to have stories about BatBoy? Man, I loved that shit.”
The world-famous author is likely referencing publications like The National Enquirer and similar periodicals that used to grab eyes in checkout lanes with claims of Elvis sightings and alien encounters. Frequently inspired by the world around him, King has his own literary brand of tabloid journalism with Inside View, a rag that has been appearing in his work for decades.
The Dead Zone
‘The Dead Zone’
Inside View began its life in one of King’s early classics, The Dead Zone (1979). This political thriller follows Johnny Smith, a teacher who awakens from a four-year coma with a disturbing ability to see into the past and future. When news of his powerful gift makes its way outside of the hospital, it peaks the interest of a sleazy periodical. Richard Dees, a journalist for Inside View approaches Johnny at his home with a lucrative offer to exploit this ability in a salacious column filled with parlor tricks and outsized predictions. Smith and his father summarily dismiss Dees and throw him off of their porch, valuing their privacy over a lifetime of lucrative infamy. But with this one interaction, an entity was born.
Inside View would become a fixture in King’s interconnected literary world and continue to appear in his novels and short stories for the next 45 years.
Danse Macabre
‘Freaks’
But to truly understand the genesis of this fascinating magazine, we need to go even further back in time. King has always been fascinated by oddities and opens his first non-fiction work, Danse Macabre, with memories of childhood nightmares. In the first chapter, “Tales of the Hook,” King tackles the concept of monstrosity by exploring fascination with carnival sideshows and the impact of Tod Browning’s disturbing 1932 film Freaks. While much of this section would be considered problematic by today’s standards, it was an uneven contribution to early conversations about disability and acceptance. King also seems fully aware of the salacious nature of this exploitation. In a treatise on horror, he’s examining the concept of otherness and our tendency to fixate on physical differences as a way of reifying the social hierarchy. He insists, “it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply.”
King credits The National Enquirer with sparking his own interest in monsters and even admits to being an occasional patron. In a footnote following a mention of the tabloid, he confesses, “I buy it if there’s a juicy UFO story or something about Bigfoot, but mostly I only scan it rapidly while in a slow supermarket checkout lane, looking for such endearing lapses of taste as the notorious autopsy photo of Lee Harvey Oswald or their photo of Elvis Presley in his coffin.” While King may cast slight judgment on the authors of these exploitative stories, he does not shame the readers themselves. He describes these stories with a mix of reverence, bemusement, and childish wonder. These grainy photos of alien autopsies, flesh-eating dogs, and grotesque physical anomalies once sparked his imagination and introduced a young horror fan to elements of the macabre that would inform his prolific writing career for decades to come.
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
While King’s work has always centered on the exploration of monsters, both fantastical and human, he dove head-first into this interest with his third short story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). Akin to a curio shelf of horrific objects, this assortment of 23 unnerving tales features a number of dangerous oddities and unexpected monsters. Subjects range from a massive finger growing out of a toilet and a pair of murderous wind-up teeth, to bat people masquerading as powerful businessmen and killer frogs raining from the sky. His introduction – King’s beloved way of speaking directly to his Constant Readers – mentions freakish tales from paperback compilations of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, a publication he fondly remembers devouring in his youth.
Rather than factual evidence, it’s belief that seems to interest King most. In a subtle nod to the climax of his magnum opus It (1986), King muses on the power of believing in myths like poisonous gas at the center of tennis balls and the ability to sever a shadow by piercing it with a stake. Similar to urban legends that shape our interactions with the larger world, King notes the importance belief in these imaginative legends has had in his own life. “This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights.” Rather than cast a baleful eye on journals that traffic in the sensational, King’s collection highlights the power of believing in the “unseen world all around us.” His introduction concludes with an invitation to suspend disbelief and venture into a world where anything is possible.
The Night Flier
‘The Night Flier’
Given this fantastical focus, it’s no surprise that Nightmares and Dreamscapes features King’s most overt exploration of Inside View. The collection’s fourth story “The Night Flier” follows Dees, now a veteran reporter, on the trail of a “vampire” traveling the country in a small private plane. It’s a grim story with a true crime feel and a fascinating approach to vampire lore. The titular pilot may wear the black cape made famous by Bela Lugosi, but he has a hideous face with two large, bore-like fangs that puncture the necks of his victims and cause their blood to spurt out like crimson guisers. Dwight Renfield is not an elegant killer, but a ripper-like psycho leaving grisly crime scenes and dismembered corpses in his wake – the perfect subject for Inside View.
Rather than focus solely on the monster himself, King spends just as much time exploring Dees’s own ethical code. Far from the ambitious hack that once knocked on Johnny Smith’s door, this Dees has been curating the publication’s scandalous content for decades. He operates on the iron-clad directive to never print anything he believes and to never believe anything he prints, an interesting subversion to King’s earlier introduction. I won’t spoil one of the collection’s best entries, but “The Night Flier” plays with the price of disbelief as Dees is forced into a world where the stories he’s been spinning for decades might actually be real.
Modern Mentions
‘Doctor Sleep’
King presents Nightmares and Dreamscapes as the concluding chapter in a trilogy of short story collections and it does feel like the end of an era. The author’s next literary phase is much more experimental, playing with formats, bending genres, and moving further away from the hallmarks of classic horror. Inside View remains a constant, but the author’s perspective seems to gradually shift. Tess, the heroine of his 2010 rape-revenge novella “Big Driver,” chooses not to report her assault in part because she fears the magazine would blame her for the crime. In Doctor Sleep (2013), Abra’s mother keeps her daughter’s psychic abilities a secret for fear that, like Johnny Smith, she would become fodder for the tabloids. This shift may have something to do with King’s own time recovering from a near-fatal highway accident. During his lengthy recovery, the world-famous author may have imagined pictures of his own mangled body appearing in publications willing to disregard ethics in favor of a massive payday.
Though mentions have decreased since the ’90s, King has not stopped writing about Inside View. Billy Summers (2021) and Fairy Tale (2022) both include references to this fictional tabloid. Inside View also makes an appearance in You Like It Darker, now available. The eagerly anticipated collection revisits Cujo, another Castle Rock story from King’s early catalog.
King’s intro for Nightmares and Dreamscapes extols not only the virtues of short stories, but also their ability to save the world. “Good writing–good stories–are the imagination’s firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable. I can only speak from my own experience, of course, but for me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.” With the world seeming to come apart at the seams, perhaps it’s time to renew our faith in the fantastical, suspend our disbelief, and once again venture with King into the world of the seemingly impossible.
‘The Night Flier’
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