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’