Universal’s monsters gave horror its family tree. Between 1925 and 1954 one Hollywood studio gave cinema its Phantom, its Dracula, its Frankenstein’s Monster and its creature from a lagoon. At their best, the BFI says, the films brim with wit, invention and atmosphere. This is the story of where they came from and the people who made them, with eight films to start on this Halloween.
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How a silent phantom started Universal horror
Universal’s monster cycle began with a man in a mask, not with a vampire. The BFI traces the studio’s horror back to two silent films starring Lon Chaney: The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923 and The Phantom of the Opera in 1925. Nobody called them horror at the time. The BFI says people thought of them as melodrama, and that “horror” only came into wide use at the start of the 1930s.
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Chaney is where the warmth of this story starts. He was born in Colorado in 1883 to deaf parents, so he grew up speaking in sign language and mime. That childhood of saying everything with a face and a body became his craft. He toured as a young actor, twisting himself into hunchbacks and other shapes, and often put his own health at risk for a new effect. By 1915 he was directing and starring in films for Universal, which billed him as “the man of a thousand faces”. The studio learned from him that audiences would pay to be scared, survive it, and come back for more.
The face under the mask
The Phantom is the summit of that craft. Chaney designed and applied the skeletal make-up himself, and the BFI counts the unmasking as one of the defining images of silent cinema. The scene works like an early jump scare. Christine’s hands creep towards the mask, and then the face is suddenly bare. The Phantom himself looks horrified when the mask comes away. The BFI supposes the first audiences, a century ago, were just as shaken.
Chaney did not stay. Irving Thalberg, the young assistant to studio head Carl Laemmle, adored him, and when Thalberg moved to MGM he took Chaney along. There Chaney made some of his most frightening films of the late 1920s, often directed by Tod Browning. He died in 1930, before he turned 50.
A vampire waiting for sound
Browning had already pitched Universal a Dracula with Chaney in the cape. Bram Stoker’s novel had been a hit on the New York stage in 1927, led by a Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi. Lugosi had frightened theatre audiences so thoroughly that, once Chaney died, everyone assumed the film role was his.
Sound gave the new film something the silents never had. The Guardian hears it in the howling wolves, in women crying out in their sleep, and above all in Lugosi’s forbidding welcome, “I am Drac-u-la”. Dracula opened in 1931 and quickly earned $1m on a budget about a third of that.
Even then, the founder was not sold. Carl Laemmle told his son that horror was morbid and that people did not want it. Junior Laemmle answered, “Yes, they do, Pop,” and asked for the chance to prove it.
The BFI adds a twist from those nights on the Dracula sets. Before reliable dubbing, Universal shot a Spanish version on the same sets after Browning’s crew went home, directed by George Melford. The BFI thinks that night-shift version is the racier and more fluid of the two.
Why the books mattered
Chaney’s two silents had proved that frightening pictures drawn from gothic novels could find a paying audience. When sound arrived, Universal followed that plan with two hugely popular adaptations in 1931: Lugosi’s Dracula and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein. The bookish source material gave the films prestige and an audience that already knew the story.
Frankenstein opened in November 1931 and took $5m at the box office, just as the Depression was hurting other expected hits. On the strength of it, The Guardian credits Universal and the Laemmles with making horror a lasting genre. Variety, writing in 2015, called Universal the house that Dracula, The Wolf Man and Frankenstein built.
The BFI splits what followed into four phases. The Chaney silents came first, then the golden run of 1931 adaptations. In the 1940s the studio pooled its creatures in “monster mash” films, and in the Cold War it turned to science fiction creatures.
The Phantom left one more habit behind. The BFI argues that Erik is cruel and possessive, yet so lonely that the audience pities him. That balance between monster and outcast runs through the Universal formula from Frankenstein to Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954.
The people who built the monsters
Junior Laemmle, born in Chicago, was the studio boss who backed Frankenstein. He handed it to the English director James Whale, perhaps as a bid for more class. Tod Browning, meanwhile, had directed Dracula for the same 1931 season.
The Guardian describes Whale as a witty, sophisticated man who could see the silliness in the new genre, yet had the sense to play the scares straight.
The Monster in the commissary
The studio’s first idea was to cast Lugosi as the Monster. Whale said no. Lugosi was not tall, and Whale wanted a Monster you could see coming. The story goes that he found his man in the Universal commissary: an actor with sallow skin and sombre eyes, towering over everyone at his table.
That actor was William Henry Pratt, born in Dulwich, who worked as Boris Karloff. He was 44 in 1931, and he had acted for years without anyone much noticing. Howard Hawks cast him in The Criminal Code that year, and then Whale asked him to play the Monster.
Karloff went to work with Jack Pierce of the Universal make-up department. The Guardian calls Pierce a key link in the success of horror. Karloff later explained their thinking. They imagined brain after brain pushed in and pulled out of that skull, so they built up the forehead. His eyes looked too bright and too knowing, so he waxed them to look heavy and half-seeing.
Look at what they made and you see the tenderness in it. The Guardian argues that the pathos Karloff found on that shoot meant more to horror than anything else that year. Audiences began to wonder whether the Monster had a lost humanity worth saving. GamesRadar+ describes him as capable of gentleness, a creature met with hatred only because of how he was made. Colin Clive played the doctor opposite him.
The bride and the rival
Elsa Lanchester made a startling bride. In Bride of Frankenstein she plays the mate made for the Monster, hissing, her hair on end and her eyes wide. The Guardian says her originality is still undervalued, because most women in these films existed to scream before they fell.
Karloff and Lugosi, the cycle’s two great faces, shared the screen in The Black Cat. Whale also made The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man in those first few years.
The first flush did not last. Gangster pictures pulled audiences towards a new kind of monster, and Universal began to struggle. Whale wanted to make prestige pictures such as Show Boat, and Karloff wanted to be taken seriously. The Hays Code banned “brutality and possible gruesomeness” in 1934, and real horror nearly vanished from American screens.
A refugee writes a werewolf
The next monster came from a man who had fled his own country. Curt Siodmak was a German writer who had had to leave home fast a few years before and learn a new language. The producer and director George Waggner walked into his office and asked what he knew about wolf men. Waggner had a budget of $180,000 and wanted to start shooting in 10 weeks.
Siodmak went to the library and read up on eastern European folklore. He came back with a man bitten by a dog, who sees hair growing on his hands at the full moon. For the lead Universal chose Lon Chaney Jr, fresh from playing Lennie in Of Mice and Men. So the 1941 Wolf Man arrived with its own star. GamesRadar+ ranks its werewolf as perhaps the definitive one in cinema.
The studio kept its stable working. Frankenstein’s monster met the Wolf Man in 1943, and from then on Universal mixed its creatures to chase ticket sales. The Guardian argues that the monsters got funnier and less frightening with each film.
The films that set the rules
These films were never planned as a set. GamesRadar+ notes that the shared universe grew on its own, years into the studio’s run, and worked because each film could stand alone first. One GamesRadar+ writer remembers begging, as a very young child, to watch the 1931 Frankenstein. That is the right way to meet them: one at a time, each with its own mood.
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Start with Frankenstein, because everything after it borrows from it. Michael Walsh, who drew a Universal Monsters comic of the story, still talks about its set pieces, shots and framing. It began a whole run of Frankenstein films at the studio. Walsh calls Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel one of the greatest horror novels of all time, and his comic tries to carry the book’s ideas inside the film’s images.
Bride of Frankenstein followed in 1935. Karloff and Clive came back, and the doctor is forced to build the Monster a mate. Lanchester’s bride is also nicknamed Mary Shelley, a nod to the novel’s author. GamesRadar+ says the sequel opens the story out into sexuality, social rules and romantic rejection. The bride is terrified of the one creature who might love her, and GamesRadar+ ties the line “We belong dead!” to one of the most moving tragedies in monster movies.
Dracula gave the cycle its count. GamesRadar+ calls the 1931 film a towering classic, and it credits it with spawning the first real shared movie universe. GamesRadar+ names Lugosi and Christopher Lee as the actors best remembered in the role. GamesRadar+ also reads the vampire as an image of aristocrats feeding on the poor.
The Invisible Man came in 1933, with Whale directing again and Claude Rains under the bandages, from HG Wells’s novel. Empire files The Wolf Man, with The Phantom of the Opera, under genuine tragedy. Its spookiness still echoed decades later. Film Comment saw an echo of it in a TV movie scene where children in pagan costumes chant in the dark.
The range was wide. Empire points out that the same era made Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Invisible Agent, a wartime piece in which the Invisible Man’s son becomes a secret agent.
The studio branched out fast. Karl Freund, who had shot Dracula, directed his first feature, The Mummy, in 1932. Empire says Universal asked him to rework the Dracula formula, and props and sets came straight from the vampire film. In Empire’s view, Freund’s Expressionist training left an indelible mark on the look and tone. The BFI finds it scarier and more emotionally resonant than Dracula, with Karloff again as the monster.
Whale’s The Old Dark House, from the same year, strands a group of travellers in a Welsh mansion during a storm. Film Comment calls it his least-seen masterpiece, and Karloff plays the scarred, mute butler. The BFI rates it the archetypal haunted house chiller.
Then, in 1934, Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat set Karloff against Lugosi for the first time. Little White Lies reads it as a clash of the genre’s heavyweights. Its villain lives in a glass-and-steel modernist house, not a cobwebbed castle. The BFI adds that it was one of the first films scored with music throughout.
The last of the line came out of a swamp. Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, in 1954, sends scientists into the Amazon, where a fish-man defends his home. Ricou Browning and Ben Chapman shared the role of the Gill-man. It was the franchise’s final film before decades of rest. GamesRadar+ calls it seminal, and notes it has been remade, homaged and spoofed ever since.
And the Phantom stays the first of them all. GamesRadar+ says Universal chose Erik as its first monster because of his possessive, violent nature. Universal’s was not even the first Phantom on film. That was a German version from 1916, now lost. Yet the BFI judges the 1925 film the most influential of them all. Most of the novels behind these films are now out of copyright in the US, so any studio may adapt them.
The studio itself now treats reinvention as the point. In 2019 its production president, Peter Cramer, said each new film-maker had seen these monsters through their own prism. He promised a more personal approach, led by creators with stories they cared about.
How the monsters multiplied, then faded
The Phantom shows how far one Universal film could travel. The BFI lists a long line of descendants: Universal’s own 1943 remake, Hammer’s 1962 version, Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise in 1974 and Phantom of the Mall in 1989. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical started with a screening of the 1925 film, before he had even read Gaston Leroux’s novel.
Britain took up the gothic next. Terence Fisher made Horror of Dracula for Hammer in 1958, with Christopher Lee as the count and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. GamesRadar+ argues it may beat the Universal original, and its imagery is far more graphic.
Some of the warmest tributes came from fans who grew up on the films. Guillermo del Toro saw Creature from the Black Lagoon as a young man and found a love story in it that nobody else had seen. In 2017 he made The Shape of Water, where the fish-man and the woman fall for each other, and it won him an Oscar.
Others paid tribute with comedy. GamesRadar+ calls Tremors, with Kevin Bacon fleeing giant worms in Nevada, a loving homage to the old creature features. Its writers, S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, once made safety films for the US Navy.
Whale’s Monster keeps returning too. Bernard Rose set Frankenstein in modern Los Angeles, and Film Comment found Whale’s vision alive in the innocence of Rose’s creature. Rose told the magazine he wanted to give the story back to Mary Shelley.
The monsters moved into comics and museums. Michael Walsh’s four-issue Universal Monsters: Frankenstein came out from Skybound in 2024. In 2019 the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened The Natural History of Horror, with props and rare stills from Dracula and Frankenstein. The show had roots in 1935, when Universal gave the museum some props. A collections manager, Beth Werling, found that a broom and pitchfork labelled as coming from The Good Fairy were in fact from Bride of Frankenstein.
The studio’s own revivals went less well. The 2017 Mummy, with Tom Cruise, cost $350m to make and promote and took $409m worldwide. It was meant to launch a linked “Dark Universe” of monsters. After it, Universal dropped the shared plan and backed one-off stories instead. The first of those, The Invisible Man in 2020, worked. Blumhouse made it for $7m before marketing, and it opened to $29m. Whannell said the smaller budget worked in favour of the film’s realism. Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore drew the lesson plainly: a really good horror film does not need a big budget. Jim Orr, Universal’s head of domestic distribution, praised Blumhouse for never cutting corners on quality.
Where the monsters stand in 2026
The shared universe failed on screen. In the mid-2010s Universal announced Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s Monster and Russell Crowe as Jekyll and Hyde. Only The Mummy came out, in 2017, to poor reviews and weak box office. Empire argues that its biggest sin was forgetting to be a monster movie at all, and playing like quippy action instead. A Guardian critic had warned in 2016 that these beasts were not superheroes, and that they shared little beyond a gothic 19th-century shell.
The single films did better. Blumhouse, under a first-look deal with Universal, remade The Invisible Man in 2020 as a story of domestic abuse. Leigh Whannell directed it, and Elisabeth Moss plays a woman stalked by an ex no one else can see. Empire says the film reframes the character in a way that frightens modern audiences.
The run of remakes kept going. In January 2025 GamesRadar+ counted Whannell’s Wolf Man among the new arrivals. It also argued that the Phantom deserved the same treatment. Because the monsters’ source stories are in the public domain, Empire notes, they have found homes well beyond Universal. By June 2025 it could list a del Toro Frankenstein, a musical take on the Bride from Maggie Gyllenhaal, and a scarier Mummy from Lee Cronin of Evil Dead Rise. As the Phantom reached its centenary, the BFI noted that it was screening at various UK cinemas.
The biggest success may be a theme park. Universal Orlando’s Epic Universe has its own Dark Universe land, and Empire reports queues around corners to meet Frankenstein and the Bride. Its ride, Monsters Unchained, has the monsters turn on a Victoria Frankenstein. The details are made with love: a Burning Blazes Tavern for Frankenstein’s finale, and a cocktail called Monocane after the drug in the original Invisible Man.
Even the Minions came calling. Universal released Minions & Monsters on July 1, 2026, a prequel in which two friends, James and Henry, try to summon monsters to make a great film in Hollywood’s golden era. It reached homes on disc on September 8. So the monsters still sell, nearly a century on. The open question is whether Universal can make another one that scares.
Starter guide
Watch these in order, and you see a genre grow up. The BFI names Frankenstein the best place to start. It also warns where not to begin. Son of Frankenstein in 1939 is fun but falls short of Whale, though it gives Karloff his last turn as the Monster. The Abbott and Costello films, from 1948, have their fans but trade the scares for laughs.
One more the BFI loves sits just off this list. Dracula’s Daughter in 1936 is a sad, overlooked film about being unable to escape your own nature. It needs a second voice before it joins the eight below.
- The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925). The BFI calls Universal’s version the most influential film of the story, and Variety puts it among the 100 best horror films.
- Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931). GamesRadar+ calls it a towering classic, and Empire says it remains seminal for its place in horror history.
- Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931). The BFI calls it the cycle’s first stone-cold masterpiece, and GamesRadar+ calls it a monumental classic.
- The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932). Film Comment calls it Whale’s least-seen masterpiece, and IndieWire puts it among the 100 best horror films.
- The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933). GamesRadar+ calls it the 1933 classic, and Variety puts it among the 100 best horror films.
- Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935). The BFI calls it probably the greatest of the 1930s horror cycle, and the Guardian names it among the best horror films of all time.
- The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941). Empire calls it Universal’s classic 1941 werewolf film, and the BFI calls it a classic entry in the studio’s monster cycle.
- Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954). GamesRadar+ calls it a seminal monster movie, and Variety puts it among the 100 best horror films.
