West, East, Africa

Richard Wright's native son and classic movie monsters

Mera Moore

pp. 129-155

in: Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed), Cross-cultural visions in African American literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstrakt

West meets East in racialized depictions of 1930s classic movie monsters.¹ These horror films exhibit racial associations in part due to casting of actors with Eastern physical features. The era's most well-known monster actors include Bela Lugosi (1882–1956) and Boris Karloff (1887–1969).² An Eastern European immigrant from Hungary who spoke accented English, Lugosi portrayed the classic Dracula character in the 1927 Broadway show Dracula, the 1931 movie Dracula, and other works, becoming so identified with this role that he was "buried in full Dracula regalia" (Jones 90–91). In a 1936 serial competing with the Fu Manchu cycle, Lugosi was cast as a Eurasian mad scientist, Victor Poten, in 15 episodes of Shadow of a Chinatown (Wong 59). He also played Igor in Son of Frankenstein (1939), the werewolf who bites Lon Chaney's character in The Wolf Man (1941), and Frankenstein's monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943).