Jack Pierce - The Man Behind the Monsters Read Free

their tremendous achievements with Frankenstein in 1931, Pierce and Karloff engaged in many unique projects that made use of each of their talents. Before Pierce and Karloff shot The Mummy , they collaborated for James Whale’s The Old Dark House in 1932. Playing the demonic butler, Morgan (left), Pierce’s conception of Karloff as a scarred haggard menace fit perfectly into Whale’s timeless haunted house tale. In 1934, the studio sought to pair their two horror giants, Karloff and Béla Lugosi, in a series of films. First up was The Black Cat (below left) in which Pierce subtly enhanced Karloff’s basic facial features, eyebrows and hairline to create a memorable Gothic persona for the actor. The next year, Pierce took his approach even further with The Raven (below), modeling a misshapen eye and right side of Karloff’s face. Though the false eye was less convincing than other aspects of the makeup, by the end of the Laemmle era (with 1936’s The Invisible Ray as the final KarloffLugosi pairing), Pierce and Karloff had amassed an impressive body of work.

werewolf of london

    Following the wild success of Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy, Universal put several follow-up horror showcases into development in the early 1930s. Junior Laemmle had long wanted to produce sound re-makes of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom of the Opera, previous Lon Chaney-driven successes for the studio in the 1920s, but neither project came to fruition during the Laemmle reign. Finally, in the early 1930s, Laemmle approved a film of The Werewolf, the classic story that had its origins in France as the tale of the “loup-garou.” Karloff was pre-cast as the title character, and Pierce went as far as designing an extensive lycanthrope makeup for him. However, the project was again put off until 1935 when it was reconfigured as Werewolf of London starring Henry Hull (above and opposite). Though Hull rejected a complete masking of his face by the makeup, Pierce devised a strategically frightening likeness which included no less than five facial stages of man-into-wolf transformation on film.

bride of frankenstein

    Though it took Universal four years to bring the long-rumored sequel to Frankenstein to the screen, the second film in the cycle, first called “The Return of Frankenstein” when it was in development, introduced one striking new Jack Pierce creation to Mary Shelley’s world. In addition to a new frontallyburned version of the monster, Pierce brought a “bride” to the screen in the form of actress Elsa Lanchester. Only appearing at the end of the film, and then for only a few minutes, the image of Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein remains as iconic as the 1931 visage of the first Monster. With augmented lips, eyebrows, and eyelashes, plus her amazing shock of hair — ostensibly put up in a wire cage with asymmetrical electric wisps of gray — the Bride, with her birdlike motions and subtle chin scars, manages to simultaneously attract and repel. Both beautiful and horrifying, Lanchester’s brief, quirky appearance on film as the Bride is one of Pierce’s simplest but most clever manifestations.

    Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein with Lanchester and Ernest
Thesiger as Dr. Praetorius

costumes by vera west

    Starting at Universal at the same time as Jack Pierce, costume designer Vera West (top right) worked at the studio until 1947, designing “gowns” (according to many of her credits) and many of the famous monster costumes in the late 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. West headed the costume department from 1928 — again, the same year that Pierce started as makeup department head — and designed the notable costumes in Dracula, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein during the Laemmle era. Of this first group of films, Bride truly gave her the opportunity to showcase her considerable talents, allegedly honed on New York’s Fifth Avenue before she came to Hollywood. In addition to the iconic costumes for