Dracula Transformed & Other Bloodthirsty Tales by Mark McLaughlin & Michael McCarty & C. Dean Andersson & The Amazing Kreskin

Author:Mark McLaughlin & Michael McCarty & C. Dean Andersson & The Amazing Kreskin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, vampire, dracula, undead, short stories
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

AFTERWORD,

by C. Dean Andersson

Abbott And Costello Meet Dracula Transformed

Thinking back to when I was a kid, the film that first scared me enough to get my attention and attract me to horror was not any of the traditional horror classics. Well, it is classic now, but not then, just one in a series of Abbott and Costello films, the one where they meet Frankenstein (not the good Doctor, but the Monster as commonly misnamed, played by Glenn Strange, later the bartender in the Long Branch on TV’s Gunsmoke, where the Marshal was played by the Vegetable Man from Mars in The Thing, James Arness).

In the same film, not only do A&C meet Frankenstein, our bumbling “Who’s On First?” duo also meet Dracula, played by Bela Lugosi (only the second time he had played that famous role in a film, believe it or not), the Wolf Man, played by Lon Chaney, Jr., and at the end, for a brief moment, the Invisible Man, voiced by Vincent Price.

Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein, originally released in 1948, is a comedy film, but it was not funny the first time I saw it on an old black-and-white TV. You see, I had never seen these monsters before! So when, near the first, I saw Lawrence Talbot transform into the Wolf Man, I was not prepared to see a man become a hairy, befanged monster, and it scared me silly.

The scene is hilarious, now, as Talbot is on the telephone talking to Costello when the transformation happens, and Costello thinks someone’s dog has taken over the phone, snarling and growling on the other end. But my being scared silly by Talbot’s transformation felt strangely good, so I kept watching, peeking through my fingers from behind a pillow on the couch, and soon, on that unforgettable late-night monster show aired out of Wichita, Kansas, hosted by a ghoulish long-before-Elvira pair billed as “The Host and Rodney,” I also met Dracula and the Frakenstein Monster.

If we had been capable of recording films for replay, or buying DVDs (or video tapes), I would have found a way to scrape enough of my meager allowance and “doin’ the chores” money together to get that film. But as it was, years passed before I saw it again, by which time, thanks to that film, I was a veteran of many other horror films on late-night TV, a couple in actual theaters, and many devoutly studied monster magazines such as World Famous Creatures, Castle of Frankenstein, and of course, Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. To the older me, A&C Meet Frankenstein was no longer the least bit scary. But it was and remains what it was meant to be, funny.

One almost wishes Dracula had succeeded in transferring Costello’s brain into the Frankenstein Monster. Maybe the Monster could then have become a top-hatted “man about town” and performed “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” years before Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder got it done. And that is another example of humor mixed

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