Each episode of The Fearmakers also features interviews with a variety of talent connected with these movie masters and the horror film world, including: John Agar, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Dario Argento, John Carpenter, Jeffrey Combs, Joe Dante, Stuart Gordon, Richard Matheson and David J. Skal.
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Tod Browning
(From Wikipedia)
Tod Browning (July 12, 1880 – October 6, 1962) was an American motion picture actor, director and screenwriter.
Browning's career spanned the silent and talkie eras. Best-known as the director of Dracula (1931), the cult classic Freaks (1932), and classic silent movie collaborations with Lon Chaney, Sr., Browning directed many movies in a wide range of genres.
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Browning's feature film debut was Jim Bludso (1917), about a riverboat captain who sacrifices himself to save his passengers from a fire. It was well-received.
Browning moved back to New York in 1917. He directed two films for Metro Studios: Peggy, the Will O' the Wisp and The Jury of Fate, both starring Mabel Taliaferro, the latter in a dual role achieved with double exposure techniques that were groundbreaking for the time. He moved back to California in 1918 and produced two more films for Metro: The Eyes of Mystery and Revenge.
In the spring of 1918 he left Metro and joined Bluebird Productions, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, where he met Irving Thalberg. Thalberg paired Browning with Lon Chaney, Sr. for the first time for the film The Wicked Darling (1919), a melodrama in which Chaney played a thief who forces a poor girl from the slums into a life of crime. Browning and Chaney would ultimately make ten films together over the next decade.
The death of his father sent Browning into a depression that led to alcoholism. He was laid off by Universal and his wife left him. However, he recovered, reconciled with his wife, and got a one-picture contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. The film he produced for MGM, The Day of Faith, was a moderate success, putting his career back on track.
Thalberg reunited Browning with Lon Chaney for The Unholy Three (1925), the story of three circus performers who concoct a scheme to con and steal jewels from rich people using disguises. Browning's circus experience shows in his sympathetic portrayal of the antiheroes. The film was a resounding success, so much so that it was later remade in 1930 as Lon Chaney's first (and only) talkie. Browning and Chaney embarked on a series of popular collaborations, including The Blackbird and The Road to Mandalay. The Unknown (1927), featuring Chaney as an armless knife thrower and Joan Crawford as his scantily-clad carnival girl obsession, was originally titled Alonzo the Armless and could be considered a precursor to Freaks in that it concerns a love triangle involving a circus freak, a beauty, and a strongman. London After Midnight (1927) was Browning's first foray into vampire film and is a highly sought-after lost film which starred Chaney, Conrad Nagel, and Marceline Day. The last known print of London After Midnight was destroyed in an MGM studio fire in 1965. In 2002, a photographic reconstruction of London After Midnight was produced by Rick Schmidlin for Turner Classic Movies. Browning and Chaney's final collaboration was Where East is East (1929), of which only incomplete prints have survived. Browning's first talkie was The Thirteenth Chair (1929), which was also released as a silent and starred Bela Lugosi.
After Chaney's death in 1930, Browning was hired by Universal Pictures to direct Dracula (1931). Although Browning wanted to hire an unknown European actor for the title role and have him be mostly offscreen as a sinister presence, budget constraints and studio interference necessitated the casting of Bela Lugosi and a more straightforward approach. Although the film is now considered a classic, at the time Universal was unhappy with it and preferred the Spanish-language version filmed on the same sets at night.
After directing the boxing melodrama The Iron Man (1931), he began work on Freaks (1932). Based on the short story Spurs by Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins, the screenwriter of The Unholy Three, the film concerns a love triangle between a wealthy dwarf, a gold-digging aerialist, and a strongman; a murder plot; and the vengeance dealt out by the dwarf and his fellow circus freaks. The film was highly controversial, even after heavy editing to remove many disturbing scenes, and was a commercial failure. Browning's career was derailed.
Browning found himself unable to get his requested projects greenlighted. After directing the drama Fast Workers (1933) starring John Gilbert, who was also not in good standing with the studio, he was allowed to direct a remake of London After Midnight, originally titled Vampires of Prague but later retitled Mark of the Vampire (1935). In the remake, the roles played by Lon Chaney in the original were split between Lionel Barrymore and Bela Lugosi (spoofing his Dracula image).
After that, he directed The Devil-Doll (1936), originally titled The Witch of Timbuctoo, from a script he wrote himself. It starred Lionel Barrymore as an escapee from an island prison who avenges himself on the people who imprisoned him using living "dolls" who are actually people shrunk to doll-size and magically placed under Barrymore's hypnotic control. Browning's final film was the murder mystery Miracles for Sale (1939).
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