Speaker Feature

"What is it about watching someone get killed in a movie that's so...entertaining?" asked horror film aficionado, amateur magician, and guest speaker Cody Nichols before an enraptured class at SJSU's Dwight Bentel Hall.

While America's fascination with horror films dates back to the early days of moviemaking, Nichols focused largely on the Universal Classic Monsters of the 1920s and '30s, including Bela Lugosi's Dracula, Lon Chaney's Phantom, and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein.

As frighteningly large film stills loomed in the background, Nichols spoke with Vaudevillian flair about the many ways such monsters reflected the deeper, darker social realities of their day. 

Nichols played a clip of "The Phantom of the Opera," the 1925 silent horror film classic; the class watched as actress Mary Philbin tiptoes behind the Phantom, carefully but swiftly removing his mask to reveal his gnarled, skeletal face.

"This might not seem that bad now, but people literally fainted the first time they saw this," Nichols mused.

Why?

"What was happening in the '20s? Men were returning from war with mutilated faces — and plastic surgery was not what it is today," Nichols remarked as he showed before and after portrait photos of soldiers with their faces sewn up, contorted, and badly disfigured.

There was some time to consider the man — the real man, not the actor — behind the mask. 

"Lon Chaney was famous for going to great lengths to play these monsters and using makeup techniques that people still don't know to this day," Nichols revealed.

He turned his attention to Frankenstein.

Because of Boris Karloff's Indian heritage, the actor was considered "too exotic" for most mainstream roles — so, they turned him into a monster.

Lining up the next clip, Nichols paused: "Studio exec Carl Laemmie screamed when he first saw this scene."

The class watched in total silence as Frankenstein grabs a young girl and awkwardly throws her into a lake to her death.

"'No children must die,' Nichols says Laemmie ruled after seeing the oddly docile scene, terrifying in its time.

Speeding through the next few decades before getting to more modern times when both Tim Burton and Johnny Depp were "still good," Nichols implored the class to take horror seriously — and, judging by the stunned but thoughtful expressions in the room, everyone was dying to start.