Some of the best Scream Kings to honor this Halloween
By Rachel Roth
5. Christopher Lee
Anyone who saw The Wicker Man (1973) knows Christopher Lee doesn’t need vampire fangs to be scary. Standing at a towering 6’5 with a voice to compete with Morgan Freeman’s and a smile that could have struck fear in the Devil, it’s easy to believe that Lee was who people pictured when they imagined a villain for many years. The last horror icon in the mode of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr, Lee served as a major influence for the shift in horror that brought in more gore and Gothic atmospheres. With 278 film and TV credits, Lee was no doubt one of the greatest actors in his generation, or of any generation, and had a life just as incredible off-screen as his presence looked on-screen.
Lee’s first big horror movie was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), considered the first real gory horror film. Following in the footsteps of Boris Karloff, he played The Monster alongside another major horror actor, Peter Cushing (who I’m sorry is not on this list). The movie resulted in Lee and Cushing striking up a strong friendship and the two would end up working together in over twenty films. Lee and the original Monster, Karloff, also worked together more than once, in both Corridors of Blood (1958) and in the episode “At Night, All Cats are Grey” from the TV series Colonel March of Scotland Yard.
His intimidating on-screen presence and portrayal of Frankenstein’s Monster led to the role that made him famous, Count Dracula in the 1957 British film, Dracula. A sharp contrast from the Dracula’s who proceeded him, Lee’s performance made him a massive star and he would return to play the character eleven more times.
When he wasn’t drinking blood he was a slave trader, a crazed king, a demented professor or just an average murderer. Appearing in The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960) Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), The Devil Rides Out (1967), Horror Express (1973), Sleepy Hollow (1999) and multiple other Burton films, The City of the Dead (1960), the Hounds of Baskervilles (1959) and of course, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003).
4. Lon Chaney
The Patron Saint of Horror and “The Man of a Thousand Faces”, Leonidas Chaney was born to deaf parents and used pantomime as a way to communicate with them. In 1902 he became a stage actor and traveled with popular Vaudeville and theater acts. From his years working with the theater, Chaney learned the secrets of the best makeup men in the world and experimented on himself to create many different “faces.” A skill that greatly benefited him during competitive casting sessions.
After being told by a studio executive that he’d never be worth “more than one hundred dollars a week”, Chaney gradually rose higher on the ladder until he landed his first iconic horror role. Chaney played the tortured Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) in a role that he fought tooth and nail for. Chaney wanted nothing more than to play the bell ringer and purchased the rights to Victor Hugo’s novel himself. Years later when the movie was made by Universal, Chaney did all he could to make it his own and it paid off in the end.
The film influenced the casting of Chaney as another sympathetic character cursed with disfigurement, Erik “The Phantom” in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Both roles were nothing like anything anyone had ever seen before, and studios were inspired to step up their game with more character roles and monster movies.
Unfortunately, most of Lon Chaney’s horror movies are lost and can’t be seen. His surviving ones include The Unknown (1927) and The Monster (1925).