October is the best time of the year. Weather and seasonal flavors are at their best, and the Halloween season is when the whole world seems to tune into the wavelength I’m on all the time. To celebrate, I’m watching a horror movie every night, and telling you about it here. This year, 2017, as the old year dies and the walls between the worlds grow thin, as we enter the October Country, I’m delving deep into the Universal Monsters.

For decades Universal dominated the horror genre, from Lon Chaney’s iconic silent features in the 20s to the iconic monstrous classics of the 30s, and on into the 40s when they pioneered the crossover and the genre mashup. Universal’s legacy casts a long, deep shadow, and I want to explore the roots of the thing. Many of these I’ve already seen, many of them I haven’t, but now we’re diving into thirty-one of the most iconic and significant horror movies of the first six decades of cinema.

Join me as we kick this off tonight with the pioneering Lon Chaney classic, The Hunchback of Notre Dame!

We begin with a movie that is not quite a horror movie, but does certainly set the stage for what’s to come. Carl Laemmle produced it, his first step in what would become a tradition of adapting gothic literature into cinematic form. More importantly, Lon Chaney stars in it. The legendary Man of a Thousand Faces, the maestro of makeup, the pioneer monster-maker, a wizard of disguise, the wellspring from which everything else flows.

Understand, this is 1923, and there are no rubber prosthetics, no latex molds; monster makeup, like any other makeup, was created out of a standard makeup kit, and that meant the grotesque features Chaney design and applied to himself were built up piece by piece, out of cotton balls, putty, and chemicals, painstakingly applied layer by layer. What Lon Chaney created is impressive even today, but what makes it really spectacular is that he accomplished it with no precedent or example to follow, and using what are, by modern standards, the most rudimentary of tools. Look at this beautiful bastard:

I’ve been talking a lot about Chaney, and not so much about literally any other aspect of the film. Get used to that, because my dude is clearly the star of the show, and the main reason this movie has endured for coming up on a century. But even apart from the man himself, this was a lavish picture. More than 750 technicians worked on it; they built a massive, beautiful cathedral set that stood for more than 40 years. Huge crowds of extras were assembled for the massive crowd scenes, many of them thieves and prostitutes from downtown LA, who reportedly did pretty brisk business in their respective professions on-set, despite the efforts of the Pinkerton detectives hired to handle security. Even through the scratchy 16mm print that survived the decades, the production values shine through.

It’s the story itself that hasn’t aged so well. This iteration of the story, that is. Victor Hugo is of course a titan, one of the greatest novelists who ever lived, and Notre-Dame de Paris is one of his best, but here’s the thing: Hugo’s stories are too big. He was a writer of scope, of sweeping, epic scale, tackling the weightiest of themes through continent-spanning multigenerational sagas and dense-packed melodramas. You can either try to cram it all in and create a highlight reel, or you can cut a slice off the massive slab of beautifully marbled sirloin that is a Hugo novel, focusing in on a part of the thing (a la the musical version of Les Miserables);or you can get real loose with it, creating something inspired by, but only loosely resembling the book (as with Disney’s take on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or as with Arm Joe!, the Japanese 2D fighting game where you can play as the robot doppelganger of Jean Valjean, Eponine has lightning powers, and Enjolras’ special move literally drops an entire barricade on his opponent). Anyway, what we have here is a relatively surface-level melodrama pulled from the highlights of the novel (even in simplified form it’s a story overflowing with characters, plot threads, and twists), and I’ll be real with you, most of it does not grab me. It’s full of striking and impressive imagery, but I find myself struggling to connect to the characters.

With one exception.

And here’s the meat of the thing, the reason this movie is the cornerstone for everything that comes after: the monster is the the one you feel for. Your sympathy has to lie with the grotesque. This is, I think, the essence of the appeal the Universal monster movies still have. Frankenstein, Imhotep, the invisible Dr. Griffin, Hairy Larry Talbot, they’re all monsters, murderers, freaks of perverted science or black magic, but they’re driven by fundamental human wants and needs, and suffer intensely relatable human pain. Dracula is evil, but charming, and Bela gave him a powerful allure and subtle hint of loneliness and grand tragedy. The Count is an outlier, the attractive devil. The others, from Karloff’s Creature to the misplaced Deep One in the Black Lagoon, are deformed sufferers rejected by the world, not always justly. Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo blazed a trail for them.

It is not by chance that these monsters struck a powerful chord with audiences in the decades after the Great War, or that they were revitalized during the Second World War. How many men, and boys, came back from the killing fields of Europe scarred and deformed? Lost limbs, lost senses, shredded or melted faces so grotesque they had to be hidden behind masks; grievous wounds that, thanks to the advances of modern medicine, didn’t kill the recipients, creating a generation of tattered freaks. The veterans and survivors who weren’t maimed or marred externally still carried with them the psychic wounds of the most horrific battlefields in our history, where they saw and did things that are hard for us to imagine even if we know of them on an intellectual level. Physical wounds, mental wounds, emotional and spiritual wounds, they were brought back from the front, into the real world, and could not be forgotten. Carl Laemmle’s impulse to adapt macabre literature into moving pictures was very aptly timed, for the world was desperately in need of a coping mechanism, a metaphor for dealing with these things.

I’m rambling now, but you see my point. What Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo gives us is a stark larger-than-life embodiment of the freak, the outsider, the monster, and breathes sympathetic life into him. Chaney, whose passion project this was, interviewed a number of deformed people in preparation for the role, studying and contemplating, fully submerging himself in the role, and he brings a feeling of truth and humanity out onto the screen. This is important because sooner or later, everyone feels like a monster, an outsider, a freak. Being, at various times, the weird kid, the fat kid, or the hulking teen gaijin in a Japanese city where literally everything feels like it’s built on a 5/6 scale, I know I have. I am Quasimodo. We are Quasimodo.

We’ll see this idea snap into sharper focus in the coming nights, when we talk about Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, and then again when we regard Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein*, but this is the wellspring from which they flow. This, this is where it all begins, with the original freak, and his inevitable tragedy.

*Before you even open your pedantic-ass mouth, I want to know what the hell you think the Creature’s name could possibly be if it isn’t Adam Frankenstein, the New Man and the Prodigal Son of the Modern Prometheus. Come at me, sticklers, I will fight you. I will go right for your eyes with a broken whiskey bottle before I let you get the words “actually, Frankenstein was the scientist” out from between your teeth.