I’ve always loved horror and monster movies. My earliest memories include trips to the drive-in movies with my folks to see* Jack The Giant Killer* and King Kong Versus Godzilla, and staying awake until the end of the movie both times , just about as thrilled and delighted as a three- or four- or five-year old could be at the spectacle of people being menaced by monsters, and the greatest moments of my young life were the Saturday nights I stayed up late to see The Mole People and The Thing That Couldn’t Die the same year I started school. And, of course, I was a dedicated fan of Famous Monsters Of Filmland magazine from the first copy I got my hands on. It was from the hallowed pages of Uncle Forry’s puns-and-pix-packed testament that I, like many a fright-happy kid back then, was first apprised of the scary-movie canon and the classic monsters – Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy and the Wolfman. Like any good little zealot, I knew to revere the Universal pantheon even before I’d made their acquaintance first-hand.
Then I actually got to see the classics myself. And while my faith wasn’t exactly shaken by what I’d seen…nor was I. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the venerated Universal thrillers, or some of them anyway, but there wasn’t anything about them which scared me, even as a grade=school kid. As a matter of fact, I found some of them --notably the Bela Lugosi/Tod Browning *Dracula * and both versions of the Mummy --somnolent, and all of them tame.
Years passed, and I saw many more horror movies, and some of them scared the crap out of me just wonderfully. But I’d come back now and then to the much-revered Universal and RKO canon on occasion. And I started to wonder: did even the original audience for these things ever think they were actually scary and horriffic? :dubious: And if they did, what on Earth was the matter with people back then, to make them such scaredy-cats? :
Don’t get me wrong; there’s much to enjoy about the 'horror" movies of the 1930s and '40s. The first two Frankenstein movies are visually incredible and as atmospheric as all get-out, and Boris Karloff’s Monster is a truly awesome characterization (Bride of Frankenstein is especially rich in bizarre and touching and splendid-to-behold elements.) But from what I’ve read of the original reaction, his appearance was thought almost too frightening for audiences to bear, back then. The same was said of Henry Hull’s make-up as the titular man-beast in Werewolf of London, who looks more like an extra hirsute bum to me, besides having fangs. The rest of the crew --Lon Chaney’s longer-lasting lycanthrope, Khais and especially Lugosi as the sanguinary Count of the Carpathians – are actually something closer to comical than frightening to behold. Furthermore, the storylines of the old horrors seem devoid of frightening elements; the action tends to be tame (I’m sure the much-stricter censorship of the time, which effectively suppressed realistic gore and violence, is largely to blame for this aspect), and the vaunted thrills and chills…just fail to thrill and chill. 
And of course, the denoument was compulsory hence predictable: good always prevailed, evil was inevitably punished, the hero and his fair maid lived, and bland quotidian order was always restored by the end credits; audiences knew it would be so before they even took their seats in the theatre --and knowing this, how could they actually be frightened?
Of course, the era I came up in had less restriction on what could be seen in movies, so maybe I’m jaded. And there were definitely a few flicks made in the same era which are still effectively creepy and frightening, which exceptions to the rule I’ll address in another post. Nonetheless, it still amazes me that people in the early-to-mid-20th were apparently so much easier to scare, and it still baffles me to guess why.
