Start with a new *Dracula *movie. It follows the classic story fairly closely. Dracula’s a villain, Jonathan Harker and van Helsing race against time to save Mina Harker. They succeed, killing Dracula by carving his heart out of his chest with a Bowie knife, which they seal away in a jar. Post credit stinger is Jonathan and Mina, safe at home, when Mina vamps out and bites Jonathan.
Next movie is Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein’s efforts at creating life are stymied until he meets a mysterious Mr. Griffin, who provides him with the bottled heart of Dracula. Frankenstein uses the heart to synthesize a serum which allows him to complete his creature - which turns out to be the creature from the books: a highly intelligent, cunning, eloquent, sociopath. As things spiral out of control for Victor, the creature is confronted by an angry mob in the lab, and he slaughters them, shortly before Victor conceives of a way to defeat the monster. Post credit sting is of the ruined lab, where the jar holding Dracula’s heart has been shattered, and lies in a large puddle of blood from the slaughtered villagers. The heart sinks into the puddle, and a gore-soaked Dracula struggles out, as if climbing out of the pit of hell.
In *The *Wolfman, Larry Talbot is attacked by a creature and contracts lycanthropy. I really enjoyed the Benicio del Toro Wolfman movie that came out a few years ago, and this follows the general outlines of that one, except it re-introduces van Helsing as an expert who helps Larry unravel what’s happening to him. At the climax, Larry kills the werewolf who created him, before appearing to succumb to his wounds. The stinger for this one is van Helsing leaving the hamlet where all this occurred in a wagon, in the back of which is a suspiciously large crate, wrapped in heavy chains. Something inside pants heavily.
Meanwhile, Victor Frankenstein, some years after the terror he unleashed in Ingolstadt, finds himself in the colonies in Africa, where his scientific genius is being under served by his new job as an engineer, building the railroads. While blasting a tunnel through a mountain, they uncover a vast network of subterranean lakes - and huge diamond seams. As the railroad company hastily converts itself to a mining operation, something starts picking off the workers. Victor discovers that the lake is inhabited by an ancient progenitor of humanity - the creature from the black lagoon, which has hibernated for millions of years in the cold, still waters under the mountain. It is, of course, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In act two, the smarmy railroad boss who’s been a dick to everyone for the whole movie is snatched away by the creature. Victor, using a hastily invented steampunk scuba rig, follows the creature to its lair, where he discovers that the monster is female - and it needed the smarmy boss to fertilize a clutch of eggs. Victor destroys the eggs and the creature in the climactic finale, but the stinger shows the smarmy boss, clad in rags in the streets of Cairo, and clearly deranged after his ordeal. In the shadows of the souk, he meets Mr. Griffin, who gives him a large sum of money in exchange for a crate full of eggs.
Our next movie opens on Mina Harker. She’s working as a background singer at the opera - a good job for someone with her condition, as it gives her an excuse to sleep through the day. She shares a rundown tenement with a sickly looking Jonathan, and is treated like shit by the prima donna lead singer. Mina at all times wears a prominent medallion, which we learn was bought at vast expense (hence their current living conditions) from a Mr. Griffin, which allows Mina to keep her blood lust in check, while Jonathan regularly offers his veins to keep her alive. Shortly after joining the opera, a series of gruesome murders begins, all of them against someone who has slighted Mina in some way. Suspicion falls more and more on Mina, and even Jonathan suspects she may be giving into her vampiric nature. Mina walks in on the aftermath of one of the murders, and meets a gaunt, scar-faced figure, who shockingly becomes bashful and tongue tied when he sees Mina, but he escapes when other people arrive on the scene, leaving Mina holding the bag for the murder. Knowing she won’t be able to hide her condition in custody, she runs from the cops, and takes a bullet right to the magic amulet, pitching off the opera roof and into the river below. Desperate that, without her amulet, she’ll become a monster, she seeks out van Helsing. She convinces him to listen, and examines the damaged amulet, when they’re interrupted by van Helsing’s butler - none other than Larry Talbot. Word has come that someone’s been slaughtering the cops responsible for Mina being shot. Mina deduces the murderer’s next victim, the shitty prima donna, and saves her life. Van Helsing contacts her, and informs her that the amulet was a fake - she’d been holding herself in check all along. Inspired by this, she uses her vampiric abilities to their fullest for the first time, tracking the murderer to his lair beneath the opera, where she kills him and drinks his blood. The stinger for this one, we see Mr. Griffin again, this time in the ruins of Castle Frankenstein in Ingolstadt. He oversees a crew of workers, backed by hard-faced guards. The workers clear away some rubble to reveal the inert body of Frankenstein’s monster. And that’s Phantom of the Opera.
Victor Frankenstein is aboard a ship from Egypt, headed to England. He’s received word that some of his effects have shown up on the black market, and is concerned about what else might have been found. He disembarks at night in London, and passes by van Helsing, who is receiving a cargo of artifacts from a recently discovered tomb in Egypt, including a sarcophagus. Van Helsing is now a curator at the British Museum, where he uses his authority to secure dangerous artifacts before they can fall into the wrong hands. Unfortunately, the wrong hands are ready for him, and he is ambushed before he can return them to the museum. The ambush is broken by Mina Harker, who has become fully comfortable using her vampiric abilities. Meanwhile, Victor has tracked down his lead on Mr. Griffin - a fully dissipated Jonathan Harker. Harker gives him the runaround, then scuttles off to sell the news that someone in town is looking for Griffin to van Helsing, where it’s apparent that he and Mina are on the outs. A second attempt at stealing the sarcophagus succeeds, and it’s revealed that Griffin is behind it. He’s stolen it on behalf of a client, a cultist who thinks he can raise the ancient Egyptian gods and throw the Europeans out of Egypt. They meet in one of Griffin’s storehouses, where we can prominently see a large crate labelled “Ingolstadt.” The cultist doublecrosses Griffin, who still manages to escape, and then performs his ritual to raise the dead right there. Important to the ritual is a Egyptian death mask, it’s elaborate paint mostly faded. The ritual works, and The Mummy rises up, bringing Biblical plague style ruin to London, opposed by van Helsing, Victor Frankenstein, and Mina Harker. They win, of course, aided by a wolfed-out Larry Talbot, who has been tamed by van Helsing using “cutting-edge techniques developed by M. Pavlov.” Victor picks up a love interest along the way, maybe the prima donna from Phantom, who’s become nicer after her near death experience. The stinger for this one goes back to the warehouse, where the ritual to raise the dead was performed right next to the crate from Ingolstadt - which starts to open.
Victor and his girlfriend are having a pretty good time in London when his monster shows up and ruins things. He wants to force Victor to build him a bride. Victor resists, and the monster kills his girlfriend as incentive. Using lab equipment provided by Mr. Griffin (who’s looking pretty haggard these days - he’s getting in over his head with Frankenstein’s monster), Victor resurrects his girlfriend as The Bride of Frankenstein. She reacts to both of them about the same way as she did in the original, except afterwards she has a big fight scene with the monster. Probably in a windmill. In the middle of the fight, an exploding machine sends strange energies surging through Griffin’s body, apparently disintegrating him. In the stinger, a singed Frankenstein’s monster pulls himself out of the pool beneath the windmill. He recognizes that Griffin is still there by scent, although the accident has rendered him invisible, and presses him into his service again.
Next: Frankenstein’s monster is determined to exterminate humanity and replace it with his own progeny. Towards that end, he’s taken the eggs from the black lagoon that Griffin bought, and uses them to breed an army of lagoon creatures to serve as shock troops, while he attempts to kidnap his former Bride - he’s convinced that, if he’s literally the last man on Earth, she must want to marry him, so they can repopulate the world. He’s opposed by van Helsing, Victor, Mina, Larry, and in a surprise twist, Dracula himself, who is not interested in seeing his food source wiped out. The fight between the heroes and hundreds of lagoon creatures is the major action set piece of… let’s call it Frankenstein’s Revenge. Frankenstein is finally destroyed, but in the stinger, it’s revealed that Dracula has made Griffin into his thrall.
The next movie is a lower-key affair, more of a spy thing, as Mina and the Bride (who really should have a name by this point) try to track down Griffin, whose been using his abilities to blackmail many important government figures, in furtherance of a plot of some kind. Using a combination of wits, martial arts, and a strong lesbian subtext, they unmask Griffin’s conspiracy and finally put an end to the Invisible Man. But in the stinger, its revealed that Griffin’s machinations were just part of a larger scheme, when we learn that Dracula has turned the entire royal family into vampires.
The last film, Age of Dracula, has the master vampire moving openly to convert the British people into undead. He’s using the mask from the Mummy to make his vampirism even more virulent, allowing him to quickly raise an army of undead. The film has a decidedly apocalyptic cast, as the whole cast of heroes battle hordes of undead in a ruined London. Dracula’s defeated, eventually, somehow. The heroes part ways, at least one of them heading to America. The final stinger: 100 Years Later. Haddonfield, Illinois. In a suburban two-story, a young boy climbs down from the attic with an ancient, duct taped box. He cuts it open with a large kitchen knife, and pulls out newspapers dated from the turn of the century, some assorted knickknacks… and in the bottom, the Egpytian death mask, now bleached bone white. The camera cuts back to a cute teenage girl approaching the boy from behind. The kitchen knife is clearly visible on the ground next to the boy’s hand. She says, “Hey, you know you’re not supposed to mess around in the attic! Are you listening to me? Michael, look at me when I’m talking to you!” And the boy turns around, wearing the mask, and its Michael Myers.
UNIVERSAL! CALL ME!
