{Movie Review} Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster (2021)

“Well the aim certainly is not to repel you – to revolt you – it’s to attract you, it’s to excite you, it’s to alarm you, perhaps.”

Several times, while watching Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster, the new documentary being released theatrically by Shout! Factory to coincide with the 90th anniversary of James Whale’s classic Frankenstein (1931), I wondered who the target audience for this film was.

Not that I don’t think there is one. Indeed, quite the contrary, I think there are several possible options, which is what led me to wonder. Is this for people who are already fans of Karloff, or those who know him only as the Frankenstein monster – if at all? Is this a nostalgia hit for monster kids, or an introduction for those of us who are too young to have grown up with Universal’s “Shock Theater” packages playing on our local stations?

Having finished the film, I’m still not entirely sure that I know the answer. One can’t argue that The Man Behind the Monster is anything but a loving ode to the career and life of Boris Karloff, without a doubt one of the greatest actors of horror’s golden age. And a loving ode – especially for someone so deserving of it – is reason enough to put together a bunch of interviews and some archival footage. But is The Man Behind the Monster anything more than that?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the film begins with Frankenstein, though it also takes great pains to point out that Karloff’s career did not begin there, even while it was his performance as the Monster that made him a star. Yet it isn’t until around half-an-hour into this 99-minute movie that we actually delve into Karloff’s early life, his work on stage and in silent films, his pioneering work (along with Bela Lugosi) as part of the then-fledgling Screen Actor’s Guild, his many marriages, and so on.

The lion’s share of The Man Behind the Monster is devoted – as it probably should be – to the titles for which Karloff is best known. The various Universal films in which he had some role, from Frankenstein and The Mummy to The Old Dark House and Abbott and Costello, the pictures he did with Val Lewton, and the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas. There are extensive digressions, of course, covering his time on Broadway doing Arsenic and Old Lace, his later work hosting the TV series Thriller, the silent film The Bells, and Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code, to name a few.

And even for someone as saturated with these old movies as I am, there are tidbits strewn throughout that were new to me, such as an anecdote, told by Karloff’s daughter, of James Whale making him carry the actual Colin Clive, rather than a dummy, contributing to Karloff’s back problems later in life.

Yet, when you get right down to it, this documentary – as any documentary like it is bound to be – is little more than a series of talking heads, mostly singing Karloff’s praises. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it is, perhaps, an inevitable thing, as the man himself has unfortunately left us, even though the doc is salted with audio recordings of his voice in interviews and the like, giving his perspective on horror and his own pictures.

What is more of a bad thing is in the heads they chose to do the talking. Besides Karloff’s daughter and a smattering of other women, who each get only a handful of lines, this is very much a panoply of old white guys and Guillermo del Toro.

Again, some of that is going to be unavoidable. Some of the people interviewed, such as Dick Miller, Roger Corman, and Peter Bogdanovich, are those who worked with Karloff, while others are classic directors from the generation of monster kids who grew up watching his films, such as Joe Dante and John Landis. And, unfortunately, then as now, the industry was dominated by white dudes, but it would have been nice to hear from some younger and more diverse voices, who could maybe connect the material with modern audiences in a different way.

As an overview of the performer and his legend, Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster does an admirable job covering all of the bases while still providing enough novelty to appeal even to those of us who are fairly well versed in Karloff and his filmography.

The documentary ends in nearly the same place that Karloff’s career did – with one of my favorite films, Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, which we recently covered at the Horror Pod Class right here on Signal Horizon. Released in 1968, just a year before Karloff himself passed away, Targets sees Karloff delivering one of his best performances as an aging horror star that is a not-so-subtle reskin of himself as he considers retirement.

Bogdanovich gets plenty of screentime in the doc, confirming the (fairly obvious, really) reading of Targets as a juxtaposition of the “old” horror, represented by Karloff, with the modern horror of its sniper antagonist, based on the real-life crimes of Charles Whitman in 1966.

In that film, Karloff laments that “My kind of horror is not horror anymore,” in a line that inspired the title of my second collection. He was obviously right, in a way, but just as obviously wrong, given the enduring popularity of the Universal monsters and Karloff’s many films, even to this very day. Will The Man Behind the Monster introduce a new generation to one of horror’s greatest stars, or is it just a confection for those of us who already worship at the altar? I guess only time will tell…