Bedlam was Val Lewton’s last film for RKO. It was Karloff’s third and final collaboration, too, with him, following Isle of the Dead and The Body Snatcher. It was also the most expensive Lewton RKO film, after the profitability of his earlier movies gave Lewton a green light for a $350,000 budget. Unfortunately, the second Hollywood horror cycle was already fading and it lost money. (Drfreex)
The second horror cycle was from 1939 to 1946. The first cycle ran from 1931 to 1936 and was driven by Universal Pictures. Seeded by the silents like Phantom of the Opera (1925), it began with Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi, and Frankenstein (1931) with Karloff, then continued with The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein, and others, like Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and Island of Lost Souls, MGM’s Freaks, and Warner’s Mystery of the Wax Museum. The first cycle ended with the changing management at Universal (the Laemmle family lost control of the studio in 1936), the stifling Hays Code with its compensating moral values, and mounting resistance from the British censors. Britain was the single most important foreign market for English-language films, and a clampdown there, culminating in the dedicated “H” (horrific) certificate, made horror sales very risky.
The second cycle was born in 1938 at the Regina-Wilshire Theatre, at Wilshire and La Cienega in Beverly Hills, showing a rerelease double bill of Dracula and Frankenstein. Audiences ate it up and Universal heard the dinner bell, producing Son of Frankenstein (1939), with Karloff in his final turn as the monster, alongside Bela Lugosi as Ygor and Basil Rathbone as heir to the Frankenstein family’s penchant for calamity.
The second cycle was fueled by Universal’s rekindled monster franchise and ended with the monster rally movies that teamed up the terrors. The Wolf Man (1941) with Lon Chaney Jr., The Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), and House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), were joined by Val Lewton’s Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim, The Body Snatcher, and finally Bedlam. Other studios contributed lower-budget entries too, from Columbia and Monogram fillers to Fox’s The Undying Monster and Paramount’s Dr. Cyclops. These last two, along with House of Dracula, hint at the seeding for the third cycle–sci-horror–that will take hold in the 1950s.
By 1946 the fuel had expired. Postwar audiences shifted toward film noir and adult dramas, turning away more and more from the Gothic and supernatural. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) proved a box office success, mixing comedy with terror, but it was the end of the classic horror cycle, where the terrors of the real world were beginning to be more scary than the cinema ones. Atomic radiation, anyone?
