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How This Iconic, 1940s Horror Mash-Up Created the Cinematic Universe 60+ Years Before the MCU
MCU? More like M-C-who? This Universal Monster mash predated the current craze by decades.
If you look at the marquee of any decent-sized movie theater these days, there’s a very good chance that at least one of the movies that’s being shown is part of a shared cinematic universe. The most famous of these is, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there’s also the DC superhero movies, M. Night Shaymalan’s Unbreakable-Split-Glass trilogy, Godzilla and the MonsterVerse, Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse, whatever’s going on with Sony Spider-Man-adjacent movies like Morbius, and more.
However, none of these are the first cinematic universe. In 1943, Frankenstein met the Wolf Man in the aptly titled Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, a monster mash-up that suddenly introduced the concept of shared continuity to the Universal Monsters movies. It’s a piece of movie history — not to mention a pretty fun creature feature — and it’s streaming now on Peacock.
Revisiting the Universal Monster movie Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, the beginning of the first shared cinematic universe
By the time Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman came out in 1943, Universal had released four Frankenstein movies, and The Wolf Man, released in 1940, was a commercial success. Having already done several sequels to The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and Dracula, the next logical step was to combine two great flavors. Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman is a direct sequel to The Wolf Man and 1942’s The Ghost of Frankenstein — never mind that the Frankenstein movies were set in the 1800s while The Wolf Man was set in the then-present day.
The movie has Lon Chaney Jr. reprising his role as Larry Talbot, the poor soul who was transformed into a werewolf and was seemingly killed at the end of the first film. However, when graverobbers break into his crypt and unwittingly remove the wolfsbane from his corpse, Talbot’s lycanthropy brings him back to life. Talbot, who is tormented by his curse and the violence he causes every full moon, wants to find a way to die, and his efforts lead him to the late Dr. Frankenstein’s castle, hoping to discover the solution in his notes. In the process, Talbot finds the frozen body of Frankenstein’s Monster (played by Bela Lugosi, the Dracula actor who took over Monster duties from Boris Karloff as of The Ghost of Frankenstein). He frees the monster, hoping it can show him the doctor’s notes, and chaos ensues.
The movie is correctly named: It’s Frankenstein meets the Wolfman, not Frankenstein versus the Wolfman. The two classic monsters only fight, briefly, at the end of the movie following a botched attempt to transfer Talbot’s life force into his undead co-star before both are swept away by a flood when a villager breaks a dam to wash away the evil.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman would set the stage for several other “monster rally” movies to come, like House of Frankenstein (a rematch with the Wolf Man), House of Dracula (wherein the Count met the Monster), and the Abbott and Costello comedy-horror crossovers. However, it wouldn’t be for several decades until the concept of a shared crossover cinematic universe would become widespread. The Godzilla series became a shared universe in the ‘60s when it brought monsters like Rodan and Mothra into the King of the Monsters’ franchise following their debuts in solo, previously standalone films. It wasn’t until the proliferation of superhero movies that they became such a dominant force in Hollywood — which makes sense, seeing as the comics they were adapted from had a long, long legacy of crossovers. Universal would even attempt to get a new monstrous cinematic universe off the ground, starting with 2017’s Tom Cruise-led The Mummy. However, the now-infamous Dark Universe ended before it began, and did not enjoy the legacy of the old movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Perhaps that’s because a great cinematic universe is harder to pull off than it looks. Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman did it, and if you want to see where so much of the modern movie landscape originated, you should check it out on Peacock.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman is streaming on Peacock, alongside many, many new horror films hitting Peacock in time for Spooky Season.
