Menu

The 10 Best Scooby-Doo-Style Movie Monster Fake-outs


5. Those We Don’t Speak Of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq_B_ukrGKo

Between his 1999 classic The Sixth Sense and this year’s amusing horror picture The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan has mostly turned out a string of misfires and interesting failures. The exceptions, for me, have been 2010’s The Last Airbender, which wasn’t very interesting; and 2004’s The Village, which wasn’t a failure, though I seem to be in a minority for thinking so. I suspect (and hope) that this woozy, unnerving fable may eventually come to be seen as one of Shyamalan’s best works.

The inhabitants of the small, isolated, pre-industrial village of the title live in dread of “Those We Don’t Speak Of”: tall, robed, long-clawed specters that haunt the surrounding forest. But it turns out [SPOILER ALERT!] that Those We Don’t Speak Of aren’t really monsters at all, but elders from the town, dressed up in Those We Don’t Speak Of drag, trying to scare the crap out of the village youth in order to keep them from entering the woods, because, as it turns out [SPOILER ALERT!] if they do, they might discover that they aren’t living in the 18th or 19th Century at all, but rather in the contemporary times, in a guarded area founded by the elders to protect their kids from modern life.

4. Rollo

There certainly is an authentically supernatural, or maybe pseudo-science-fictional, aspect to the 1935 gothic Mad Love. It’s one of several films based on Maurice Renard’s Les Mains d’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac), in which the hands of an executed murderer are grafted to a maimed concert pianist, who then begins to feel the late donor’s murderous urges. But in this elegant version, directed by Karl Freund, the focus is less on the pianist (Colin Clive) and more on the brilliant but icky transplant surgeon Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre) who’s obsessed with his patient’s gorgeous Grand-Guignol-type actress wife (Frances Drake).

At a particularly macabre point in these bizarre proceedings, a shadowy figure in a neck brace presents himself to the wife as Rollo, the guillotined killer, claiming that his head was sewn back on by Dr. Gogol. But it turns out [SPOILER ALERT!] that it isn’t Rollo at all, but the twisted Gogol himself in disguise.

Psych!

3.-2. Count Mora and Luna

Bela Lugosi played this very Dracula-ish Count in 1935’s Mark of the Vampire. Some of the richest, most archetypical horror-movie imagery can be traced to this deeply atmospheric movie from director Tod Browning, as Mora and his daughter Luna, the grandmother of all sexy raven-haired Morticia Addams/Lily Munster types, stalk about side by side.

Supposedly the script originally gave them an unsavory backstory: The Count was cursed with vampirism after committing suicide over his incestuous relationship with Luna. Eeww. All this was removed from the finished film, which leaves the wound on the side of Lugosi’s head rather perplexing.

It would have been gratuitous in any case, however, because as it turns out [SPOILER ALERT!] Mora and Luna aren’t really vampires at all. They’re actors, hired to participate in an elaborate charade to get a murderer to crack and confess. Lugosi speaks only a line or two, in the final seconds, where we see he’s just a ham, raving about the brilliance of his performance (he gets much more to say in the trailer). The whole thing is somehow almost more implausible than the idea that vampires are real.

It could be re-titled Untrue Blood.

1. The Man in the Beaver Hat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSvhDCWD5ZI

Maybe the most recognizable “monster” from this category comes from a lost movie. It’s “The Man in the Beaver Hat,” with buggy, baggy eyes and a grin full of nasty big pointy teeth, created and played by the famed Lon Chaney, Sr., in Tod Browning’s 1927 silent thriller London After Midnight.

Regrettably, no prints of this movie are currently known to survive. Still, this chilling vampiric visage remains one of the immortal images of horror cinema, even though it turns out [SPOILER ALERT!] that the vampire is fictitious within the story. As in Browning’s later Mark of the Vampire, a very loose remake of this film, The Man in the Beaver Hat is part of a ruse aimed at getting a murder to spill it.

Also as with Mark of the Vampire, this seems both ridiculous and a cheat. But it also seems to have been closer to Browning’s original conception for Dracula. He liked to use the apparently supernatural to generate scares, but then explain the whole thing away.

Spoiler alert, Mr. Browning: Audiences tend to hate that.

 

Previously by M.V. Moorhead:

The 13 Best Fictional Bird Monsters