The first movie that “scared the shit” out of Mel Brooks: “I was really terrified”
He might have played a key role in one of the defining horror movies of its generation, but in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t a genre that Mel Brooks has ever been too interested in.
The comedy veteran has always made his bed in the genre that precipitated his rise to fame, but he’s been known to spread his wings on the odd occasion. As an actor, writer, and director, Brooks knows that his style and approach are ill-suited to horror, but when he’s not so hands-on, he doesn’t mind.
The most famous horror flick that bears his name is unquestionably David Cronenberg’s The Fly, with the EGOT winner’s Brooksfilms banner backing the body horror maestro’s stomach-churning classic, and he was savvy enough to omit his name from the credits in the off-chance an unwitting audience member would see ‘Mel Brooks’ attached to the marketing and convince themselves that laughs are afoot.
The others didn’t get quite the same levels of attention, which is understandable when The Fly won an Academy Award, made a small fortune at the box office, and haunted the nightmares of viewers everywhere, but Brooks also executive-produced another two ’80s efforts; Freddie Francis’ The Doctor and the Devils and Chris Walas’ The Vagrant, which failed to make similar splashes.
That was about as far as his involvement in genuine horror got, but he loved poking fun at it. Young Frankenstein and Dracula: Dead and Loving It were Brooks’ ode to the classic Universal monsters he’d been so enraptured by as a child, and turning the former into a classic comedy may have been his way of reconciling the childhood trauma he suffered watching James Whale’s seminal film for the first time.
Brooks is so old that he saw it the first time around back in 1931, even if Frankenstein hardly came as recommended viewing for a five-year-old. “Scared the shit out of me,” he admitted to Famous Monsters. “I was really terrified.” It’s tame when viewed through a modern lens, and only runs for 70 minutes or so, but it left him shellshocked.
He knew he was “much too young” to be watching Boris Karloff’s titular creature, which became woven into the fabric of pop culture, but “my brother Lenny was going, and he took me.” 40 years later, Brooks still hadn’t forgotten the impact the movie had made on his impressionable young mind, and when Gene Wilder devised the idea for Young Frankenstein, he didn’t need to think twice about it.
“When you do a satire of a genre, you’ve got to love that genre,” he declared. “It’s got to mean something to me.” As a formative experience in his filmgoing life, Frankenstein fit the bill perfectly, and it was an opportunity he couldn’t resist. “I really had fun with the western and I was saluting it, but the intensely beautiful work of James Whale had to be recognised.”
That’s exactly what he did, and with Wilder on what Brooks called career-best form, they paid the best tribute possible with a classic film of their own.
