delayed posting due to travel recovery

The big three:  Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man.  Could be the Big Four if I throw in the Mummy, but he didn't make the cut this year.  Neither did the Phantom, who's either too early or too late to be in the club.  And the Creature from the Black Lagoon? Whole different can o tuna, imho, even WITH Julie Adams looking hot in that white one piece.

Let's start with the last, the Wolf Man.  Doesn't age well, past Maria Ouspenskaya and her fortune telling.  Lon Chaney Jr. is servicable as Larry Talbot but I could never figure what Evelyn Ankers saw in him.  Of courswe we have Bela Lugosi again, and in his second appearance on the list Ralph Bellamy.   This one hasn't aged well.   Perhaps because technology has passed it bye, perhaps because of all the remakes.  Watchable as part of the trio, but not a high recommendation.

Dracula.  Bela Lugosi and a bunch of other people.  We now have vampires who sparkle so old pre-Hayes code dead Rumanians just don't get it done anymore.  Perhaps the weakest of the trio, but as per the above, needs to be watched to fill out the season.

Frankenstein.  Stands the test of time surprisigly well.  Boris Karloff gets it right.  Although the material is relatively melodramatic, and occasionally extremely so (especially in the case of Henry Frankenstein), the performances always come across as serious and realistic rather than campy (with the possible exception of a single snarling "growl" from the monster when he encounters Elizabeth, Frankenstein's bride-to-be). Contrast this to how Tod Browning's Dracula plays in the present day. In that film, Lugosi  comes across as occasionally campy, especially in the close-ups of his "hypnotically staring" eyes. Even the one character that is meant to give some light comic relief, that of Frankenstein's father, Baron Frankenstein (Frederick Kerr), is comic only in that the character is a bit sarcastic, with a dry sense of humor. As such, Kerr portrays the Baron seriously, also.

Because there is no score, the actors have no help in amping up the emotions in their performances. Despite this, rarely has either Boris Karloff's monster or Colin Clive's mad doctor been matched. Whale helps with some ingenious shots and sequences, such as the "progressive close-ups" when we first see the monster. He also gives us a number of "stage-like" devices that work remarkably well, such as the pans through cutaways in the set that in the film's world do not really exist. Interestingly, Whale has still had the cutaways decorated as if they are extant in the film's world. Although they may seem dated now, Whale's technique of fading to black between scenes also amplifies the sense of "literary chapters" in the story, and gives an effective, ambiguous sense of time passage between the scenes.

Whale also achieves some wonderful, more understated scenes of horror in the film, often set up by contrasts. For example the severe contrast of the villager walking into the wedding party with his daughter, and the surreal bucolic adventure of the villagers working their way through the countryside to find the monster. 

Watch it again, and again.