Lou Costello Was the Real Monster in ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein featured many classic movie monsters, including Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula and the Invisible Man. But according to the film’s director, Charles Barton, comedian Lou Costello was the real horror during production.
“You hear a lot of things about little Lou (Costello) — and he was a little terror!” explained director Charles Barton in the book It's Alive!: The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein, as reported by MeTV. “He was a very hot-headed little Italian, and he’d have tantrums you wouldn’t believe— really wouldn’t believe.”
It’s a wonder Costello ended up in the movie at all. The original script had a different plot, with Dracula stealing Frankenstein’s Monster. The vampire then went looking for a simpleton, aiming to steal his brain for the Monster’s body. Costello wasn’t impressed with the screenplay, then titled The Brain of Frankenstein. “You don’t think I’ll do that crap, do you?” he griped. “My 5-year-old daughter can write something better than that.”
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Costello changed his mind after he was offered a $50,000 advance on his percentage, but both he and his partner, Bud Abbott, were pains in the ass during production. The comedians would “fight me like hell,” complained Barton. They’d also take off for days at a time, or show up only to spend all day playing cards on the set, according to It’s Alive!
Costello wanted to make the cast and crew cower in fear, said Barton, “and that’s what he loved, so he’d walk all over them.”
But Barton stood up to Costello, and the tactic worked. “With me, and I don’t know why in the hell it was, we got along even better than brothers,” Barton said. “Things that I’d like him to do in a picture, he would at least try — something he wouldn’t do with many other directors — and that showed that he had confidence in me.”
The comedy was the last appearance of Bela Lugosi before he became addicted to painkillers and ended up in Ed Wood movies. Lugosi also sounds like a piece of work, agreeing to reprise his famous vampire role because the script was not “unbecoming to Dracula's dignity. All I have to do is frighten the boys, a perfectly appropriate activity,” he said, probably in a Transylvanian accent, according to No Traveler Returns: The Lost Years of Bela Lugosi. “My trademark will be unblemished.”
Despite all of the backstage histrionics, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein turned out to be one of the duo’s classic comedies. The Library of Congress selected the “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” movie for the National Film Registry in 2001, and the American Film Institute ranked it #56 on its list of the 100 Funniest American Movies.
But one other person besides Costello hated the comedy. That was Lon Chaney Jr., who starred in many of the original spooky movies that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein spoofed. “I used to enjoy horror films when there was thought and sympathy involved,” he lamented. “Then they became comedies. Abbott and Costello ruined the horror films. They made buffoons out of the monsters.”
