In the 13th episode of Season 2 of The Old SwitchAroo, we talk at length about the original Castlevania, first released in North America in 1987. Castlevania is one of many games that came out in the 1980s that has credits that don't really list the names of the people that made the game. However, while there are a lot of games that will use shortened names, nicknames, initials, or things of that nature that partially credit people but are still a bit ambiguous, and some games may have been using fake but plausible names, Castlevania decided to go a slightly different direction and instead lists a whole bunch of fake credits inspired by the sorts of things that influenced the game, and I just couldn't stop talking about Castlevania's crazy cinema credits.
While it's hard to find something precise and authoritative about why they chose to do this, one developer that recalled his conversations with Castlevania head dev Hitoshi Akamatsu included some discussion of how much the team liked Western movies, and the particular preferences do show through with who the various credits are referencing. So prepare for a long journey into the many people and films behind Castlevania's Crazy Cinema Credits and beware spoilers!
Directed by Trans Fishers | Terence Fisher
We begin with the choice of director, with Trans Fishers being a reference to British director Terence Fisher. Fisher began directing films in the late 1940s, but spent the next decade jumping around both genres and studios, with a number of crime films and thrillers, as well as drama and comedy, and with Hammer Films being the studio he would work with that would ultimately have the most impact.
In 1957, Fisher was asked to direct Hammer's first colour horror film, the gothic horror film The Curse of Frankenstein. Hammer was choosing to make Gothic horror that had increased gore and sexuality in colour and so it was pushing the envelope of what would be allowed by censors in the late 1950s. The film would, however, succeed and with that it would also bring into prominence two now-legendary actors, Peter Cushing in his role as Victor Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as the Creature. Personally, I also think this is an interesting take because I think it puts a bit more focus on how Frankenstein is the monster here, not the creature he created. The resultant movie is more reliant on Cushing's performance than simply a narrative that follows the Creature would be, which would be more like the older Universal Classic Monsters version of Frankenstein (1931).
This would have a major impact on horror and established Hammer Films as a major player in the genre, with Fisher in particular going on to direct a number of other horror films for Hammer, including Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), The Gorgon (1964), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), and several more films in the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises. Hammer Films developed a stable of actors that were often drawn from, and so a number of Fisher's films (and Hammer films more broadly) see the same British actors in a variety of roles, including being frequently paired up with one another.
It's Fisher's direction on the Hammer Dracula films (starting with the first one) that clearly leads to him being the directing credit. From the American perspective (and perhaps a more modern one), it actually was a bit surprising to me that the director that got referenced here was for the Hammer films because while I enjoy them, it does feel like the Universal films centered on the 1930s were so much more influential and long-reaching. But as we go through the casting, it becomes very clear that while Konami developers were familiar with the Universal monsters, their first picks tended to be from Hammer films and so Fisher beats out the director of Universal's 1931 Dracula film, Tod Browning.
Screenplay by Vran Stoker | Bram Stoker
For the screenplay, of course, credit has to go to the original author of the 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula, a book now in the public domain in the US, the Irish writer Bram Stoker. Dracula was building on a relatively new phenomenon of the vampire story, with arguably the first modern vampire archetype being The Vampyre (1819), a story written by John William Polidori based on a shorter story told by Lord Byron in the same story-telling contest that resulted in Mary Shelley ultimately writing Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), a landmark story of both horror and sci-fi, and a book that has a major impact on both film genres (and, as we'll touch upon later, Castlevania).
After the success of The Vampyre, the connection between vampires and some expression of sexuality would continue, as it does in Carmilla, an 1872 novella by Sheridan Le Fanu. In Carmilla, the narrator is a young woman that is befriended by and ultimately preyed upon by another young woman named Carmilla, who makes mysterious visits to the narrator in the middle of the night. When her health fails, it is eventually linked to the wounds on her neck from Carmilla and it is realized that Carmilla is the now centuries-old vampire Mircalla Karnstein. She is ultimately killed, and with the clear sexual tensions that this explores with Carmilla and the narrator, it serves as a template for the archetype of the lesbian vampire. I think it's not much of a stretch to see influences from Carmilla in Universal Studios' first sequel to Dracula, 1936's Dracula's Daughter, which also has some elements that can come off as restrained sexual tension (as it would likely need to be in 1936 Hollywood). A number of later movies, especially from the 1970s onward when it was much easier to be explicit about sexuality like this could require, also draw on the story, and at least one recent film decided to deconstruct this away from being supernatural and more a look at sexual repression in 2019's Carmilla is ambitious, but doesn't feel like it quite hits the mark (though it is able to be quite atmospheric and evocative at times).
Finally, though, this brings us to Bram Stoker's Dracula, a story that would be so impactful that the Guinness Book of World Records lists Dracula as the literary character with the most portrayals in film, just ahead of Sherlock Holmes. One of the very underappreciated parts of the original Dracula, in my view, is that it is an epistolary novel, where the whole story is told through the writings of the characters in it, be it letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, shipping logs, and so on. In that sense, I don't think enough people see a throughline from Dracula as a novel to modern found-footage horror films. The epistolary nature of this does make it quite suited to full cast audio books, in my view, but I was also pleasantly surprised that Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) used a lot of narration to the same effect.
The story itself is of a Count Dracula, who lives in Transylvania and wishes to relocate to England and enlists a British man by the name of John Harker to help him secure property in London for him to move to. The film doesn't actually explore the idea of vampires much until quite a bit into the story, after a number of events have occurred that are clear from an understanding of vampires... but I don't think would be clear otherwise. Things like seeing animals that vampire lore says they can transform into, or the way that this avoids really identifying the neck wounds as significant. In England, Lucy, a friend of Harker's fiancée Mina, becomes quite mysteriously ill and the three men that have been courting Lucy work together to figure out what is wrong, ultimately bringing in Professor Abraham Van Helsing for assistance and it is he that explains the mythos of vampires. While they are not able to stop Dracula from killing Lucy, they are able to release her from being a vampire, and repel Dracula before he can kill Nina.
Even knowing the gist of the story from how many times variations of it have been retold, it's still a book I think is worth checking out, and its influences on Castlevania in particular are obvious and explicit.
Music by James Banana | James Bernard
The music credit, again, goes back to the Konami team's prioritization of the Hammer Dracula films, as James Bernard often worked with Terence Fisher, including two Dracula movies and four Frankenstein movies, including the initial 1958 Dracula.
Dracula - Christopher Bee | Christopher Lee
A villain or monster across many genres, Christopher Lee was often placed in those roles opposite of Peter Cushing, something that in a sense began in horror films when they both appeared in The Curse of Frankenstein. They would continue to do so in a number of other films, such as The Mummy (1959), but I don't think it's a stretch to say that his most recognizable role was as the titular character in 1958's Dracula, opposite Peter Cushing as Dr. Van Helsing, where they'd overlap for 4 of the 7 films where Christopher Lee would play Count Dracula.
Death - Belo Lugosi | Bela Lugosi
The casting of Belo Lugosi, a take-off of Bela Lugosi, is the first credit that pays reference to the Universal Studios instead of Hammer Films, as it was Bela Lugosi who would play Dracula on Broadway in 1927 then be cast in the 1931 film of Dracula, a movie that is often pointed to as establishing horror as a distinct genre. With Lugosi's Hungarian accent, his performance would serve to shape much of our idea of a vampire, and I feel like the largest share of vampire depictions that are trying to draw off of a cultural idea of what a vampire looks and sounds like are rooted here.
Though Lugosi would only play Count Dracula one more time in his career, in 1948's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. He would, however, play a great number of other roles in horror films as he would somewhat specialize in the genre, including Ygor in the Frankenstein sequels Son of Frankenstein (1939) and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), one of a few characters that'd eventually merge into the Igor assistant trope character, and that of Frankenstein's Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), a slightly ironic bit of casting as the studio wanted to make him the Monster in 1931 and he didn't want to take the role.
If we're looking for a character of Bela Lugosi's that is most suitable to his Castlevania credit of Death, though, I think the best candidate might be Murder Legendre, the necromancer that Lugosi played in White Zombie (1932), as that feels pretty close to playing the concept of death itself.
Frankenstein - Boris Karloffice | Boris Karloff
Universal Studios' other big horror star of the 1930s, when Boris Karloff first played Frankenstein's Monster (not to be confused with Frankenstein or Victor Frankenstein, who was played by Colin Clive in the 1931 film), the movie actually began by listing the Monster in the credits as "?", and it was only at the end of the movie, with the message "a good cast is worth repeating", that Karloff's name even appeared on screen. The distinction between Frankenstein and Frankenstein's Monster doesn't seem to exist in Castlevania, though, so we see Karloff simply credited as Frankenstein as that's what they refer to the Monster as.
Some of what made the Monster so distinct initially was unique to Karloff, as the Monster's asymmetrical and sunken face wasn't from prosthetics, makeup, or lighting, but because Karloff was able to remove a dental bridge to allow his right cheek to sink inward unnaturally. That was just built upon with the makeup work done by Jack Pierce, which was a level of craftsmanship that would also help Karloff be so impressive as the titular role in 1932's The Mummy.
While Karloff would only play the Monster in the first three films — Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939) — he actually would have two more roles in Frankenstein films. In the Universal Studios film The House of Frankenstein (1944) he would play Dr. Gustav Niemann, and in the independent Frankenstein film Frankenstein 1970 (1958) he actually would play Baron Victor von Frankenstein, so perhaps his casting here works out after all.
Mummy Man - Love Chaney Jr. | Lon Chaney Jr.
Cast here as the Mummy Man, Lon Chaney Jr. (son of the great Lon Chaney) was also in a number of Universal Studios films, but this is a bit of an odd choice mostly stemming from his most recognizable role not having a Castlevania analogue. Lon Chaney Jr.'s most recognizable role would be playing The Wolf Man (1941), both in that it's the largest role he established and also because unlike many of his roles, he spends a lot of time in that role where you can see his face clearly.
Lon Chaney Jr. would get used in a lot of roles with Universal Studios, it seems, and that would include him taking over as Frankenstein's Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and Dracula in Son of Dracula (1943)... he really isn't the right casting for Dracula though, lacking both the charm and the Europeanness to sell that role.
Lon Chaney Jr. actually does have the distinction of having played all four of the classic Universal monsters, as he played the Mummy in The Mummy's Tomb (1942), so while I suspect that is his least remembered role of the four classic monsters, he does still fit the bill for Mummy Man with it.
For a fun Lon Chaney, Jr. movie without him needing make-up, check out Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told (1967), where Chaney Jr. also sings the opening theme song.
Medusa - Barber Sherry | Barbara Shelley
With Mesuda and Barbara Shelley, we return back to England and Hammer Films. While Medusa is the name of the character in mythology who had snake attributes and whose look (or being looked at) would turn people to stone, she is one of the sisters collectively called The Gorgons. A 1964 Hammer film, directed by Terence Fisher, under the title The Gorgon, would again draw from the Hammer film regulars, including music by James Bernard and prominent roles for Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
In the film, there's a series of killings in a small town where men are being turned to stone and the main bit of story is about Paul Heitz trying to resolve the death of his father. It's determined that there is the spirit of a gorgon responsible for the deaths, while at the same time Paul has now fallen in love with Carla (Barbara Shelley) and so there's also some pressure of them to resolve the killings vs simply fleeing the town. In the climax, the gorgon appears, Christopher Lee's character is able to behead the gorgon but not before Paul sees it and begins to turn to stone. The final thing he sees is the gorgon's head transform back into Carla.
Technically speaking, in The Gorgon Shelley is actually playing a Gorgon named Megeara but to me that sort of feels like they just accidentally used the wrong mythological name as she wasn't a Gorgon, but in any case Shelley makes sense for being cast as another Gorgon here. Some of her other roles included a few more Hammer films, including also sharing the screen with Christopher Lee's Dracula in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966).
Vampire Bat - Mix Schrecks | Max Schreck
Here we move on to the slide with the really old film references, as this slide takes us back to the silent era. Fairly appropriately cast as Vampire Bat is Max Schreck, who quite notably played Nosferatu or Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922), directed by F. W. Murnau.
The film is notable for two things. The good one is that it is a very prominent example of German Expressionism, and there's some very memorable shots in here and some great use of shadow. The much less positive aspect of this is that Nosferatu's storyline is so strongly just the plot of Dracula with names changed. As early versions still even had the Dracula name, the Stoker estate filed suit and won so all copies were supposed to be destroyed. So in a sense, we lucked out that copies of Nosferatu even survived.
Hunch Back - Love Chaney | Lon Chaney (Sr.)
The father of Lon Chaney Jr., somewhat obviously, Lon Chaney was known as "The Man of a Thousand Faces" at a time when a lot of makeup fell on the actors to do themselves. He played a whole host of roles, and while he has some that feel like they're horror films, others like He Who Gets Slapped (1924) or The Unholy Three (1925) aren't things I'd think of as horror, being thriller or crime stories.
He also had quite a few more memorably monstrous appearances, like the now-lost London After Midnight (1927), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and his role as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), and it's that role clearly leading to his casting here. Chaney is almost an underrated performer in the sense that his appearances seem to be more of what people focus on but I think his acting is also really good. He also was an actor that Universal Studios had been looking at wanting to cast for Dracula in 1931, before he died in 1930.
Fish Man - Green Stranger | Glenn Strange
Our Fish Man casting of Glenn Strange is the first casting that I can't really square, though I'm glad to see Strange mentioned here. Strange is also the first actor that I wouldn't really consider a horror film actor, generally.... Letterboxd lists him as having nearly 200 credits, and 150 of those are Westerns. Though while he was in a lot of films, a great many of those are bit parts; he may appear in Red River (1948), Calamity Jane (1953), and Marty (1955), they're all uncredited roles. Even his first Universal Studios horror film, The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), has him as an uncredited Farmer Holding Horse.
His real prominence would come in 1944, when Strange would be the fourth man (after Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaney Jr.) to become the monster, a role he'd hold for House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1848). Still, the Monster is no Fish Man, and Strange just never seemed to play a role like that.
Based on the character, the Fish Man seems to pretty clearly be drawing on Gill-Man, who first appeared in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and returns in Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). For all the underwater scenes across the franchise, he's played by Ricou Browning, an actor and underwater stuntman (and later a co-creator of Flipper), while on land the role would be played by (in order), Ben Chapman, Tom Hennesy, and Don Megowan. When it comes to names in horror movies, though, I suppose it's hard to not include such an apt name as Glenn Strange somewhere.
Armor - Cafebar Read | Oliver Reed
Oliver Reed's casting is another tricky one, as again he does have a varied career. For example, he's in several Ken Russell films, and while The Devils (1971) can fall into horror, things like Lisztomania (1975) are just pure Russell madness of the best kind. And he even gained prominence from playing Bill Sikes in Oliver! (1968).
He does have some other notable horror roles later in his career are things like Burnt Offerings (1976) and David Cronenberg's The Brood (1979), but it feels like the movie that would've brought Reed to relevance here was that he was in the Terrence Fisher-directed Hammer film The Curse of the Werewolf (1961). Much like Lon Chaney Jr., he suffers a bit from not having a werewolf in here to be cast as.
So why is he Armor? No idea, I can't find any role that really comes close enough to fit... even looking at his non-horror films I didn't spot anything offhand that would involve a suit of armor but maybe there's a role out there I'm missing and would be a reasonable influence.
Skeleton - Andre Moral | André Morell
Cast as the Skeleton is André Morell, another actor that wouldn't necessarily be expected to show up here. Some of the most prominent movies he's in are Barry Lyndon (1975), Ben-Hur (1959), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which aren't exactly horror classics.
He did still have quite a few Hammer horror films, though, like The Plague of the Zombies (1966) or the Terrence FIsher-directed horror/mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). Nothing that I can find to link to the skeleton role, though.
Zombie - Jone Candies | John Carradine
Our final credit, Jone Candies, feels like it must be John Carradine to me, not out of confidence, per se, but from not seeing anyone that would come to be a closer fit. John Carradine was quite prolific with horror films, as roughly a third of his nearly 300 films are horror films.
His most reoccurring role, though, is actually as Count Dracula, which he first played for Hammer Films in House of Frankenstein (1944), but he would also return for House of Dracula (1945) for Hammer and also playing Dracula in non-Hammer horror/comedy Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula (1979), where Dracula's castle has been converted into the Hotel Transylvania. Throw in his roles in movies like Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966) and Vampire Hookers (1978), and his role as Count Alucard in The Vampire Girls (1969), and Carradine actually played Dracula in more movies than Lugosi and also played vampires in more movies than Lugosi.
Carradine isn't as known for zombie movies... but that doesn't mean he isn't without those in his credits. In Voodoo Man (1944) he is an assistant to a voodoo master played by Bela Lugosi. In Revenge of the Zombies (1943), he's a mad scientist building zombies for the Nazis. In The Astro-Zombies (1968), Carradine is a scientists who creates monsters from murder victims. In Shock Waves (1977) he's the captain of a ship that stumbles upon underwater Nazi zombies (everything comes full circle). So while I don't think he plays a zombie at any point of any of those, he may end up a zombie at some point and certainly spends enough time with zombies to justify the credit.
Anyone Missing?
There are, of course, a whole lot of horror movies out there, and so there's absolutely some actors that come to mind with horror that aren't in here. One of the easiest is probably Vincent Price, who made a lot of horror films and doesn't make it on here, but Price's were rarely aligned with the more monstrous characters themselves, though he had his moments like the invisible man in The Invisible Man Returns (1940) or his rare appearance as a vampire in the anthology film The Monster Club (1981). Peter Lorre also feels a bit worth mentioning, particularly with his coappearances with Vincent Price in Roger Corman films like Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963).
But there is someone else that comes to mind much more strongly, and there's some suggestions that maybe he was going to get credited in this after all. While the credits cover all the monsters and some behind-the-scenes crew, our hero Simon Belmont isn't in there. And Simon Belmont was not always what he was going to be named, either.
In the Castlevania Anniversary Collection's The History of Castlevania: Book of the Crescent Moon, early concept art shows that originally Simon Belmont was going to be named Peter Dante, the grandson of Christopher Dante. While some people have argued that Dante is a reference to director Joe Dante, who made films like The Howling (1981), I don't think that's too persuasive in this case. I'd buy it just as much if this was more tied to Dante Alighieri, the 15th-century Italian writer of The Divine Comedy, which chronicled a fictional trip through Hell.
What I think is far more interesting is that the use of Peter for a character that fights vampires, and the pairing of the name with Christopher as the grandfather, makes me quite curious if Simon Belmont was originally going to be named after Peter Cushing. It certainly would be reasonable to honor Cushing, who played Dracula's foe Van Helsing several times and was often fighting the forces of evil, by having him play the hero here. Maybe Simon Belmont does have a good ring to it... but I'm still a little disappointed the final credit of Castlevania wasn't "Simon Belmont - Pete Cushion".
Want a full list of just all the movies mentioned here? Check out the Letterboxd list: Mentioned in Castlevania's Crazy Cinema Credits
