Prof. Blair Davis has recently published a book chapter in the new anthology
Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade. The chapter, entitled "Of Apes and Men (and Monsters and Girls)," examines the 1941 Paramount film
The Monster and the Girl as a case study of the transition between 1930s and 1940s horror cinema. He argues that just as 1940s horror cinema remains largely undervalued, the phenomenon of the ‘Ape film’ is one symptom of why the genre is not taken as seriously in this decade when compared to the horror films of the early-to-mid 1930s like
Dracula and
Frankenstein. "Ape films were a regular staple of the horror genre for decades, and yet (King Kong aside) they have not enjoyed the same patterns of cyclical resurgence that many of the other monsters have enjoyed," says Davis. "If some see 1940s horror cinema as a generally less successful period in the genre’s history, then the ape film is an even more problematic entity within an already precarious cinematic phenomenon.
The Monster and the Girl - with its central premise of an executed man’s brain having been transplanted into an ape’s body - serves as a case study of the ape film phenomenon and more importantly of the difficulties affecting the reception of 1940s horror cinema," he argues.
