In observance of that autumn spell when we celebrate the primal, compulsive instinct of fear, Rainestorm highlights 31 days of spooky scares to season the eerie atmosphere of Halloween.

This week we pay obligatory homage to the studio that brought some of finest thrills and greatest cinematic cheese to the 20th century. It’s Universal Monster Week!

Reign of terror: 1931

The horror… the horror: By no means the first horror movie ever made (nor, in fact, the first Frankenstein movie ever made) but James Whale’s eternal classic is the fountainhead from which has sprung the modern horror movie. Though he would later go on to the make the deliberately silly Bride of Frankenstein (sorry folks, but it’s nowhere near as good as this film), here Whale constructs an elegantly tragic frightener that taps into the timeless theme of man playing god. It can be interpreted a number of different ways: a cautionary tale of mankind interfering with nature; a paranoid rant against medical advancement; a sociological parable on the way societies treat those who are different. It never seems to lose its relevance, particularly now that cloning is an established reality.

Halloween haunt: The definitive haunted castle movie, with black and white photography heightening the shadows. Frankenstein features a twilight grave robbery with a statue of the grim reaper holding vigil; prototype Igor, Fritz, committing a B&E to steal a brain and accidentally dropping it; the creaky corridors of Frankenstein’s castle complete with crashing thunder and lightning; and torch-wielding villagers pursuing the creature to a fiery windmill.

Tastiest treat: The monster’s innocent disport with a young girl turns inadvertently tragic.

Check the candy for: The famous Castle Thunder sound effect, used in countless films since, was created for this movie.

Devilish discourse: “It’s alive. It’s alive… It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive!“

Goes great with: Frankenstein (1910). It’s worth having a peek at the first attempt to bring Mary Shelley’s tale to cinematic life. The protracted creation sequence is really quite clever, if a bit simple and alchemic. And at a mere thirteen minutes, director J. Searle Dawley does a fairly efficient job of distilling the story down to its most basic components.