Autumn has fallen and it’s time once more to celebrate the primal, compulsive instinct of fear. Rainestorm finishes its horror trilogy and goes to the well one last time to highlight 31 days of spooky scares that season the eerie atmosphere of Halloween. In this week’s Serial Thriller, we focus on the classic Universal Frankenstein series.

Hex cast: 1945

The charm: Four years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and four months after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Universal monster movies gasped their last as literary monsters gave way to monsters of the atomic age. The plot itself is a Frankenstein creation, cobbled together from bits and pieces of previous Universal monster movies for one last cash grab. That doesn’t mean it lacks any kind of enjoyable charm. Things got progressive as the hunchback this time around is a beautiful and benevolent woman (Martha O’Driscoll), whom Dr. Franz Edelmann (Oslo Stevens) has promised to cure. Dracula (John Carradine returning from the previous film) has become a medical curiosity rather than a supernatural evil, demanding that Dr. Edelmann cure his vampirism. Thrown into this hodgepodge is wolf man Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.), also seeking a cure from the good (soon to be mad) doctor. To top it off, the Frankenstein monster is tossed in as the keystone that makes these varied cures possible. Strangely, all this insanity manages to hold together and Stevens is hilarious as the altruistic doctor who goes bananas after an infusion of Dracula blood. Perhaps it’s the nature of such franchises that once all the horror has been milked dry, all that remains is parody and hijinks. All in all, a goofy finale to what began as a sad tragedy.

Focal point: Angst-ridden immortal Larry Talbot pitches himself into the sea in a vain suicide attempt. How he thought that would work after being bludgeoned with a silver cane and buried under tons of water and rubble is anyone’s guess.

Entrancing trivia: Unlike the other Universal movie monsters, Wolf Man Larry Talbot actually enjoys a happy conclusion, having been cured of lycanthropy forever.

Speak the words: “I will explain everything… before sunrise.”

Companion spell: See House of Frankenstein (1944). It’s the same film in every way that matters.

The curse: All of the original actors but Chaney are gone from this last monster movie hurrah.