Universal never had a better shot at making a modern Universal Horror cinematic universe than when they had Brendan Fraser making mummy movies.

They've tried twice since then and never come close.

I say "tried twice" but I don't think they've ever exactly stopped trying. I mean they came out with Van Helsing, and then they came out with the Mummy Impossible movie and the Dark Universe branding that went nowhere.

Van Helsing's take on Frankenstein was brilliant, though. A creature design that married their classic Karloff makeup version with the well-spoken and literate creature of the book, with modern Todd MacFarlane flourishes.

And one of the more interesting things about the Van Helsing creature was that because they did the mash (THEY DID THE MONSTER MASH!), his origin was changed... because of Dracula's meddling, his formative memory was his father standing over him, dying to protect him.

That was one of the more interesting things about Van Helsing and it came out of the franchise's original sin, which was that they did the mash (THEY DID THE MONSTER MASH) in the first movie.

Everybody wants to be Marvel's The Avengers but nobody wants to assemble.

And yes, I know that Van Helsing predates Iron Man by 4 years, but Dracula didn't meet the Wolfman in Tod Browning's Dracula, either.

I haven't seen The Invisible Man (hey-o!) but I want to, I think it looks really good, much better than anything we would have gotten out of a Dark Universe. Domestic horror. Interpersonal horror. Ghost story meets gaslighting.

In Wells's book, Griffin wants to take over the world. He proclaims himself Emperor Invisible Man I. His pain and paranoia are doing a lot of the driving there but at the turn of the 19th century one dude being invisible would have been a bigger advantage than today.

In the 21st century, one dude managing to disappear himself and thinking it makes him the king of everything just isn't plausible anymore. One drone strike and his rein is over. Or dozens of drone strikes. Hundreds, forever, justified by "hey, might be an invisible man there."

So they took the concept of a monstrous man becoming invisible and they made a smaller scale horror, up close and personal. That works. That's plausible. That's SCARY.

Van Helsing felt like the midpoint of a franchise, or even the endpoint of one since they had the archenemies meet and fight each other and the main villain defeated. Like they were trying to Leonard Part VI or Star Wars Episode IV it. https://twitter.com/numb3r5ev3n/status/1252260141765885954

So Van Helsing felt kind of tired as a starting point already. I think a lot of what it did worked and it is many ways underrated. But I think a big part where it failed was in getting audiences excited about the wider universe it tried to show us.

What I would like to see in terms of a Universal Horror universe would be more films like The Invisible Man. More small films, more intimate films, films that *could* be set in the same world but don't have to be, until they are.

As a Universal Horror buff, I was so excited by the Mummy movie, just the concept of it. And then it was a great supernatural action-adventure/pulp cliffhanger movie. And Universal was talking about bringing back more of their horror properties for the modern age.

And then I remember being mystified but still interested that instead of building off of the Mummy series, they were going to create a whole new tentpole movie and just... cram everything into it. League of Supernatural Gentlemen.

And it just very much didn't work. I mean, Van Helsing almost doubled its production budget at the box office and they were talking sequels and spin-offs in the years afterwards, but the momentum wasn't there.

Van Helsing even had a Mr. Hyde who was nothing like the literary figure and a lot like the comic book character, who was in Paris for reasons not elaborated upon in the film (as the comic book character had been).

It wasn't subtle, what they went for. https://twitter.com/OiShinyThings/status/1252264361042862081

This is really it.

I think a good modern day movie Dracula would have to look a lot more like the literary Dracula, where we meet a lot of people who have been touched by his actions before the heroes put together a real picture of him. https://twitter.com/kristenmchugh22/status/1252263652977229824

It's hard to make a modern-day vampire movie that's not vampire romance or action, without going for more intimate and personal stakes (hey-o!)

It might seem strange that I'm holding up pulp supernatural action-adventure as one exemplar of how they could do it and domestic-violence-as-horror/horror-as-domestic-violence as the other, but it's about periodicity.

You could have both in the same universe, different eras.

As soon as you have Imhotep making giant sand faces in the modern world, you're in Godzilla territory. The world is changed in ways that make it unrecognizable as ours.

If you don't want your monster universe to be a superhero/superspy universe, the modern era needs more subtle horrors. Monsters that know they are giants on the earth and who tread lightly.

You could also do them as separate things. A pulp period universe and a modern personal horror world, which again could all be the same world but doesn't have to be.

The Invisible Man does not have cinematic universe franchise potential built in, but neither did Iron Man.

And I can't imagine an update of a classic Universal horror film character working better than The Invisible Man seems to have.

(I note again that I still haven't seen it, but I hope to scrape up a chance to see it this month.)