Monster kids are a film school smash! Sara Karloff and Bela Lugosi Jr. regale students with stories from their famous fathers' days of horror

Chapman University film production major Nathan Mulroy ’17 has worked his way through
1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
, discusses cinema history like an academic and watches horror movies with a scholar’s steely nerves.

But his heart fluttered just a bit on Tuesday afternoon when the children of screen stars and horror legends Bela Lugosi of
Dracaula
fame and Boris Karloff, the creature of
Frankenstein
, took the stage Tuesday at Chapman’s
Dodge College of Film and Media Arts
.

“Twelve-year-old me was like freaking out,” said Mulroy, a native of Eagle, Idaho.

He wasn’t alone. For film students, especially fans of the horror genre, the event was pretty much a red letter day.

“It was amazing to come see two descendants of people who are pretty much the basis for almost every modern horror movie nowadays,” said senior Mike Pinkerton of Los Alamitos, Calif.

Students in Film Studies 244 were treated to the screening of a flickering 35mm film copy — on loan from
Universal
— of the 1934 movie
The Black Cat
, starring Lugosi and Karloff. Then the audience listened to “monster children” Sara Karloff and Bela Lugosi Jr. share stories about the work of their famous dads.

Karloff said her father was a hard-working pro who took his craft seriously and was unconcerned with stardom. No one expected the creature in
Frankenstein
to become the star. Karloff wasn’t even invited to the premiere, she said.

“My dad was really a very modest, self-effacing man with a wonderful sense of humor, which was often self-directed,” she said.

But he also had a keen artistic sense and declined more Frankenstein movie scripts, lest the character become overdone and lurch into caricature, she said.

Lugosi remembered his father as a voracious reader and an actor trained on the stage of the National Theater of Hungary who “could do anything with his eyes and anything with his voice.”

Students peppered them with a variety of questions, some of which reflected both the pop culture of their childhoods and Hollywood lore. Would Lugosi’s father have appreciated the
Sesame Street
send up of him in the character Count Von Count? Absolutely. Did Karloff’s father really rush to the hospital still outfitted in the nuts and bolts of his Frankenstein costume when she was born? Absolutely not.

And how would their fathers feel about all this affection and fan following some 80 years since they first hit the big screen?

“Grateful,” said Karloff.

Lugosi echoed that sentiment.

“Dad died in 1956 and he thought he was forgotten,” Lugosi said. “So he would be really happily amazed and surprised to see what’s happened in the intervening years.”