“And Tom Noonan as Frankenstein.”
These beautiful words adorn the screen in gothic blood-red font during the opening credits of 1987’s The Monster Squad as the camera prowls through the bowels of an old castle, whose Tartarean depths are lit only by torches affixed to stone walls, and in which lie scurrying rats and a group of coffins. This credit is incorrect, of course, as Noonan plays not the mad scientist Frankenstein but his creation, but it’s a historically common misnomer. The movie knows this: During a gathering of the geeks, one of the questions the boys pose to the cool kid to see if he deserves to be welcomed into their monster club is whether “Frankenstein” is the name of the monster or the man. “The guy,” he says in a tone implying annoyance at the easiness of the question. This knowingly erroneous credit before we even see a single character hints at the playful tone, a marriage of Hammer horror’s brand of frightful macabre and a coming-of-age boys movie done in a very 1980s style. Our main boy, Sean, even wears a shirt that yells “Stephen King Rocks” with yellow lettering on vibrant red cotton.
The gaggle of monster-loving boys also includes, Patrick, the chubby Horace, little Eugene, and the cool kid Rudy, who is garbed like a 1950s greaser with his leather jacket, white T-shirt, and slender blue jeans from the bottoms of which are visible white socks sticking out of black shoes, on which Rudy lights his matches. There’s also Sean’s baby sister, Phoebe, and Pete the dog. Sean finds the diary of Abraham Van Helsing, which says that Dracula will, the very next day, attempt to destroy an amulet which is concentrated goodness, plunging the world into everlasting darkness. Dracula recruits a cadre of classic monsters: The Wolfman, The Gill Man, The Mummy, and Frankenstein’s monster. It’s the 6’5” Noonan as the lumbering monster with bolts in his neck who epitomizes what co-writers Shane Black and Fred Dekker are doing.
Noonan had an ability to use his inimitable, mesmeric docility to wicked effect. In Manhunter, probably the movie for which he will be most passionately remembered, he plays a man so shattered in his soul that he wants to transform into a new, less spiritually burdened version of himself: the Red Dragon. But he isn’t evil in the normal cinematic sense. He shows tenderness with his blind coworker, with whom he feels safe because she can’t see the deformities he thinks he has. When he brings her to the zoo and lets her pet a sleeping tiger, Noonan stands in the background—his presence, still large, is now less looming and unsettling, less monstrous, and more gentle, a man who feels that maybe he can be human after all, his emotional scars healing, his heart opening, if just a little bit. When he thinks this caring woman is seeing another, sleazier man, he reverts to murderousness. This is a damaged man engendered by trauma and hate not coming from him, but inflicted on him. You understand why he does bad things and even feel bad for him.
In the X-Files episode “Paper Hearts,” Noonan plays a child killer who has an enigmatic relationship with the disappearance of Mulder’s sister, the mystery that has been the impetus for Mulder’s whole life, the catalyst for his obsession with the supernatural, the pain he can never mollify. Noonan’s imposing, soft-spoken killer makes Mulder question his own existence, his purpose, with his cryptic musings, the way he can say scary stuff without ever resorting to any traditional techniques of horror acting. When he dies, so do the answers to Mulder’s mystery.
The Monster Squad afforded Noonan a chance to use his quiet, understated acting style to play a good guy whose appearance belies the tenderness of his (reanimated) heart.
Noonan also has a brief but essential role in The House of the Devil, a movie inculcated with nostalgic love for the late-’70s and early-’80s low-budget horror flicks and Satanic Panic hysteria. Noonan and Warhol Factory it-girl Mary Woronov are worshipers of evil enacting a stratagem to bring about, through the manipulation of a young money-strapped babysitter, the birth of the Devil’s spawn, born in blood, anointed by the moon. Noonan initially seems like a nice old man frustrated by an unfortunate situation, but is also a little calmly unsettling, and, in a moment of unintended honesty with the unsuspecting babysitter, barely able to keep from yelling in anger. But he does keep calm, just a fleeting glimpse of the promise of violence which won’t come for a while. His absence for most of the movie is itself an ethereal presence as we wait for him to return.
The Monster Squad afforded Noonan a chance to use his quiet, understated acting style to play a good guy whose appearance belies the tenderness of his (reanimated) heart. Slick-haired, black-hearted Dracula thinks that Frankenstein will help him in his quest to usurp the powers of good and corrupt existence with evil forever; but Frankenstein promptly befriends Phoebe in a scene that plays with the iconic image of Boris Karloff tossing an innocent, young, unassuming girl into the pond as if she were the petal pulled from a flower—and then the boys. When he first meets them, Noonan, his malformed face framed in bright daylight and against the green of a towering tree, looks genuinely awestruck, smiling with a sense of palpable wonderment at these strange little creatures scurrying away (Horace hides poorly in a trash can). Their fear doesn’t frighten or distress him; with Phoebe’s delicate hand wrapped around his giant finger, he patiently and innocently waits for them to come over (they call him “Frankenstein’s Monster,” it’s worth noting, though they nickname him Frank). What scares him is the thought that he is scary.
Looking at a photo of a naked girl he accidentally took, he’s oblivious to the appeal of such an image, but understands that it’s something special to a preteen, whose knowledge of girls stems from pure imagination of what the movies show them. He’s like a boy himself, going through puberty at an accelerated rate, so many years after his progenitor fulfilled his God complex by assembling parts purloined from various bodies and imbuing them with unnatural life in his lab. Later, in a decrepit house whose face is smothered by vines and weeds that Dracula has made his home, Sean succinctly and sincerely sums Frank up: “Don’t call him a monster.” Consider the smile on Frank’s face when he grabs Dracula by the neck and tosses him onto a wrought iron fence, then looks lovingly down at Phoebe when she finishes the spell to open up limbo and banish the evil. This is the most cuddly version of the creature, and, in his very brief time on screen, encapsulates what made Noonan a special actor. FL
