October 1956: Bela Lugosi dies in a charity ward, buried in his Dracula cape—the only valuable thing he owned. Boris Karloff sends flowers but doesn't attend, too busy earning $7,500 a week on Broadway. The monsters of Universal Horror spent thirty years locked in a bitter rivalry that began when Karloff's Frankenstein eclipsed Lugosi's Dracula and ended with one man a pauper, the other a millionaire. From their first film together in 1934 to Lugosi's final humiliation playing the Monster he once "rejected," Marcus Reid unearths the petty sabotage, salary disputes, and scene-stealing that poisoned eight collaborations. Featuring Lugosi's morphine addiction, Karloff's icy British contempt, and the cruel mathematics of Hollywood fame that declared one monster a star and the other a has-been. Just in time for Halloween, discover how the men who gave us Dracula and Frankenstein spent more energy trying to destroy each other than any hero in their films ever did. Some monsters wear makeup. Others just wear their ambitions on their sleeves.
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