They also meet Dracula and The Wolf Man!
A central goal I have in watching past horror movies is to chronicle the placement of such films into the public consciousness and detail the evolving depictions of horror movie elements in popular culture. In past reviews of iconic Universal horror movies, I position the films and their monsters as representations of philosophic, political, psychological, societal, and spiritual questions and fears of the time as America, the nation producing these films, reconciles and attempts to decouple itself from a Euro-centric past to establish its own cultural perspective and output. In doing so, storytelling conventions begin to change from 'structure to adhere to' into 'model to follow,' as their meanings are adapted into society's informal understanding of those conventions and thus create an aesthetic lifted from such conventions that is less pronounced and more subtle in its ways of engaging in convention.
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is a film which came out in a period when monster movies were declining in the critical and public eye, as their already dubious originality had worn thinner with subsequent installments, and their original frightening meanings had become more nebulous with vacuous reiterations which lifted the likeness of identifiable creatures with fewer textual elements. Seventeen years after his debut, Count Dracula was not the same suave seducer he once was; now he was a staple character whose motivations could be simplified for immediate audience understanding in mass consumption. The old guard of horror simply wasn't horrifying anymore and was now kind of funny to watch as Lugosi's mannerisms and eccentricities in performance were mirrored in subsequent performances of the character and his knock-offs. Realizing this decline in the horror aspect of the horror genre alongside declining interest in a famous American comedic duo, a self-aware parody and celebration of the horror aesthetic through its blending in comedy is born.
Several crossovers and re-imaginings of Universal characters existed before they met Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, but whereas the previous 'Monster vs Monster' and 'Spawn of Monster' style Universal sequels attempted to posit their entries into a growing canon and shared universe, Abbott and Costello spoofs the studio's attempts via blurring the lines between in-universe and out-of-universe with tongue-in-cheek humor. In the film, the Universal monsters are simultaneously recognizable icons complete with consumer merchandise as well as the actual monsters, made more sincere yet absurd with the inclusion of original actors Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. reprising their Dracula and Larry Talbot/Wolf Man mantles (original Frankenstein's Monster actor Boris Karloff did not reappear, but Glenn Strange, frequent Frankenstein sequel Monster portrayer did). Our lead funnymen bumble through a plot involving Larry Talbot trying to stop Dracula from reviving The Monster once more all while they poke fun at tropified horror elements like 'the villain skulking in the shadows somehow undetected.' For two things as publicly aware at the time as Universal horror and Abbott and Costello to mesh as well as they do has several potential implications: perhaps audiences enjoy familiarity, perhaps film studios hold more power over what makes a film a success than a film's merits, and perhaps comedy and horror are not dissimilar in how they achieve their goals as genres.
Horror and comedy can both be thought-provoking and critical genres that use exaggeration and abstraction to make entertaining arguments and arrive at compelling conclusions, but both genres, more often than not, focus on creating spectacle over debate—and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Genre works are particularly adept at demonstrating popular understandings and conceptions of the time due to their frequent use of tropes and readily-identifiable elements for audiences to grasp quicker. In Abbott and Costello, the absurdity of the horror genre is recognized through juxtaposition and comparison with popular comedic routines, but an undercurrent of respect and appreciation for the genre is kept intact as it simultaneously immortalizes the way people think about and engage with horror conventions while recognizing the burgeoning iconic status of horror villains. While the evolution of the horror genre and its icons into public consciousness was and is an ongoing process, a parody film such as this marks a watershed event in that evolution and definitive turn from past scruples about the state of the world to a more modern, ironic distance that ponders such concepts more indirectly or even inadvertently through inserting humor and reconfiguring tropes.