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It’s the birth of the modern horror film:

The Curse of Frankenstein on DVD

By Jay Woelfel

Without fanfare something quite important happened this month. Warner Brothers released The Curse of Frankenstein, a film made cheaply in 1956 in England and now released on DVD just in time for Halloween.  The box art is not bad.   The main menu page features no animation but is accompanied by the film’s title music.   There are a brief couple of lines about the film and other films in Hammer’s Frankenstein series, that this film spawned, and a decent looking version of the film’s trailer And last but not least and in fact most important thing of all is a beautiful looking and sounding version of the film that in many ways is the first modern horror film ever made.

The film was released originally before I was even born, but by now I’ve seen this film a number of times, though mostly chopped up on television and once in an overly vivid but still soft looking 16mm print at the American Cinematheque.  But seeing it this time, really being able to see it, was a revelation to me in many ways that I hope to share with you.

There are really three films that created what I’m calling the modern horror film.  The Curse of Frankenstein is the chronologically the first, Horror of Dracula (as it is named here in the United States) the second and Psycho the third.

The reason these three films followed quickly one after the other is that each was made very cheaply and grossed increasingly large amounts of money.  Ironically, Psycho, the most modern and lastingly influential is the only one of the three to be in black and white.  The decision was initially to save money as an experiment by producer director Alfred Hitchcock.  Low budget horror films without stars specifically The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula were making lots of money for little investment and Hitchcock figured he could experiment with one of his own.

The fact that all of these revolutionary modern horror films were directed by two sedate, quiet, middle-aged Englishmen is something for a sociologist to figure out.

Of these, Horror of Dracula, also released this month in a not-quite-as-pristine a DVD from Warner Brothers is, although a better film than The Curse of Frankenstein, not modern in its themes which are purely and wonderfully Gothic Horror, but is modern in terms of the pure sexual appeal of evil that it portrays and that it added to genre.

What makes The Curse of Frankenstein and Psycho modern, where Horror of Dracula is not, is in their central protagonist and villain.  These two films introduced us to the sociopathic killer as the main character and the major element of horror in their stories.

Now I have to pause here to acknowledge Fritz Lang’s M, the remake of The Lodger and Hangover Square both directed by John Brahm and starring Laird Cregar.  These films deal with this type of character years earlier but aren’t but aren’t true horror films and don’t focus as much or as deeply on the lead “psycho”.  None of these excellent films changed the type of horror films being made the way that The Curse of Frankenstein and Psycho did.

 These lead villains are normal looking men, not mythic creatures of European folklore but products of modern society’s pressures and opportunities, disappointments and conflicts.  Psycho owes this central character, Norman Bates, in most everyway to its source novel by Robert Bloch.  In everyway save however for the performance and cast-against-type casting of Anthony Perkins brilliantly cast against type as Bates.   The Curse of Frankenstein’s Baron Victor Frankenstein is a much more complicated creation, part source material, part script, part actor and director.

When we first meet Victor Frankenstein he is about to be executed for what we’d now call being a serial killer.  He calls for a minister not because he believes in the minister or in his beliefs, but because he knows the minister will be believed by others.   Frankenstein claims he is innocent, not because he didn’t kill people, but because he created a monster that did.

To him it’s not important that the monster killed but that it lived.  Frankenstein created life.  No one else even dared to conceive of the idea, let along succeed at it. He craves to impress and be saved by a society that he is not a successful a part of.

Baron Frankenstein in this film is a goal oriented self-made man.  This in and of itself is, or could be a good thing, but the constant frustrations of society stopping him from achieving his lofty goals are what drive him further and further into the back woods of evil (as actor Peter Cushing once described the character).

Left alone at a young age and put in charge of his family’s money, he uses it to isolate himself from society and build his intelligence and desires in a vacuum.  It’s clear when we first meet the young Victor Frankenstein that he wants to be considered and impress as an adult would.  He continues to use his inheritance to force adult knowledge upon himself without really growing out of his childish desire to impress a world of he’s never made himself a part of.

Frankenstein’s personality as written, and perhaps even more, as played by Cushing, fits into the glove of the sociopathic personality perfectly.  He only feels his own pain and doesn’t even understand the pain of others. 

I was struck especially towards the end of the film with how truly panicked he becomes when Paul, initially his mentor, then his friend, now an enemy, arrives at the jail.  His begging for Paul to help save his life is powerfully pathetic and real.  The scene is was probably written so the audience to enjoy seeing the villain Frankenstein suffer, but instead, it shows the depths of obsession his isolated desires have taken him to.

His former friend’s refusing to tell anyone that Frankenstein’s wild story is true is the ultimate punishment.  But if the minister really had come to believe the “I created a monster” story it would only add another even greater reason to kill Frankenstein, though Frankenstein ironically himself is oblivious to this fact. 

It reminds me of serial killer Ted Bundy’s finally discovering his own fear of death after years of denial.  This fear of the loss of the only life he really understood, drove him to offer up information on his crimes and the locations of missing victims bodies, claiming that this would help those he “harmed” (he could never really say he killed people) while not seeing that this just made him seem more insane and murderous.

If I’m making a case here that Victor Frankenstein represents this type of serial killer personality, which I guess I am, then the element that seems to be missing from Victor Frankenstein’s personality is a degree of sexual dysfunction and motivation behind his crimes.

But there’s certainly a sexual side to this story, or asexual reproduction, as the case may be.  The source novel written by a woman, though published initially as the work of a man, is in some ways not about mankind’s creating life being an abomination, but specifically as being man’s attempt to do so being one.  Her own mother, an early feminist writer, had died from complications of Mary’s birth and she hated her stepmother.

Mary Shelley would have a number of her own children die at an early age and one had already died before Frankenstein was published.  Women are the ones in nature who must endure the at times surreal and frightening transformations of pregnancy and child birth and as a woman, she was uniquely qualified to express and reflect some of these feelings mixed with her own personal problems in her novel.

In this film, it always surprises me when we suddenly cut to Frankenstein hiding in a corner of the castle kissing and rather cruelly teasing his servant who is his secret lover.  Up until this point in the film Frankenstein seems almost asexual in his pure pursuit and practice of the knowledge and his quest to create life.  It’s only after we meet his arranged marriage bride that we first see him clutching sexually with his servant.  She later says she’s pregnant with his child in an attempt to blackmail him into marrying her at which point Frankenstein arranges to have his monster kill her.  The killing takes place behind a closed door and from the way she is screaming we could guess that the monster is doing more than just killing her.  We watch this event entirely from the reactions on Frankenstein’s face which show a total relief, and growing satisfaction, then joy and finally just a subtle almost self-satisfied smile at his own cleverness.

In the later, and arguably best of the Hammer Frankenstein films, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, there is a scene (censored in the United States for years) in which Frankenstein actually rapes a woman (in case you think that Frankenstein isn’t ever motivated or isn’t to some degree sexually deranged).

I’d argue that his whole pursuit to create life becomes a substitution for a normal sex life in many ways.  Mary Shelly as a woman would tend to see sex, as women often do more so than men, as being a means to an end—creating a new life which is what drives Frankenstein.  The curse in The Curse of Frankenstein is his desire and relentless pursuit to create life

Early in the film there is a wonderful camera dolly into a close up of the Doctor’s face and he waits to hear the heartbeat of a dog as it comes back to life.  In this way we realize the success of the experiment and share the joy of his first achievement by his reactions to it.  This contrasts sharply with how we, the audience, see his actual creation of artificial life for the first time. 

The first sight of the monster is done by increasing and then slowing down the speed of the film in a way that is currently very popular in feature films and especially in previews for films.  We see the monster standing in the middle of the laboratory; its face and whole body are wrapped like a mummy in yellowish white dripping wet bandages.  As it senses our presence – the dolly shot thrusts the monster at us—the creature begins to turn its head and then the entire speed of the film changes so that we snap much closer to the monster.  Then one of its hands whips quickly up and then rips the bandages from its face at which point the speed of the film slows again so that we get almost a still image of the hideous face.

Unlike the novel, in which Frankenstein is horrified when he actually sees what he has created, his “being” in the film, Frankenstein seems always to be nothing but proud and thrilled by his creation.  Does the term “a face that only a mother could love” apply?  Yes. 

For most of the film, he keeps it locked in a depressing little dingy cell covered with straw, chained to the wall, but proudly demonstrates how it now obeys commands that a dog would perform with more grace.  He tries, very badly to care for his child, he is seen fixing some awful looking baby-food-like slop for the creature to eat.  He samples it and then rather than pulling a face, as a lesser actor would do, Frankenstein dowses the gruel with salt to kill the awful taste.

All this shows how bad a mother Frankenstein is.  The malignant killing rage that erupts frequently from the creature itself, demonstrates the evil Frankenstein himself never shows us.  It is his child/ his creature that demonstrates the evil Frankenstein himself never shows us.  The creature is in this way, the Mr. Hyde to Frankenstein’s own self-appraisal of being Doctor Jeckyll.  This is what makes the monster horrifying and modern as an external symbol of the characters own corruption.

The monster itself in The Curse of Frankenstein is a horror especially in the clear and vibrant DVD, which does also reveal the limits of the makeup effects in a few instances.  When I first saw this film I expected that it would be about the monster.  It’s a popular misconception that the monster is named Frankenstein where in fact the monster has no name in the novel or in The Curse of Frankenstein.  The creature in Curse as portrayed by Christopher Lee is really the screen’s first zombie, as we now know them.  It looks dead.  Grey.  One eye is white, as though boiled and blind.  Scars are all over its face. Its body and limbs don’t move in coordination with each other.  And most of all, it seems to live on as a mockery of life so that it can kill the truly living.

When it escapes into the world we quickly cut to the kindly old blind man and his cute grandson walking in the woods.  We are set up to expect to see the kind side of the monster because that’s what these characters and these scenes demonstrated in the original novel and in the James Whale’s earlier Frankenstein films.  But instead, this monster discovers the blind man is helpless and then kills him because of it and soon after, though the death is off screen, he kills the little boy too. 

After this horrendous offense, the monster is graphically shot to death, buried and then dug back up to be revived a second time. By this point, the monster seems ashamed of its own appearance.  After it has been shot in the face one of its eyes goes black then soon afterwards acquires a surgical bald patch on half of its head.

It seems to hate human life and why wouldn’t it, given the quality of life Frankenstein has given it?  Yes, the creature in this film lacks the personality and impact that Karloff and Shelley gave it.  The reason for this is by choice of the writer, Jimmy Sangster, who makes Doctor Frankenstein the monster himself.   This is a large part of what makes it a film with a foot in today’s world rather than in the superstitions of yesterday. 

The studio wanted with their remake of a Frankenstein the film to “go gothic,” but in this film, and the series that followed it, explores a dangerous and modern villain, really a serial killer personality. 

The motives for this revolutionary film’s existence began naturally and purely as economic.  Hammer Films, a small British company, had been in business for a number of years and had cultivated a staff of filmmakers who had by this time worked together as a family in many ways on a variety of different types of films. 

Hammer had recent success adapting live British television Science Fiction shows into films and wanted to continue the trend and decided perhaps it was time to revisit the monsters that Universal had made a lot of money from during the 1930’s and 1940’s.   Having thrown out a first script by Milton Subotsky, they then hired one of their production staffers, recently turned writer Jimmy Sangster to script (I’m sure for less money than Subotsky had been paid) a remake of Frankenstein.   They did not buy the rights from Universal (part of the beauty of their plan) because the source material was in the public domain and the name Frankenstein was their built-in and free star power.  Sangster was told he could not use the look of the monster that Universal had created and this suited Sangster fine since he was interested in Doctor, not monster, Frankenstein as the central character.  Sangster was guided in the scripting by a frequently overlooked force for good at Hammer, producer Anthony Hinds who would write (under the name John Elder) many fine scripts for the company in years to come.

Staff director Terence Fisher, who had recently made the very interesting science fiction film Four Sided Triangle (available on DVD from Anchor Bay) was, depending on whose story you believe, either looking for something different and more gutsy to work on, or was chosen for the project by producer Hinds who knew that Fisher had the right mix of restraint and the ability to show off and would make the project catch fire.  Fisher certainly did both with The Curse of Frankenstein as did actor (and then recent   British television star) Peter Cushing, who heard about the remake and asked his agent to submit him for the part.

The intention was to shoot the film in black and white, but director Fisher, excited by the script, wanted more time and Hinds again, probably helped get a few more dollars for extra days and to shoot in color.

This seemingly small color gamble was Curse’s first revolution.  No one had really seen a horror film in color before.  Color films only began to be dominate in the 1960’s and were usually big budget spectacles or romances.  The vivid red of Technicolor was great for women’s lipstick but nobody had thought about the impact of seeing this amount of bright red blood and yellow-gray flesh on screen for the first time.

Universal’s Horror films had ultimately turned into vehicles for Abbot and Costello.  All of them were in black and white and the monsters were only shadows of their once great originals, especially James Whale’s two very gothic Frankenstein films.

Another major modern and still fresh element is the music by James Bernhard.  Bernhard used the names of the films to inspire his themes and this is true in The Curse of Frankenstein, but what impresses most about this score is how non-thematic it is.  It growls and groans like a deeply upset stomach in a pre-minimalist and heavily and uniquely orchestrated way that was totally unlike most horror music before.  It expresses horror and shock but never in this films case the characters emotions, nor does it give us any release at the end of the film’s “happy ending”. 

What’s ironic is that Hammer only wanted to revive Gothic Horror while director Terence Fisher was interested in suspension of disbelief and emotional impact.  Fisher also did not believe the old saying, “that what you don’t see is more frightening than what you do see.”  Director James Whale’s Frankenstein is a great film, (though flawed by studio re-editing) greater than The Curse of Frankenstein, but it was larger than life, heavily designed in an expressionistic way that made it surreal and therefore less disturbing.

Director Fisher did not re-watch the original film, not wanting to be influenced, though star Cushing did re-read the original book and had fond memories of the first films, which sparked his initial interest in playing the character.

Fisher’s film with its production design by Bernhard Robinson and photography by Jack Asher is expressively muted.  The earth tone colors are well coordinated in a grim and sometimes expressively nasty way.  Or to put it more basically, no current technology innovation had the impact that bright red blood had on audiences then.  It was put there to horrify.  After all, isn’t that what a horror film should do?  Not everybody thinks so.

The critical reaction at the time is now generally believed to have been one of being offended and sickened by this success of being a horror film being horrifying-ugh, better!  In fact, a review of the original novel had stated “our taste and our judgment alike revolt” and in like manner, the reviews of The Curse of Frankenstein had film critics saying what they have continued to say about the genre ever since.  The said the film was morbid, not entertaining, that it was graphic, degrading…  But in fact, the bulk of reviews were, simply dismissive of the film because it was a horror film and not worthy of serious consideration one-way or the other.  This is certainly still true of reviewer’s attitudes towards horror films and fiction.

Nevertheless, audiences responded and the film was a huge hit.  The color of blood and horror films walked hand in hand from that day forth and with the copycat films that followed and led ultimately to what could be called a sub genre now known as gore films.

In The Curse of Frankenstein, much of this new graphic approach is about collecting and using and abusing the various body parts needed to create the monster.  The camera dollies quickly past the bird-picked and rotting face of the dead thief, who is- the body of the creature.  Frankenstein then cuts off the degraded head off camera, but the look of heartless concentration Cushing shows while doing this and the way he smears the first swatch of blood onto his jacket before dissolving the head in acid is cold and clinical.  

The headless body is then kept in the background of much action that follows in the lab.  There is a constant presence of these gruesome details in the film that still has impact and again echoes the way serial killers collect and use the body parts of victims.

One letter received by Police in Cleveland, Ohio during a series of still unsolved and long series of serial killings in the 1920’s, actually claimed that the body parts of the victims were being used in some revolutionary medical experiments whose end would justify the means.  Certainly this is Frankenstein’s explanation whenever anyone seems shocked by his actions.

There is an interesting shot—now a cliché—of Frankenstein examining a disembodied eye through a magnifying glass.  In the foreground of the shot we see one loose eyeball in a glass, then in the center of the shot, we see the eyeball in his hand, then we see his own eye enlarged and huge looking at the eyeball.  This is not a gimmick – Now just a gimmick shot, in this film, it morbidly focuses our attention on the eyeball in three ways in the same shot.  This is typical of how this film concentrates and emphasizes the gruesome elements in a morbid way.

Frankenstein comments about the stitched together body during one of these floating-corpse-in-the-tank scenes by saying, “let him rest in peace while he can.” There are several other instances of this kind of gallows humor that Frankenstein displays that also set horror films on the path that led unfortunately to the constant quips that destroyed the once terrifying Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm street films and to the post modern quips in the Scream films. 

This is counterpoint and context humor, which is modern, unlike the over-the-top theatrical goofy fool characters that exist to be comedy relief in Whale’s two Frankenstein films.

Victor Frankenstein later delicately unwraps the (rather bad props though they are) severed hands of a sculpture he will put onto his creation and soon after that covets the most brilliant brain in Europe.  This whole fetishistic interest that Frankenstein has in these pieces and putting them together impressed me while watching the DVD as being very much like the way serial killers collect and store and tend to body parts they keep from their victims.   

The images from the later Frankenstein film, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed of buried bodies bubbling up out of the mud in his back yard and being placed beneath his floorboards is what I’ve always thought John Wayne Gacy’s basement must have been like when it was dug up to pull victim after victim out into the light.

Victor Frankenstein has another common quality of the sociopathic personality, a huge ego.  He isn’t content to bring the dead back to life he wants to create his own being. 

Human lives only exist to supply parts for him and the ultimate part he needs is a brain.  The brain that Frankenstein gets for his monster he gets through direct murder—as opposed to the indirect murders he misguidedly hopes to blame on his creature in order to save his own life.

Bernstein, the scientist and unlucky victim to be, is first treated to after dinner drinks and polite conversation.  Frankenstein wants this brain because he considers it to be the best in Europe.  The professor warns Frankenstein of all the dangers he has already indulged in; of never being satisfied with knowledge, but continuing to search in the dark for further discoveries rather than staying in the light by sharing the knowledge to better the world.  Frankenstein seems to be enjoying a drink and a smoke and ignoring most of this conversation at the time, but he’s actually just waiting for the moment to strike.

Alone at last with his victim, Frankenstein leads the professor upstairs (one of the films few poorly made sets) to where he asks him to stand back from a painting of a early surgical procedure at the top of the stars in order to see it better.  Frankenstein then yells.  “Look out professor!  Look out!” and shoves the old man through the banister.  There is then a high angle shot of a pretty amazing fall by a stuntman directly down onto his head on the floor below.   It’s almost as if Frankenstein has killed the professor because he disagrees with his advice to “relax and enjoy life” and will instead prove to the professor how wrong he is by putting his brain behind the eyes of his new creation.

Whether this is one of the reasons the creature rages against life is unclear in the film.  Does, as the film suggests, the body reject the brain?  Some have felt that Bernstein’s brain immediately recognizes Frankenstein and that is why it attacks him since it knows this is its murderer and creator/tormentor. 

This precious brain was previously damaged in a fight over it with Frankenstein’s former teacher, now disavowed assistant Paul, but Frankenstein proceeds to pick the pieces of glass from it and put in into the body anyway.  This is the reason the creature’s eye gleam with joyous rage as it kills in the film.

These issues of the monster’s personality aren’t dealt with in this film, but would be at great length in the series that followed.  And, I feel they don’t really matter in this film’s context.

Frankenstein is alone once all the pieces are assembled and must use his electrical machines to bring it to life, but he must stop part way through to get his former friend and supporter Paul’s help to run the equipment designed to be operated by two people.  It is at this moment that lightning strikes the equipment and completes the experiment without him.   Nature once set even unnaturally in motion, can’t be stopped.

And neither could Victor Frankenstein as he continued to exist and develop through a series of largely good to great films that followed in this series where the monstrous creations became the true victims of each film.  The majority of them directed by Fisher and written by Anthony Hinds and together they are among the most impressive in Horror cinema, putting the real monster inside of the man named Frankenstein in a still modern way.

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READING

Like any film worthy of serious discussion you will find in the material below many opinions and theories that contradict or cancel each other out from source to source.   You can decide for yourself who in your view is or wrong about this important film or let the information guide you to your own equally valid ideas and theories. 

ENGLISH GOTHIC: A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA

WRITER JONATHAN RIGBY

REYNOLDS & HEARN LTD. 2000

DO YOU WANT IT GOOD OR TUESDAY?

WRITER JIMMY SANGSTER

MIDNIGHT MARQUEE PRESS 1997

THE MEN WHO MADE THE MONSTERS

WRITER PAUL M. JENSEN

TWAYNE PUBLISHERS 1996

MIDNIGHT MARQUEE PRESENTS A TRIBUTE TO HAMMER FILMS

ISSUE 47, PUBLISHER/ EDITOR/ WRITER GARY J. SVEHLA 1994

CLASSIC HORROR WRITERS

EDITOR HAROLD BLOOM

CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS 1994

HAMMER AND BEYOND: THE BRITISH HORROR FILM

WRITER PETER HUTCHINGS

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS 1993

HORROR MOVIES

WRITER ALAN G. FRANK

OCTOPUS BOOKS 1974

THE HOUSE OF HORROR: THE COMPLETE STORY OF HAMMER FILMS

EDITORS ALLEN EYLES, ROBERT ADKINSON AND NICHOLAS FRY

LORRIMER PUBLISHING 1973

FRANKENSTEIN or THE MODERN PROMETHEUS

WRITER MARY SHELLEY 1818

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