It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Universal’s Frankenstein franchise lasted from 1931 to 1948, closing with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, featuring Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr. reprising his role of the wolf man, Lawrence Talbot. Dracula wants Lou Costello’s brain to reanimate a simple, pliable Frankenstein’s Monster. Its reception was generally positive, and the film was ultimately selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2001, but I can’t help but feel disappointed with where the franchise ended up. It would be seven years later before there was a hint of Frankenstein or his creature on film, in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster, and there it was mainly just in passing reference.
Then, producer Max Rosenberg approached Michael Carreras at Hammer Films in England, cutting a deal to produce a new original Frankenstein movie, however after Hammer received the rights, both Rosenberg and his screenwriter Milton Subotsky were cut out of the deal and kicked to the curb. It’s no surprise then that Rosenberg and Subotsky went on to establish Amicus Films, Hammer’s main horror movie rival in the 1960s.
With Rosenberg and Subostsky out of the way, a new script was commissioned from Jimmy Sangster and The Curse of Frankenstein was soon underway. Hammer had been in business since 1935 but had only really come back into the mainstream between 1939 and 1955 without really making a significant mark on filmmaking. It was with 1955’s adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s BBC Television science fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment that suddenly Hammer Horror was born.
The Curse of Frankenstein was the first real foray into classic-style horror, and as such it is a remarkable achievement not only with the quality of the film itself, but for the careers that it catapulted to international fame. The director, Terence Fisher had only recently been brought on board in 1951, but it was with the gothic horror that Hammer embraced that he truly began to shine, directing not only Curse, but Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), and The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), as well as the strongest of Hammer’s Dracula films, their Sherlock Holmes franchise and the majority of the Frankenstein franchise until 1974’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. Fisher became the architect for the look and feel of Hammer’s entire horror output.
Curse also brought us Peter Cushing in his first lead film role as Baron Victor Frankenstein after a steady diet of high-profile roles in British television. And while Christopher Lee had been working in film since returning from the war in the 40s, he had mostly been playing stock action characters. With Curse, Lee made a striking Hammer Horror debut as The Creature – hired mainly because of his height (6’ 5”) – but would leave the Frankenstein franchise to lead his own horror franchise as Count Dracula, beginning with the following year’s Dracula.
The loss of Lee as the Creature in future films helped the Hammer Frankenstein franchise stand out from the previous Universal series, where instead of having the monster as the returning character tying the films together, the central recurring character for Hammer was the mad doctor, Victor Frankenstein, and Peter Cushing ended up starring in all but one of the films in the series (six out of seven films in total).
It’s remarkable that this film launched the horror careers of two of the 60s most popular and talented actors, both of whom would have careers working in classic films for the following sixty years.
Make-up artist Phil Leakey was responsible for designing the look of the Creature and he was tasked with avoiding any resemblance to the iconic Boris Karloff look created by Jack Pierce. As such, the look of Lee’s Creature is much more realistic and ghoulish than even Karloff’s look. The scars are more raw, he has a milky eye, and is generally just more disgusting and corpselike than anything that had been seen on film before. He’s truly hideous. The look of the Creature, combined with the more graphic and disturbing nature of Frankenstein’s work (than the Universal version, that is – by today’s standards the film is still relatively mild in what it shows, but what is implied is seriously disturbed), meant when the film opened at the London Pavilion on May 2, 1957, it received an X certificate from the censors.
To be honest, even now, The Curse of Frankenstein is a much more unnerving adaptation of Mary Shelley’s original story than anything that came before – although calling it an “adaptation” is a bit of a stretch. If James Whale’s Universal film had taken liberties with the contents of Shelley’s novel, Fisher and Sangster’s Hammer version was even more removed from the original concept, mainly only retaining the idea of creating new life from the pieces of corpses.
The film bookends its main narrative with Victor Frankenstein in prison awaiting death by guillotine for unspecified crimes, telling his story to a priest in hopes that he will believe and save him from certain doom.
With Frankenstein actually being the main focus of this film, we begin with his childhood (Melvyn Hayes plays the young Victor) as his parents have both died and he has assumed control of the Barony and the Frankenstein fortune. His first act is to kick everybody out and hire the best private tutor he can find. We then get a montage as he and his tutor Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) grow older together, digging deeper and deeper into scientific experimentation until finally, Victor (now played by Cushing) and Paul develop the technology to reanimate a dead puppy. Paul wants to bring this ridiculously amazing discovery to the world, but Victor has different ideas. Having conquered death, Victor now wants to create life, and for a while Paul reluctantly goes along with the plan.
However, once Victor’s fiancé arrives, Paul decides he wants out. This is all too fucked up, and Victor may now be evil. The main strength of this iteration of Frankenstein is just how rational Cushing plays him, though. Colin Clive’s mad scientist dripped of madness and was amazing for it, whereas Cushing takes the exact opposite approach and is calm, cool, and logical. It’s completely understandable that Paul might be reined in to this plan to defy nature and claim godhood, but after Victor goes a little too far in procuring body parts for his ideal creation, he’s had enough. The only reason he even stays in the house is ostensibly to protect Elizabeth (Hazel Court) from the potential harm of Frankenstein’s experiments.
There’s also a more lurid sexual nature to Hammer’s approach to the story, as Victor, in a demonstration of his underlying lax morality, is maintaining an affair with the maid Justine (Valerie Gaunt) even after Elizabeth has returned and moved in. This lasciviousness is a fundamental part of the Hammer Horror formula and it’s found right here in the first real Hammer Horror feature. And when she reveals that she may be pregnant and threatens to reveal Victor’s secrets to the world, he simply tricks her into a locked room with the murderous Creature.
In another differentiation between Hammer’s Frankenstein and Universal’s, our focus is almost entirely on the mad doctor, with the Creature not even appearing onscreen until well past the halfway point of the film (in comparison, Karloff’s Monster appears very early in the first half of the 1931 film).
Also, there’s not really an attempt to humanize the Creature in this film. After an accident damages the brain that Victor has chosen for his creation (thanks to Paul’s interference), Lee’s Creature is a straight up nightmarish murder machine. There is a moment or two where we feel sympathy for the Creature, but by that point Frankenstein has clearly become the real villain of the piece and the Creature a minor second villain. Yes, it’s horrible that Frankenstein has done hideous brain surgery on the Creature in an attempt to make it compliant, but FFS, it’s still an impulsive murderer.
When we get to the finale, where Frankenstein completes his tale to the priest, it’s obvious that this has done no good (thanks to the Creature tumbling into a vat of acid and leaving no evidence of its existence behind), and its down to Paul to provide witness to Frankenstein’s story.
And he refuses, leaving Victor to meet his fate with the guillotine.
This is easily the darkest and bleakest version of the Frankenstein story put on film to this point in history. With no Hayes Code to deal with, Hammer was able to go much more gory and much more violent than Universal, but at the same time, their Creature lacked some of the pathos and sympathy that the Monster had garnered in the past. Hammer struck gold (particularly in America where the gore and violence was embraced) but their Dr. Frankenstein was more akin to H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West, Re-Animator. This becomes especially clearer as the Hammer series continues and Dr. Frankenstein escapes the gallows to the continent, where he changes his name and continues his nefarious experiments!