Beginnings of Hammer Horror
(originally posted on IMDb 25 August 2018)

Hammer's first color horror film and adaptation of one of the classics of 19th-century, English-language Gothic literature, which was to be followed the subsequent year by their adaptation of "Dracula," "The Curse of Frankenstein" is a considerable departure from Mary Shelley's book and the earlier Universal Frankenstein film series of the 1930s and 1940s. I viewed Hammer's Dracula films before viewing its Frankensteins, and one can see here the beginnings of the studio's blood-and-bosoms formula, which was so effective for the vampire splatters. It's not quite as suitable to Shelley's story, though, as it is to Bram Stoker's, which was always mostly about blood and sex. Nevertheless, Hammer does rather effectively realize from Shelley the cautionary tale on science and playing God, if little else.

Also similar to the book, "The Curse of Frankenstein" begins and ends with a frame story, and the majority of the picture in between is assumed to be the narrated memories of Victor Frankenstein, as he tells it from his jail cell to a priest. The book's structure is more layered than that, including an epistolary structure of the book being a series of letters and including three major narrators, but it's nice that the movie at least incorporated a simplified variant. Moreover, one could read both the book and this movie as the tales of unreliable narrators, but I don't, and I doubt either media were intended to be read that way.

Even more than the Universal series, "The Curse of Frankenstein" focuses on the creation of the monster, something that Shelley mostly glossed over. The lab is largely inspired by the Universal films, with moving and flashing gizmos and the spark of life from a lightning strike. There are also vats of bubbling liquid about, and the monster is half-submerged in water. Unlike the book, Frankenstein initially has a laboratory partner, his non-hunchbacked former tutor turned friend. Much of the movie is spent on the arguments between these two on the ethics of creating a human life from assembled cadavers.

In the book, Frankenstein, as well as the monster, really, are sympathetic and tragic figures. Here, however, the Baron is a murderous jerk. Oddly, the movie that is supposedly his narrated contestation of innocence to the priest admits that he was complicit in the murder of his maid and her unborn child that he fathered. As well, he murders a man to use the brain of a genius for his creation, but the brain is later damaged twice over--similar to the brain mix-up in the 1931 "Frankenstein." The book, however, in large part plays out as an extended debate of nature versus nurture as to the monster's murderous ways. Not in these movies: it's his nature due to a defective mind. Furthermore, this Frankenstein doesn't abandon his creation, although he is initially repulsed by his hideousness and exploits him as a murderous slave. Actually, as the movie tells through a rewritten history of Victor's childhood, it was Frankenstein and not the creature who was abandoned by his parents. I'm not sure what, if anything, the movie is trying to say with this invented background and somewhat reversed roles, though.

There's also an old blind man, as in the book and "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), as well as a child by a lake as in "Frankenstein" (1931), but neither are used in any interesting way this time. On the plus side, the monster is a uniquely grotesque figure. The action picks up by the end, and the filmmakers used their low budget effectively, including a musical score that's an effective cue for the horrors and some nice, albeit limited, sets. And, of course, this is the first of Hammer's pairings of Peter Cushing, here as Victor Frankenstein, and Christopher Lee, as the monster.

(Included on my list of 50--and counting--Frankenstein films.)