"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 2 (Frankenstein)

We continue our look back at the Universal Horror franchise with what may be the most famous movie monster of all time, the Monster of Frankenstein. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley, just as Dracula was adapted from Bram Stoker's novel, Frankenstein is usually seen as a lightning-charged morality play on the dangers of tampering in God's domain. How does it and its sequels hold up after all this time?

(If you didn't let Dracula suck your blood with Part One of this Retrospective, click here!)

Frankenstein (1931):

Tastes do change. I had only one thought on Frankenstein when I first watched it as a young'un: zzzzz. But four movies in, and this is the most fascinating I've seen so far. Frankenstein is not perfect, but it's much easier to understand why this one is hailed as a classic, while Dracula leaves me scratching my head. Not only does Frankenstein have superior character development and story momentum than the Dracula series, but it's shot better and its world feels more immersive. It's astonishing to consider that the two films were made in the same year, when one is so animated and the other so lifeless.

We open with a scene where a completely unnecessary narrator gets up on stage and alerts us that the ensuing movie will be strange beyond our comprehension, weird and terrible, blah, blah. "It might even horrify you!" he warns us. We then go to a cemetery, where Dr. Henry Frankenstein and his hunchback assistant Fritz creep on a cemetery, intending to steal the body for an as-yet-unknown reason. The film takes merciful time in unfolding the awful truth, that the two are stitching together body parts to make a new body, upon which Frankenstein will endow life. Unfortunately, when Fritz is given the task of finding a brain for the creature, he steals the brain of a criminal rather than a healthy person. (Even into the 1930s it was still generally believed that there was a physical difference in the structure of a criminal's brain compared to a non-criminal's. Now we know that's not really the case.) Frankenstein doesn't learn he's using an abnormal brain until later, and before the horrified eyes of his professor Dr. Waldman, fiancee Elizabeth, and best man Victor, he brings life to the body. Of course, it doesn't take long before Frankenstein loses control of his creature, and Fritz is killed. It's decided the creature must be killed, but that's before it escapes. And thus the famous rampage of the Monster begins...

Rewatching Frankenstein surprised me, as I remembered it being much more sympathetic to the titular character and much crueler to the Monster. Yet much like the tragic novel the film is based on, this movie does a good job of establishing that Frankenstein is the Monster. When we first meet the Creature he is rather innocent, craving the warmth of the sun and fearing fire. There is a suggestion that he is not bound to his abnormal brain and that he could be taught humanity--hell, the sequel to the film shows that he can learn to speak, so what's to say he's nothing other than a child in an adult's body, in need of nurturing? Yes, his stiff motions and crude vocalizations make him hard to relate to, but the Creature is more relatable than Fritz or Frankenstein, who whip the Creature and scare him with fire. Yes, the Creature kills a child, but it is by accident, and he is clearly horrified by the act of doing so. Finishing out the tragedy is the ending, where the Monster is killed by nothing short of his worst fear, fire. He screams not in anger or vengeance at the mob that burns the windmill he's trapped in, but in terror. As in the book, he's a Monster only in name, a victim of a heartless creator and a misunderstanding mankind.

Which makes it odd when the producers go out of their way to make Frankenstein sympathetic. I assume this was born out of a desire to give the audience a human character to follow and be comfortable with. He's still an asshole, but he's far from the self-pitying sociopath of Mary Shelley's original novel. The character of Frankenstein then becomes inconsistent from one half of the film to the next--they set him up first a grave robber, obsessed with his own experiments and prideful enough to believe himself to be equivalent to God. But in the second half, we're supposed to care for him because, well, he's Elizabeth husband-to-be and we're supposed to care for her, and also, we're supposed to care because he feels guilty about what he's done. But intriguingly, we get the impression that Frankenstein never would have started the cycle of abuse leading to the Monster seeking revenge on him if he had never learned that the Creature had an abnormal brain, with this tidbit having been passed on by his unwanted friends. If only he had been given the isolation he wanted, and had the chance to mold the Creature in his own image fully, things may have been different. Even if we also get the impression that, like his literary counterpart, Frankenstein is way more concerned with the glory of creating life than parenting, failing to understand that creating a life involves giving that life good chances in the world as well.

Making Frankenstein the hero also casts some doubt on the commonly-perceived theme that one must not tamper in God's domain...many forget that that idiom comes not from Frankenstein, but Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster! Oh, yes, it would have been controversial to include the infamous "Now I know what it's like to be God!" in a 1931 film--that's why it was censored in its original theatrical cut and many cuts released in the years that followed. But by a variety of factors--whether it be the secularization of Western culture over the last eight decades or the popularization of the Mad Scientist as a fun and amusing stock character, whose menace has become cliche--Frankenstein has lost some of his horror as time has gone on. He is still a grotesque figure, but I don't fear him because he's blasphemous; I fear him because he's cold, refusing to put heart outside of manic passion into his work, and of course also because he digs up and stitches together corpses for a living. That will always be creepy.

Perhaps there's a reason to fear the science of Frankenstein after all, however, even if you're not frightened by science encroaching on God, because there's a weird prescient thing in here that I haven't heard other people comment on before. Yes, the Creature is animated by electricity, but also a ray: a ray which Frankenstein says is beyond the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. The Frankenstein's Monster is given life by gamma radiation! Certainly the movie monsters of the 1950s were derived from seeing the horror of atomic weapons in action, but it's amazing to me that Frankenstein managed to slip it in first, fourteen years before Hiroshima. History works in mysterious ways...

Bride of Frankenstein (1935):

What the hell is this? No, seriously. I daren't hope for any of the later ones to be this weird--Bride of Frankenstein is one of the most baffling and stupid movies I've seen in my whole life, which means that it was a thoroughly entertaining sit.

Bride of Frankenstein begins on a bad note, with an introduction even more ludicrous than the one at the beginning of Frankenstein. Instead of a guy on a stage, we're suddenly trapped in that old house where Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron were trapped on the night of that fateful storm, wherein Mary wrote Frankenstein and essentially created science fiction. Lord Byron, portrayed as the gayest aristocrat set to film since A Clockwork Blue got to Louis XVI,  rolls his r's like Sylvester McCoy on cocaine as we see a jarringly bad montage of scenes from Frankenstein, as he recounts Shelley's story. Shelley says that the story is not yet ended, and thus we reach the actual story. We begin where the first movie left off--with the burnt windmill. Here we are subjected to the movie's massive tonal issues as we see a prolonged sequence of the villagers bickering with acting so bad that I can't tell if this is comic relief or not. Then, we cut to the father of the little girl drowned by the Creature in the first film, as he decides to venture into the ruins of the mill. This leads to a horror sequence where he falls into the dark watery depths of the building, where he is drowned just as his daughter was, by the same thing that killed her. From there we follow more comic relief segments laden with astonishingly bad acting, leading up to Henry Frankenstein (not dead, surprisingly) meeting the sinister Dr. Pretorius, who begins to encourage Frankenstein to return to his experiments and create a Bride for the Monster. He shows that he's an even greater master of science than Frankenstein, in an extremely bizarre sequence where he shows some miniature comic-relief homunculi, which he has grown "as Nature has...from Seed." (So he or someone else jerked off into some jars, apparently.) As this happens we see many long vignettes of varying tones featuring the Monster prowling through the countryside. Eventually Pretorius and the Monster join forces to bring Frankenstein's talents once more into practice. Soon the Bride of Frankenstein('s Monster) is complete, but is a match made in Heaven...or Hell?

Imagine if the sequel to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was Troll, or perhaps more properly, a version of Troll that has some scenes cut in from Troll 2. Bride of Frankenstein is such a wildly broken movie that it's hard to believe it was four years in the making, let alone four months. Not only does it have absolutely no sense of where to place comic relief, it doesn't provide nearly enough material for the comedy to relieve us from anything. Not even the plot makes sense: in the beginning, when he's first recovering, Henry tells Elizabeth that he wishes his experiments could have gone even further--he was sure he could even find the secret of eternal life. But later, he begs Pretorius not to force him into continuing his work. Perhaps it's meant to be that Elizabeth's hammy reaction to Frankenstein's persistence changed his heart but I don't think that was properly explained. Never before have I seen such a jarring fusion of what is seemingly two different narratives, short of a Godfrey Ho movie. Bride of Frankenstein is a sequel that's also a parody that's plagued with the same cloning of scenes that Dracula's Daughter experiences, only brought to frivolous extremes. It's like if H.G. Lewis was put in charge of sequelizing the 1931 film thirty years too late.

If it weren't for the fact that much of it is padding, I would be able to appreciate Bride as a whole based solely on its entertaining parts. Genuinely good moments include the famous scene where the Monster learns to speak (and smoke cigars) from a blind hermit; and literally everything with Pretorius is fun. (Curiously, there is a convincing argument that Pretorius is written as gay. That makes two gay villains in sequels to Universal franchise-starters.) But other than that, we are forced to follow one of the ladies of the angry mob who screams shrilly at everything like an Invader Zim fan finding Hot Topic for the first time. You are begging for her death at the end of this movie, and it never comes. And again, there is much padding. Long shots of the Monster running across forest sets, or coming across random villagers who make much ado about him. It's a long 75 minutes, somehow. 

I don't know. This movie feels like something that should have never been released, and you know me--I love that stuff. I can pretend that this is not related to the other Universal movies and take it in a trash film. If you come here expecting a serious sequel to Frankenstein, however, you are as shit out of luck as one can get in this world.

Son of Frankenstein (1939):

It's alive! This movie is alive! It has energy and passion for what it's doing and by God it's actually worth watching.

Henry and Elizabeth Frankenstein had a son, the ominously-named Wolf Frankenstein. Wolf, along with his wife Elsa and son Peter, have decided to move into the old Frankenstein House, neighboring the blow-up watchtower that once served as his father's lab. The entire village hates all the descendants of Frankenstein, but Wolf is undeterred. There's sort of a Let Me Be Evil moment in Wolf's decision, when presented the opportunity, to continue to his father's work--a grave-robbing hunchbacked survivor of a hanging named Ygor (played by Bela Lugosi) leads him to the comatose remains of the Creature, in the ruins of the Frankenstein family tomb, which is weirdly located under the wrecked laboratory. Evidently the Creature was merely buried by the explosion from the end of the previous film. He and Ygor are friends, building on the friendship between the blind man and the Monster seen before. But in this case, it's clear that Ygor sees the Monster as less than equal, taking advantage of his apparently-scrambled brains to use him as a mindless hitman against those who hanged him. (Brain damage is my explanation for why the Creature suddenly can't talk anymore.) Tensions boil over until Wolf kills Ygor, coming to his senses when the Monster kidnaps his son, to throw him into a sulfur pit just as he threw the little girl into the lake. When we conclude, we get our happy ending, with it seeming as though the curse of Frankenstein is over at last.

There are some great scenes in this movie. One of the early ones is a part where Wolf is getting a tour of Castle Frankenstein, and he is introduced to a portrait of his father (who is painted to at least dimly resemble Colin Clive, Henry Frankenstein's actor). Wolf and the butler talk about how it was lightning which gave the power of life to Wolf's father, even as a tremendously violent thunderstorm goes on outside. Similarly, there's the subplot involving the movie's de facto protagonist, Inspector Krogh. Krogh you may remember from Young Frankenstein, which most closely parodies this movie over the first two--he's the one-armed policeman! Krogh's arm was torn off by the Monster when he was a child, ruining his aspirations of becoming a General. When young Peter Frankenstein is telling the story of how the Monster visits him at night, he refers to the Monster grabbing his arm--Krogh, who is protective of Wolf's son, winces at the thought of it, even though the Monster clearly didn't go as far as it did with Krogh. There's depth to this movie which the other five I've reviewed thus far lack. I have little to say about this one save that it actually feels like a studio movie which justified its budget. I encourage you to check it out as a good movie, unlike Bride of Frankenstein which should be watched for how hideous it is.

As far as continuity, then: assuming Wolf Frankenstein to be in his mid-thirties, and the events of the film to be set near to when it was shot, Frankenstein must be set in the early 1900s. This is ignoring the fact that that shitty opening to Bride of Frankenstein has Mary Shelley telling the story of the first film, and unless in this reality she set her story in the future that means the events probably took place in the late 1790s. So, that's non-canon. It's interesting then, that both Son of Frankenstein and Son of Dracula retcon the placement of their first films to the late 19th or early 20th Centuries.

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942):

I wrote my statement about the lifting of the curse of Frankenstein in the review for the previous flick totally unaware that the opening lines of this movie were, "There is a curse upon this village! The curse of Frankenstein!" No, Universal, The Curse of Frankenstein gets made by another company. And from what I've heard, Hammer's Frankenstein movies would be relief from this thing. The Ghost of Frankenstein was not made with the yearning for visual spectacle like Dracula, nor as an authentic attempt at horror like Frankenstein. It wasn't really made with anything in mind, even if it still has some moments of note.

The movie opens with angry villagers feeling like their recent crop failures and deformed births and whatnot are caused by the taint the Frankenstein family left on the land. They believe that this is also the fault of Ygor, who survived being shot and now lives in a hollow space under the sulfur pit that the Creature fell into (!). Ygor helps free the Monster from the hardened sulfur before the villagers blow up Castle Frankenstein--when the Monster is rejuvenated by lightning, he takes it to gain further strength with the assistance of Wolf's brother Ludwig. In the process the Creature is arrested (!) and put on trial (!!). But it's not long before Ludwig gains possession of the Monster, and not long after then when he is haunted by the titular Ghost of Frankenstein (who doesn't even sort of resemble Colin Clive!). The illusory Frankenstein tells his son that the Monster was evil because of its criminal brain--because fuck my analysis, apparently--which gives Ludwig the notion that he should give the Creature a brain transplant, so that Henry's work is not wasted. Ygor desires to be free of his damaged body, and also to be united with his "friend" forever, so he wants his brain to be the one occupying the Monster. Would it be a proper horror movie without that desire coming true? Except Ygor didn't factor on what would happen if he and the Monster had a different blood type...

The Ghost of Frankenstein feels rather like a lot of the monster movies that would be made in the '50s and early '60s, by such folk as Roger Corman. While Son of Frankenstein was grand opera, Ghost of Frankenstein is an episode of Beverly Hillbillies. It's a disappointing contrast but by merit of being relatively unoffensive, albeit pretty dumb, it's simply forgettable. Especially forgettable is Lon Chaney Jr.'s turn at playing the Monster, with Boris Karloff never returning to the role after Son. He legitimately spends most of the film standing around with a mild grimace, staring into space and doing nothing. Man, it's good that he picked up a new brain--compared to what we've seen before, the Monster is borderline lobotomized. Chaney's performance is an avatar of the film itself, which is generally just boring.

That's not to say that the screenwriters inserted some fun bits here and there, if anything to keep themselves going. Probably the most notable scene I remember features the trial of the Monster, where the judge--who's ten-year-old daughter was kidnapped by the Monster but returned safely due to her befriending him--argues about how he refuses to let the court use his daughter to try to talk to the Monster. As he goes on and on, his daughter goes up to the Monster and begins questioning him herself, rendering him speechless. It provoked a little bit of a laugh out of me. As Stockholm Syndrome set in for the Dracula series, however, so too does it seem to be for the Frankenstein series. Ghost of Frankenstein is hardly great and it can't stand on its own, but it was not as bad as I expected.

Continuity time: Ygor mentions having worked with Henry Frankenstein, which is odd, because Henry only worked with three assistants: Fritz, Bride's Fritz stand-in Karl, and Ludwig, also from Bride (did Henry name his son after his fellow graverobber?). Fritz was a hunchback before his neck was broken, and that was the fault of the Creature, not a mob of angry villagers. Karl was a hunchback previously as well and was also killed by the monster. So presumably Ygor is the little-seen Ludwig? Who knows...the filmmakers probably didn't care nearly as much as I do. This movie also technically marks the death of the original Frankenstein's Monster--the body still lives, but the brain of the creature from here on out is that of Ygor. I'll remember that, but will the filmmakers...?

Next time, the moon shines full and bright and the wolfsbane blooms, with the Wolf Man! Featuring the ends proper of the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises with the monster rally films.

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Image Source: Classic Horror Posters, Wikipedia, Universal Horror Wiki