The Curse of Frankenstein

For a movie about a creature stitched together from an aggregation of body parts, it is apposite to think of the film itself as based on the joining together of different influences. As the credits say, it is an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. While the title may have been a shorthand reference to an entire story-telling tradition and the controversy that accompanied it, the resultant film is best considered a ‘transgressive adaptation’, where the source selected for adaptation is ultimately a foundation for later deviation away from the original. Although most of the reviews on its release were critical, in particular attacking Fisher and his film for being degrading and violent, one positive review in Punch thought the film was a ‘conscientious version of the novel’ (cited in Meikle, 2009: 43). In its own way this comment is as strange and misplaced as the trenchant attacks that thought going to see The Curse of Frankenstein would be a debasing experience. By no measure could anyone who has read the novel be able to say the film is a conscientious adaptation. Curse telescopes the action and changes the plot, the ending and the characters. The film is textually dialogic; it is the ultimate or final result of the adaptation of multiple sources that script writer, director and creative personnel have adapted into the narrative. While the opening credits proclaim that it is an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s book, it is much more than this, and it shocked and appealed to an audience in a way that a ‘faithful’ adaptation would not have done.

The film has a complex relationship with this source novel and the idea of an adaptation is itself complex. ‘Adaptation’ is a charged word and the meaning and implications of the adapting process are contested. For many years adaptation theorists were concerned with the idea of ‘fidelity’, and adaptation studies themselves were hidebound by the so-called ‘fidelity paradigm’, which compared the faithfulness of a cinema adaptation to a source book, and mostly engaged in criticism of adapting works that transgressed too much from the source work.

Transgression is at the heart of The Curse of Frankenstein in both its plot and its creation. The first words we hear the Baron speak are to the priest: ‘Keep your spiritual comfort for those who think they need it’, he brusquely tells the clergyman. The Baron rejects the priest and his teachings, placing him beyond the controlling influence of religious beliefs, as do his unholy experiments. Frankenstein is a fornicator, a murderer, a tomb robber, a violator of the laws of nature as he refuses to let the dead stay dead. In short, the protagonist and titular character of the film is a transgressor against law and morality, and in this the character intersects neatly with the transgressive nature of the film itself.

In this chapter I will put these ideas on adaptations, be they faithful or transgressive, worthwhile or worthless, in a broader context of adaptation and the production history of Hammer. The way the Hammer team approached making their adaptation of Shelley’s novel can be refocused away from criticising lack of fidelity to recognising the film as an instance of what Peter Brooker (2007: 110) calls a ‘more intensively… ironic and self-reflexive’ set of adaptations from sources such as classic literature. Adaptation theory itself has developed in enriching directions, moving past the traditional emphasis on studying the fidelity of a film adaptation to a source novel into more adventurous areas, including embracing the idea of a ‘transgressive adaptation’ and the manner in which an adapted work departs from the source. Far from looking for fidelity, theorists now consider the ways that a transgressive adaptation produces a work of cultural interest. Moving past and beyond the once dominant binary model of examining a book made into a film, and judging how faithful the resulting film was to the book, has also given us the critical apparatus to evaluate the points of differences as much as the points of similarities between an original work and the adapted work.

Adaptation is essential to understanding Hammer in general, not just Curse of Frankenstein. Eventually Hammer’s company name became synonymous with horror. But some of the films made by the ‘old dark house’ of Hammer seem to not quite belong. By the 1970s the company’s gothic horrors were becoming box office failures but other films including On the Buses (1971), Mutiny on the Buses (1972), Holiday on the Buses (1973), Love thy Neighbour (1973) and Man About the House (1974) were much more successful. They were adaptations in a two-fold manner. They adapted from the original television situation comedies that were then ratings successes on British television. But they also adapted from the trend then prevailing in British cinema of making film adaptations of successful television shows. These films are a reminder of the extensive adaptations that Hammer carried out. These cheerful comedies can seem weird anomalies, out of step with the prevailing gothic horrors. But they are nothing of the sort; they are reminders of the central most important creative impulse in Hammer to adapt from as many sources as possible.

Works examining Hammer horror have gained momentum since Pirie’s influential and ground breaking Heritage of Horror but have tended to consolidate a particular narrative that leaves this adaptation to the side. While Pirie’s book was not specifically about Hammer, as a survey text on British horror cinema he did have a great deal to say about the company and devoted an entire chapter to Terence Fisher. Since then books and more recently serious academic journal articles have appeared, alongside a continued interest in the company and its output in trade journals and fan writings. But a major aspect of the company – and by extension their first gothic horror – continues to escape serious or sustained scrutiny: the adaptation process. The Curse of Frankenstein is the best place to consider this adaptive impulse. Looking at the film as a product of adaptation and as particularly intertextual adaptation, meaning that it is a work that draws simultaneously on many different sources, not just Shelley’s novel, allows us to understand major aspects of the film’s production, themes and reception, but ultimately leads to deeper understanding of Hammer in general.

Hammer’s greatest successes and its astonishingly varied output are the result of adaptation. Early successes after the company’s 1940s revival were the trilogy of Dick Barton films, Dick Barton: Special Agent (1948), Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949) and Dick Barton at Bay (1950). The films were adapted from the popular BBC Light Programme radio serial that ran from 1946 to 1951. From there the company plundered from a diverse range of sources. Some of Terence Fisher’s earliest work for Hammer involved adaptation: his 1953 film Spaceways, which combined science fiction elements with a romance and a murder mystery, was adapted from a popular radio serial. Other radio serials including ‘P. C. 49’, ‘Meet the Rev’ and ‘Life with the Lyons’ were all adapted for scripts (Miller, 1995: 44). The studio scored major successes in the 1950s with its two Quatermass films, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957). These were again borrowed plumes, courtesy of the BBC and the television serials written by Nigel Kneale and produced by Rudolph Cartier, broadcast live in 1953 and 1955.

Throughout its production history Hammer continued to be a studio whose output was contingent on adaptation, including not just the gothic classics by Shelley, Stoker, Conan Doyle, le Fanu and Stevenson, but novels by Dennis Wheatley (specifically The Devil Rides Out, which Fisher filmed in 1968, and To the Devil, A Daughter, Hammer’s last horror in 1976) and even more unexpected directions such as 1971’s On the Buses. Hammer also scored a major hit with this film and it was the most profitable released in Britain that year (Bright & Ross, 2001: 45). Hammer’s managing director James Carreras after all declared that ‘we’ll make Strauss waltzes tomorrow if that’s what people want’ (cited in Harmes, 2014: 102). If he never quite got to make his waltzes, he did at least omnivorously consume from, borrow, steal, rip-off and adapt from anything that seemed popular or just provided the basis for a good idea. Classical mythology relating the history of Medusa the Gorgon was the basis of Fisher’s 1964 The Gorgon. Other sources adapted ranged from Russell Thorndyke’s Dr Syn novels, that were used to make Captain Clegg (with Peter Cushing playing the fake vicar) in 1962 to J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Karmilla, the vampire story which provided the subject matter of Hammer’s commercially successful soft-core lesbian trilogy The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil of 1970 and 1971.

To the very end of Hammer’s commercial life in the late 1970s, adaptation remained a central aspect of their output. The company’s last gasp at the box office was 1978’s The Lady Vanishes an adaptation as remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s critically and commercially successful 1938 film. Hammer’s version was a dismal failure and killed off the ailing company, but it also indicates that the adaptive impulse remained with Hammer until the very end. But in 1956, long before decay set in, it was the turn of Shelley’s Frankenstein to provide the adaptive substance for Hammer. Curse does directly adapt from the source novel, in terms of the contours of its plot, the naming and motivation of characters and the setting of the action, but also deviates wildly as much as it adapts and generated high levels of cultural interest in doing so.

Like any film that, however loosely, tells the Frankenstein story, Curse adapts from the novel. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel has been a major source of adaptive impulses in general, but these are rarely faithful. The 1931 Universal Frankenstein was not the first cinematic adaptation and there had been versions of the story since Thomas Alva Edison’s 1910 silent film, followed by the loose adaptation Life Without Soul from 1915 (which did retain the chase across Europe that Hammer and most other film adaptations excised)⁴ and then 1920’s Il Mostro di Frankenstein. The novel inspired even earlier adaptations and stage versions were being performed as early as the 1820s (Hand, 2007: 10). The creative (and commercial) impulse to adapt from Shelley’s novel has been apparent from the inception of cinema, continued through the Universal cycle (which lasts up to Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein in 1948), through the Hammer cycle to Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein of 1994 and the yet more recent (2007) television film with Julian Bleach as the monster and Helen McCrory as Dr Victoria Frankenstein, a geneticist. At the time of writing, yet another adaptation has been announced to star Daniel Radcliffe as Igor (essaying a character played by Bela Lugosi from 1939’s Son of Frankenstein rather than the novel) and James McAvoy as Victor von Frankenstein (Young, 2013). But there are many elements of the novel, such as Captain Walton’s voyage, the encounter with the Irish magistrate Mr Kirwin, or the creature’s first person narrative, that have not made it into any film adaptation.

A common denominator across these films is their problematic, transgressive relationship with the source novel. Even in just a 16 minute silent reel, Edison’s version was able to adapt from more than the novel. The appearance of the creature itself and of the makeup worn by actor Charles Ogle borrowed heavily from contemporary theatrical imagery, and especially from the portrayal on the stage of Caliban, the debased creature from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Hand, 2007: 12). This recurring transgression is especially striking with Branagh’s 1994 adaptation. Its title Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a statement claiming authenticity and faithfulness, indicating to audiences that this film is the story as told by Shelley herself. Significantly the near contemporary adaptation of the Dracula story by Francis Ford Coppola was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, again proclaiming an apparent fidelity of the film to the novel. These statements of fidelity to a long-dead author and their novel are strikingly at variance with the actual films. Branagh’s film is not at all a story that could be described as ‘Mary Shelley’s’ and nor is Coppola’s Dracula exactly as Stoker told it. Instead there are many creative liberties, including an extensive backstory for Dracula and the idea that Mina is the reincarnation of Dracula’s lost love.

Shelley’s book has been adapted, plundered, parodied, mocked and turned inside out. There have been adaptations for the stage, including Sally Netzel’s Frankenstein’s Monster (1972), Victor Gialanella’s major Broadway flop of 1981, and the National Theatre’s 2011 production directed by Danny Boyle. Yet even freer adaptations extend to 1967’s I’m Sorry the Bridge is Out, You’ll Have to Spend the Night and Frankenstein Unbound by Bobby Pickett and Sheldon Allman, or arguably even Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Picture Show. An updated version Frankenstein Unbound was created by science fiction writer Brian Aldiss (Martin, 2003). The comedic potential of the novel has inspired Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), which was also a homage to the 1931 adaptation, down to the reuse of surviving props and sets that were still on the Universal back lot. Elements of the original story, mostly the core element of a mad scientist bringing a monster to life, have appeared in works otherwise as diverse as the regular The Simpsons Easter specials, in manga works and even in pantomime (Forry, 1990; Heffernan, 1997).

The sheer diversity of media in which adaptations have been made, the variety of tones and styles in approach and the bewildering range of national contexts and storytelling traditions from which these adaptations have emerged, all indicate the richness of the source novel as an inspiration. This diversity also indicates that adaptations of the novel transcend media-specificity, having been films, television and mini-series, plays, musicals and comics. The adaptations are also diverse in the tone, from the relatively serious efforts of Universal and Hammer (although even here the comedy eventually burst through with 1970’s Horror of Frankenstein), to the ponderous Kenneth Branagh adaptation, which contrast with the comedy of Mel Brooks or Richard O’Brien.

The diversity of adaptations of Frankenstein and Hammer’s place within them can be explained by certain key statements about the processes and results of adaptation. Adaptation theory is a productive way to understand the Hammer team’s creative intentions with Curse, and the outcome of their work. The ‘moment’ of adaptation, the transformation of a source (such as a novel) into another work (such as a film) registers as a point of cultural interest and generates significant cultural capital (Hutcheon, 2006: 7-8). It also means that the adapting work proclaims its prior relationship with the source in terms of title, plotting, character and other aspects that may carry across.

‘Fidelity’ has long been a core aspect of the theoretical speculation on adaptation. This focus has limitations and is problematic in a number of ways. To think about the fidelity of an adapting work to a source immediately casts the former as a palimpsest of the latter, but one which will inevitably be an unfaithful adaptation. Particularly with works such as eighteenth or nineteenth-century novels, most of which are of a length that render them unfilmable in their entirety (and the fact that there has never been a full adaptation of Frankenstein is a case in point) it is impossible to make a faithful adaptation. Inherent in the once dominant intellectual model of the adaptation of a book into a film were value judgments of the ‘fidelity’ of the adaptation to the source and criticism of works that ‘betray’ the adapted work (Lowe, 2010: 99).

Being judgmental brings to mind a crucial aspect of how Curse has been received and discussed. In critical terms, we find Curse adrift in what Petley (1986: 98-119) refers to as the ‘lost continent’ of British cinema, or the films which have sometimes sat below critical view and almost always below critical respectability. Petley includes in the ‘lost continent’ the quota quickies and B films, as well as the James Bond films, the Carry On films, trash and sexploitation cinema such as the Confessions films, as well as Hammer horror. They are ‘lost’ in the sense that they have been undervalued or critically derided, even if collectively they are among the most commercially successful and visible aspects of British cinema for popular audiences. Although some definitions of ‘trash’ and exploitation include box office failure (Brottman; Hunter, 2013), Hammer films are not lost to audiences, but to a body of critical thought that privileges social realism above genre cinema and a faithful adaptation above a transgressive one.

When applied to Curse, but also to a host of other films, the fidelity paradigm is limiting in two particular ways. One is that it insists on the binary of a book being adapted into a cinematic screenplay. Standard accounts of adaptation privilege a linear or one-way process of adaptation: a book becomes a screenplay which then finally becomes a film. This model is simply not up to the task of understanding many adapted works, including Curse of Frankenstein. The other is that it will inevitably subordinate the film to the literary original, as the idea that the film must inevitably betray, or just not be as good, as the novel can hamper critical appreciation of adaptations in their own right. Critical opinion can subordinate the adaptation to the original. As one major bookseller (Waterstones) asserts: ‘the book is always better’, a clearly commercial judgment that is understandable in its context, but which is also a problematic statement. The interest aroused by the transgression from the original cannot be taken on board or interpreted if we are only looking for fidelity.

Recent writings about adaptations of all kinds have provided different ways to think about adaptation than just the linear progression from book to film. However a consistent idea in adaptation theory is, as Hutcheon says, that ‘adaptations have an overt and defining relationship to prior texts’ (2006: 3). Further, adapted works ‘usually openly announce this relationship’ (ibid.). Such is the case with Curse; the credits proclaim that it is adapted from Shelley’s novel, but at a deeper narrative level, the film is consistently proclaiming the different sources that have fed into it.

There were a range of contrasting and sometimes competing influences at work on the team at Bray in the plotting, casting and production of Curse. These range from the textual to the cinematic. The film is richly intertextual, meaning it draws on a diversity of sources. Cushing’s dandified aristocrat derives from the tradition of wicked aristocrats from British melodrama, not to mention other sources as well, some of which are subtly but tellingly alluded to. One visually arresting sequence of the Baron leaving to visit the municipal charnel house to buy eyeballs, and Fisher keeps the audience’s attention fixed on the Baron’s nifty little leather bag. As he exits the front door Fisher’s camera tracks down to the bag dangling in his hand, and the scene cuts immediately to the Baron walking into the charnel house, the camera all the while following the bag, into the next scene when it is resting on a coffin in the charnel house. The sequence in its entirety shows Fisher’s long experience in editing as the sequence is seamless, but there is also a telling sign of an adaptive influence: the small bag with the sharp instruments shows the influence of Jack the Ripper on the Baron’s characterisation. Other influences range from the monster mash-ups of the 1950s, the records of crimes committed by notorious anatomists such as Robert Knox, as well as the glossy costume dramas made by Gainsborough. But in no way does Curse faithfully adapt from any of these sources; it is indebted to them, it plunders from them, but also transgresses from them in tone, style and effect.

At the foundation of all influences is Shelley’s novel, but the relationship between text and film is complex. Much of this adaptation reflects script writer Jimmy Sangster’s pragmatism. He called his memoirs Do you want it good or Tuesday? (2009), a title that reflects his no-nonsense realisation that he was never going to let mere fidelity stand in the way of borrowing a good idea. Sangster’s script adapts from Shelley’s novel, but also transgresses wildly. The film condenses the narrative, removes entire characters and settings, changes motivations and even changes the ending, as is raised in chapter three. In Shelley’s novel, Herr Frankenstein is a student of natural philosophy from Geneva studying at Ingolstadt, whereas in the film he is a privately wealthy nobleman. The action in Hammer’s film was mostly confined to Baron Frankenstein’s chateau, whereas Shelley’s original is far more epic, moving from Geneva to Chamonix until finally Frankenstein pursues his monstrous creation across the world to Scotland and to the Arctic. Key characters from the novel such as Frankenstein’s father are absent from the film, as are key events, such as the creation of a mate for the creature and the monster’s killing of Frankenstein’s wife on their wedding night. Certainly the film is an adaptation, but it pays bare lip service to its source novel. Where it does most strongly adapt is from other cinematic traditions. The core essentials of the story – a scientist imbuing a monstrous creation with life – do remain in the film, but otherwise this film is a highly transgressive work.

Intertextual dialogue, the bringing together of different textual influences, promotes and stimulates originality. Attempting to break open the confines of the fidelity paradigm, theorist Robert Stam has come up with alternative terms to understand what adaptation is and why writers may be motivated to resort to it, as adaptation could also be called: ‘…reading, re-writing, critique, translation, transmutation, metamorphosis, recreation, transvocalization, resuscitation, transfiguration, actualization, transmodalization, signifying, performance, dialogization, cannibalization, reinvisioning, incarnation, or reaccentuation.’ (Stam and Raenga, 2008: 25). Several of these are deliciously appropriate to a film about Frankenstein and his monster, including transmutation, metamorphosis, cannibalization and incarnation. While Stam is using these words to think about the different and often transgressive and iconoclastic ways that texts can be adapted, the resulting film made at Bray is in its own way to be understood with these terms. Jimmy Sangster’s screenplay cheerfully cannibalises what Hammer wanted from the novel, subjecting some of it to strange metamorphoses – the scruffy Krempe becomes a young and urbane man for example – and other terms are capable of similar application.

The result of course is not ‘faithful’. The result is a film that stimulated critical reaction and commercial success by bringing different works into dialogue with each other. If we move on from considering an adaptation as having a prior relationship with just one source, or as being something either derivative or unfaithful, we reach a more productive idea of adaptation as organic and provocative. Something of this capacity for creation is captured by Sanders’s notion that: ‘Texts feed off each other and create other texts’ (2006: 13-14). The Curse of Frankenstein appears to us as a work that comes out of a process of intertextual dialogue, where there is not one original source but rather there are multiple points of origin in dialogue with each other (Hutcheon 2006: 2). These move from Shelley’s novel to other horror film traditions and to the conventions of period drama.

It would be limiting to think of Curse of Frankenstein as faithful or not to the novel. Nor is there an uncomplicated linear relationship from book to film, as what we see on screen in Curse is the result of multi-textual influences; the film adapts, but from much more than just Shelley’s novel. Curse was an adaptation that critics hoped would be a one off. Horror films had been so very rarely made in Britain prior to 1956, and those made in Hollywood were often only shown in restricted sessions or were banned altogether, including Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, which the BBFC banned outright. But there was this native tradition of gothic literature, until then plundered by foreign film makers but which had been left untapped by British film makers. With these thoughts under our belt on the immediate creative and commercial context for Fisher’s and Hammer’s work, is now time to look in more detail at the film as an adapting work. It is time to move back from Britain, from Bray, and from the Hammer set, and to take attention to Switzerland, in 1816.