The Curse of Frankenstein

Describing The Curse of Frankenstein as an adaptation of the 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is a problematic point, even though the book clearly was of influence on at least some of the people making the film. Jimmy Sangster’s script was both inspired by it and avoids it. The novel was being read on the set at Bray Studios, including by Sangster. Peter Cushing, who played Frankenstein more times than any other actor, was inspired by a range of sources. He consulted with a real doctor about the practicalities of brain surgery and also found inspiration in the accounts of the notorious nineteenth-century anatomist Dr Robert Knox, the employer of body snatchers Burke and Hare.⁵ But Cushing also recalled in his memoirs that he the only way he could get a fix on the character and all its ‘oddities and eccentricities’ was to go back to the original source: the novel (Miller, 1995: 64; Dixon, 1991: 230).

But note Cushing was playing ‘the Baron’; there is actually no such person of that rank in the original novel. One critical assessment of Peter Cushing’s acting and his appearance in horror films described him as a ‘frighteningly grey eminence’ (Hutchinson, 1996: 86). The eminence alluded to is an apt description of the aristocratic bearing that Cushing brought to bear on his horror roles, especially playing the elitist dandy Baron Frankenstein. The literary Frankenstein eventually was a solitary figure, lost in the frigid and barren Arctic ice, a character far removed from the Baron of Curse who so clearly enjoys the comforts, not to say luxuries, of home life. The literary Frankenstein is an isolated and isolating figure, whereas Hammer’s version is part of a social milieu. It is even established in the film that Frankenstein cannot operate his equipment on his own and he in fact must have a collaborator.

This aristocratic status is one of many deviations away from the source novel, and indicates from the outset that the relationship between the novel and Hammer film is complex and ultimately transgressive. But these transgressions, which ruthlessly condense plot, characters and dialogue, created cinematically suitable and satisfying alternatives to the original novel. Hammer created succinctness and cinematic impact in place of wordiness. Their approach to the novel is clear: it was a source ripe for commercial exploitation, not for faithful adaptation. By 1956 the book had long since been in the public domain, but the 1931 Universal film, notably its script and makeup design, was not. Universal tried to stop Hammer registering the film title Frankenstein in the United States and issued threats to the small British company that they would sue if the Universal take on Frankenstein was appropriated in any way. As a consequence was Hammer forced to look back past the 1931 film and take their inspiration from the novel?

The opening credits acknowledge that it is an adaptation from the ‘classic story by M. Shelley’. But beyond that opening credit no other claims to textual fidelity are made, even if the credits are talking up the classic status of the book. The fact that Cushing is playing a Baron alerts us to the nature of this adaptation and its looseness. The very first line of chapter one in the novel (the first chapter of Frankenstein’s narrative and thus after the three epistles by Captain Walton) says that ‘I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic’ (Shelley, 1985: 31). The line instantly distances the literary Frankenstein and his background from European aristocracy and locates him amongst the republican syndics of the Helvetic confederation. Later in the novel Elizabeth rather smugly reminds Victor that the ‘republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it’. Thus their serving girl Justine was more like one of the family, as a ‘servant in Geneva does not mean the same thing as a servant in France and England’ (Shelley, 1985: 63). In this moment Mary Shelley is very much writing as the daughter of her radical and free-thinking father William Godwin, but this talk of republican sensibilities finds no place in Curse, where a servant girl exists to be sexually exploited by a louche aristocrat. Even while they are covertly making love Victor insists that Justine address him as ‘Baron’. He later contemptuously brushes off the now-pregnant Justine’s demand that he marry her and suggests she finds a local boy in the village instead who will ‘do just as well’. The film constantly refers back to class distinctions. Justine is left to simmer with jealousy when Elizabeth arrives and announces her engagement to Victor; in the same moment Victor casually tosses his top hat and cape to Justine, ignoring his concubine to make polite conversation with his fiancée. The characterisation of the Baron, his relationships with supporting characters including tutor and fiancée, his aristocratic as opposed to republican status and his interior milieu rather than his Alpine setting are all marked points of departure between novel and film that merit more detailed analysis. We start with the setting.

The mise-en-scene in Curse is almost entirely based on the interior of the Baron’s grand house, a focus at odds with the original novel. Mary Shelley conceived of the original idea for her story when staying in the Alps in the early-nineteenth century with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician (Macdonald, 1991). The subsequent novel is heavily descriptive of the beautiful alpine Swiss scenery, from Frankenstein’s trips to Geneva and back, the creature’s appreciation of the beauty of nature, and the pursuit of the creature through meadows and hills. The gardens around Bray were extremely versatile, becoming in time to represent India (in Fisher’s Stranglers of Bombay) and Egypt (The Mummy) and endless middle European villages, but even Hammer’s legendary design ingenuity couldn’t stretch to recreating the Alps in Berkshire. The only glimpse of anything scenic is the brief outdoor scene of the murdered Professor’s funeral procession, where the background is an unconvincing matte painting of some snowy mountains.

Sangster’s script excises the panorama of the novel. After the opening titles have faded, the first shot is of a priest on horseback riding towards a forbidding looking prison in the distance. The priest rides against an alpine background that was achieved via another matte shot. However this glimpse of the wide outdoors is fleeting. Seconds into the film’s running time the priest reaches the gateway of the prison and enters. His arrival allows Terence Fisher to display one of the most characteristic aspects of his film direction: action captured by a static camera and framed by a doorway, in this case the imposing gateway into the prison. It is not just the framing and camera positions that set the tone of the film, so does the action that is taking place. There is a rapid transition from the outdoor alpine world to the dark interior of the prison, as the priest enters, and is taken into the depths of the prison to meet Baron Frankenstein. From then on, the remainder of the film takes place in dark, interior spaces. In the film Frankenstein does not journey to Geneva, to London, to Edinburgh and the Scottish highlands, to Ireland, or to the Arctic. He barely sets foot outside his own front door. The theatrical trailer for the film promised cinema patrons a glimpse inside a ‘house of hell’, a comment that reflects the inward focus of the movie.

The literary Frankenstein and his creation were sensitive to nature and the outside world, the former even quoting Wordsworth and mediating on the ‘awful majesty’ of Mont Blanc (Shelley, 1985: 95). The latter noted the flora and fauna around him after his ‘birth’. Frankenstein’s fiancée Elizabeth also gets in on the act, rhapsodising in a letter to Victor about the ‘blue lake and snow-clad mountains’ near their family home (Shelley, 1985: 63). Fisher’s world is by contrast interiorised and claustrophobic. Aside from the occasional exterior shot of Oakley Court (a stately home near Bray) that doubles as the exterior of the Frankenstein chateau, we see almost nothing of the exterior of Frankenstein’s house, such is the emphasis on the world within. Inside the house, many of the spaces are dark and cramped. In one specially virtuosic sequence at the end of the film the Baron goes round and round these spaces, lunging up the stairs, turning corners to get into this laboratory, round more corners to get onto the roof and then around the flying buttresses. Fisher’s immaculately framed and closely edited sequence reinforces the tight, interior spaces through which the Baron moves.

Not just the setting but the characters are also altered. Peter Cushing embodies a character markedly different from the literary original. At the most basic level, the 44 year old Cushing was significantly older than the young student of the novel (Meikle, 2009: 37). Cushing’s energetic performance (including scaling the gibbet and the sprightly fight scenes and chase around the roof tops at the film’s climax) more or less disguise the age difference, but there is certainly almost nothing of the young university student in Cushing’s well-heeled aristocrat.

Nor is the vapid lifelessness of Shelley’s Frankenstein apparent in Cushing’s characterisation. The literary Frankenstein is listless where Cushing is dynamic. Early in the film it is made clear that the young Baron and the tutor have effectively changed places; the student outstrips the teacher in terms of energy and imaginative insight. Cushing’s Baron is in charge of their study and their experiments and in an early scene when they reanimate the dead puppy, Frankenstein abruptly pushes Krempe’s hand away and superintends the work himself. Throughout the film Fisher makes frequent use of close-ups of Cushing, whose bright blue eyes are in their way as visually arresting as all the red that is on the screen. Cushing brings astonishing energy to the part far removed from the effete and ultimately helpless character in the novel. Cushing is a bright and dynamic centre of the film in a way he could never have been if playing the effete weakling of the novel.

This effeteness shows in the way the literary Frankenstein responds to his creation. In the novel, once Frankenstein has animated his creation, he retreats from it in horror, falls asleep, returning to his home and hoping to never see the creature again. Throughout remainder of the novel Frankenstein is a tormented man, shattered by the deaths of friends and family members, struck down by mental and physical illness, and haunted by what he believes to be spectral visitations from his dead family who urge him on in his hunt of the monster across the Arctic, even as the hunt takes a terrible toll on Frankenstein’s health. In some respects the role essayed by Colin Clive in the 1931 film comes closer to some of the descriptions of Frankenstein and his state of mind than Cushing’s portrayal. Clive’s highly strung, cackling and clearly demented scientist is reminiscent of the madman in the ice discovered by Captain Walton at the start of the novel. Cushing’s character is clearly demented, in that he hopes to play god and create new life, but he also is poised, aristocratic, judicious and cunning. The literary Frankenstein was not only a denizen of a republic but tended to express his feelings and wear his heart on his sleeve. Cushing’s character is coldly oblivious of his fiancée and indifferent about his marriage, when the literary Frankenstein offers reassuring and loving sentiments in letters to Elizabeth.

As the daughter of the radical thinkers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley provides a strong literary underpinning to the novel derived from the writers valorised in her childhood home, including the seventeenth-century puritan writer John Milton. The impact of this literature vanishes in Sangster’s screenplay. In the novel, the creature reads from a number of morally improving texts, including Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as the classical Greek biographer Plutarch and the German poet Goethe and indeed he speaks in an exaggeratedly archaic and early modern style, informing Victor Frankenstein that ‘thou art my creator’. In his final moments, the creature returns to this Miltonic language when addressing Captain Walton, telling him ‘Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine’ (Shelley, 1985: 215).

At a deeper ontological level, Milton’s Paradise Lost and the relationship it delineates between the Maker and his creation informs Shelley’s story. As Hindle points out, the reproachful tone of Adam’s address to God in Paradise Lost, where Adam remarks ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me Man/did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me’ encapsulates the fraught relationship between Frankenstein and the creature he has made but spurned (Hindle, 1985: xxvi). Later the creature (who has been reading Milton when hiding in the hovel next to the De Lacey’s cottage) likens himself to the ‘fallen angel’ of Milton’s poem (Shelley, 1985: 213). Shelley is clear that the tragedy of the creature’s situation is twofold: he is hideous and therefore spurned; but he is endowed with sufficient insight and intelligence to perceive his ugliness and to understand he can never be loved. The creature in the novel is highly articulate and intelligent, not only reading Milton and Plutarch but being able to speak cogently. No such articulateness has defined the cinematic treatment of the monster. Karloff’s creature could create sound, but mostly inarticulate grunts (although he did speak in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein). Sangster’s screenplay for Curse went one further, and Christopher Lee’s autobiography recalls his annoyance on getting the script and discovering that the monster had no dialogue at all (Lee, 1997: 249).

The creature of the novel was capable of premeditated and cunning action, most shockingly murdering Victor’s brother and then Elizabeth, as well as deliberately planting evidence to incriminate Justine and cause her execution. His sheer brutal maleficence contrasts to Karloff’s inadvertently tragic actions, such as throwing a little girl into a lake. Lee’s actions as the monster seem more directly evil, to judge from the expression on his face when he bears down on the helpless old blind man but these are explained in the film as psychopathic impulses caused by brain damage, not the cunning of the literary monster. Lee also evokes considerable pathos in his performance. Towards the end of the film Krempe is brought in to see the creature, and by then it has been shot in the eye, been brain damaged, buried and resurrected, and looks even more hideous than ever because the Baron has partly shaved off its hair to operate on the brain. The creature turns away from Krempe, and seems to do so out of helpless embarrassment, but it is then forced by the Baron to ‘perform’ in a grotesque kind of show and tell, as it is made to sit and stand at the Baron’s command. The scenes gain remarkable pathos if we remember that these pathetic actions are being performed by what remains of the ‘finest brain in Europe’ that Frankenstein cut out of the skull of the murdered Professor. Not only that but the hands belonged to the ‘finest sculptor in Europe’ but now they are only good for breaking sticks and snapping chains. The creature in the film has suffered horrendous brain damage, compared to the ugly but tragically articulate creature of the novel. The role makes full use of Christopher Lee’s pantomimic ability and he resembles a marionette puppet with broken strings as he moves eloquently, but he is totally silent.

The supporting characters also differ from the novel to the film. Cushing’s Frankenstein is assisted by a tutor, Paul Krempe. There is a Krempe in the novel, but this Monsieur Krempe is described as ‘an uncouth man’ (Shelley, 1985: 45), far removed from the dandy played in the film by Robert Urquart. Other characters such as the chemistry lecturer M. Waldman, are missing entirely, as are Frankenstein’s great friend Henry Clerval (who is later murdered by the monster), his parents, his two younger brothers, the De Lacey family and Mr Kirwin. They have all vanished in Sangster’s brisk contraction of the narrative. Also gone is the entire period of Frankenstein’s sojourn at Ingolstadt University and his other travels.

Other major plot points of the novel are omitted or condensed. A servant called Justine does appear in the film and has an antecedent in the novel. However in the novel Justine was a sweet and good hearted girl wrongfully accused of murder and cruelly executed. In the film Justine is a girl of loose morals and is murdered by the monster. Speaking of murder, the entirety of the literary Frankenstein’s family is missing from the film, as well as their terrible fates. In the book Frankenstein’s mother dies of scarlet fever (Shelley, 1985: 42), his younger brother is murdered by the monster (who incidentally implicates Justine for the crime, leading to her execution) and his father, his health shattered by everyone he loves dying violently, expires towards the end of the novel. None of these characters appear in the film or are even mentioned, barring the parents who are both dead by the time we flash back to the Baron’s childhood. In the novel Frankenstein’s fiancée Elizabeth is murdered on their wedding night, whereas in the film Elizabeth walks away from the cell, arm in arm with Krempe.

The relationship between Victor and Elizabeth is in fact one of the strongest points of transgression between the novel and the Hammer film. In the novel, the mutual love and affection between them is strongly emphasised (so much so that when she re-issued the novel in 1831 Shelley felt compelled to change Elizabeth’s character from being Victor’s cousin to being of no familial connection at all). Victor writes love letters and grieves violently for Elizabeth after her murder. He even feels haunted by his dead family, finding that their spectral immanence pushes him on in his quest to find and destroy the creature. Cushing’s Frankenstein is coolly indifferent to Elizabeth, although one of the most subtly chilling suggestions in the film is the possibility that Frankenstein might one day cut her up and use bits of her in his experiments. ‘Who knows my dear? Perhaps you will…. one day’ says the Baron to Elizabeth after she expressed a hope to help him in his experiments. In the original script the line was intended as one of the more comedic, but its tone and impact were transformed by Fisher’s serious treatment of the material and Cushing’s subtle but chilling delivery (Meikle, 2009: 39).

The dialogue is another area where Curse differs from the novel. In many ways this is a blessing. When he eventually gains speech, the creature in the novel speaks in an elevated and high blown literary style indebted to his highbrow reading matter, but the spoken thoughts of other characters are even more florid. While the cast for Curse of Frankenstein included many highly talented actors, not least Peter Cushing, even they would have struggled to deliver some of Shelley’s lines with any conviction or without tipping over into scenery chewing. Cushing is given terse and often blackly ironic dialogue, defined by its brevity, which is just as well. With Shelley’s lengthy dialogue the film’s narrative would have ground to a halt. Likewise, in the film the creature expires by plunging through a glass skylight into a vat of acid, with his clothes, hair and face aflame. How much more cinematically satisfying than if Sangster had tried to recreate the end of the novel, when the creature treats Captain Walton to a long speech on the misery of his existence.

There are other aspects of the narrative which are not so much omitted in Sangster’s screenplay, but which had to be created anew. Any reader who comes to the novel after seeing any of the film adaptations, be it Edison’s 16 minute 1910 silent, Whale’s 1931 effort, the Hammer film, the 1973 American television adaptation with James Mason and Tom Baker, or Branagh’s sumptuous 1994 adaptation, may well be surprised that so many elements common to these cinematic adaptations, and seemingly so intrinsic to the Frankenstein story, are not actually in the novel. The novel is essentially a ‘blank slate’ in terms of the absence of any visual cues for the adaptor (Bonner and Jacobs, 2011: 40). There are, strikingly, no descriptions of what Victor Frankenstein actually looked like. Captain Walton’s fourth letter noted that he had a foreign accent (to Walton’s British ears) and his eyes had ‘an expression of wildness and even madness’ (Shelley, 1985: 25). Otherwise the character is a visual cipher.

Even more strikingly, there are few descriptions of what the monster looked like, nor of the process of its creation. There is a comment that the creature is ‘hideous and my stature gigantic’ and that it is ‘distorted’ (Shelley, 1985: 125) but otherwise the rest is left to the imagination. The horrified reaction of the two De Lacey children to seeing the monster (they scream and one of them faints) is also a good indication that there is something appalling about its appearance. But otherwise there are no accounts of surgical scars, robotic bolts, or obvious stitching that informs the cinematic portrayal of the creature, from Karloff’s lumbering monster to Christopher Lee’s makeup by Philip Leakey, which has been described as looking like a car crash.

A yet more striking absence for anyone encountering the novel after seeing the film, especially the Universal or Hammer versions, is the exceptionally low key creation scene in Shelley’s book. Besides reading Milton and her father’s own work, it is known that Mary Shelley was familiar with the work of the radical scientist Humphrey Davy and his writings on electricity. During the stay with Percy, Lord Byron and Dr Polidori there was also much talk of the experiments of Dr Erasmus Darwin and electrical galvanism (Hindle, 1985: xvi). Percy Shelley was himself fascinated by electricity and galvanism and one of his biographers Thomas Hogg recalled that Percy Shelley, while at Oxford University, had shown Hogg ‘various instruments, especially the electrical apparatus; turning the round the handle very rapidly, so that the fierce, crackling sparks flew forth’ (Hogg, 1858 I: 33). As Hindle (1985: xxi) points out, this description is actually a close literary match for the many realisations of the monster’s creation in film, including the 1931 Universal version and Hammer’s own, where lightning crackles and sparks fly. In Hammer’s film, the novelty of using colour film was exploited to great effect in the scenes of Cushing at work in his laboratory. The dual wheels of the Wimshurst machine caused lights to glow bright red when in operation, more red lights on a power board flared brightly and sparks flew around, all echoing Percy Shelley’s excited experiments with his apparatus when a young man at university.

However if we seek any similar passages in the 1818 novel we are disappointed. There is admittedly a description early in Frankenstein’s chapters of the narrative of his scientific curiosity about lightning and electricity, when the young Victor ‘witnessed a most violent and terrible thunder-storm’. As Victor narrates to Captain Walton, ‘I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak…. so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump’ (Shelley, 1985: 40). No such level of description characterises the actual moment of creation later in Frankenstein’s narrative. One paragraph, which opens chapter five, is all that Shelley provides by way of description, when Victor ‘collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet’. Frankenstein succeeds after some hours work, and ‘I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and the convulsive motion agitated its limbs’ (Shelley, 1985: 56).

The follow-up to the creation is equally low-key, not to say anti-climactic. Having done the impossible, played god, become the modern Prometheus, Frankenstein’s next step is to fall asleep. Again Sangster transgresses from this scenario in the novel; in his treatment of the story, the next stage after the monster awakes is more dramatic, as the creature goes mad and tries to throttle the Baron. The Hammer film historian Mark Miller is right to pinpoint the ‘maddening dullness’ of Shelley’s literary Frankenstein, a character who sleeps, frets, wallows in a moral agony and who lets his wife get murdered by the creature because he was searching in the wrong room of the house (Miller, 1995: 55). He spurns his creation immediately, whereas in the film Peter Cushing looks like a proud father as he beholds the creature. In all vital respects the character created in Sangster’s script and personified by Cushing differs greatly from Shelley’s.

Accordingly there were elements that Shelley included, such the extensive intellectual speculation underpinned by her reading of Milton, Godwin and other authors, that film adaptations have eschewed. Then there those aspects not in the novel that film makers have had to introduce, including the set pieces of the monster’s creation and animation through electricity. In this regard, The Curse of Frankenstein sits in a trajectory with other adaptations. There is certainly no room in Sangster’s no nonsense screenplay for philosophical speculation about the relationship between a creator and his creation, or for heavy handed dialogue. The education which Baron Frankenstein is shown receiving in the film is similarly brisk and matter of fact. In the novel, the young Victor was originally entranced by the fifteenth and sixteenth-century writings of natural philosophers and high magicians such as Cornelius Agrippa, only to discover when at university that their theories and conclusions were long discredited. Hammer’s Baron Frankenstein doesn’t waste his time on out-dated and esoteric writings but rather an early montage sequence shows the young Victor (Hayes) and the slightly older version (Cushing) receiving a thoroughly grounded anatomical education from Krempe. The film inverts the novel’s delineation of Victor’s early immersion in outmoded scientific thought, as the young Baron, so he tells Krempe, has found his old tutor unsatisfactory because his reading and knowledge were at least 30 years out of date. In the film it is Victor, not his tutor, who hungers after new knowledge and disparages the old.

Conversely Sangster makes up for those things that Shelley does not provide, besides the creation scene. While she briefly mentioned Frankenstein having to visit a charnel house, Sangster’s script actually takes us there, and to gallows, graveyards and sepulchres. The brief and laconic description of the creature coming to life in Shelley’s novel is replaced by an extended and visually dramatic and colourful sequence of the creature being blasted into life by lightning.

As I have previously suggested, critical opinion on Curse tends to put it as the tentative start to the greater success of next year’s Dracula. But Sangster’s ability to turn a sprawling nineteenth-century novel into a compact 80 minute film is an ability that bursts forth fully developed with Curse and which repeats with Dracula. But the essential ability was there already with Curse. With his screenplay with Dracula Sangster again took a lengthy novel which, like Shelley’s, comprised multiple authorial voices and different textual forms (letters, diary entries, newspaper reports and so on). Once again Sangster is ruthless. Out go entire plot lines (Dracula’s trip to England and the action in Whitby, including the spooky arrival of the ship with the dead man strapped to the wheel are both missing). Also gone are entire characters. Dracula’s three wives become one; Dr Seward, his fiancée, the fly-eating Renfield and others have all vanished. But Sangster also creates anew. In Stoker’s original novel, Harker had arrived at Castle Dracula with the rather prosaic task of cataloguing the Count’s library. In Sangster’s script he has come with the much more dynamic and cinematically interesting intention of murdering the Count. The changes, the cuts and the additions work together to produce an admittedly superb film adaptation of Dracula. Combined with Fisher’s judicious camera work and his immense experience as an editor, the 1958 film is a taut and powerful version that arguably has not been bettered by later and more lavish versions. But the script is the basis of it all and this script is simply the second iteration of a talent that Sangster showed he had all had fully at his command in Curse’s script, where he could cut, amend and add to create something that worked on screen.

And yet we cannot regard Sangster’s script for Curse, or Fisher’s realisation of it, as wholly eschewing the novel. If we look deeper, influences reveal themselves. One is the structure of the film itself, which is non-linear and told in flashback. In this regard, it is notably different from the 1931 Universal version, which after a brief introduction from Edward van Sloan (who appears from behind a curtain to fore-warn the audience not to get too frightened) is told through a linear narrative progression. By contrast, Sangster takes us to the story through non-linear means. It starts at the end, with the disgraced Baron in a prison cell, awaiting execution for murder. We end up there again at the very end of the film, having come full circle and the Baron is led off to execution. In the meantime the Baron has told his story to the priest, moving back in time to his childhood and then forward in time to more recent events that have climaxed in the murder of the serving maid Justine and the destruction of the creature.

Sangster’s narrative is actually emulating one of the most striking literary features of the 1818 novel: its onion-ring structure. Shelley’s novel is notable for its dramatic intimacy; the narrators all see each other through each other’s eyes as Walton describes Frankenstein, who in turn narrates the birth of monster, and the monster recounts his own sightings of Frankenstein and his family. The novel begins in epistolary form (showing that besides Milton and Godwin, Shelley had likely been reading the great eighteenth-century novelists such as Samuel Richardson) with Captain Walton’s letters from his ship back to his sister. From these the novel moves into Frankenstein’s first person narrative recounted to the Captain. Then at the core of Frankenstein’s narrative come several chapters of the monster’s own narrative, which is in terms of the novel’s narrative relayed back to Frankenstein who in turn relayed it to the Captain. On the other side of the creature’s narrative the novel returns to Frankenstein’s first person narrative, until we end up back where we started with Captain Walton writing a letter to his sister, now recounting the death of Frankenstein and the disappearance of the creature in the arctic wastes. The structure of the 1957 film is not so complex, beginning in the cell, flashing back to Frankenstein’s childhood, then his adulthood, till finally we come back to the cell and the priest. Also, in contrast to the multiple authorial voices that are in the 1818 novel (Walton, the creature, Victor and sometimes Elizabeth as well, whose letters are quoted) the only authorial voice in the film in Baron Frankenstein’s. However the structure of the framing narrative, and the use of the flashbacks, take their point of origin from the ‘onion-rings’ of Shelley’s novel.

By thinking of the complex ways the film intersects with and deviates from the novel, we can start to liberate the film from the mass of critical opinion which sees it as a faltering first step before the triumph of 1958’s Horror of Dracula. The opening narration, the super-text on the screen and above all the framing narrative in the prison cell announce the film’s prior relationship with the novel. Words (in vivid red) flash up on the screen and we read: ‘more than a hundred years ago, in a mountain village in Switzerland, lived a man whose strange experiments with the dead have since become legend. The legend is still told with horror the world over. It is the legend of the THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN’. They suggest Sangster’s emulation of the famous onion-rings whereby Shelley leads the reader deeper and deeper in the plot and to the relationship between the creature and its creator. The use of this opening title-card with the back story has been singled out by some commentators as evidence of the tentative and less successful nature of this film compared to the next year’s Dracula but this judgement can be re-oriented, if we consider that this opening is one aspect of the adroit transformation into cinematic form of the novel’s structure. While Sangster jettisons much of this depth and subtlety, and almost all of the philosophical speculation, he does take us deeper into the narrative by means of this structure.

The novel that Curse adapts from is itself drawing off multiple sources, from Milton’s seventeenth-century epic Paradise Lost (not to mention the classical epics that in turn had informed Milton’s style and narrative and the notion of Frankenstein as a ‘second Prometheus’) to works on electricity by Humphrey Davy and natural sciences by Erasmus Darwin and Luigi Galvani, on natural philosophy by Jean Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical ideas imbibed at home from her parents. As Hand points out, the Frankenstein character in the novel is himself experimenting with adaptation in the way he is metamorphosing body parts into a new creation, but the book itself is a work of intertextual adaptation (Hand, 2007: 9). It is a complex work in terms of the influences it synthesises.

Equally complex is the nature of the relationship between Curse and the novel. The film’s structure and its text-heavy opening are both adaptations into cinematic terms of the structure of the novel. But where it adapts the film also leaves out many aspects, and adds others not found in the novel. Throughout its running time, the film proclaims its prior relationship with the novel, from the title and titular character, to the basic contours of the plot. One of the clearest parallels is that both the film and the novel move to a dramatic climax on the eve of Victor’s wedding to Elizabeth. But it transgresses in the way it is plotted, in the way it presents its central character and the supporting characters and their relationships, and in what it either leaves out or creates anew, in contravention of the novel. Even if the dramatic movement towards the wedding is a point in common, even here the film diverges from the book; in the book the creature malevolently and deliberately kills Elizabeth but in the film she walks away from the carnage arm in arm with Krempe.

But has there ever been a faithful adaptation of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus? Even the subtitle of the novel, which adds a richly layered set of associations to the novel (Raggio, 1958), to the ambitions of the titular character and in terms of the literary, religious and mythical antecedents that were running through Mary Shelley’s mind, is a layer of depth that no film has captured. In its own way the 1931 adaptation leaves out and creates anew. Despite claiming to be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Branagh’s was arguably more in line with Fisher’s 1957 work. Notably Branagh included a lengthy creation scene, showing the creature emerging from amniotic fluid, which has no precedent in Mary Shelley’s book but does in Fisher’s film. In 1968 the Thames Television series Mystery and Imagination attempted a faithful retelling of the novel, with Ian Holm starring as both Frankenstein and the creature. If we try to judge fidelity in terms of how much of the novel is included in the adaptation, then this version may be the most faithful. Frankenstein attends university, is lectured by M. Krempe, his maid Justine is implicated for the murder of Frankenstein’s younger brother, and there are other sequences from the novel that have rarely made it into other adaptations. However there is still no trip to England, Scotland and Ireland, no chase across the arctic ice, no Captain Walton and certainly no Alpine scenery in a television production that was entirely made in a studio. The sheer scale of the novel defeats full adaptation.

Or does it? A central issue raised by adaptation is the question of choice. Adapters make choices about what to remove, what to keep in, and what to create anew. Any adaptation therefore is not necessarily or not at all a compromised or pale imitation of a literary source, but a result of choices. A classic novel especially, one from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, presents adapters with a number of choices, such is the length of the narrative, the diversity of locations or the proliferation of characters in a work such as Henry Fielding’s History of Tom Jones a Foundling or Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, or indeed Frankenstein. Sangster and then the remainder of the Hammer team chose to make a taut, tense and claustrophobic thriller, with a minimum of distractions away from Cushing’s intense scientist.

Ultimately the most significant question about choice in adaptation is the question of genre. In the novel, the rhapsodising about nature, the republican sympathies, the allusions to Goethe, all position Frankenstein as a Romantic text and Shelley as a child of the Enlightenment. While some scholars such as Brian Aldiss have attempted to position the novel as an early science fiction story, we can still say that it is not a horror story. Yet it could be adapted into a horror film. Curse took the essentials of the story and added those things – the laboratory, the bodies, the eyeballs, the violence, the hideousness - necessary to make it horror. Whale’s film had contained some grotesque elements, but these were the mannered grotesqueries of Expressionism rather than the direct surgical horrors of Curse. Hammer’s achievement in making the Frankenstein story into a horror story, which is the way it has been seen since, is a reminder of why we need to strip away the weight of later traditions and see the power of its innovation.

When James Carreras first registered the title for his proposed film in 1956, he set of figurative alarm bells at Universal, who threatened a lawsuit should anything done by Hammer emulate the 1931 Frankenstein. Some historians have seen the result of this threat as forcing Hammer to go back to the novel, as it was safely in the public domain. But this resort to the novel was at best qualified. There are the core elements of the story: a mad scientist; a creature; Switzerland; and a fiancée called Elizabeth. But in almost every other respect, the film is daringly different from the novel. It contracts and interiorises a book that straggled in its narrative and was fixated on the outdoor panorama of Swiss scenery. Justine moves from being a virtuous victim executed by the state to a vamp murdered (and perhaps raped) by the monster. Whole characters, episodes and sequences are removed or changed beyond recognition, such as the dishevelled M. Krempe becoming the young and attractive Paul Krempe. Frankenstein in the film does not have the family of the novel, nor does Cushing’s character attend university, nor read widely in antiquated works of natural philosophy as does the literary original. Having examined the relationship of novel to text, it is now time to return from Shelley’s visit to Geneva with Byron and Polidori and return to film studios.