The Curse of Frankenstein

The Hammer name is one of the most prominent in the history of horror cinema, but The Curse of Frankenstein was not created in a vacuum, in terms of what was happening at Bray, in the wider British film industry, and in Hollywood. Both Terence Fisher and his creative environment are suffused with questions of adaptations from prior cinematic achievements. In taking perceptions and focus off the twenty years of film production that came after the release of Curse and re-orienting attention back to the film itself and its creative context, we will see clearly why and how it adapts from cinema, and understand how that adaptation created a work of shocking novelty. Curse appalled critics, but little has been said about why it shocked, and its relationship with the horror films preceding it in British cinemas, including native British cinema and American imports. By considering it as the starting point for a tradition of twenty years’ worth of film production, as many writers have done, overlooks what was regarded as its novelty.

There are many ‘firsts’ wrapped up in The Curse of Frankenstein. It was the first of Hammer’s gothic horrors, the first to team Fisher, Lee, Cushing and the rest of the Hammer crew, the first of many sequels, the first Frankenstein movie in colour, and the first Frankenstein film made in Britain. But it did not emerge from nowhere. It is now time to give more detailed attention to where it came from, in commercial and creative terms and the film’s relationships with earlier films.

Hammer’s chief executive James Carreras has been praised for his business acumen (including signing distribution deals simultaneously with every major US studio) and derided for vulgarity and crassness. His technicians and actors were bucking a trend in making gothic horror but doing so successfully. Circumventing and in fact inverting the normal commercial implications of getting an X certificate is one indication of this point, as is the original decision to make a Frankenstein film. Where did it come from? What brought Lee, Cushing, Fisher and Hammer together? To answer these questions we leave Bray for a time, going back further and to different studios.

It seemed that by the 1950s horror films and the genre in its entirety had outstayed their welcome. Most histories of Hollywood and British horror situate the 1950s as a nadir of horror production, with films made on poverty row by washed up stars, or else done on the cheap by Universal. This narrative is well-entrenched, particularly in the juxtaposition of a ‘golden age’ of 1930s horror with the low point of early 1950s. But these critical assessments overlook that there was still a paying audience for horror features into the 1950s. Hitherto the immediate background to Curse has been located with Hammer’s own early genre efforts, especially the Quatermass films. So far historians of the company have not linked the company’s first gothic horror with the much maligned but still profitable horrors being made in Hollywood. But if we do, suddenly things fall into place: why Hammer decided to venture into gothic cinema; why they decided at first to make a black and white comedy horror; and the market they were trying to tap into.

As Peter Hutchings and David Pirie have both pointed out, horror cinema that is quantifiably ‘gothic’ takes that name and its defining characteristics from literature, notably the gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The definition of any work as gothic is fraught with contested meanings, even if there is at least agreement among scholars on a core body of texts from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that comprise a gothic canon, including Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Mrs Radcliffe’s Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Godwin’s own gothic work St Leon, and, of course, Frankenstein. There is also Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–5) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Women (1798). These novels and texts pursue a number of trajectories that continued into nineteenth-century works, notably Dracula and a number of Robert Louis Stevenson’s works such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, although scholars are increasingly alert to the number of expressions of gothic themes across the century, even in Marx’s Das Kapital, which is full of gothic metaphors and allusions to the uncanny, such as hobgoblins and werewolves (Policante, 2010: 2). Gothic novels comprise of a range of preoccupations and settings, and Sedgwick (1986) suggests that some of them are religious institutions, subterranean spaces, burials and the unspeakable as typical features of gothic novels. Some of these do appear in Curse.

If we say that Sangster and the rest of the team of the adapted from a ‘gothic; novel, this statement brings into view a complex trajectory from the source text to the film. The script and production design together create a richly gothic world. The Baron’s chateau is a world of rich luxury but also dark chambers. The climax of the film shows the Baron and the creature chasing each other around the gothic flying buttresses of the roof space.

Another delicious gothic touch comes shortly before the Baron murders the visiting Professor Bernstein. The Baron invites the Professor to inspect a painting hanging on the landing: ‘It was purchased by my father and illustrates one of the early operations’, says Frankenstein. In his analysis of the film, Wheeler Winston Dixon says that they are looking at a nondescript painting but that’s not right; actually the picture is the 1632 oil painting ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp’ by Rembrandt. The painting shows the dissection of an executed criminal and is a closely detailed and gruesome depiction of the corpse’s anatomy. Details such as these enrich the gothic atmosphere of the film.

But this gothic potential had not previously been exploited by a British studio. Most of the landmarks literary texts that have been influential as adapted sources are British (if that is taken to include Stoker and le Fanu before the establishment of the 1922 Irish Free State) but earlier horror films had been made by Universal Studios in Hollywood. Such is David Pirie’s point in A Heritage of Horror, where he suggests that British horror films take their inspiration and textual sources from a body of native British texts and traditions. Pirie’s point was part of a wider body of arguments he deployed to build a case for taking British horror cinema seriously, which at the time he wrote in 1973 was far from being a common critical or academic position. While partly polemical, his argument remains valid, as especially in the case of Shelley and Stoker, but also Conan Doyle and le Fanu, major works that have been adapted have been by British writers, even if there works have been set in non-British locations including Switzerland and Transylvania.

But there was also an irony underpinning Pirie’s argument, in that these native British literary traditions had been appropriated by foreign film makers, mostly the horror specialists working at Universal Studios in the 1930s. Even here we must be cautious in seeing cultural divides. Notably the 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein was made in America, by an American studio and with American money, but the director (James Whale) and its stars (Boris Karloff and Colin Clive) were British. But overall the irony stands that Hollywood, mostly Universal, plundered long-dead British writers to make their horror films and appropriated from a British literary heritage.

In the same year as Whale’s Frankenstein, 1931, Universal also made an adaption of Stoker’s Dracula (or more accurately an adaptation of the theatrical adaptation of the original book). Hollywood also later made adaptations of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and a version of his Body Snatchers and Conan Doyle’s most gothic Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Universal exploited to a degree this literary heritage. Wheeler Winston Dixon describes Terence Fisher as the ‘John Ford of horror cinema’; the comment has some meaning in terms of the way Fisher and his Hammer collaborators clawed back national ownership of their literary heritage.⁶ If Ford’s westerns were deeply embedded in American national archetypes and foundational narratives, then Fisher’s first Hammer is a statement of British re-appropriation of a lost cultural heritage, but also a source of adaptation never before used by British film makers.

Curse may be gothic, but its adaptation from the gothic literature comes via other mediating sources that stand between the original gothic texts and the film. From Mrs Radcliffe, Horace Walpole to Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis and then Shelley, to Robert Louis Stevenson, J. Sheridan le Fanu, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker later in the nineteenth century, ‘gothic’ as a term became synonymous with a number of characteristics. One is the uncanny, or the appearance of things, objects, situations or people that promote feelings of dread or uncertainty. These uncanny things often appeared in against backdrop of dark underground spaces, mouldering castles, frightening monasteries or sepulchres and graveyards, including the Frankenstein family vault. But this body of British literature mostly chose to locate the uncanny gothic horrors outside the British Isles, from Transylvania (obviously) to Geneva to castles and convents in France and Germany (Harmes, 2014). The titular Castle of Otranto in Walpole’s 1764 novel was set in medieval Italy.

Mention of gothic source texts reminds us of two important points. One is that any film about Frankenstein is an adaptation, taking inspiration from the 1818 novel but also from the very considerable cultural baggage that has accumulated around Shelley’s work. The other is that even as relatively early (in film making terms) as 1956, there was already a fairly extensive film making tradition within the horror genre based in Hollywood. But gothic horror’s place within the British film industry and more broadly within British society was complex.

Not only does Curse normally play second fiddle to Hammer’s own Dracula of the next year, but it also languishes in the shadow of Universal’s 1931 movie. If Christopher Lee may be the definitive Dracula (certainly the cinematic representation of vampires with fangs belongs to him, not to Lugosi’s Dracula), his Creature has nothing of the spectacular afterlife and recognition factor of Karloff’s from the 1931 film. Karloff’s flat headed, neck-bolted lumbering creature (which does not take inspiration from Shelley’s descriptions) is the definitive representation of Frankenstein’s monster, repeated in sequels (sometimes played by Karloff, as in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein and other times with the role taken by lesser talents such as Lon Chaney Jnr) and endlessly in parodies, from The Munsters to Frankenweenie. In comparison, Hammer’s monster make up, while effective and testament especially to Phil Leakey’s ability to improvise and produce impressive results on a small budget (a skill he shared with everyone else working at Bray) has not been nearly so enduring in popular consciousness.

The very obvious visual distinction between Karloff and the Universal Studio look and Hammer’s monstrous aesthetic indicates the ambiguous and complex relationship between the 1931 film and Curse. Commercially and creatively (and who can say how separate these are) the Hammer film is not a palimpsest of the1931 Universal Frankenstein. Commercially, it couldn’t be. Universal Studios threatened legal action if Hammer included any scene, design or character that was in the 1931 film but not in Shelley’s novel. In 1956, Universal’s 1931 film remained a current and well known property. In the US it was routinely repeated on television and the bullet-neck iconography of Boris Karloff’s creature remained enduringly potent and popularly known. Universal was thus not defending a film that was over 25 years old, but something that remained known through repeats and through sequels and was still a viable commercial property.

Creatively the film differs from the 1931 version in the choices Sangster made about which scenes and characters to delete, choices which differed to Universal’s own condensation of the novel’s plot. Visually Whale’s vision wholly differs from Fisher’s. The 1956 and 1931 films are significantly different in the way different characters are foregrounded and emphasised. One reason Karloff’s monster make up remains such a signature creation (besides the fact that it is brilliant) is that the monster is the focus of Whale’s 1931 film. The film is arguably responsible for one of the most familiar confusions about Mary Shelley’s story in modern popular culture: that it is the monster itself that is called Frankenstein (the title of the 2014 release I, Frankenstein is a recent restatement of this confusion). The 1931 places its focus on the creature, ineluctably associating a name – Frankenstein – with an image – Karloff in his make-up. The character of the scientist, played in Whale’s film by Colin Clive, is a subordinate character compared to the monster. Hammer inverted this relationship. Lee’s monster does not appear until the latter part of the film, and throughout the entire film the focus is on Peter Cushing’s poised, energetic scientist. Cushing steals the show. He was an energetic actor, moving constantly around a film set; Lee tended to remain still and only move when necessary. Overall it is Cushing who captures and holds attention with his icy performance and his finely crafted details and nuances, from the way he expertly wields the antique surgical equipment to his fussy checking of times with his fob watch. Colin Clive had personified Dr Frankenstein as a gabbling, neurotic and above all deranged scientist. Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein may still be a mad scientist, but he is altogether a more urbane, aristocratic and above all classier character than Clive’s highly mannered characterisation. Whereas Clive’s Frankenstein was assisted by a hunchbacked man, Cushing’s is aided (to start with anyway) by the equally urbane and well-dressed figure of Paul Krempe. It is impossible to think of Clive’s character having a social life or sitting down to make polite and sophisticated chit chat.

By contrast, Curse shows an altogether more rounded view of Frankenstein and the character grips and holds the audience’s attention as a rounded, fascinating person. He raids charnel houses, murders people and reanimates the dead, but is also the perfect host (until he throws his guest over the bannister rail) and has a taste for the finer things in life. In one sharply realised scene, the Baron and his wife sit down to a breakfast in their beautifully furnished dining room, pass each other delicately crafted cruets, and chat about the inconvenience of the sudden disappearance of their parlourmaid.

The maid has been murdered by the deranged monster lurking upstairs and the scene, dripping in black humour, captures the sophistication of Baron Frankenstein that lies alongside his diabolical experiments. Almost as good is the jet black comedy of the conversation between the Baron and the Professor as they mount the staircase in the chateau just before Frankenstein pushes the professor off and steals his brain. Again we see the urbane and erudite Baron. ‘I really am most honoured to have you here, sir’, says Frankenstein, in a line that yields up more than one meaning as the Professor is a distinguished visitor, but Frankenstein also means that he is relieved to have at last found a suitable brain. In turn the Professor compliments the Baron for his charming home and its ‘wonderful atmosphere’, dialogue that is blackly ironic given that the Professor has only seconds to live because the Baron has coolly and cunningly arranged his murder.

Colin Clive’s mannered performance finds no echoes in Cushing’s more grounded if totally mad scientist. As Dixon has pointed out, the visual aesthetic of the films also contrast, in a way that reinforces the distinctions in style, expression and acting style between the Universal and Hammer iterations of the story and the actors starring in them. Clive’s mad scientist operated in an environment and mise-en-scene that suited his mannered style. The sets were severely expressionist in character and harked back to German cinema of the previous decade (Dixon, 1991: 258). Cushing’s laboratory is an earthier and more realistic setting, even down to the ambient sound, as the characters in Whale’s film clambered around on echoing wooden rostrums, giving a rather shoddy theatrical impression compared to the solidity of Hammer’s sets. Not only was the Wimshurst machine real and generated large amounts of electricity, the rest of Baron Frankenstein’s equipment, the scalpels, the brass instruments, the charts and the anatomy tomes, gives the impression that you could actually do real medical work with them. These moments take us a long way from the babbling lunatic and his expressionist laboratory of the 1931 film and project us into a quite different film making tradition of Britain’s period and costume dramas, of which more later.

The general trajectory of the Universal gothic horror films has been well told by a number of film historians, who follow mostly the same contours in the points they make. Generally they suggest that the original high standards of the 1930s Universal horrors, including Whale’s Frankenstein, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein (1939) gradually fell away (Crane, 1994: 75). While the original stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi found their careers on the skids, Universal continued making horror films to diminishing returns, casting lesser actors such as John Carradine and Lon Chaney Jnr. in multi-monster films such as House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula (Hutchings, 2003: 22), which debased the former high standard of the films featuring Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy and the Wolfman. Meanwhile smaller studios on the Hollywood ‘poverty row’ such as Monogram made cheap horrors, giving employment to former Universal stars such as Lugosi, and horror descended to the sensationalist lows of stereoscopic and gimmick horrors such as House of Wax (1953) (Leeder, 2011).

Overall the impression is not very edifying. Hollywood horror after the relatively high budget and highly esteemed 1930s productions falls away markedly in quality but not in quantity, as Universal and the smaller studios seemingly compete to make the most inept horrors as vehicles for faded stars. Is a nadir reached with 1948’s Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein? This comedy horror brings together the two comedians along with a host of the Universal monsters in their trademark makeup. The monster mashups now involving comedians continued into the 1950s and are one of the cinematic backgrounds to Hammer’s own work. Both Karloff and Lugosi, doubtless pleased to get a pay cheque, were making comedy horrors by the 1950s.

Thus we should remember a point about the early development of The Curse of Frankenstein: it was originally going to at least partly comedic (Meikle, 2009: 37). The original intention was to make a comedic version, not a straight one, of the Frankenstein story. Few traces of this original intention show through in the finished film bar some very black humour, the comedic idea otherwise being obliterated by Cushing’s very intense portrayal of the Baron and Fisher’s serious handling of the material. The notion of the 1956 production being a comedy or spoof of the stories is thus confined to the footnotes of the histories written about Hammer. But it is actually an important point and is a reminder of the condition of the horror industry in both Britain and the United States prior to 1956 and to the creative intentions that prompted Hammer to put a Frankenstein film into production. From initial planning for a black and white comedy version of Frankenstein, all the plans, budgets and intentions changed to create a serious film.

Cushing and all the rest of the cast played the material totally straight and Fisher’s stately and measured direction created a film that was far removed from any comedy. There are, as Meikle points out, some humorous lines in the script but Cushing delivers them deadpan (2009: 37). Cushing’s intense and quietly spoken performance owes nothing to the broad strokes of a Bud Abbott or a Lou Costello. But in 1956, some of the most recently successful horror films were those featuring Abbott and Costello, which included not only 1948’s Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, but Abbott and Costello meet the Killer Boris Karloff and Abbott and Costello meet the Mummy (1955). Once again we see an adaptive impulse at work at Hammer, even if it is one that ultimately travelled down a dead end. But in 1956, in casting about for relatively recent examples of successful horror making, the Abbott and Costello films were likely inspirations for Hammer’s creative personnel to seize upon. The film historian Mark Miller dismisses the horror output immediately before Curse as ‘shoddy, unimaginative’ (1995), but as accurate as these comments might be in terms of production values or scripting, these films do have an importance in the trajectory that leads us towards Curse. Dixon says (1991: 223) that Abbott and Costello’s 1948 film Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein left the horror genre moribund, but the commercial success of the film, its sequels and the inspiration it provided to the early development of Hammer’s own film challenge this verdict.

The Abbott and Costello comedy horrors were the last hurrah for a number of Universal monsters. Bela Lugosi returned as Dracula in Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein and Lon Chaney Jnr. played the Wolf Man. The verdicts that the films are shoddy or unimaginative are only a part truth. The films had coherent plots and Meet Frankenstein has a traditional horror narrative of attempted brain transplantation. There are also moments of genuine spookiness; Abbott and Costello meet the Killer, Boris Karloff was censored in some countries, including a scene of corpses playing card games.

These monster mashups were among the few examples of viable horror film production around in the 1950s. They were cheap to make and popular at the box office: Meet Frankenstein cost only $792,270 to make and recouped over $3 million (Furmanek & Palumbo, 1991: 175). Previous evaluations of The Curse of Frankenstein have tended to dismiss the original plan to have made a comedic version, but it is an important point in terms of thinking about this film as an adapting work. These comedy horrors presented to Hammer’s executives a cheap but popular reconfiguration of classic monsters.

Thinking about Curse in this light can be liberating in terms of the weight of history than has come to rest on it and the entire Hammer company. Histories of Hammer or more broadly of the British film industry have tended to think of the company as a ‘plucky’ small scale British enterprise taking on larger and more threatening rivals, especially in America. Familiar parts of this narrative trajectory include Universal’s initial threats and their efforts to stop the registration of the title of the film in the United States. But these views can be disingenuous. From the outset, far from being just a little British company, Hammer was backed up by American studio money and the ever-brilliant James Carreras signed profitable distribution deals with Hollywood studios. There is also an American influence at work on the early development of The Curse of Frankenstein as the earliest drafts, the comedic ones, were by the American film maker Milton Subotsky. While the general consensus among historians of horror cinema are that the American horrors of the 1940s and early 1050s were made to diminishing returns in terms of quality, this judgement can overlook their continuing success at the box office, especially with the drawcard of two widely popular comedians getting in on the act. Likewise, thinking of Curse of Frankenstein as an adapting work can make clear that in Britain in the 1950s, there was a clear antecedent for Hammer’s first effort in the comedy horrors.

Ultimately Curse only drew on American antecedents in limited ways. As Hutchings points out, Hammer anchored their horrors in a middle European past and gave centre stage to middle aged rather than teenaged actors, in contrast to contemporary American efforts (Hutchings, 2003: 31). But in seeking answer for where Curse came from and the earlier successes it capitalised on, the enduring if ramshackle horrors of Universal and poverty row of the 1940s and 1950s require attention and have often been marginalised in accounts of Hammer’s history. While a film such as Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is often described as a sad ending to the once respectable Universal horrors, this standard judgments overlooks the popularity of it and other films of the type (indeed Universal was still using excerpts from the film in new works as late as 1965 including The World of Abbott and Costello) ensured there was both a space for horror and an approach to it that makes sense of Hammer’s actions in 1956.

Looking to the enduring if critically disreputable efforts of Universal and poverty row in the 1940s and 1950s provides a more meaningful source of inspiration for Hammer’s efforts than anything that may have been happening in Britain. If, as Pirie points out, American studios appropriated native British literature to make horror films, then in fairness it could be pointed out that British film makers were not all that interested in making such films themselves or adapting from those books. Histories of British cinema and of its horror cinema in particular make two points. One is that there are only a handful of instances of horror films (including The Ghoul of 1933 and Dark Eyes of London of 1939, with Karloff and Lugosi respectively brought over from Hollywood to star) made in Britain before The Curse of Frankenstein inaugurated Hammer’s intensive decades of horror production. The second associated point is that the cultural and political parameters that defined British film making were hardly conducive to horror production.

For a time in the 1930s Hollywood itself shut down horror productions in the belief they were unfashionable and unprofitable. Part of this belief was fuelled by the actions of both British censors and the local municipal authorities which had authority to ban horror films from showing. County councils and the Licensing Committee did not so much view the H certificate as providing a means for horror films to be shown but rather they hoped that no films would be so dreadful to actually merit a H certificate. A few did creep through, including The Ghoul. Exclusive Films, which was actually the distribution arm of Hammer, distributed some horror including The Vampire Bat. Then in 1936 Karloff came back to Britain to make The Man Who Changed His Mind (known in the USA as The Man Who Lived Again) (Jacobs, 2011: 198). The body-swapping science fiction presented in this film was dressed up with some horror trappings. The mad scientist Dr Laurence (Karloff) conducts his experiments on brain and personality transplantation in an old dark cobwebby house and he has a deformed sidekick. The film showcases some mild body horror as well as fiendish experiments on a monkey. But The Ghoul and The Man Who Changed His Mind are oddities; largely dead ends rather than trajectories in film making. Their directors were not specialists in horror or in any way committed to the genre. The Man Who Changed His Mind was directed by Robert Stevenson, a versatile film maker who worked across a wide variety of styles (he later directed Mary Poppins, 1964) and whose horror film was a one off. Karloff would return to make more films in England, but later, in the 1960s, when he came back to England to make among others The Sorcerers (1967) for Michael Reeves and The Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968) for Vernon Sewell. By then, Hammer horror was in full swing and other British or Anglo-American film production companies and distributors including Amicus, Tigon, Lippert, Anglo-Amalgamated and American International Pictures were making horrors. In the 1930s however few directors or companies would make them, few cinema managers would show them, and few local authorities and municipal councils wanted there to be films requiring a H certificate.

Such attitudes endured. They endured in the willingness of local authorities to flatly ban H films (and later X films) and in the attitudes of censors and critics who were bewildered and angry that film makers continued to make such sickening products. The point of the H certificate was to discourage horror films. In the 1930s at least the discouragement seems to have worked, mostly. Besides The Ghoul and Dark Eyes of London (which earned a H certificate) British film makers mostly eschewed the horrific and supernatural, and Hollywood horrors were often outright banned, including 1932’s Freaks by Tod Browning. The director of Hollywood’s Production Code Administration (and many Universal horrors were ‘pre-code’) assured the BBFC that Hollywood did not wish to offend British sensibilities (Johnson, 1997: 145).

But by the 1950s critics were concerned the fight seemed to be slipping away. Earlier we encountered Derek Hill’s splenetic review of Hammer films in Sight and Sound in 1958. From the same piece comes this plaintive lament that ‘the displays, the posters and the slogans have become an accepted part of the West End scene. So too, have the queues. The horror boom […] is still prospering. Why?’ (cited in Cooper, 2011: 31). It clearly did not occur to him that writing a piece promoting films as being so excitingly lurid as containing sights fit for the concentration camps might actually have inadvertently promoted the horror boom. There is an important point lurking in Hill’s overreaction: he points out that horror films were becoming an established part of the landscape, literally so in terms of the billboards and posters, but also as a routine part of what cinemas were showing. A year before Curse went into production at Bray Abbott and Costello had released their comedy-horror mummy film. William Castle’s gimmick horrors, as well as pulp American horrors such as The Fly were in production or soon would be. The horror genre in Britain gives the impression of lying dormant but ready for activation.

We are now at a point to see several contrasting traditions and factors at play. Even if the British film industry had proved reluctant to adapt it, British literature had produced a volume of gothic texts that Hollywood had found to be a viable source of adaptation. While conventional wisdom insists that these horrors made in Hollywood by Universal eventually tailed off in quality, they did not lose popularity, giving Hammer a viable model for adaptation. But other cinematic influences came into play as Fisher’s background at Gainsborough, the nascent British horror industry and Hammer itself all converge at a particular moment in time when Fisher, Cushing and the rest of the Hammer team all assembled in Black Park, erected the gibbet, and began shooting the very first scenes of Curse of Frankenstein.