The Curse of Frankenstein

In The Curse of Frankenstein the Baron conducts his diabolical experiments among circumstances of considerable charm and comfort, almost akin to an ‘upstairs/downstairs’ juxtaposition of adjoining but contrasting worlds popular from period dramas such as Downton Abbey or the original Upstairs Downstairs itself. Fisher creates what Hutchings calls a ‘solid, thoroughly materialistic world’ (Hutchings, 1996: 117). Frankenstein’s biomechanical experiments on dead tissue and organs are carried out in the same house where he lives his ostensibly respectable life with his fiancée Elizabeth. Eventually the façade cracks and then shatters in the most embarrassing of ways; Elizabeth and the authorities discover the Baron’s scientific depravity, the monster erupts into view, and the Baron is dragged off to the local prison and kept among the common prisoners prior to being taken to the guillotine. By the end of the film the dandified Baron is a grubby, sweaty man in shabby clothes, far removed from the poised and elegant figure he cut in his chateau. The gold fob watch, top hat, cane and cloak have gone.

The Curse of Frankenstein is a hybrid, adapting from a novel but by no means suggesting that the film is subordinate to the literature. Nor is it committed to the realistic. The film instead sits in the trajectory established by Gainsborough period dramas, which the ‘upstairs/downstairs’ aesthetic of the Baron’s world indicates. Curse’s extremely stately opening even gives the impression of being another period ‘bodice ripper’ as Fisher holds back on anything horrific happening until way into the film’s running time. This point indicates an important aspect this chapter explores of where Curse of Frankenstein came from and why it was so shocking, as critics saw the sumptuous period trappings of costume drama turned to the altogether darker and more gruesome ends of the horror film.

Hitherto the continuities in personnel and style between the small Gainsborough operation and the equally close knit work at Bray has been noted but not explored in depth in terms of their creative implications. In particular the adaptation from the themes and style of the Gainsborough melodramas is an explanation for a major aspect of the transgression from the book made by the film and in the way the central character of the Baron was written, framed and made to interact with the supporting characters.

Horror film making in Britain was, as we saw in the previous chapter, extremely limited prior to Hammer’s experiment with The Curse of Frankenstein. Whatever limited horror production there had been in Britain before Curse had not involved Terence Fisher. His career is a peculiar one. Fisher is now thought of as a horror specialist, but seen in broader perspective his career is bifurcated in a way that indicates the restrictions on horror that prevailed in the British film industry. The general indifference from critics or obituary writers at his death in 1980 has been made up for since by an extensive body of critical writings, including biographies and filmographies. But what has been written about him tends to focus almost exclusively on his Hammer films (as well as the works he completed in the 1960s for small studios on the occasions when Hammer was employing other directors, including his science fiction thrillers The Earth Dies Screaming and Night of the Big Heat, both cheap films for small studios). The decade he spent directing an eclectic range of films before beginning work on Curse of Frankenstein languishes in the shadows of his Hammer work, because Fisher is evaluated as a horror specialist. Film historians have found it hard to make the early films fit into the contours of his later career.

However some aspects of his career do present themselves as significant to understanding not only how he came to direct Curse, but also the type of film and the nature of the adaptation which he shaped. Even though Fisher was not making horror films prior to 1956, he was a busy director, including making crime dramas and costume dramas. The confluence of circumstances that put Fisher in that right place and at that right time have been well enough accounted for in biographies by Dixon and Hutchings to not need restatement. However a few aspects of what he was up to before 1956 and his convergence with Cushing, Lee and Carreras at Bray stand out as important.

The main details of Fisher’s life have been told effectively by Hutchings and particularly by Dixon, who was fortunate to access interviews with Fisher from before his death in 1980 and who was able to interview Fisher’s widow in person. Having been the oldest clapper boy around, starting in that lowly capacity at the Limegrove studios in 1933 at the age of 29 (Dixon, 1991: 6), Fisher rapidly rose from position of third assistant director to second assistant director to assistant editor in 1934 (Dixon, 1991: 7). He became a much-sought after editor, sometimes working on up to ten films a year. By 1948 Fisher was handed his first directing project, the modest 60 minute B feature Colonel Bogey.

Fisher made this little film for the Rank Organisation, which he had recently joined. This point is of capital significance to understanding where Fisher came from by the time we reach 1956 and his preparations for Curse. Lord Rank’s sprawling movie empire, whose films were marked out by the famous gong and gong beater of the Rank ident, encompassed a number of nominally distinct film making entities, including Highbury studios and Gainsborough studios. The latter of these had its own distinctive ident of a lady in eighteenth-century costume sitting inside an ornate picture frame, in emulation of the company’s namesake, the eighteenth-century portraitist and landscape artist Thomas Gainsborough (Cook, 2009: 254).

These disparate groups were presided over by J. Arthur Rank, a teetotal Methodist. Lord Rank would not have entertained the idea of making a disreputable gothic horror film and indeed the projects Fisher helmed for the Rank Organisation are far removed from the later horrors that his name is now synonymous with. Despite this disjunction, some of Fisher’s biographers have attempted to locate thematic consistency or coherence in Fisher’s pre-horror directing projects. Pirie for example attempted to distil what he regarded as characteristic Fisherian themes and preoccupations from the director’s pre1956 projects, such as a preoccupation with external deceit hiding inner decay, as well as a distinct xenophobia. Also attempting to pinpoint a consistency in Fisher’s career by suggesting he was making horror films before anyone realised it, including Fisher himself, Pirie suggests that one of Fisher’s Gainsborough/Rank projects, So Long at the Fair (1950) could ‘easily have been re-shot, sequence for sequence, as a vampire movie without making any difference to its basic mechanics, for the same dualistic structure pervades every frame’ (Pirie, 1981).

However, there are several problems with these efforts to account for the sudden emergence of Fisher in 1956 as a gothic horror specialist by attempting to project consistencey back into his career. One, as Dixon has pointed out, is that Pirie’s assertions were based on limited evidence, as so few of Fisher’s pre-1956 films were available for viewing when Pirie was writing in the early 1970s (Dixon: 116). Another is that when Fisher’s surviving films from before 1956 actually are examined, they reveal an extraordinary eclecticism in tone, themes and subject matter, not to mention quality, that any attempts to pinpoint a distinctive if nascent ‘Fisherian’ set of tropes or preoccupations becomes problematic.

Yet we should not dismiss entirely the idea of a series of formative influences at work on Fisher and the adaptation of Frankenstein. He did after all burst forth seemingly fully formed as a horror director in 1956, but his work on Curse of Frankenstein did not emerge from a vacuum. Even if Fisher’s career lacked any particular consistency, we can nonetheless reconstruct some points of importance. These include the trajectory of Fisher’s career, which took him closer and closer to Hammer, to Bray and to the production personnel working there, as well as the types of projects he seems to have valued as a journeyman, as opposed to those where he very clearly just pointed the camera, shot the film, and went home.

The Curse of Frankenstein is stately but it is certainly not slow and the action rattles briskly through the 80 minutes running time. To create balance and structure, Fisher puts the film together largely as a sequence of medium shots, carefully composed and balanced, from which he sometimes cuts away to a close-up. His directing style and use of cameras are discussed in depth by Dixon. The film is inevitably quite static, as much of the running time comprises master shots of two people in the frame talking to each other. The visual style of Fisher’s major films for Gainsborough such as So Long at the Fair carry over into his first gothic horror. From the beginning of Curse Fisher sets up a series of mostly static shots which are framed by a doorway. At the beginning it is the priest entering the prison. Many shots are of two people, mostly Frankenstein and Krempe, framed by the double doors of the drawing room or the door of the laboratory, acting before a static camera. Fisher does however break these up with expressive close-ups and cutaways, such as Krempe attempting to calm the frighten horse at the gibbet when the corpse drops. Fisher intercuts this close-up into a wide shot of the area around the gibbet. Krempe is shown looking perturbed in another close-up in a medium master shot when the Baron is cutting the dead criminal’s head off.

But Fisher achieves a great deal within these static shots and assessments of his directing style have often pointed out his ability to stage dynamic action in front of an almost stationary camera. Normally the scene signalled out as illustrative of this ability is the moment in Horror of Dracula when Lee’s character appears coming down stairs, and swoops dynamically into shot while the camera stays put. But similar dynamism had been achieved in Curse of Frankenstein. Fisher’s camera stays still in scenes including the fight between the Baron and Krempe in the vault and later when the creature awakes and begins to viciously throttle Frankenstein and the scenes come to life without the camera needing to move around the actors. Fisher achieves a great deal within these carefully composed shots. One of the blackest and most sardonically amusing moments in the film comes when the Baron has invited the Professor to dinner, ostensibly for a brief overnight stay but in reality to murder him and steal his brain. As Elizabeth innocently says that the Professor has ‘the greatest brain in Europe’, Victor turns to the Professor sitting next to him and glances briefly and speculatively at his head. The moment comes and goes in the blink of an eye. The shot is immaculately set and framed, with Victor and the Professor sitting side by side on a sofa, smoking cigars and drinking brandy, all framed in midshot. A close up on Victor as he turned to appraise the Professor’s head would have been crude and would have unsubtly rammed home a point about the Baron’s character. Instead Fisher achieves a more subtle point with a brief midshot and Cushing accomplishes the same with his acting. This framing and editing allows Fisher and Cushing together to achieve this moment of dark humour and character development.

Earlier on I quoted John Carpenter’s appreciative observation of Fisher’s choreographed scenes of mayhem and the comment nearly captures the essence of Fisher’s visual style. Neat framings and coherent action define his films. The efforts of some historians and critics to adduce the defining ‘fisherian’ characteristics may neglect that his films before 1956 are widely eclectic in narrative, themes, style and even just in Fisher’s imaginative and technical approach to the material. But there is an important prelude to his Hammer films and to the dignified and stately horror scenes he staged: his work for Gainsborough.

Gainsborough studios may on first evidence be a strange place to look for insights about the production and reception of Curse. It was part of the god-fearing Lord Rank’s empire and produced films in a variety of popular genres, including Will Hay comedies and the costume dramas starring the likes of Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Stewart Granger. Because it seems an unlikely place to look for Fisher’s grisly mayhem, historians’ and commentators’ attention has normally been directed to a different point of origin for Hammer’s horror output in the Quatermass films of 1955 onwards. The Quatermass films are far removed from the sumptuous period design and Victorian-era scientific apparatus in Curse. They were set in the (for the 1950s) present day and with narratives involving alien invasion. They were, like so much else made by Hammer, adaptations, in this case from two BBC drama productions written by Nigel Kneale and produced by Rudolph Cartier.⁷ Most often historians of the Hammer company suggest that Curse of Frankenstein went into production after the company experienced major success with its Quatermass films and X the Unknown and elected to make another horror film.

However this oft-repeated narrative neglects the fact that the Quatermass films are science fiction with contemporary British settings, not gothic horrors set in an indeterminate nineteenth-century Europe. There is little in these films’ tone, style or sources to account for the company’s decision to make a Frankenstein film. There is more to splitting hairs over genre in this point: moving away from the supposed influence of Quatermass allows for the foundation of this major strand of British and horror movie making to be understood in new ways.

While historians of Hammer films tend to locate the Quatermass serials and X the Unknown as the ‘Ur texts’, or origin texts, of the company’s successful horror cycles, this view can be adjusted. Certainly the films showed Hammer’s executives that there was a profitable market to be had from X rated material. The films also consolidated Hammer’s already winning formula of adapting from the BBC that had begun with the Dick Barton films, continued with Terence Fisher’s Spaceways and now continued with Nigel Kneale’s science fiction scripts (although X the Unknown was an original story by Jim Sangster, it was meant to include the character of Professor Quatermass). But in other important respects these science fiction thrillers of the mid 1950s are false starts or even dead ends. They are contemporary rather than period or costume dramas. The Quatermass Xperiment very clearly located menace in everyday reality, including the famous climax in Westminster Abbey, a location recently seen by the then largest yet television viewing audience at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (Harmes, 2013: 220). The second Quatermass film likewise juxtaposed the alien threat with the drab modernity of prefab huts and factories. The science fiction films are scientifically rational (even if the science is of the outer space variety) rather than supernatural. The key difference then is that they are not gothic. They are not distillations of the dark, hidden and grotesque world that Curse would promote, nor are they attempts to create an indeterminate European ‘other’ in a British film studio, such as Gainsborough’s melodrama Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944).

Science fiction ultimately is a road that Hammer did not travel and Curse killed off the black and white thrillers the studio was producing (Miller, 1995: 69). Whatever science fiction was made in Britain in the late-1950s and 1960s emerged from other studios. There are a number of such films from the noteworthy and successful such as Village of the Damned (1960) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1964) to more light-hearted fare such as The Trygon Factor (1967) to the simply bizarre Zeta One (1969). But these were not Hammer efforts. Even Fisher’s science fiction thrillers were made for other studios. Although the company’s creative personnel were omnivorous adapters from of course gothic texts but also swashbucklers and pirate stories (such as Russell Thorndyke’s books), from ‘ripping yarns’ in the mould of G. A. Henty with films like Stranglers of Bombay and from successful television sitcoms, science fiction was not a repeating pattern. Hammer’s own audience research showed that audiences wanted horror, not science fiction (Dixon, 1991: 224).

A number of important parallels between another studio and Hammer direct attention away from science fiction to Gainsborough. While part of a larger film empire, Gainsborough was a small-scale operation with a repertory of performers and technicians. The Gainsborough networks that later formed at Bray were extensive, encompassing not only Fisher and Asher and Len Harris the camera operator, but also the crucial figure of Anthony Nelson-Keys, the producer (Dixon, 1991: 227). The name of the company is synonymous with a particular type of output, namely costume melodrama, based on the more fantastical and gothic elements inherent in British storytelling, a trajectory that also includes Hammer (Cook, 1996b: 54). The company’s costume dramas also gained their dramatic impulse from the deliberate archaisms and period details, an impulse that recurs in Baron Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Gainsborough’s output was popular at the book office but also often critically derided at the time of release and has since been mostly neglected by film scholars, although a small number of historians including Pam Cook have attempted the recuperation of the company’s reputation (Petrie, 1997: 118). Any attempt to recuperate or champion this studio has required the assertion of the validity of a non-realistic aesthetic in British cinema. As Petrie points out, from the 1950s onwards many critics and many film makers championed a ‘documentary-realistic aesthetic’ as a major hallmark of British cinema (127-128). A studio-bound, anti-realist set of film aesthetics would inevitably incur disdain in comparison and have only a low cultural status in the eyes of critics who privileged what Cook calls the ‘austere realism’ of post-war cinema (Cook, 1996b: 53). Gainsborough established and then swiftly consolidated its reputation as a breeding ground for actors, technicians and directors unhappy at working within the realist orthodoxy (Harper, 1994: 119). The Gainsborough costume cycle was comparatively short-lived, lasting from 1943’s The Man in Grey to 1950’s So Long at the Fair (co-directed by Terence Fisher); but while short lived the cycle comprised popular and attention grabbing films made by a close-knit team. So Long at the Fair was a breakaway from the B features that Fisher had mostly been doing. It had a reasonable budget and a prestige cast including Dirk Bogarde, Jean Simmons, David Tomlinson and Honor Blackman. Its period setting (it is about the mysterious disappearance by a young man at the 1889 Exposition Universelle) and its sumptuous trappings, not to mention its highly sinister atmosphere, make clear why is seems so strongly a precursor to Fisher’s Hammer work.

What is often neglected in assessments of Hammer and their inaugural gothic film is the heritage of transgression that follows a transit from Gainsborough into Hammer. In Hammer, exaggerated and amplified by the gore and violence brought into the narrative by the horror trappings, these transgressive elements took on new life. Some film historians have noted the trajectories of careers from Gainsborough to Hammer that made this new life possible. Petrie points out that what he calls the ‘Hammer aesthetic’ of colour film, period sets and costume are aspects exported out of Gainsborough along with key technical personnel including Fisher, Harris and Asher (1997: 135). It is also of course anti-realist and non-documentary in style. The lavish and non-realistic sets and costumes reflect the sumptuousness that typified a Gainsborough picture; former Gainsborough alumnus Anthony Nelson-Keys was particularly proud of the costume and set design on Curse (Dixon, 1991: 227).

The Gainsborough melodramas attracted a critical press as emotive as the barbs against Hammer’s films. Comments such as ‘nauseating’ were routinely applied to the films, as were criticisms that the historical dramas were unfaithful to the sources. The Wicked Lady, set during the reign of King Charles II (1660-1685), attracted criticism for multiple historical inaccuracies (Cook, 1996: 64-65). The critical opprobrium given to the Gainsborough films were a prelude to the similar comments made about Curse. Back in chapter one I also compared the critical reaction to Curse to the vitriol three years later about Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom of 1960. The comparisons are not absolute. The Gainsborough films were period features like Curse, but were not horror films. Curse was a horror film, as was Peeping Tom, but Peeping Tom was set in the present day and was not a gothic horror.

This last contrast is important to understand the reactions to Hammer’s film. Curse and Peeping Tom had almost identical critical reactions (the films were disgusting, debasing, cinema had stooped to an indefensible low, the people who made them were sick) but contrasting outcomes. Fisher’s film made his career; Powell’s ended his. These differences feed back into the nature of the films. Even if critics felt that Hammer’s film was disgusting, its horrors were safely back in an indeterminate, European past. Powell by contrast had brought his horrors much too close to home. The film was set in present day London and its queasy and uneasy plot of a young film technician murdering women was made all the more direct and confronting by Powell’s narrative showing the origin of the man’s perversions in his troubled childhood and by Powell casting his own son in the role of the disturbed little boy. The horrors in this way were immediate and in the present.

Although the year that Curse is set in is indeterminate it is at least 150 years earlier than 1956 and the action is remote where Powell’s was contemporary. Throughout the film Fisher reinforces the juxtaposition of the respectable and the immoral that the period setting promotes. Towards the beginning of the film he dissolves from a scene of Frankenstein and Krempe relaxing in their drawing room and chinking their brandy glasses together to one of their arrival at the gibbet where the dead robber is hanging. In a later scene in the drawing room Elizabeth rhapsodises about her and Victor’s mutual love and Fisher cuts immediately to Frankenstein groping Justine. Later in the film Fisher cuts from a scene of Frankenstein fastidiously pulling on his surgical gloves prior to performing brain surgery to him coming downstairs in impeccable evening dress, adjusting his cuffs with the same fastidiousness. Frankenstein’s action – moving downstairs into civilisation away from the charnel house of his laboratory upstairs – reinforces the differences between the worlds, but the same level of sartorial fastidiousness indicates that he belongs to both the respectable and the infernal domains that he inhabits.

The actor bringing the Baron to life, Peter Cushing, felt at home among the period trappings the Hammer set designers created at Bray. Cushing himself was an aficionado of history and historical artefacts, as the recollections of his co-stars and colleagues testify (Eddington, 1995: 114-115). In daily life and in interviews he even dressed in historically inflected clothing, including an appearance on Terry Wogan’s chat show in 1987 dressed in a nineteenth-century style suit that he had been given by the BBC when he was playing Sherlock Holmes. By 1957 he was already used to appearing in costume drama, having been in Laurence Olivier’s lavish period dress adaptation of Hamlet (1948), BBC Shakespeare adaptations, as well as playing Mr Darcy in the BBC’s 1952 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Besides the addition of the monster, the gibbet and the laboratory apparatus, Cushing would have felt right at home among the period trappings at Bray.

But because Hammer adapted not just from Shelley and not just from Universal, but also from the Gainsborough melodramas that reliable old hands like Fisher and Asher had worked on, their horrors were altogether more remote because of these period trappings. Nor were they taken entirely seriously; although the most frequently quoted reviews from 1957 about Curse are the ones which expressed horror at the moral corruption engendered by the film, others were more lightly mocking (Hutchings). They share this tone with the reviews which ridiculed Gainsborough for getting their history of King Charles II muddled up.

Although the continuities in personnel between Gainsborough and Hammer have been noted by historians of both companies, as has the basic point that Hammer was making costume dramas in the Gainsborough mould, these points deserve to be stretched further. Particularly so in terms of the how the original Frankenstein story was adapted into Hammer’s first gothic horror. More than just personnel and costume carried over from one studio to another; so too did important dimensions of the adaptation of sources into films.

One of them is the treatment of the aristocracy. Throughout Curse’s running time the audience is constantly reminded of Frankenstein’s aristocratic status, one missing from Shelley’s book (see chapter three). In the early scenes of his childhood he is already precociously arrogant, bullying his relatives and peremptorily interviewing his new tutor, Krempe. The adult character played by Cushing is in Pirie’s words ‘a magnificently arrogant aristocratic rebel’ who lives comfortably with access to women, wine and cigars (Pirie 1981). Curiously this aspect of the character would become more and more diluted as the Hammer Frankenstein series continued and the Baron became more and more bourgeois, living in humdrum surroundings (a doctor’s surgery in Frankenstein Created Woman, a guest house in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed, an asylum in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell) and looking less and less like the Byronic dandy of the first film. But in Curse, the central character is firmly located in a louche aristocratic milieu. Cushing’s Baron flaunts his aristocratic status; he toys with his gold fobwatch, goes out and about in a top cane, cloak and with a cane and bullies servants and family.

The dramatic potential of wicked aristocracy is adapted from Gainsborough, as is the locating of this aristocracy in a generic historical milieu. Gainsborough’s costume cycle came to an end when new management changed the studio’s focus based on the belief that audiences wanted to see films set in the present day (Harper, 1994: 121). By the early 1950s the costume cycle was at an end, but Hammer’s executives had meanwhile poached technicians and producers from Gainsborough in the belief that audiences still wanted costume films. Admittedly Gainsborough did not have a monopoly on period-set drama involving the bourgeoisie and higher echelons. Crime films set in the past ranged from Uncle Silas (1947, an adaptation from J. Sheridan le Fanu), The Mark of Cain (1948) and Madeleine (1950) (Gillett, 2003: 133). These films, especially the first, do though inhabit a similar world which emphasises the wickedness of the rich. They also invoke the emphasis on a lush period setting as a background to sexual tension and drama that is anti-realist in its aesthetic (Collins, 2012). These were costume films centred on the crimes of the aristocracy.

Study of particular iterations of aristocratic villainy in the Gainsborough films indicate that the source novels were adapted in a way to reinforce or even freshly create this aspect of the plots, a creative process that strikingly parallels what Jimmy Sangster did to Shelley’s novel. The adaptation of the novel Caravan turned what Harper calls an ‘amiable invalid’ into the outrageous villain Sir Francis, of whom in the film a whore said ‘he’s a beast, he’s the worst of the lot’ (Harper, 1996: 125). The honest aristocratic character in the novel The Man in Grey became in the film adaptation what Harper (ibid.) calls ‘a Byronic misogynist’. In all, deliberate adaptive transgressions created aristocratic characters in films that were ‘the site of fascination, fear, and unspeakable dark sexuality’ (Harper, 1996: 126).

The parallel with what happened to the republican son of a Swiss syndic in Shelley’s novel to the character that Sangster created and Cushing embodied is striking. One commentator characterises Cushing’s Baron as a ‘charming yet corrupt dandy’ (Newman, 2011), and the performance and the way the role is written traces an ancestry back to the wicked aristocrats of the Gainsborough bodice rippers, not to Shelley’s novel. The character in the film sexually exploited his maid servant, and more generally exploited friends, family and colleagues. Particular messages about aristocratic power are conveyed by the writing, acting and production in Curse, from the very fact that Sangster made Frankenstein a Baron to the ornate interior design of the chateau. The treatment of the aristocracy in Fisher’s films has been subject to contrasting critical assessment, including claims that they are distinctly anti-aristocratic in sentiment, a point evaluated by Hutchings in his biography of Fisher (2001: 100-101). Regardless of where Fisher’s or the company’s sympathies may have lain, the film does certainly exploit the potential for wicked aristocracy. So far we have heard that critics objected to perceived violence and gore in the Hammer films, but the dark, sexualised aristocracy of the film and the earlier Gainsborough costume cycles is an overlooked aspect of what worried critics so much. The very fact that Curse is set in an indeterminate historical period both allowed Hammer to foreground the aristocratic villainy of the central character but also meant the film was including aspects which had traditionally worried the British Board of Film Censors. Although the Baron was shown amidst a background of ornate period trappings, the dandified evil of the role remained a current and ongoing preoccupation with both cinema patrons and censors. The ruthlessness of the character was as contemporary as other cinematic and literary sensations of the period from Room at the Top to the James Bond novels (Newman, 2011). But the portrayal of a corrupt aristocracy was especially worrying.

The portrayal of the aristocracy on film was also current. The Board of Film Censors had long frowned upon more than just horrific content; films with working class characters were also unpopular, such as the Old Mother Riley films, and conversely the Board was also worried about offending the sensibilities of the aristocracy (Harper, 1994: 151). But by the post-war period the number of films being made with historical settings was growing, and historical settings allowed for the portrayal of a lurid and louche aristocracy. To an extent, the executives at Gainsborough were determined to have their cake and eat it; their films were as risqué as was possible in that era, and the company’s output was designed for mass appeal. But the company also played the quality card, positioning their films within a discourse of art and culture (Cook, 2009: 254). A similar strategy did not emerge from Hammer, although the industry professionals making Curse were themselves upholding the highest standards based on their many years of experience. But no similar claims for quality emerged from Hammer, whose executives were content to unleash the violence.

The Gainsborough films which showcased this decadent aristocracy deviated markedly from the source novels, as did Sangster. For this reason Cook is right to judge the costume dramas as hybrids, incorporating sources of inspiration and ideas from literature but also from other forms and types of storytelling (Cook, 1996b: 58). If we scrape away the accumulations that have accreted on Curse we get a similar sense of its powerful hybridity. It is a film that made daring use of Shelley’s novel, that plundered from disparate strands of Hollywood and British horror and which did unspeakable things to the costume drama genre. These are points from which the film emerged, not narratives of its later influence. Mary Shelley, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, reader of Milton, admirer of Swiss republicanism, may well have been surprised by the dandy at the heart of the story as told by Sangster and directed by Fisher, although there were the echoes of her friend Lord Byron. The dandified Baron traces his ancestry to a source beyond the novel to another type of storytelling and from a team that started out at Gainsborough but who brought their ideas on decadent aristocracy across to Bray.