The Curse of Frankenstein

The Curse of Frankenstein was a sensation on its release on 2 May 1957. Queues formed around blocks and it was a financial success for Hammer Film Productions, the company which made it. But it prompted dire predictions from film critics that it would debase civilisation. Certainly there was a great deal that was tacky about this film, at least by the standards of 1950s Britain. It was made in Kodak Eastman Color, a crude film processing method that made up for its cheapness by giving the director and cinematographer a range of startling and vivid hues, especially red. The Curse of Frankenstein revels in its redness, from liquids in chemical flasks to the glow of the batteries powered by the cross-rotational discs of the Wimshurst machine to a character’s red silk dressing gown or the red berries in the forest near the Frankenstein chateau, and most horrifyingly of all, the creature’s red eye after it has been shot in the face (Meikle, 2009: 43; Collins, 2012). Further tackiness was ensured by the decoration of cinema foyers with laboratory equipment, skeletons and a mannequin of the headless creature suspended in a tank, against which members of the cast and crew playfully posed at the premiere pretending to strangle each other (Meikle, 2009: 44). Posters for the film carried the tagline ‘The Curse of Frankenstein will haunt you forever’. Another promised ‘No one who saw it lived to describe it!’ on a poster showing the star Peter Cushing toying with infernal apparatus and the monster looming over a screaming female in a negligee. Critics wished it had never been made and hoped that the film, the company making it, and the popular demand for their wares, would all go away. But my entry point for analysing this film as a landmark work of major significance in film history is the way it defied these wishes. While the hyperbole of the poster that the film will haunt us forever is now just a quaint reminder of canny movie advertising, the tagline still has meaning. The Curse of Frankenstein remains, close to sixty years after its production, a visible and important cinematic commodity. It remains in print as a DVD release; it has been shown at commemorative film festivals; and it remains a source of topical (and mostly appreciative) discussion in online sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and the Internet Movie Database. If it has not exactly haunted us forever, it has continued to matter to ilm-makers, film historians, theorists, bloggers, critics and viewers, who have extensively discussed the movie, its makers and stars, and its impact and influence, including over more recent ‘period horrors’ such as Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) to the adaptations of Anne Rice’s vampire novels. The recent commercial revival of Hammer Film Productions and the box office success of the company’s remake of The Woman in Black with Daniel Radcliffe in the starring role, has only served to again bring the Hammer name and its output of gothic cinema back into public consciousness. This gothic tradition has a starting point: The Curse of Frankenstein.

The film is remembered in a number of ways and for a number of reasons. Exemplifying the theory that even bad publicity is good publicity, Curse is remembered as a box office sensation that didn’t just make the careers of stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, but established the name and fortunes of the film’s production company, Hammer Film Productions. Hammer had been in business since the 1930s and in 1936 it brought fading horror star Bela Lugosi across to Britain to star in Phantom Ship (Miller, 1995: 43). The company fell into abeyance in World War Two but resumed production in the 1940s, overseen by Managing Director James Carreras and producers Anthony Hinds and Anthony Nelson-Keys. By 1951 the company had purchased Down Place, a Georgian country house in Berkshire that had been converted to house film studios (Miller, 1995: 45). Bray’s facilities were small scale in comparison to other studios and the tightness and closeness of the working conditions came to define the work done there by a close knit team.

Particular team members stand out. Film historians generally note that it is the film that launched the international careers of actors Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Cushing played Baron Victor Frankenstein. He was 44 years old when Curse was released in 1957. He went on to star in dozens more horror and fantasy films, including playing Grand Moff Tarkin in 1977’s Star Wars. Lee, now Sir Christopher Lee, is younger than Cushing (he was born in 1922). At the time of writing he is still going strong as the world’s most prolific actor, including recent prominent roles in the Star Wars prequels as Count Dooku (an obvious nod to his role as Hammer’s Count Dracula), in the Lord of the Rings films and The Hobbit as Saruman the White (more cinematic villainy deriving from Lee’s Hammer work). He is the recipient of a British Film Institute fellowship, a mark of cultural respectability far removed from the period of Curse’s release when the film and its makers and stars gained overnight notoriety, especially Lee who was covered in horrifying makeup as the monster. Cushing and Lee became the ‘unholy two’ in the press, inextricably associated with each other and with the horror genre (Hutchinson, 1996: 85). In reality they only appeared in 22 films together, but their impact makes it seem much more.

Lee, Cushing and Hammer are names that are tightly associated with each other, but not as a trifecta, as there are four names at the heart of this movie, Cushing, Lee, Hammer, and then Terence Fisher (1904-1980), the film’s director. Fisher had worked his way up the ranks from clapper boy to editor to director, including early Hammer science fiction genre efforts Four Sided Triangle (1953) and Spaceways (1953). Fisher’s films before Curse were modest; they were certainly competent and even received the occasional positive review, but provide no meaningful prelude to the sudden spectacular success and critical condemnation of his first gothic horror.

Success breeds success. Hammer’s managing director James Carreras and his team of executives, producers and writers realised they had a hit and began making sequels and other gothic horrors. In quick succession they made more Frankenstein films, a series of Dracula films, and began to produce other monster films such as The Mummy (1959), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and Curse of the Werewolf (1961). In the end, Hammer made seven Frankenstein films, almost as many Dracula films, and innumerable other genre efforts, including iterations of the Jekyll and Hyde and Phantom of the Opera stories, films based on the Jack the Ripper killings and others based on the gothic fiction of J Sheridan le Fanu. Hammer continued making horrors for nearly twenty years, ending with 1976’s To the Devil, A Daughter, again with Christopher Lee pressed into service. Cushing kept playing Baron Frankenstein up until 1974’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell.

This then is how Curse of Frankenstein is remembered, as the foundation of twenty years’ worth of gothic horror and of the commercial and cinematic exploitation of public tastes for gore and violence. In a similar vein Hammer is remembered as opening a floodgate of domestic British and international gothic horror production that began at Bray but which was swiftly emulated as horror again became economically viable. In Britain film makers Milton Subotsky (who had actually contributed an early draft for The Curse of Frankenstein) founded Amicus and Tony Tenser founded Tigon, both companies committed to horror production. The small company Anglo-Amalgamated predated Hammer’s gothic success, but also in the late 1950s moved into horror production following Hammer’s example, making among others the vivid Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and the early exploitation features Peeping Tom (1960, which attracted even worse press than Curse of Frankenstein) and Circus of Horrors (1960). The producer Monty Berman, a film maker almost as indefatigable as James Carreras, borrowed Hammer’s script writer Jimmy Sangster to create period horrors including Blood of the Vampire (1958) and Jack the Ripper (1959) (Hamilton, 2013: 56-61). Both were period horrors and Blood was made in Eastman Color, although as a protagonist its star Vincent Ball was no match for Peter Cushing and the films lacked the energy that characterises Fisher’s work.

The queues forming to see Hammer’s early movies were noted by film makers elsewhere, such as Roger Corman who produced a cycle of lush gothic horrors for American International Pictures, a company that subsequently made a number of horror films in Britain. In Europe, film makers such as Luigi Carpentieri (often credited under anglicised pseudonyms to try to convey the impression they might be British film makers) launched gothic cinema onto continental audiences, including the ornate Baroque horrors starring the British actress Barbara Steele such as The Terrible Secret of Dr Hichcock (1962) and Nightmare Castle (1965).

But this trajectory can bury the original film under the influence of its own impact and what it spawned. Success once consolidated and repeated can obscure the novelty of the original. Curse can and has been buried; most comment and discussion tends to diminish the film by treating as merely a starting point, not as a creative output in its own right. I aim to recapture the impact of this novelty by looking at Curse not as the origin of a tradition that by 1976 had gone stale but as something fresh and new for audiences in 1957 and as a dramatically powerful hybrid adapted from contrasting sources. Assessments of Curse are often looking forwards, to the next twenty years, and view Curse as the forerunner of those twenty years of horror production. Again, this buries the film, encasing it as the forerunner of later achievements. If we move our position and start thinking about the film the other way – as in where it came from, not where it went in terms of its influence – we get a more singular impression of a film that is a landmark in its own right and as a transgressive adaptation that generated high levels of audience interest.

My overall goal in this study is to assess The Curse of Frankenstein not as the harbinger of later horror films, but to consider instead the film’s presumptive relationship to its literary and cinematic past and as an adaptation that is a powerful hybrid of literature and film. In particular I will show the film, or rather its creators, as omnivorous adapters and users, not just of Shelley’s novel and not just of the renowned 1931 Universal Frankenstein. Rather the film appears in this study as a transgressive, textually complex adaptation, drawing on a diversity of resources. One way to think about this process of adaption is as triangulation: between the film, literary sources, and earlier film adaptations.¹ This process results in films with complex and often troubled reputations; they may not be as ‘good’ as an original, or faithful to the source or sources. But adaptations can also raise high levels of interest and they can be accessible. In 1956 Hammer’s creative personnel turned to Shelley’s novel to provide the basis of their film, and in doing so they were treading a well-worn path. But swirling around were yet more influences, from the dregs of poverty row horror and the Universal horror comedies, to the extremely limited indigenous British horrors from the pre-war period. Curse also shocked critics by placing the horrors in the recognisable settings of a Georgian drawing room and the surrounds of period drama and seems to be an unholy fusion of respectable heritage and disgusting horror.

Even the casting of Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein contributed to this impact, as before starring in Curse Cushing was known primarily as a television actor in period costume productions, including playing Mr Darcy in a BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The study overall will pursue this film’s production and impact as (in the eyes of almost all contemporary reviewers) as an offensive appropriation of earlier literary cinematic traditions. I read Curse not as a follow up to Hammer’s science fiction successes, nor as a revival of a flagging horror industry, nor as the modest first step in the next twenty years of Hammer’s horror production, all of which are the common takes on this film. Instead I locate it as a shocking example of a period or heritage film. The film places Baron Frankenstein, his fiancée, his servants and his monster in a mise-en-scene and setting adapted straight from glossy period dramas, but distorts them into ugliness and horror. On release critics trenchantly attacked the film, but hitherto studies of the film and its reception have not studied the way these reactions responded to the film and the way it was shocking because it was a transgressive adaptation.

In the chapters that follow I examine the creation and impact of The Curse of Frankenstein and how the film was not just a matter of bringing a well-known novel onto screen but in fact brought a range of different and even conflicting texts and storytelling traditions into dialogue with each other. I consider aspects of the film that have received limited attention or none at all. These include systematic analysis of the ways that it did but as importantly did not adapt from Shelley’s novel, as well as full consideration of points that hitherto have only been footnotes to the history of the film, including the early comedy drafts and the importance of the Gainsborough melodramas in shaping its style and tone. In order, the chapters examine the production history and reception of the film, the way the Hammer company constantly adapted, then three case studies of adaption: from Shelley’s novel, from poverty row and comedy horror, and from period drama. Thus in chapter two I consider in broader terms the adaptation of sources, before in chapter three considering the far from clear cut relationship between the novel and the film. In chapter four my focus moves to the traditions of horror film making prior to 1956, including the much maligned Universal horror comedy mashups of the 1940s and 1950s, films that are mostly disregarded by horror film historians but which I position as important aspects of Curse’s background. In chapter five I then consider a different film making tradition, the heritage and costume dramas of Gainsborough studios, assessing them as the breeding ground of the team that later coalesced at Hammer and as a key to understanding the transgressive nature of the film which critics found so shocking. But to start with in chapter one, I sketch in some introductory points about Curse including its narrative and what people thought of it in 1957. To reach that point we move attention to the confined, cramped but exciting environment of Bray Studios, where in 1956 a group of otherwise seeming staid and conservative film makers (almost all men) were embarking on a new project. This was something not before attempted in a British studio and it was, in the Britain of 1956, a frankly weird and unexpected thing to do: they were making Frankenstein.