The Curse of Frankenstein (Hammer Films, Clarion Films, Warner Bros., 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, May 17) my husband Charles and I watched two 1950’s films on Turner Classic Movies. One was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the first Frankenstein movie made by Britain’s Hammer Studios. TCM’s regular host, Ben Mankiewicz, presented this with guest host John Carpenter (director of the Hallowe’en franchise films as well as the 1982 remake of The Thing, which I liked better than the 1951 original, and at least one masterpiece, 1988’s They Live) as the second half of a double bill with the original 1931 Frankenstein, made at Universal in Hollywood, directed by James Whale with Colin Clive as Frankenstein and Boris Karloff in his iconic star-making role as the Monster. I skipped the 1931 Frankenstein (I’ve seen it innumerable times and Charles and I had to make dinner sometime) and I hadn’t seen the first Hammer “take” on it since the early 1970’s. I attended a free screening at the College of Marin and didn’t care for it. I resented that, barred by copyright from using the original Jack P. Pierce makeup Karloff and his successors (Lon Chaney, Jr., Bela Lugosi and Glenn Strange) had worn in the Universal films (one of my favorite pranks is going up to people wearing T-shirts with the Universal Frankenstein face and calling out, “Jack Pierce!” Most people assume I’m under the misapprehension that their name is Jack Pierce, and then I explain that he created the original Frankenstein makeup – well, someone had to decide what the Monster should look like and figure out how to make Boris Karloff look like that), Hammer’s makeup crew – Philip Leakey, Roy Ashton and George Turner – decided to make the Monster (Christopher Lee) look like Marcel Marceau had been in a really bad accident.

The Curse of Frankenstein is the first Frankenstein film ever made in color, though Charles groaned when he saw the credited process was Eastmancolor instead of Technicolor. As we watched the film Charles wondered if they were deliberately muting the hues to evoke the early two-strip Technicolor process, and given the reputation Hammer had for upping the gore quotient from the Universal originals, it was surprising that the color was actually fairly muted and didn’t just splash red blood across the screen like all too many modern horror films do. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster did one interesting thing with the story; he presented it as an extended flashback opening with Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) narrating it from a prison cell where he’s been incarcerated for murder. Sangster also definitively returned the story to Mary Shelley’s original Swiss setting (Charles was startled that the opening title of The Curse of Frankenstein identified the locale as Switzerland – I think he’d always assumed it was Germany but Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in Switzerland and so she set it there) and changed Frankenstein’s first name back from Henry (in the 1931 film) to Victor (in Shelley’s novel). Director Terence Fisher copied a lot of the setups from the 1931 film, though he and Sangster put quite different “spins” on them: there’s a scene in Curse in which a blind grandfather is out in the woods with his grandson when he encounters the Creature (as he’s called in this film; they deliberately avoided using the term “Monster”) which at first seems to be a mashup of the scene with the little girl with the daisies in the 1931 Frankenstein and the scene with the blind hermit in Whale’s brilliant 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein – only in this version it’s the blind man who’s killed by the Creature while the kid survives.

The biggest single difference between the 1931 Frankenstein and the 1957 Curse is that Frankenstein himself is literally psychopathic. When he decides that his Creature needs a super-brain he doesn’t just send a hunchbacked assistant to steal him one; he murders his ideal brain’s owner, Professor Bernstein (Paul Hardtmuth), and harvests it. His guilt-ridden assistant, Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart), tries to wrest the brain from Frankenstein’s hands but only damages it in the process, and that (not the inclusion of a so-called “criminal brain” as in the 1931 film) is what makes the Creature a monstrous killing machine. As in both Shelley’s novel and the 1931 film, Frankenstein is engaged to marry his cousin Elizabeth Lavenza (Hazel Court), but in this one he’s also carrying on an affair with his maid Justine (Valerie Gaunt) until he strangles her for expecting him to marry her. One thing John Carpenter said he liked about The Curse of Frankenstein is it went into more detail than the 1931 film about how Frankenstein assembled the parts for his Creature, including a famous scene ordered deleted by the British censors but included in current prints in which, deciding that the head of the corpse he’s just stolen from a hangman’s scaffold is unusable, he cuts it off and throws it in a vat of acid, saying that this will wipe out all traces of its existence. (Apparently it didn’t occur to Jimmy Sangster that though the acid might eat away the flesh and organic parts of the brain, the skull would survive.) The other scene that fell afoul of the censors was one in which Frankenstein uses a magnifying glass to examine a stolen eyeball to determine if it’s good enough to use in the Creature. (This scene hasn’t been restored and it apparently no longer exists.)

One quirk of The Curse of Frankenstein is that the makers of The Rocky Horror Picture Show used the vat of liquid in which the Creature was brought to life from this film; even before I learned that, I commented on Rocky Horror that it was more a spoof of the Hammer Frankenstein films than the Universal ones. This time around I was more impressed by Peter Cushing’s performance than I was previously; the authority he projects and the profile shots of his aquiline nose show why two years after The Curse of Frankenstein Hammer decided to cast him as Sherlock Holmes in their 1959 film The Hound of the Baskervilles, with André Morell as Dr. Watson and Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville. Cushing thus became the first actor to play Holmes on screen since Basil Rathbone hung up the deerstalker and pipe after Dressed to Kill (1946), and of course Rathbone also got into the monster-creating business in the title role of Universal’s Son of Frankenstein (1939). The Curse of Frankenstein is an O.K. movie, not terribly inspired and certainly not at the level of James Whale’s two takes on the Frankenstein mythos. John Carpenter couldn’t help but joke about how it ended – Frankenstein is led off to be guillotined for the murders of Bernstein and Justine, which struck me as odd since I hadn’t thought the guillotine was ever used as a means of execution outside France and its colonies – when the next year he again appeared as Frankenstein in Hammer’s immediate sequel, The Revenge of Frankenstein! The imdb.com synopsis for Revenge explains, “Having escaped execution and assumed an alias, Baron Frankenstein transplants his deformed underling's brain into a perfect body, but the result proves to be mortally perilous.”