Frankenstein's Daughter (Layton Film Corporation, Astor Pictures, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On November 20, 2007, I ran my partner (not yet my husband) Charles an intriguing "B" horror filmfrom 1958 called Frankenstein's Daughter, which I was just reminded of because last night (June 28, 2026) he and I watched Mel Brooks's and Gene Wilder's comic masterpiece Young Frankenstein and at least one of the gags in that film reminded me of this one: Dr. Frederick Frankenstein's (Gene Wilder) insistence that people pronounce his last name "Frahnkensteen" so he's not associated with his famous grandfather that created the monster in Mary Shelley's original novel. It's also worth noting that the androgynous appearance of the monster in Frankenstein's Daughter is, according to an imdb.com "Trivia" post, due to the producers having hired a man, Harry Wilson, to play the monster, and never having told their makeup artist, Harry Thomas, that the monster was supposed to be female. When he found out, all Thomas could think of doing was having Wilson apply lipstick to the monster's face.

I ran Charles a movie, coincidentally also something he had downloaded from a public-domain site: Frankenstein’s Daughter, a 1958 horror indie credited to Astor Pictures Corporation on the credits (usually Astor was a TV reissue label that handled the output of PRC and Monogram) and “Layton Film Productions, Inc.” on imdb.com. Produced by someone with the marvelously reversible name of “Marc Frederic” (“and directed by Frederic Marc!” I wanted to joke) and actually directed by one Richard Cunha from a script by one H. E. Barrie (presumably no relation to the creator of Peter Pan), Frankenstein’s Daughter is an intriguing film that definitely shows its origins for the drive-in market but manages to be a little bit better than that despite some pretty risible elements. The film opens with a pre-credits sequence showing Don (Harold Lloyd, Jr., who actually got an “Introducing” credit here) and blonde bombshell Suzie Lawler (Sally Todd) necking standing up, when he’s distracted by something and she comes face-to-face with something with a badly-fitting negligée on and a face that’s supposed to be monstrous but just looks like the poor girl tried to put her makeup on in the dark. Just when I was thinking that this film ought to have been called Frankenstein’s Bad Drag Queen (and certainly having just returned from the Transgender Day of Remembrance had something to do with that thought occurring to me, though Charles, who hadn’t been there, agreed with me!), the credits came up and in a series of expository scenes we learn that the girl with the bad makeup is Trudy Morton (Susan Knight, who later co-starred with Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson in the abysmal The Terror), live-in niece of nice-mad scientist Carter Morton (Felix Locher — and no, we’re not given an explanation of how a character with a comic German accent got an Anglo name like “Carter Morton”!), who claims to have invented a drug that can eliminate all bacteria, viruses and toxins from the body and ensure perfect health and long life almost forever. There’s only one catch: the formula for the drug involves a proprietary substance called “Digenerol” owned by a drug company that doesn’t want to sell it to Our Character Hero, and which comes with a nasty side effect: it disfigures the skin of anyone who takes it.

Carter and his nasty-mad assistant, Oliver Frank (Donald Murphy), have been secretly testing their formula on Trudy, which sends her out at night as a negligée- or bathing-suit clad monster and leaves her waking up each morning with memories of nightmares and what feels like the mother of all hangovers. There are actually two monsters in this film, the one Trudy turns into when Drs. Morton and Frank secretly feed her their monster juice and the one Dr. Frank is clandestinely building from bits of dead bodies in Dr. Morton’s otherwise disused wine cellar. It turns out that Dr. Frank, who from his first frame has been suspiciously coy about his background and scared to death about any involvement with the police, is really the grandson of the original Baron Frankenstein and is continuing granddad’s and dad’s researches. We learn this when the weird hunchback character Elsu (Wolfe Barzell), who supposedly is Morton’s gardener but who really is a relative of the hunchbacked assistants who served previous generations of the Frankenstein family, inadvertently addresses Oliver as “Frankenstein” and he turns furiously towards Elsu and says, “Here my name is Frank!” (Is that where Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder got the marvelous “My name is … Frahnkensteen” gag in Young Frankenstein?) Things heat up when it turns out that there’s a whole lotta sexual tension going on: Suzie seems to be throwing it at every male in sight — she’s already upset that Trudy stole her former boyfriend Johnny Bruder (John Ashley, top-billed and every bit as annoying as he was in How to Make a Monster — he’s got one of those overhanging 1950’s hairdos that looks like you could come in out of the rain under it, and he and acting remain strangers throughout the film, though at least in this one he doesn’t get to sing) — and Oliver attempts as close to raping Trudy as you could get and still get a seal of approval under the Production Code in 1958.

With his boss’s niece out of consideration, he makes a date with Suzie instead — and when she, too, turns him down he runs her over with his car and extracts her brain for use in his monster. (I couldn’t resist the obvious joke: “You can’t use her brain! She’s a 1950’s movie blonde and therefore she doesn’t have one!”) He thereupon refers to the monster as “Frankenstein’s Daughter” even though it’s all too obviously a male-based body and the only female component in it is the brain. (Earlier Elsu has complained, “We’ve never used a female brain before,” and I couldn’t resist the comment, “Of course we have! Does the name ‘Dr. Pretorius’ mean anything to you?” — though, come to think of it, in The Bride of Frankenstein the female monster’s brain was artificially grown by Pretorius using his plant-based methods and only its body was a woman’s.) The monster’s makeup is as close to the famous Universal one as makeup artists Paul Stanhope and Harry Thomas dared, though they surrounded the face with bandages and kept them on throughout the film even after the monster came to life. To make this movie even quirkier, Johnny Bruder is not only Trudy’s boyfriend and Suzie’s ex, he’s also an apprentice cop serving under Lt. Boyle (John Zaremba), who gets the call to investigate once the monster (the bio-created one, not Trudy in bad makeup) kills someone. There’s also a scene at a barbecue thrown by Dr. Morton for his teen friends (including quite a few actors obviously in their early 30’s) in which the Page Cavanaugh Trio perform. The appearance of a group like this performing the film’s obligatory musical number (a song called “Daddy Bird” which is clearly attempting to be rock ’n’ roll and falling short, though on its own terms it’s not bad and it’s certainly better than “You’ve Gotta Have Ee-Ooo” from How to Make a Monster) is a bit strange — the Page Cavanaugh Trio was most famous for movies like A Song Is Born and Romance on the High Seas, where they got to accompany Virginia Mayo (or her voice double, Jeri Sullavan) and Doris Day, respectively — and yet I’d rather hear a lightweight but genuinely talented pop act than the fluff that usually passed for rock ’n’ roll in movies like this. Frankenstein’s Daughter runs 85 minutes, which is about 10 minutes too long for its own good, and it’s really not much of a movie, but it has a kind of quirky charm and was certainly several cuts above the out-and-out exploitation film we were expecting.