Harmes - The Curse of Frankenstein

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ALSO AVAILABLE IN THIS SERIES

Black Sunday Martyn Conterio

The Blair Witch Project Peter Turner

Carrie Neil Mitchell

The Descent James Marriot

Halloween Murray Leeder

Let the Right One In Anne Billson

Saw Benjamin Poole

The Silence of the Lambs Barry Forshaw

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre James Rose

The Thing Jez Conolly

Witchfinder General Ian Cooper

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Antichrist Amy Simmonds

Dead of Night Jez Conolly & David Owain Bates

Near Dark John Berra

Nosferatu Cristina Massaccesi

Psychomania I.Q. Hunter & Jamie Sherry

Suspiria Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

DEVILS ADVOCATES

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN

MARCUS K HARMES

Acknowledgments

My thanks are primarily due to John Atkinson, editor of this ongoing series, for advice and encouragement throughout the entire process from writing the proposal to completing the work. Dr Murray Leeder, a contributor to the Devils Advocates series, also provided a number of helpful suggestions and I am grateful for these. Dr Matthew Jones of University College London answered a number of questions for me about 1950s cinema going. Dr Ian Hunter generously shared some forthcoming research with me. The interlibrary loans officers at the University of Southern Queensland have been uniformly helpful and successful in locating sources I have needed.

I dedicate this book to my mother and to Chloe and Suzette.

Bibliographic Note

All quotations from Mary Shelleys novel are taken from the 1985 edition by the Penguin Classics, edited by Maurice Hindle. Quotations from the 1957 film The Curse of Frankenstein are my own transcriptions.

CONTENTS

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 characters red silk dressing gown or the red berries in the forest near the Frankenstein chateau, and most horrifyingly of all, the creatures 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 Branaghs Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1994) to the adaptations of Anne Rices vampire novels. The recent commercial revival of Hammer Film Productions and the box office success of the companys 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 IN HISTORY

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,