Review: 'Frankenstein Lives: The Legacy of the World's Most Famous Monster'

Dracula may be sexier, but Frankenstein is the king of the monsters. His power, pathos, versatility, metaphorical possibilities, and iconic looks are all larger than manmade life. The story of his literary creation is much more legendary than that of Dracula's, and the subsequent tales he has inspired more profound. So it's only natural that this unnatural character has been the topic of many books.

Review: 'Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination'

From this past October 4 through May the 4th of 2023, The Science Museum in London is running an exhibition called Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination. Those who might cry "blasphemy!" at the idea of a serious science museum paying tribute to a world of made-up monoliths and wookiees hasn't been paying very close attention to sci-fi for the past two-hundred years. Ever since Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, the genre has been raising serious questions about the role science plays in our lives, using fantastical scenarios as a means to discuss touchy topics, and inspiring the next generation of astrophysicists, paleontologists, and biologists. 

Review: 'The Science of Women in Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts, and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films'

Horror lurks on a hostile terrain, and that landscape is unquestionably most hostile toward women. Throughout most of the genre’s history, women have usually been present to shriek, get slaughtered, show their bodies, and huddle in a corner while some dude tussles with the monster. This is a particularly sorry situation since it was a woman—Mary Shelley—who invented the horror genre as we now know it two centuries ago.

Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence are two horror fans well aware of this problem. Their new book The Science of Women in Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts, and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films mainly functions as an entertaining movie and TV guide for feminist horror fans frustrated by the lack of non-insulting viewing options. The writers basically whittle their list of feminist-friendly horrors down to a skimpy 29 films, which probably would not fill the first ten pages of the usual horror guide. So, as their book’s unwieldy title suggests, they pack their pages with much more than the standard starred recommendations. The Science of Women in Horror offers some interesting tangents related to the real life science, history, and psychology behind the films; analyses (a reading of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as a sort of horror/western is particularly compelling); making-of details; and interviews with actresses, filmmakers, and fellow horror fans.

Review: 'Frankenstein Alive, Alive!: The Complete Collection'

In 2012, writer Steve Niles (30 Days of Night; Batman: Gotham County Line) and artist Bernie Wrightson (Swamp Thing) began publishing a four-issue sequel to Wrightson’s 1983 comic adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. While the new story was somewhat slight, and gave the resurrected monster little to do besides ponder his newfound humanity and commit one decisive, redemptive act, Wrightson’s artwork is absolutely extraordinary. The level of detail is remarkable—you could spend hours exploring a mad doctor’s roomful of freakish curios—while the black and white work recalled both E.C. Comics’ and Universal Horror’s best. The monster, himself, was an original creation without Jack Pierce’s trademark flattop and “bolts,” representing the more human-like creature Shelley described while still delivering something truly monstrous looking.

That is where the monstrousness of Niles’s creature ends. He is thoroughly benign in the Frankenstein Alive, Alive! series, leaving the most monstrous deeds to a Dr. Ingles (an clear homage to “Ghastly” Graham Ingles, E.C.’s greatest renderer of oozing grue and a major influence on Wrightson). Dr. Ingles’s warped attempts to restore life to his dying wife provide the true horror of Frankenstein Alive, Alive! and infuse the plot with its meatiest moments. However, the real star of this sideshow—as Niles acknowledges in his introduction to a IDW’s new hardcover collection of all four issues—is Wrightson.

Sadly, the artist died of brain cancer before he was able to complete the fourth and final installment of Frankenstein Alive, Alive!, so at his personal request, Kelley Jones (Swamp Thing; Batman) was brought on to finish the final issue with illustrations based on Wrightson’s sketches. As we can see from those sketches included as valuable bonus pages in Frankenstein Alive, Alive!: The Complete Collection, Wrightson’s fine detailing was still in full force for the final chapter, though Jones curiously mutes those details despite the relative faithfulness of his reproductions of Wrightson’s sketches. Some artists truly are irreplaceable.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 266

The Date: June 22

The Movie: House of Frankenstein (1944)

What Is It?: “FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER! WOLF MAN! DRACULA! HUNCHBACK! MAD DOCTOR!... All the Screen's Titans of Terror - Together in the Greatest of All SCREEN SENSATIONS!” House of Frankenstein is the kind of matinee pap one would expect from a movie with such a tagline, but as far as matinee pap goes, it’s gold. Logic, craft, and all pretensions toward thoughtfulness are pitched out the crypt door, leaving nothing more than a gullet-choking feast for monster aficionados. If one could detect the last gasps of a once formidable genre in House of Frankenstein, at least the Universal monster movie was going to go out just as it came in: overflowing with fun.

Why Today?: On this day in 1816, Mary Shelley allegedly had the dream that inspired the book without which there’d be no Frankenstein and no house for him.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 14

The Date: October 14

The Movie: Andy Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

What Is It?: Gloriously repulsive take on Mary Shelley’s classic with the gloriously weird Udo Kier as a Dr. Frankenstein who believes the only way to know death is “to fuck life in the gall bladder”!

Why Today?: On this day in 1944, Udo Kier is born. The world still has not recovered.

Review: 'The Curse of Frankenstein (Devil’s Advocates)'

Marcus K. Harmes lodges a fair complaint early in his book on The Curse of Frankenstein for the Devil’s Advocates horror cinema studies series: Terence Fisher’s film is usually discussed in terms of being a first—first Gothic Hammer horror, first pairing of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee—rather than being “a creative output in its own right.” From there Harmes attempts to prove that valid point by putting the film into context as an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, finding its place in the tradition of British horror films, exploring its roots as a horror comedy, and comparing it to Gainsborough Pictures’ costume dramas.

The problem is that Harmes fails to connect his dots in a way that warrants all the discussion. While constantly referring to The Curse of Frankenstein as an adaptation of Shelley’s Frankenstein, Harmes spends 15 pages of his 88-page book explaining how it really isn’t a true adaptation at all. Has anyone ever suggested it was? Personally, I’ve always viewed Fisher’s film as an installment in a long line of works that merely use the novel as a nugget of inspiration, like Peggy Webling’s similarly unfaithful stage play or J. Searle Dawley and James Whale’s movies.

Instead of finding Curse of Frankenstein’s place in the line of British horror films, Harmes concludes that there really wasn’t one prior to Curse’s 1957 release. Here, the writer fails to connect a saucer-sized dot when he concludes that Hammer’s own Quatermass Xperiment is hardly the precedent many critics suggest it is because it isn’t Gothic and differs in “tone, style, [and] sources.” Harmes doesn’t even mention the fact that Quatermass features Richard Wordworth as a creature seemingly directly inspired by Karloff’s portrayal of the Frankenstein monster, or that Wordworth’s encounter with a young Jane Asher in Quatermass is a direct reference to one of the most famous scenes in Whale’s Frankenstein. I’d call that precedent.

The book’s biggest surprise for me is the revelation that Curse of Frankenstein was originally intended to be a horror-comedy along the lines of Abbott & Costello’s monster meetings, but once again, this leads nowhere since Fisher’s film most certainly is not a comedy. Harmes never reveals anything about what the Hammer execs had in mind for their funny Frankenstein flick. Another dead end.

Harmes’s only avenue of inquiry that leads somewhere is his comparison between Fisher’s film and the Gothic bodice rippers of Gainsborough Pictures, which employed Fisher before he found work with Hammer. But this only constitutes nine pages of the book.

I suppose Harmes’s point is that Curse of Frankenstein was an original work without much literary or cinematic precedence. My questions are: has anyone ever suggested otherwise and does an 88-page explanation of what a film isn’t adequately convey why it’s special?

Review: Philip J. Riley's 'The Return of Frankenstein'

Bride of Frankenstein went through several iterations on its way to becoming the greatest monster movie ever made. Philip MacDonald, who’d later adapt Rebecca for Hitchcock and The Body Snatcher for Robert Wise, imagined Frankenstein’s invention of a death ray as an integral plot element of the sequel to James Whale’s 1931 smash. L.G. Blochman, who enjoyed greater success as a mystery novelist than a screenwriter, had a more fanciful vision in which the mad doctor and his bride Elizabeth leave their troubles behind to work as puppeteers in a traveling carnival. John L. Balderston, who’d adapted the original Frankenstein, got closest to the film we know and adore, though his screenplay was a much darker affair, more faithful to Mary Shelley with a meatier role for the Bride than Elsa Lanchester got to play in the finished film. There’s no Dr. Pretorius in his draft dated June 1934, no Minnie, no humor or homunculi. The Monster, however, does get to talk a lot more and a lot more articulately. He also gets to milk a cow and eat a muskrat. Plus, Fritz is back, because Balderston apparently forgot that the Monster wrung his neck in the first film. So much for continuity.

Philip J. Riley compiled MacDonald and Blochman’s treatments and Balderston’s complete screenplay in his recent book The Return of Frankenstein (this was the preferred title for a while since the producer’s realized the Bride wasn’t actually Frankenstein’s intended…though Balderston does have the Monster refer to himself as Frankenstein a couple of times! So much for knowing who your main character is…). Like all entries in Riley’s “Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters” series (or the “Filmonster Series-Lost Scripts,” as it’s now called), The Return of Frankenstein is a juicy tidbit of film history cluing us in on what might have been. Sometimes the scrapped scripts are better than what ended up on screen, as was the case with Dracula’s Daughter, the most essential entry in Riley’s series. In the case of Bride of Frankenstein, we ended up with the very best monster picture imaginable, elevated incalculably by James Whale and William Hurlbut’s witty and imaginative revisions. The treatments and screenplay in this book aren’t nearly as much fun to read as Whale’s movie is to watch, but they are still fascinating, essential documents for any classic monster education. If nothing else, they really make you appreciate the depth of James Whale’s genius.

Ten Reasons 'Bride of Frankenstein' is the Most!

There’s a lot of brilliance packed into Bride of Frankenstein’s slight 75 minutes. Here are 10 reasons why James Whale’s final monster movie remains cinema’s greatest.

1. What of My Mary?

As we open on Bride of Frankenstein, we witness one of its most inspired scenes. We are not in a laboratory of blasphemous horrors but an opulent living room where literary giants Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley discuss the latter’s most famous creation. Informing her husband that Frankenstein “wasn't the end at all,” she proceeds to tell the tale of the Monster’s quest for a mate. There is literary accuracy in this scene, since Shelley’s original novel did, indeed, include a major subplot in which the Monster compels Frankenstein to build him a bride. There is also great cinematic ingenuity in this prologue. It is a way to directly transition into the second chapter of Frankenstein, to acknowledge its literary origins, and to tie the new monster to her true creator, as Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary and The Bride. As barrier-breaking ideas often do, the prologue had its obstacles. Editor Ted Kent wanted Whale to cut the sequence, feeling it detracted from the horror. The décolletage-baring gown Lanchester wore as Shelley set off alarms with the censors. Fortunately, Whale ignored Kent and a few minor cuts placated the censors enough for the prologue to remain, providing Bride of Frankenstein with its cleverest postmodern touch.

2. Woman… Friend… Wife

She only has four minutes of screen time in the film named after her, but Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein is without question the most memorable female monster in cinema history and certainly the first significant one. With her lightning-streaked fright wig and childlike awkwardness, The Bride has inspired countless imitators and been captured on an innumerable amount of merchandise. Her unsettling combination of morbid weirdness and early-Hollywood glamour (designed by Universal’s resident makeup whiz Jack P. Pierce) laid the groundwork for all of the sexy grotesques that followed her, from Vampira to Princess Asa Vajda of Black Sunday to Morticia Addams to Elvira to Lady Sylvia Marsh of Lair of the White Worm. Her hairstyle has been appropriated in one form or another by personalities ranging from Lily Munster to singer Dave Vanian of The Damned. Her teasingly brief presence in Bride of Frankenstein sparked numerous attempts to fill in the gaps (Elizabeth Hand’s imaginative feminist novel The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride; Franc Roddam’s film The Bride), yet she packs a lot of living into her four minutes on film. She learns to walk by leaning on the shoulders of her creators, takes in all around her with a wide-eyed mixture of wonder and disgust, tentatively considers a romance with an ugly but sensitive brute, and ultimately says “no thanks” to it all. That concise arch from childlike hesitancy to aggressive self-reliance makes The Bride a fully realized personality despite her lack of screen time. Couple that complexity with an iconic appearance and you’ve got the most unforgettable female monster of them all.

3. A Perfect Human

Review: 'Frankenstein and Philosophy: The Shocking Truth'

Open Court Press’ “Pop Culture and Philosophy” series has been holding up various films, books, TV shows, and video games up to philosophical scrutiny since the publication of its inaugural volume on “Seinfeld” back in 2000. It’s surprising the series has taken so long to swing around to Frankenstein since Mary Shelley’s tale is so philosophically pointed. Or perhaps it has taken so long because Shelley makes her point so clearly that it doesn’t lend itself to multiple interpretations that well. We are reminded of this time and again Frankenstein and Philosophy: The Shocking Truth, because a lot of the book’s 27 essays hit the same conclusion: neither the Monster nor science is inherently evil; it is Doctor Frankenstein’s lack of love for his creation that drives the Monster to destroy, and therefore, science must always go hand-in-hand with love, care, and humanity. Although the writers behind these essays may frame them within themes of theology, eugenics, or Marxism, the fact that Shelley’s essential conclusion is so often repeated can make for repetitious reading. So I often appreciated the essays with which I don’t necessarily agree (such as Keith Hess’s examination of whether or not the Monster has a soul), were inconclusive (such as Jonathan Lopez’s attempt to figure out who a man is that has been created from multiple parts), or didn’t focus as keenly on the topic (such as Skyler King’s primer course on moral relativism vs. moral absolutism that merely uses the monster as illustration) simply because they mixed up the perspective.

Several of the more divergent essays stand up on their own merits completely. I liked Elena Caseta and Luca Tambolo’s rejection of the flippant and erroneous buzzword “Frankenfood” for its originality, its soundness, and my own pet peeve about flippant and erroneous buzzwords. I found Caroline Mossler’s piece on the Monster as a pioneering revolutionary against a human-centered society provocative and particularly relevant. John V. Karavitis daringly blasts past Shelley completely to examine the morality of biomedical enhancements under the microscope of Dean Koontz’s reinterpretation of the Frankenstein story.

Some writers managed to illuminate otherwise unobserved angles of Shelley’s central theme or find particularly clever ways of approaching it. Jesse Dern clarifies the theme by explaining how Frankenstein has superficially written off his creation as a monster from first glance. Mirko D. Garasic inverts the theme by using Frankenweenie as an example of how a creator’s love can redeem a monster. Nevertheless, we should not accuse the multiple philosophers behind Frankenstein and Philosophy of unoriginal thought but applaud Mary Shelley. How many 18-year olds can construct a philosophical fiction so lucidly that the philosophy remains both unmistakable and valid 200 years later?

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Mary Shelley

215 years ago today, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was born. 19 years later she’d give birth to horror’s most notorious —or should I say beloved?— monster. We all know that much, but here are twenty other things you may not have known about Mary Shelley.

Monsterology: Brides

In this new feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

“Here come the brides”…

As they have in so much of our male dominated cultural, women have always taken a backseat in the horrifying side of horror literature and film. While there is no shortage of women playing the victim or the damsel in need of rescuing, far, far fewer have been the agents of terror. The most common—and ancient— she-monster is the witch. But another lady killer has also been a fixture of horror, and she’s been in the game a lot longer than 1935 when Boris Karloff’s Monster first demanded a mate.

Logically, it was a woman who first saw fit to touch upon the monstrous bride. In her genre-defining Gothic horror novel Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dwelled on a disturbing plot thread in which the creature does, indeed, demand a mate. He presents his creator with a grotesque ultimatum: build me a bride and I’ll stop killing and otherwise making your life less than pleasant. The plotline had any number of unsavory implications. The Monster had more in mind than handholding (“…one as deformed as myself would not deny herself to me”), essentially inventing a new strain of necrophilia in which both parties are deceased. There is Frankenstein’s equally demented destruction of the bride that bears traces of sexual violence (“trembling with passion, [I] tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged”). The doctor destroys the bride before she has a chance to animate and reject her nefarious fiancé, as she would in the film this plotline would inspire 117 years later. Rather than a havoc-raising monster in her own right, she is just another of the numerous female pawns destroyed during Frankenstein and his creation’s macabre chess match. Victor’s destruction of the Monster’s potential mate is payback for the Monster’s murder of Victor’s brother William, as well as the ostensible destruction of the boy’s nanny Justine Moritz, who is executed after being accused of the murder. His own mate obliterated, the Monster kills Victor’s fiancé Elizabeth on the day they are to be married.

Mary Shelley at Work
In Frankenstein, Shelley angrily, unflinchingly comments on the roles women so often played in reality and maps out the roles they would often play in horror fiction for centuries to come. As such, Frankenstein can be read as an anti-patriarchal diatribe, a criticism of a society in which women are built, controlled, and ruined according to the whims of men. Mary knew well of such things firsthand. Percy Bysshe Shelley left his bride’s name off the book when he submitted Frankenstein for publication, knowing that her gender might hinder its acceptance. Upon its first printing, she received no credit for her extraordinarily imaginative and influential work. Not surprisingly, Percy was generally believed to be its true creator, and even after his wife finally received her due credit upon the book’s 1822 second printing, her authorship was often questioned and continues to be to present times (see John Lauritsen’s The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, published in 2007).

The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneering feminist commentary A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, must have felt the sting of such sexist skepticism keenly. Even those who accepted that Frankenstein was written by a woman often used that fact against the novel. As related in Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s essential Frankenstein: A Cultural History, a writer for British Critic grunted, “If our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should, and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”

Contrary to that critic’s command, Frankenstein was not forgotten. Its brand of Gothic horror persisted similarly. So did the bride, and toward the end of the decade, Bram Stoker supplied not one but three monstrous brides in Dracula. And this time, they would not be destroyed before getting the opportunity to terrify. However, Stoker was no feminist. Quite the opposite, and his trio of brides are both fiendish abominations of female sexuality, hungrily draining the essence from poor Jonathan Harker, and embodiments of female subservience, cowering before their master like Mormon sister wives at the feet of their priesthood-holding husband. Shelley wanted us to sympathize with her women. Stoker wants us to be repelled by his. If Dracula’s brides are not the most flattering representations of women, they at least get the chance to do some damage, keeping Harker prisoner and Van Helsing and Mina at bay. They also eat a baby.

May 4, 2009: Psychobabble Presents… Frankenstein A-Z

By the late ‘40s the original Universal Monsters were growing a little tired. While the “monster rally” pictures House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) were loads of fun, the creatures (Wolf Man, Dracula, and the Frankenstein Monster) were basically depicted as parodic ghosts of their former sinister selves. So the Powers That Be at Universal Pictures had the stroke of genius to pair their most monstrous properties with their most hilarious comedy duo in a film that put an official end to the golden age of Universal Horror while sparking off a successful string of Abbott and Costello Meet… (insert monster) films. None of those subsequent movies was as frenetically hilarious and dementedly delightful as the first. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) finds Bud and Lou going snout to snout with Universal’s most terrifying trio, and the one-liners (Larry Talbot: “Every night when the moon is full, I turn into a wolf.” Costello: “You and twenty million other guys.”) come fast and fabulous. Notably, this picture marks the second and last time Bela Lugosi would ever play Dracula in a feature film.

Of the nine novels Christopher Bram has composed, none has garnered more attention than the one originally published as The Father of Frankenstein. That’s largely because the book was adapted into a major motion picture as Gods and Monster (a considerably better title) in 1998, winning director and writer Bill Condon an Academy Award for Best Screenplay Adaptation and scoring star Ian McKellan slobbering reviews and an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Frankenstein director James Whale. The book and film focus on