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?
