“ M
ORE THAN ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in a mountain village in Switzerland, lived a man whose strange experiments with the dead have since become legend.” When those words – written in antique script against a fire-engine red
Technicolor background – were flashed on cinema screens across the UK in 1957, film- goers were unaware they were witnessing the first shot in a war against the staid con- ventions of the horror film. The picture was The Curse of Frankenstein, and though the lurid reds of the intro distinguished it from the atmospheric, black and white Universal horror classics of the ’30s and ’40s, audiences had no idea what was about to hit them. After all, they were familiar with the gentle, brilliant but misguided Doctor Frankenstein, creator of the cinema’s most sympathetic monster. And besides, fondue notwithstand- ing, had anything truly horrible ever come out of Switzerland? Director Terence Fisher’s mixed palette of dull greys, browns and flesh tones con-
trasted with the almost hallucinatory bright colours of Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory – bubbling beakers of green, red and blue liquid – which certainly heightened the film’s uncanniness and quiet horror. What really put audiences off guard, though, was the de- piction of Frankenstein himself, which emphasized his ruthlessness and disregard for human life. Both in Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel and James Whale’s classic 1931 adap-
tation and its sequels, Frankenstein was an idealistic seeker of knowledge whose ex- periments with the powers of life unleash a monster on the world. But Fisher, a veteran British director who’d been hired by Hammer Films to do for horror what the company’s successful Quatermass series was doing for science fiction, had a different Franken- stein in mind. Using Jimmy Sangster’s script, Fisher created a very modern scientist: ambitious, devoid of human feeling and utterly contemptuous of conventional morality, a man determined to wring the very secret of life and death from the corpses he steals from the graveyard. Luckily, Fisher found an actor up to the challenge of reinventing the good doctor: veteran British film and television actor Peter Cushing. The soft-spoken Cushing plays Frankenstein as a calculating, charming sociopath who is honestly dumb- founded by the moral objections of his idealistic assistant, Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart), who wants to use their discoveries in reviving dead
tissue to assist surgeons during long operations. Frankenstein wants nothing less than to create a new life form, a superman sewn together from the body parts of the physically powerful and intellectually brilliant. In one unforgettable scene, the doctor methodically picks shards of broken glass from a half-squashed brain – in full view of the camera – and viewers knew this wasn’t their parents’ Frankenstein. Fisher’s second crucial innovation was to present a monster as insidious as his cre-
ator. He chose Christopher Lee, a relative unknown at the time, to play Franken- stein’s creation, mainly because of his unusually tall build. Lee’s powerful physical presence, coupled with makeup artist Phil Leakey’s grotesque redesign, shocked audiences and critics, who recoiled at the monster’s tattered flesh, open sores and milky dead eye. Lee turned the monster into a vessel of pure rage and anguish, a mur- derous brute cursed to defy the limits of nature. The film broke new ground in its depiction of gore and bodice-popping maidens,
innovations not lost on England’s film critics. A reviewer for Tribune magazine said watching the film was degrading “for anyone who loves the cinema,” while C.A. Lejeune of The Observer actually apologized in advance to American viewers on be- half of his nation. One critic was closer to the mark when he accused the filmmakers of exhibiting
a “preoccupation with disgusting – not horrific – charnelry.” The age of the onscreen gross-out had begun, and critics weren’t happy about it. As is often the case, the howls of outrage from guardians of public decency only
drove curious moviegoers to the cinemas to check out Fisher’s transgressive spec- tacle. The movie was a hit in both England and America, where its lurid blend of gore, melodrama, dizzying colours and grotesque symbolism wowed audiences and influenced an entire generation of filmmakers, such as Roger Corman and Martin Scorsese, not to mention just about every Italian horror director for the next 30 years. Not lost on Hammer Films executives was Cushing and Lee’s onscreen chem-
istry. The two were soon paired in an even more daring reinvention of a classic movie monster – Fisher’s Dracula – and nothing would ever be the same, now that British horror had revealed its nastier side.
JAMES GRAINGER
Photos copyright Hammer Films Legacy Ltd.
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