average John Elder job that it’s tempting to as- sume Batt’s credit was a friendly gesture to a val- ued team-mate from someone else who preferred not to be credited with all the heavy lifting. Or, it may be that Batt had one good work in him, and was helped along by the committed involvement of Fisher, Keys and demanding players like Cushing—whereas Lee would just complain that he only had a few dreary lines and sometimes refuse to read them, Cushing made copious notes and insisted on script input—and Freddie Jones. However it came to be, MUST BE DESTROYED is an unusual Hammer horror for its complete pes- simism (for once, no one gets out alive), the cast- ing of Cushing as a villain several degrees darker than anyone else he ever played, the complexity of its “monster” (here’s a scary notion—the Fran- kenstein Monster with a gun!) and a reliance not on shock and surprise but on suspense. From the first sequence, in which a horror-
masked Frankenstein scythes off the head of a rival doctor for use in some unspecified experi- ment and then comes home to engage in a knock- down fight with an ordinary burglar, the film consistently comes up with scenes in which the peril of discovery or disaster ratchets up ten- sion: an abduction from an asylum with an arachnophobic patient who might wake at any moment and throw a fit at any intrustion; enslaved assistant Karl (Simon Ward) barring entrance to
the incriminating cellar laboratory by pretending to paint the hallway as the police search the house; a burst water-main that flaps the arm of a buried corpse from a flower-garden, while only abused heroine Anna (Veronica Carlson) is around to cope with the crisis (Hitchcock would have chortled at the icy blonde getting soaked and muddy as she wrestles the body from its grave into the under- growth); later, the girl venturing into another down- stairs laboratory just as the “monster” is coming round, with the suspense here coming as much from the possibility that (terrified of male pres- ences since the Baron raped her) the girl will hurt the blundering creature as from any threat he might pose to her. The emotional thread is car- ried by George Pravda and Freddie Jones in the same role, as the brain of Brandt, a now-mad colleague of the Baron’s, is planted in the skull of Richter, another pompous rival doctor, and awak- ens cured of his insanities (perhaps) but unable to reconnect with the loving wife (PEEPING TOM’s Maxine Audley) who stuck by him as a catatonic but can’t accept him in another body. Though often labeled gratuitous (with stories
that director and stars filmed it under protest) and absent from British and American prints for years, the rape is a key plot and character point—show- ing Frankenstein’s brute use of bodies living and dead to satisfy needs he feels on an instinctive rather than emotional level, and also motivating
A burglar learns not to burgle the Baron’s Bavarian basement in this grisly early moment from FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED.
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