THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN — Warner Archive Collection 2-disc Blu-ray Edition / Review
“I should rank The Curse of Frankenstein among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have encountered in the course of some 10,000 miles of film reviewing.” That was C.J. Lajeune’s humble, if not hyperbolic, opinion, in The Observer of 5 May 1957, of the film which established the signature of Hammer’s Gothic horror revival and the team responsible for it.
For Hammer, this was an extraordinary convocation of the talents they had been nurturing through the 1940s and 1950s, particularly director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, producers Anthony Hinds and Anthony Nelson Keys, cinematographer Jack Asher, production designer Bernard Robinson, composer James Bernard and make-up designer Phil Leakey. Nelson Keys and Hinds were instrumental in bringing the talents of Bernard, Asher and Robinson to the company. Keys, Fisher, Asher and Len Harris, the camera operator, had also worked together at Gainsborough Studios in the late 1940s. These individuals would create in The Curse of Frankenstein a template for Hammer horror that continues to be admired to this day and a key film in the evolution of British cinema per se.
It was the first British horror film in colour (Hammer’s first film in colour was The Men of Sherwood Forest, made in 1954), at a time when most British films were made in black and white, and the first of their films to pair together two actors now synonymous with Hammer, the legendary Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Its humble origins can be found in the aftermath of Hammer’s success with The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), itself a co-production and distribution deal with American film producer Robert Lippert who supplied the finance, American actors and distribution. Hammer, under its Exclusive moniker, distributed his films in the UK. After the film’s success and the end of the Lippert deal, Hammer were keen to seek further finance and distribution backing and it would be executive James Carreras’s association with the Variety Club that would lead him to Eliot Hyman, new production deals, and to Frankenstein.
Hyman, based in New York, was head of Associated Artists Pictures and he was, by a circuitous route, presented with an adaptation of Frankenstein from Max J Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky (they would later form Amicus, one of Hammer’s rivals in the 1960s and 1970s). He was unsure that the pair had the experience to produce the film but knew exactly who to approach and sent the script to James Carreras in London. ABC Cinema manager Jack Goodlatte also reminded Carreras that a connection had already been made with Hammer’s first Quatermass film, the Daily Sketch having labelled it “a poor man’s Frankenstein”, and he suggested a remake might be profitable. The Subotsky script was duly passed to Carreras’s son Michael, as Quatermass 2 went into production in 1956. The first draft script was timed and found to run about 55 minutes, too short even for a supporting feature, and Michael spent some time corresponding with Subotsky about its inadequacies and, more importantly, the serious legal problems they might face with Universal in trying to avoid duplication of elements from their 1931 Frankenstein. (1) He eventually asked Rosenberg and Subotsky to meet with Hammer in London on 9 May 1956.
A revised screenplay from Subotsky, now titled Frankenstein — the Monster, was submitted to the BBFC for their consideration. They immediately categorised it as an X and their reader Audrey Field offered that the script tended “to exaggerate what is brutal and nauseating, as opposed to what is merely good, tense horror.”(2) Hammer were dictated a memo requesting many changes, reducing the focus on the more horrific elements such as the scenes involving surgery on the monster, various strangulations, screams, rats and rotting corpses.
When James Carreras submitted this to the BBFC in June 1956, he also informed them “we are remaking in colour.” This rejects the received wisdom that it was producer Anthony Hinds who had pushed for the decision to make the film in colour. Hinds was all for making it quickly, in black and white, and earning what money they could from the project. Michael and Tony Hinds were both unhappy with the Subotsky script and Hinds was not enthusiastic about the prospect of a remake, either of Mary Shelley’s story or the Universal film. However, Hinds saw a challenge in that Universal were threatening litigation if Hammer proceeded. Rather than remake what had come before, he suggested Hammer reject the Subotsky script and turn to Jimmy Sangster to write an alternative script after Sangster had professed an interest in taking a shot at it.(3)
Joining Hammer in 1949, Sangster worked as an assistant director and production manager on many of the pre-Gothic horror B-pictures the studio made. By 1955, he had scripted a short film, A Man On the Beach and had written his first feature, X the Unknown (1956), which was planned as a Quatermass sequel but then changed when Nigel Kneale refused Hammer permission to use the character.
“a magnificently arrogant rebel… with an utterly unscrupulous and authoritative elegance”
Sangster’s screenplay reinvigorated the studio’s approach to the property and Hinds pushed for the film to get the resources he felt it deserved and, in collaboration with Anthony Nelson Keys and Jack Asher, he then budgeted and scheduled for the film to be made in colour. Meanwhile, Universal were getting twitchy about Hammer’s decision to go into pre-production on Frankenstein and, with impending litigation on the horizon, Hammer’s lawyers set to work. Their conclusion was that Hammer was free to adapt the original Mary Shelley book, as it was in the public domain, but that the company should avoid reproducing any material specifically created by Universal in their own adaptation. This would have repercussions down the line, particularly when Phil Leakey was assigned to design the creature make-up for Curse.
Hinds was meticulous and, after studying Universal’s Frankenstein (1931), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) — both directed by James Whale — and Son of Frankenstein (1939), he recommended using Sangster’s script as he felt that the Subotsky version used too many ideas from the Universal films, particularly Bride, and it would require some painstaking revisions. But he was confident, “we — that is Terry Fisher, Bernard Robinson, Jack Asher, Jim Needs [the editor] and I — were all brought up on the original Gothic horror tradition and I think we knew what it was all about; it may be something English. James Whale was English, I believe.”(4) Meanwhile, Eliot Hyman was kept informed of the decision to use the Sangster script and Subotsky and Rosenberg were offered a percentage deal for their work in developing the project. He was also party to Universal’s constant legal threats, which would continue throughout production of Curse, and was instrumental in Hammer closing a distribution deal with Warner.
Sangster submitted what was now titled The Curse of Frankenstein to the BBFC on 9 October 1956. His take on the Frankenstein story would usher in a significant refocusing on the central character of Victor Frankenstein, rejecting, as David Pirie notes, “the bland and self-pitying martyr of fate, whom Mary Shelley envisaged” and replacing him with “a magnificently arrogant rebel… with an utterly unscrupulous and authoritative elegance.”(5) This Byronic figure would also find favour with Peter Cushing’s approach to the role, one that suggested the Baron, while clearly an amoral sociopath, was an intelligent, passionate scientist steadfastly determined to prove his ideas.
As an indication of the bumpy road ahead for the censors and Hammer, the BBFC were equally appalled at Sangster’s script. Readers Audrey Field and Frank Crofts were unanimous in their apoplexy, with Fields describing it as “infinitely more disgusting than the first script” and “really evil” and Crofts attacking Sangster’s intention to “pile horror on horror” in “a monstrous script.”(6) Both recommended significant changes would be needed for the BBFC to even consider an X certificate. Among the various bones of contention, they demanded restraint in the depiction of the young Victor performing vivisection on a rabbit (a scene eventually dropped); the revival of a puppy in Victor and mentor Paul Krempe’s first experiment; the cutting down of a corpse from a gibbet; the attack on an old man and a little boy and the use of close ups on dismembered hands; the mutilated head that is destined for an acid bath (edited down to the minimum in the finished film); eyeballs; bodies in coffins; the creature’s body and face. They also found the association between this sturm und drang and Victor’s infidelity with his maid Justine, and her subsequent pregnancy, very unsavory.
Hinds ploughed on regardless and made some amends to the script as the £65,000 production took up residency at Bray Studios and he gathered together his cast and crew. Peter Cushing was an award winning television actor, fresh from success with the BBC’s adaptation, by Nigel Kneale and Rudolph Cartier, of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), and Hinds and James Carreras had been pursuing him, hoping his presence in a Hammer film would grant them a certain kudos. Cushing actually saw the announcements for Hammer’s colour Frankenstein in the trade press and asked his agent, John Redway, to submit his name just as Hinds and casting director Dorothy Holloway were considering a further approach to him. Even though James Carreras had, however, promised Lippert’s US distribution contacts that the film’s cast “would have no trace whatsoever of British accent” the film was cast completely with British actors.
It was a fortuitous move for Cushing. The theatre world, to be followed shortly by television and film, was in thrall to the era of the ‘Angry Young Man’ and ‘kitchen sink drama’ after the huge success of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in 1956. The plays of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, often vehicles for Cushing, were now in retreat. How apt then that, after he attended a private screening of X the Unknown to gauge Hammer’s suitability as an employer, “in one move he established a new career for himself and was given a rather different type of angry young man to play” when he signed on the dotted line to play the Baron on 26 October 1956.(7) For their fee of £1,400 pounds, Hammer engaged a perfectionist in Cushing, a meticulous craftsman grateful that at least one British studio hadn’t dismissed him as merely a television actor, an actor who would research anatomy, learn how to handle medical instruments and the intricacies of medical procedure. He was fastidious about props and costumes and first assistant Derek Whitehurst recalled, “he was very particular about the whole set up, the fob watch, the magnifying glass, the boots and the cane.”(8)
Robert Urquhart, playing the Baron’s tutor and associate Paul Krempe, had won an ex-serviceman’s scholarship to RADA and had joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1948. After working in rep and the West End, he made his film debut in 1952 with You’re Only Young Twice, followed in the same year by Tread Softly and Paul Temple Returns (one of his co-stars was Christopher Lee). This garnered him a contract with Associated British (ABPC). ABPC’s co-financing deal with Hammer for Curse suggests he was cast as part of the deal. Urquhart, initially enthusiastic about the project, became rather antagonistic towards the film and, according to co-star Hazel Court, regretted his involvement and even walked out half way through the film’s premier screening. Marcus Hearn and Jonathan Rigby elaborate on this in their commentary on the 2012 Lionsgate disc. They detail how he irked the Hammer executives by openly criticising the film to journalists. Rigby quotes a 1994 interview with him, conducted by Alan Barnes for Marvel’s short-lived Hammer Horror magazine, where he praises the competence with which the film was made but was horrified at “what it did” to audiences.(9)
“should look like it had been put together, literally.”
As for his co-star Christopher Lee, it was agent John Redway (he and Cushing shared the same agent) who volunteered him for the role of the creature when Hammer had requested to see tall actors. For a while, the casting was between him and future Carry On stalwart, the slightly taller, at 6' 5", Bernard Bresslaw. According to Melvyn Hayes, Lee came cheaper. He was signed the day shooting commenced, leaving make-up artist Phil Leakey with roughly 20 hours to come up with the creature’s appearance. Leakey came from a family of doctors and scientists, had developed an understanding of medical procedures and used his experience in the film industry to experiment with new materials. He joined Hammer, then known as Exclusive, in the 1940s and moved with them to Down Place, a country house on the banks of the River Thames between the towns of Bray and Windsor, which would eventually become Bray Studios. There he worked on the more elaborate make up effects for Stolen Face (1952), The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), X the Unknown (1956) and Quatermass II (1957) before being thrown in the deep end with Curse.
Leakey had to create a unique creature and Lee recalls Leakey didn’t have much of a brief and was constantly being reminded by Tony Hinds not to mimic the Karloff make up for fear of legal proceedings from Universal. As well as testing on Lee, Leakey would try things out on other members of the team, including Derek Whitehurst. “I remember two — one of which was totally grotesque and made me look like the Elephant Man… and another test on me which made me look like an animal, really”, recalled Lee of Leakey’s experiments.(10) The tests were deemed unsuccessful and, after Leakey struggled to come up with ideas, he and Lee discussed how the creature “should look like it had been put together, literally.” Using mortician’s wax, Leakey improvised to replicate the kind of surgical procedures the Baron would have used.
Although the cameras began rolling on 19 November 1956, with the priest’s arrival at the prison the first scene to be filmed, Leakey was under considerable pressure to get the creature make up ready for a press junket in London on 21 November. Leakey considered that the version of the make up revealed to the press was only the first steps to something more elaborate and he wasn’t entirely happy with the outcome, deciding it was “a bit of a mess.” To alleviate the boredom of replicating and applying the make up on shooting days, Lee and Leakey used to listen to the Olympic Games coverage on the radio. He also took Lee to Paxtons, an opthalmic specialist in London, to measure him for the prosthetic misted cornea that he would require for the creature, and was asked to create the severed head for the notorious acid bath scene, a long lost sequence of which only the briefest of shots remains, and the severed hands that Frankenstein proudly displays to Krempe. Leakey tells an amusing story that, as he drove to the studio with the head and had stopped to buy some cigarettes, a cyclist parked by his car and, alarmed to see the prop on the front seat, made a hurried exit. The head was cast in wax, inserted with rabbit innards, Alka Seltzer tablets and a reactive dye and suitably frothed away when Cushing dropped it into boiling water on the set. The BBFC later insisted on removing this shot.
“rich looking, slow, deliberately paced, bursting with unstated sex but with nothing overt.”
Director Terence Fisher claimed he was hired for Curse purely by chance because Hammer owed him a film from an unfulfilled contract and it was the next one in line. However, Hinds was adamant that he wanted Fisher specifically for the film because “he would at least understand what sort of films I wanted the Hammer horror shows to be” and that this new Hammer horror should be “rich looking, slow, deliberately paced, bursting with unstated sex but with nothing overt.”(11) Fisher had been a jobbing director since 1947 at various studios, including Highbury and Gainsborough, and was noted as a man with much experience in low-budget film making. “To the Public Danger (1948), an impressively staged adaptation of a Patrick Hamilton radio play, was the best of these, and some critics have retrospectively seen it as anticipating Fisher’s later horror work”, noted Peter Hutchings.(12) After the closure of Gainsborough, where he had directed four films, Fisher spent a period making support features, many of them for Hammer. Films such as Stolen Face and The Four Sided Triangle (1953) hinted at his talent and some of the themes he would articulate to a greater degree in the horror films made at Hammer from 1956 onwards. Fisher was a man of meticulous detail and recalled a fruitful collaboration with Jack Asher on Curse, where they both wanted to see how far they could push their experimentation with colour. “Jack Asher makes a very stylised use of colours… and can also create a highly surreal atmosphere with very little means. He believes in the dramatic power of colours”, recalled Fisher.(13) While shooting the encounter between the creature and the blind old man, Fisher also painted leaves and berries red to underline the symbolic use of colour, the hidden meanings it conveyed in the film.
Bernard Robinson, who could create magnificent sets out of next to nothing, first entered the film industry as a draughtsman at Teddington Studios in 1935. By the time he was working at Shepperton during the war, he was an art director. He first worked for Hammer in 1956, on Quatermass 2 and, when he came to design Curse, he already knew director Fisher and Jack Asher, the director of photography. He and Asher were sympatico on the use of colour on the sets constructed at Bray’s tiny studios, basically two large rooms in the house at Down Place. Frankenstein’s laboratory, lounge, hall and stairs were shot on one of two stages, the New Stage, while the prison cell was filmed on the Ballroom Stage. Robinson’s attention to detail is seen throughout, from lush interiors of Frankenstein’s house to sourcing the antique equipment and red fire buckets for the laboratory. Chief electrician Jack Curtis also created the electrical effects for Robinson’s laboratory set and, among the luridly coloured bottles, test tubes and valves, he installed a functioning Wimshurst generator that could produce lethal voltages in the wrong hands.
James Bernard’s music also became another vital component to what would become the ‘Hammer horror’ signature. Bernard came into Hammer’s orbit with The Quatermass Xperiment when Anthony Hinds already had composer John Hotchkis in mind for the film’s score. According to Bernard, Hotchkis fell ill and, when Hinds turned to musical supervisor John Hollingsworth to suggest a rapid replacement, Hollingsworth played Hinds a tape of Bernard’s score for the 1954 radio production of The Duchess of Malfi and they agreed to hire him. The Malfi score would be repurposed in parts for Curse, along with variations on Schubert and several trademark passages that foreshadowed the spectacular music that would adorn Dracula in 1958, syllabic music that ratcheted up the horror with “a slow and dominant, often descending progression of notes over a rapid flurry of orchestral dissonance, growing and building in volume and register.”(14).
The film completed shooting on 3 January 1957 and by 11 January, Hinds had submitted a black and white print of the first cut to the BBFC. They were still concerned about the sounds of heads being severed from bodies and wanted these and the screams of the burning creature at the film’s climax removed altogether. This was also when the head frothing in the acid was excised too. When they finally saw the colour version in February, they demanded further changes to shots featuring the severed hands, the eyeball sequence and the creature’s bloodied face. The film was eventually awarded an X certificate on 8 April and was premiered at the Warner Theatre Leicester Square on 2 May 1957.(15) And the rest is history…
Curse offers something of a test run when it comes to the creation of the signature Hammer style. It was also a style that performed as a barometer of the times. The film was released at a period when Britain, as a world power, was in retreat, when consumerism was in its ascendance and when deference to class and age were being challenged by the shifts in popular culture marked by the emergence of the teenager and the ‘Angry Young Man’.
It’s notable that for their first colour horror film, one based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the emphasis that was placed on the creature in Universal’s adaptation is entirely redirected to the character of Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) himself. The Baron becomes a rebel with a cause and as Peter Hutchings has examined, he is a symbol of Hammer’s exploration of authority and masculinity, “where the unassailable confidence of Baron Frankenstein, Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes sits along side slightly more troubled representations of professional activity.”(16)
The film therefore emerges at a time of shifting patterns in national identity but also within a period where masculine authority is being questioned. In Hammer’s first foray into Gothic horror these enquiries are mounted within a lush, period romance where troublesome desires are restricted to the drawing room and not the laboratory. As Marcia Landy succinctly puts it about Hammer horror, “such films worked over issues of authority gone awry and of beleaguered masculinity and femininity in an anti-realist cinematic language that invoked the sexual images and scenarios earlier identified in Gainsborough melodramas.” (17)
As the film progresses, the male dominated world of Frankenstein and Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) is purely concerned with exploring knowledge and acquiring academic and professional success. In fact, the two men, with Krempe as tutor to pupil Frankenstein early in the film, swap places in the echelons of authority. Frankenstein becomes the driven, professional supreme and Krempe the nagging moral consciousness of the film. Sangster and Fisher then use the characters of Elizabeth (Hazel Court), the child bride cousin promised to Victor, and Justine (Valerie Gaunt), the maid with whom he has an affair and makes pregnant, to puncture Frankenstein’s authoritarian detachment.
Granted that the female characters in early Hammer horror are never really given autonomy, their decorative presence is often enough to suggest female desire as a provocative influence on male authority in these films. Justine demands the sexual attentions of her lover while Elizabeth demands the proper role of the husband in domestic and social relationships. There’s tension here between men and women that reflects the view, in popular culture of the 1945–65 period, that women who deviated from their assigned gender role (here the categories of wife and servant) were often punished symbolically for daring to display autonomy of thought and action. Frankenstein is allowed to aspire and move between the domestic and private spheres whereas his women are not.
When women do threaten to interfere with his work, Frankenstein offers the guarded warning given to Elizabeth or the final punishment as reward for Justine. This theme would permeate Fisher’s work well into the late 1960s, “with male authority figures increasingly viewed with suspicion and doubt especially in their dealings with women.”(18) Frankenstein pays lip service to both women but rejects their attempts to become involved in his academic life. He even uses the threat of bringing Elizabeth into his experiments to manipulate Krempe into continuing as his associate. That academic life is, of course, devoted to the creation of his mirror image in the creature. It is a symbol of masculinity, his narcissism reproduced in the ideal, sophisticated man, with the hands of a renowned sculptor and the brain of Professor Bernstein (Paul Hardtmuth), an eminent intellectual.
His ambivalence to female figures is present from the start to the end of the film. In the opening, young Frankenstein (Melvyn Hayes) fobs off a young Elizabeth and her aunt with the continuance of an annual allowance and later, he’d rather salivate over a pair of severed hands than welcome her to her new home, satisfy himself with the maid, spend his wedding night in the laboratory consummating a marriage of a different kind and use his creature to murder/rape the pregnant Justine. The latter is one of the central scenes of the film, evoking German expressionist horror, an undercurrent of transgressive female sexuality, and situating the creature, already ‘aborted’ once by Krempe shooting it in the head, as his doppelganger in the relationship with Justine.
It is the birth of Hammer horror.
Curse tentatively and soberly gathers momentum, reflecting Hind’s opinion that this new horror, which would go on to revitalise the genre in cinema, should be conducted at a gradual pace. The film is framed by a prologue and epilogue and the events in between are a flashback related by Frankenstein from his cell. As noted on the Hearn and Rigby commentary, if you didn’t know any better then you’d almost believe that the first twenty minutes of the film was a Gainsborough bodice-ripper and not a horror film.
Sangster’s economic narrative takes a left turn only ten minutes into the film when Frankenstein and Krempe revive the puppy and he steers the script towards the grander themes of Frankenstein’s single-minded, god-like ambitions. The sedate opening evolves into a series of set pieces, each escalating the mounting horror as Frankenstein fulfills his ambitions to build a man and bring him to life. A quarter of an hour in and the film’s Gainsborough origins have been replaced by two men cutting a body down from a gibbet, a steely scientist cutting the corpse’s head off, casually wiping blood on his frock coat after he’s done, and then dumping the head in a bath of acid. All this is done with casual effrontery by Fisher, in full colour, and with James Bernard’s score of brass and strings ratcheting up the hysteria. It is the birth of Hammer horror.
Naturally, this is where the Cushing iconography begins too, with the close up on his bright blue eyes as he listens for the puppy’s heartbeat as an opening invitation to the sequence where he peers through a magnifying glass at an eye, admires a nice pair of severed hands or eyes up Professor Bernstein’s brain. These are further indications from Fisher where “apparent sobriety was punctuated by moments and segments that could in certain instances reasonably be described as expressive” and escalate in intensity towards the most explosive moment of all — the reveal of the creature, with its overcranked camera zooming into it as it rips off its bandages. This in itself shows how Fisher’s dynamism would eventually mature and shape the kinetics of Dracula (1958).(19)
There are also examples of Fisher’s maturing style in the way that humour is placed within the film. As well as the legendary “pass the marmalade, my dear” of the breakfast scene that’s adjacent to the murder of Justine, from which Frankenstein gets a certain amount of arousal by the looks of it, there is the subtlety of Bernstein’s final moments at the top of the stairs. Here, Frankenstein asks him to peer at a reproduction of Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson’ before pushing him to his death. His penchant for dropping in a bit of comedy is also prefigured in that brief moment at the wedding reception when one of the male guests overindulges in a series of toasts. British character actor Miles Malleson would provide similar comedy relief in Fisher’s Dracula (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and The Brides of Dracula (1960).
As well as Cushing’s meticulous and precise performance, praise should be directed at Christopher Lee. He is now properly acknowledged for a very physical and affecting presence in the film. The creature is like a puppet with broken strings, evoking a great deal of pity through its dumbness and inarticulacy, and Lee transmits the physical and mental damage in a spasmodic way, through his sheer physicality and mimetic abilities. It culminates in that disturbing scene where Frankenstein treats the creature like a lap dog, triumphantly presenting to Krempe its wretched attempt to sit down as some sort of evolutionary advance.
The Curse of Frankenstein is a collaborative effort and is not only the summation, at that point, of the talents of Fisher and his actors but also of composer James Bernard, production designer Bernard Robinson and cinematographer Jack Asher. Bernard’s music, all soaring strings, bellowing woodwind and brass, is established as a signature of Hammer’s output and his themes tease out the disturbing psychological undercurrents in the film. Robinson’s genius was to create luxury out of nothing and the laboratory set is simply but effectively executed and very much a taste of the lavishness to come. Asher uses colour very radically for the time, using green and red as symbolic totems throughout the film. The laboratory is particularly a kaleidoscope of colour but the red and green palette is accentuated in the costumes, especially Krempe’s bright red dressing gown and Frankenstein’s green overcoat, in the green tinge of the creature’s flesh in contrast to the garish blood that drips from its eye after Krempe shoots it, and with the greenery of the locations and their highlighted red leaves and berries.
As David Pirie notes: “For a combination of reasons, the rich mix of personalities who contributed to Hammer films originated a revolutionary kind of popular art.”(20) With the incredible success of The Curse of Frankenstein neither screen horror nor British cinema would be the same again. The re-emergence of Hammer and the restoration and rediscovery of its legacy will hopefully allow a greater understanding of the impact their “revolutionary popular art” had, and continues to have, on British cinema and culture.
Sources
(1) Bruce Hallenbeck, ‘The Making of The Curse of Frankenstein’, Little Shoppe of Horrors #21 (September, 2008).
(2) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films — The Bray Studios Years (Reynolds and Hearn, 2002).
(3) Bruce Hallenbeck, ‘The Making of The Curse of Frankenstein’.
(4) Anthony Hinds interview ‘Hammer Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, Little Shoppe of Horrors#4 (April, 1978)
(5) David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror — The English Gothic Cinema (I.B Tauris, 2008)
(6) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films — The Bray Studios Years
(7) David Miller, The Peter Cushing Companion (Reynolds and Hearn, 2000)
(8) Ibid
(9) Marcus Hearn and Jonathan Rigby, Blu-ray audio commentary The Curse of Frankenstein (Lionsgate, 2012)
(10) Christopher Lee and Phil Leakey, DVD interviews from Greasepaint & Gore: The Hammer Monsters of Phil Leakey (Tomahawk, 2004)
(11) Anthony Hinds, in ‘Fisher Fantastica’ tribute to Terence Fisher, Fangoria#11 (February, 1981)
(12) Peter Hutchings, ‘Terence Fisher’: BFI Screenonline.
(13) Michel Caen, ‘Hammer’s Old Guard: Terence Fisher’, Little Shoppe of Horrors #9 (March, 1986)
(14) Randall Larson, Music from the House of Hammer: Music in the Hammer Horror Films, 1950–1980 (Scarecrow Press, 1996)
(15) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films — The Bray Studios Years
(16) Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond (Manchester University Press, 1993)
(17) Marcia Landy, ‘The Other Side of Paradise — British cinema from an American perspective’ in British Cinema Past and Present (eds) Andrew Higson, Justine Ashby, (Taylor & Francis, 2012).
(18) Peter Hutchings, British Film Makers — Terence Fisher (Manchester University Press, 2001).
(19) Ibid.
(20) David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror — The English Gothic Cinema.
About the restoration
Courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection we now have a new restoration, “derived from a recombination of separation masters scanned at 4K 16 bit by MPI, before undergoing full restoration and color correction.” It’s presented in three aspect ratios: ‘open matte’ 1.37:1 (known as Academy), matted 1.66:1 (allegedly the ‘standard’ projection ratio used in Europe but documentation confirms that this was not an agreed standard) and the 1.85:1 ratio, which was how it was shown in some theatres, mainly in the US.
Jack Theakston and Bob Furmanek detail the adoption of widescreen formats in the UK here and confirm that in 1955 “the Camera Technical Committee of the British Film Producers Association was now recommending 1.75:1 as the optimum ratio for British productions. Cinematographers will be instructed to compose shots loosely in order to work from 1.66:1 up to 1.85:1, with 1.75:1 being considered ideal.”
1.37:1 is the full frame ratio Jack Asher shot the film in, composing the image to ensure that it was ‘safe’ at the top and bottom of the frame for subsequent matted widescreen presentation in those UK and US theatres equipped to do so. Therefore, you’ll notice that, in composition, there’s quite a bit of space top and bottom of the frame. On Warner’s new scan, while there is less information on the left of the image there is actually just slightly more information top and bottom of the frame than there is on the 2012 UK transfer released by Lionsgate. The matted widescreen ratios of 1.66:1 and 1.85:1 crop the frame centrally, matting an equal amount of space at the top and bottom of the frame.
Watching the 1.37:1 version, it’s clear Fisher and Asher composed quite freely with widescreen in mind, because there are many instances where the camera moves, tracks back or tilts, to accommodate what might be a matted widescreen presentation in theatres. One of the issues with the 1.66:1 ratio on the 2012 Lionsgate release was that it often cropped the very tops of heads off in the frame. Warner’s 1.66:1 scan just about manages to avoid this, by using the smidgen of extra space the new scan gains at the top of the frame, which suggests a sensitivity to the issue of framing during the restoration. It’s a more comfortable viewing experience on the Warner disc. Personally, the 1.85:1 image feels a little too tight for me but at least the choice is there. The 1.37.1 is the more detailed of the presentations.
A far greater issue with the 2012 Lionsgate image was the quality, irrespective of which aspect ratio you chose to watch it in. It was, as most agreed, very underwhelming and rather a disappointment. The image was quite soft, the grade lacked the intensity of colour that was expected and it felt somewhat colder and brighter. It may well have been the best that could be achieved with the materials available at the time.
Warner’s image is an improvement by dint of returning to the separation elements, recombining and scanning them to 4K. The picture is still rather soft, particularly in medium and long shots through the first half of the film but it noticeably improves in the second half, with slightly more intense colour and finer detail. Robert Harris, who knows a thing or two about restoring films, having worked on the spectacular restorations of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Vertigo (1958) and Spartacus (1960), noted on the Home Theatre Forum recently that this was potentially a result of processing the film using cheaper, redundant stock: “Kodak replaced their 5216 sep stock at some point in 1956 with the long-running 5235. One might wonder if Humphries [the processing lab] had some left over, and used it for Curse. The masters are just slightly soft overall. Scanning and recombine appears nicely performed by MPI.” Regardless of this issue, the image is more colourful, slightly more detailed in some instances, and displays a better balance between shadow and highlight. While not entirely perfect, the image does gain a lusher film texture and thickness. What also helps here is that the encode bit rate for the film itself is practically double that of the 2012 disc.
Special features
The 2012 UK edition is worth hanging on to as none of the extensive special features have been ported over to Warner’s two-disc edition. However, we do get some very welcome new features and a new commentary.
Disc One
- Audio commentary (on the 1.85 and 1.66 presentations) by Constantine Nasr and Steve Haberman. Both film historians need little introduction to any of you who have previously purchased classic horror films on disc or who’ve been reading Little Shoppe of Horrors magazine. As Constantine notes, theirs is a scholarly approach to the film, rooted in their comparison of the draft Sangster scripts and the Subotsky material. To that end they provide significant information about the Subotsky script and how it differed from Sangster’s and, furthermore, what was dropped from Sangster’s script. Both also provide much background information on the origins of Hammer’s approach to horror, as a convergence of their British noir realism and the heightened period melodrama of Gainsborough.
Disc Two
- 1.37:1 ‘open matte’ version of the film, restored and remastered from a new 4K scan. This was as shot by Jack Asher, the lighting camerman and director Terence Fisher. It has a text preface: “For decades after the theatrical distribution of THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, the film was subsequently enjoyed by generations of fans on television and later on home video where it was shown in an “open matte” 1.37 aspect ratio, which reveals more information at the top and bottom of the screen. While not representative of how the creators intended it to be seen theatrically, this iteration is included here as it is so familiar to the film’s legion of dedicated fans.”
- Resurrection Men: Hammer, Frankenstein and the Rebirth of the Horror Film. Publisher Richard Klemensen provides a great introduction to the various personnel and elements that aligned at Hammer to create a groundbreaking film that redefined the horror genre in 1957. (21:51)
- Hideous Progeny: The Curse of Frankenstein and the English Gothic Tradition. Sir Christopher Frayling provides one of the highlights of these short featurettes, using his knowledge of the horror genre, the Gothic, and Mary Shelley’s original concepts to demonstrate how Hammer took the established traditions of literary and cinematic horror and turned them to their own advantage. It’s particularly informative about how Hammer elevated the Baron in favour of having his creature at the centre of their film. (22:49)
- Torrents of Light: The Art of Jack Asher. Many fans will be pleased to see director of photography David J. Miller’s recognition of Asher’s brilliant use of lighting and colour in the early Hammer horror films, particularly Curse, Dracula and The Mummy. Asher was an essential figure in the creation of Hammer horror in the late 1950s and, quite rightly, Miller confirms the excellence of his craft. (15:15)
- Diabolus in Musica: James Bernard and the Sound of Hammer Horror. Animation and video games composer Christopher Drake examines the work of Bernard and his unique contribution to Hammer’s rebirth of horror. He traces the various motifs that carried through Bernard’s scores for Curse and Dracula. (17:06)
- Theatrical trailer. Newly-scanned in HD
The Curse of Frankenstein
1957
Hammer Films Production
Distributed by Warner Brothers
Warner Brothers Archive Collection Special Edition 2 x BD-50 discs / Region Free / Released 1 December 2020 / Not Rated
BD Disc 2: 1.85:1 and 1.66:1 (83 mins) / MPEG-4 AVC Video / DTS HD Master Audio English 2.0 Mono / English SDH subtitles
BD Disc 1: 1.37:1 (film) 16:9 (features) / MPEG-4 AVC Video / DTS HD Master Audio English 2.0 Mono (film) / Audio and subtitles may vary for the special features.
Discussion of the film was originally published 2 October 2012 at Cathode Ray Tube and has been expanded and revised for this 2020 review. Details of the Warner Archive release are completely new additions to the review.
