Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
A few years before I wrote a book about Frankenstein, I was asked by a popular website to write some introductory pieces on movie masterworks. So I did a few, and Frankenstein was one of them. The website went kaput not long after, and the piece never appeared.
Nothing is wasted, as Dr. Frankenstein himself might have said, so I mined the article for some bits and bobs in the book. But with Guillermo del Toro presenting his long-awaited F-film to the world (I haven't seen it yet) and a couple of extremely lightweight thinkpieces on Frankensteiniana appearing in the New York Times, I thought I would revive this particular monster. You will see that it is meant to be a sort of critical introduction to the movie.
It has as many famous moments as any film classic: the smashing of a jar that contains a human brain, the quiver of an inanimate hand, a little girl tossing flowers into a lake, an angry mob with torches. Here’s one not-so-famous moment from Frankenstein: Henry Frankenstein and his monster face each other in a burning windmill, as the doctor’s experiment comes to a violent end. Chasing around the workings of the mill, they pause to look at each other through the revolving gears of the windmill’s struts. Vertical beams sweep past their faces in matched cuts, and for a heartbeat their faces seem to have blended into the same person—scientist and monster, different sides of the same person.
Watching a great genre film, it is common to wonder: to what extent is the filmmaker a conscious artist? Thinking about this bit from Frankenstein, I would say the answer in this case is: very. In this visual coup, the film’s theme is evoked in an effortless, natural, yet potent way, the staging and editing are technically superb, and there’s even the hint of pre-postmodern self-reference—the effect of the vertical “wipes” across the faces strongly resembles a Zoetrope or Stroboscope, one of the primitive early forms of motion pictures. The director, James Whale, the man whose cinematic sacred monsters include The Bride of Frankenstein and The Old Dark House, knew exactly what he was doing.
The screen story of Frankenstein is one of those inspired Hollywood simplifications of a great book. Mary Shelley’s celebrated 1816 novel is many things, but it’s not a straight horror story. Whale and a team of screenwriters honed the basic idea down into a streamlined tale about a hubristic scientist, a man who felt the heady power of a god—with a good dollop of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari thrown in (in the year Frankenstein was made, 1931, Caligari was still exerting a hypnotic influence over Hollywood stylists). The film Frankenstein is thus a ripping good yarn, and a distillation of the increasingly fluid art of the early sound picture. But Mrs. Shelley still peeks through. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the heavy-booted creature would have clomped his way into an enduring place in our culture without the rich underpinnings of the novel’s Romantic ideas: civilization and nature, ego and id, gods and monsters.
(A peculiar sidelight to the cinema history of Frankenstein: so compelling is the franchise that even the story of Mary Shelley’s writing of the book, during a summer spent near Lake Geneva with her husband and Lord Byron, has been fodder for movies. Ken Russell’s Gothic, Ivan Passer’s Haunted Summer, and Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound all cover the events of 1816. So does the prologue to Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, which has the same actress, Elsa Lanchester, as both Mrs. Shelley and the hissing bride of the monster—a cheeky joke and a very intriguing suggestion.)
Frankenstein does not open with a polite scene of drawing rooms or sherry by the fireside. Instead, we are in a graveyard, its damp nearly palpable on our skin. The scene is in a heavy murk—are they really burying someone at night, or does the setting simply imply gloom? The visual plane is all askew because of cemetery's mounds, with large crosses and an ominous statue of Death rising at canted angles. Behind an iron fence, we meet two principals of our story: Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive), the excitable re-animator, and wild-eyed Fritz (Dwight Frye), his hunchback assistant. In short order, these two will steal the corpse (“He’s just resting,” says the scientist); as Henry digs up the fresh earth, he tosses a spadeful of it into the face of the statue of Death—shorthand for his attitude toward mortality. The grave-robbers then proceed to a local gallows, where they cut down a hanged man. In the next scene, Fritz pilfers a human brain from a medical school. Unfortunately for Doctor Frankenstein, though fortunately for film history, it is the brain of a criminal.
As though to allow the audience a chance to decompress after these ghastly shocks, we then retreat to a drawing-room—the home of Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), Henry’s betrothed. She expresses her concerns about Henry’s strange reclusiveness to Victor (John Boles), her disappointed suitor. With Henry’s old professor, Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan), they will go to Frankenstein’s castle/laboratory just in time to catch Henry’s dazzling experiment. The procedure, conducted in the midst of a lightning storm, is memorable not merely because of its flashing gizmos and crackling tubes, but because it lends credence to the idea of re-animation. All those levers and dials, and the elaborate pulley system to raise the “patient” to the upper reaches of the tower…damned if it doesn’t look like something that might actually work.
This is also true of the creature. The inspired make-up of the monster, by Universal’s legendary make-up man Jack Pierce, is one of the most familiar designs of the modern age, as recognizable as the Eiffel Tower or the curved script of the Coca-Cola logo. The monster’s head is practical as well as scary: consider the flat-top skull, convenient for brain insertion (if a bit roughly-stitched), with the discreet combing-down of hair to cover the scar. The masterstroke is the pair of electrodes protruding from the neck, which place the creature squarely in the machine age. Indeed the monster’s movements tend to be stiff and mechanical, more robot-like than the infantile flopping we might expect from a newborn.
Bela Lugosi, fresh from his Dracula triumph, was expected to perform the monster, but he was miffed at the thought of playing a big dumb lummox. (He did submit to a filmed make-up test, which has been lost.) It was Whale’s lover, David Lewis, who suggested Whale look at an English actor with a cadaverous face, Boris Karloff. Karloff had already appeared in dozens of films without breaking through, but Frankenstein would change his life. He suffered for his art: the complicated make-up took hours to apply, Karloff’s gaunt body was wrapped in heavy layers of bulk (his feet encased in weighted boots), and he had to eat lunch alone, as Whale did not want to reveal the monster’s design to curious onlookers.
Cinema history would have been considerably altered if Lugosi had stayed in the role, although he did eventually play the part, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Karloff made an indelible triumph. The Whale-Karloff conception of the monster is unexpected, sometimes startling. For the monster’s unveiling, Karloff backs into the frame, slowly turning to reveal his freakish facial landscape. Whale punctuates the moment with a couple of brief close-ups, held just long enough to register the fact that this thing is hideous beyond belief. The creature then staggers, tilting at an alarming angle (like those graveyard icons), as he crosses the lab. We might expect such an ugly thing to rampage, but instead the monster is seen grasping at the sunlight revealed far above him—a strangely moving sight, wonderfully articulated by Karloff’s long, beautiful hands. Whale even gives the hands their own close-up, as they seem to plead for an answer.
The following scene opens with a view of the monster in his cellar prison—a superbly designed shot, with a distorted composition that would have been right in place in Caligari. Karloff, chained to the wall, has the body language of a large animal in confinement, swaying back and forth in rhythmic frustration. All of which raises the question: why do we always call him “the monster”? One of Henry Frankenstein’s cruelest strokes is that he never gives his spare-parts son a name. The film clearly makes the creature a pathetic, tormented natural man, struggling to understand his place in the world and his relationship to his father. Maybe calling him the monster makes it easier for us to distance ourselves from the loneliness and alienation of the wretched creature.
Though film and actor have sympathy for this cosmic loner, Karloff’s creature has stomped his way into the nightmares of countless viewers. But he scares us not because he’s evil, out to jump us as we wander thoughtlessly through the forest or sleep in our beds, but because he represents something uncomfortable. He is the thing we dread being: outcast, deformed or disabled, an orphan, godless (pick whatever combination you want).
Whale brings the film to a swift third act, as the monster escapes and Henry and Elizabeth prepare for their wedding day; chase and conflagration follow. Universal cut the film in spots, most notoriously during a sequence in which the uncomprehending monster innocently throws a little girl into a lake to drown (a sequence restored a half-century later). One key line, at the climax of Frankenstein’s “It’s alive!” cackle, was erased by an added thunderclap: “Now I know what it feels like to be god!” cries the mad scientist, his lips easy to read even in the edited version. (David J. Skal, author of The Monster Show, asserts that this line was intact in the initial 1931 cut of the film, and edited out only for a 1937 re-release.)
Universal’s father and son team of moguls, Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr., also hedged their bets by adding a prologue. Instead of a cop-out, this turns out to be a delightful and puckish table-setter for the deluge to follow. Edward Van Sloan, who was quickly becoming the gray eminence of the Universal horror cycle (he was the vampire slayer Van Helsing in Dracula and Dracula’s Daughter, and performed a similar function on Egyptian relics in The Mummy), stepped out from behind a curtain and spoke to the audience. “I think it will thrill you…it may shock you…it may even horrify you.” Naturally, the effect of this speech is to increase the audience’s anxiety that much more.
The picture became a runaway hit, and continued to make money for Universal long after its first release. Whale resisted making a follow-up film, but the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein proved too delicious to resist, an ingenious (and very funny) successor that picks up where the original left off. In fact, the Frankenstein series, regularly brought back from the dead, has enjoyed good fortune. Bride is generally considered the greatest film of the Universal cycle (maybe the greatest horror picture of all), while Son of Frankenstein (1939, without Whale) is a fine, atmospheric third installment—and the source, incidentally, of many great bits in Mel Brooks’ loving parody of the series, Young Frankenstein (1974).
The monster continued his stint with Universal in the forties, doing battle with the Wolf Man, Abbott and Costello, and the rest of the Universal horror gang. Among the countless versions of the story over the years, Peter Cushing’s incarnation of the Baron in a series of features for Hammer Films is notable, and a 1973 made-for-TV version, called Frankenstein—The True Story, hewed closer to the Shelley novel than usual, with fascinating results; less successful was Robert De Niro’s muttering fling at the monster in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). James Whale himself became the subject of a fictional film, Gods and Monsters (1998), in which the monster still looms large in the ailing Whale’s imagination.
At the end of the 1931 Frankenstein, in the burning windmill, Henry Frankenstein was originally killed by the monster, but Whale changed the ending to allow Henry to live. The sequel revealed that the monster, too, had survived the fire. The box office demanded it, of course, but it also had to be that way: either they die together or they survive together. So much of the movie is about divided selves, doppelgangers, things stitched together. The ambitious Frankenstein wanted to triumph over death, and without a doubt, cinematically speaking, he has.
November 7, 2025
