“It sometimes gets overshadowed by its pop culture footprint, but James Whale’s Frankenstein is a great movie. That pop culture footprint is so vast and so all pervasive that I think the movie is taken for granted most of the time. Certainly, film people take it for granted, often preferring its sequel to the original item (this is a preference I do not share). But behind all the Aurora models and colorful cereals and novelty songs and what have you, there is the film. And that film is great. It’s a film that is a confluence of cultural streams that combine into a mighty river, into a veritable cataract, a Niagara, a Mississippi. The great flowering of horror movies in the 1930s is unimaginable without it. So is the explosion of science fiction films in the 1950s and onward. It is ancestor to much of what makes cinema cinema.
“At the source is Mary Shelly’s novel, which continues to haunt the popular imagination as one of the very first transhumanist narratives in the Western canon. The question of what comes after human beings--of The Singularity--is one of the central concerns of science fiction. It’s a story that finds its way into apocalypses of varying degrees, from 2001 to The Terminator to Ex Machina to Her to Robocop to The Matrix. Prior to James Whale’s film, though, Frankenstein existed in the hinterlands of the pop culture meme pool. There had been a couple of attempts to film the story in the silent era and there was a dreadful stage play, but those productions have left barely a trace on the cultural imagination and those films have mostly vanished. Whale’s film, though…Whale adopts the central idea of Shelly’s novel and discards almost all the rest, welding it to an image born of German Expressionism and the electrical wonders of Metropolis and Karl Freund’s image of The Golem and the lingering trauma of the great World War to create an embodiment of The Creature that has all but eclipsed other interpretations, including Shelly’s. Whale caught lightning in a bottle, if you’ll pardon the image. All those other manifestations of the Frankenstein story flow through Whale’s film to one degree or another. It’s the perfect mating of image and archetype.
“Central to the film and its enduring influence is Boris Karloff, who made the film when he was 44 years old. He had been struggling as a film actor throughout the silent era. He isn’t billed in the film’s opening credits. A question mark has been left in place of his name. Karloff wasn’t even invited to the film’s premier. The film made him a star anyway, because his performance is one of the greatest in film. When you first see him, with his sunken cheeks and dead eyes, he’s an object of horror, a shocking sight even today. When the sun shines down on him, and he grasps at the light, that horror changes to pity. Neither Bela Lugosi, who turned down the role, or Lon Chaney, who would have played it had he lived, could have done any better. It is significant that when the cereal people gave Frankenberry a voice, it was a parody of Karloff’s voice despite the fact that he speaks nary a word in this film (and his voice sounds nothing like its usual sinister half-lisp in Bride). Karloff is inseparable from the monster.
“As a visual object, Frankenstein is unusually sophisticated. The places where Dr. Frankenstein haunts are places of madness. The gravestones in the cemetery at the start of the film are all akimbo, as if their inhabitants are particularly restless. Few horizons in the film are horizontal. None of the walls in Frankenstein’s laboratory rise at right angles. None of the bricks run in straight courses. The film is populated by memento mori even in places where reason holds sway. It’s a ghoulish and oppressive film, an effect amplified by the lack of a score. It has almost none of the humor that Whale imparted on his subsequent horror movies. It means business.
“There’s a sense of transgression in this film that’s absent in the subsequent Frankenstein films too. This was the only Frankenstein film Universal made during the pre-code era and it likely could not have been made after the production code was enforced. The code sent many films into vaults for generations, but Frankenstein was too big for that. They left in the drowning of the little girl because the film makes no sense without it, but cut lines of dialog like ‘Now I know what it means to be a god!’ Its commercial life was by no means finished by 1934, and when it was subsequently released as a double feature with Browning’s Dracula, it was a blockbuster all over again, with lines around the block to see it.
“Some of the ripples sent out by Frankenstein are in the real world. The success of the film rescued the teetering Universal Pictures, which remains in business today. It’s also partly responsible for the unionization of Hollywood. Karloff was one of the founders of the Screen Actor’s Guild. He was motivated by his experiences making Frankenstein, which exacted a physical toll that followed the actor for the rest of his life. Karloff recruited actors on the sets of his subsequent movies and offered his garage to the rest of the organizers as a meeting place.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Frankenstein. I don’t remember when I first saw it, though I’m sure I saw it on a Saturday afternoon before I was seven, back when the Shock Theater package was still offered to television stations around the country. It’s been a constant companion to me through a life with movies, and whenever I see versions of Karloff’s creature show up in The Munsters or in The Far Side or in The Spirit of the Beehive, I smile because I know that I am not alone in my affections for him.” ~ Christianne Benedict
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