Faces of Frankenstein: Reclamation in the Age of Excess
By Brian Keiper
In the 1980s, horror was obsessed with slashers, but a new Frankenstein film in the classic style managed to find its way onto television.
Help Me Victor Frankenstein, You’re My Only Hope
In the wake of the success of the stage revival of Dracula starring Frank Langella (later filmed by director John Badham and released in 1979), a production manager at the Loretto-Hilton Repertory Theater in St. Louis, Missouri named Victor Gialanella’s adapted Frankenstein-on-spec as his first play. It was successful in this smaller venue and bought by producer Joe Kipness to be reworked for a Broadway run under the direction of Tom Moore, best known at the time for directing the long-running hit Grease. Two million dollars (the record for a Broadway play in 1981), the casting of William Converse-Roberts as Victor who was also fired and replaced during previews, three delays in opening, and many scathing reviews later, the play closed on opening night and is now remembered as one of Broadway’s greatest debacles. By all accounts, it was a massive spectacle without much substance. Preview audience member Howard Sherman, quoted in the New York Times, said, “I remember the set design and special effects vividly. The play? Not so much.”
Produced by and originally broadcast on Yorkshire Television (now operated by Britain’s ITV Broadcasting), the shot-on-video adaptation of Gialanella’s play was made on a decidedly more conservative budget than its Broadway counterpart. This comparatively brief film (clocking in at 67 or 81 minutes depending on the cut) makes optimal use of its limited resources, specifically Ripley Castle and its surrounding grounds in North Yorkshire, England, and has one of the strongest top-billed casts of any made for television movie of the era including Robert Powell as Victor, David Warner as the Creature, Carrie Fisher as Elizabeth, and the great John Gielgud as the blind man, De Lacey. The one slightly odd bit of casting here is Fisher, the only American in the cast, who affects an English accent only slightly more convincing than the one she delivered (in some scenes at least) as Princess Leia in Star Wars (1977).
What makes the film unique from others of the time is the “love-triangle” component between Victor, Henry Clervell[1] (Michael Cochrane), and Elizabeth. To call it a triangle is perhaps something of a simplification. Though rarely explicit in the text, the subtext indicates that Elizabeth is in love with Henry, though Henry only has eyes for the doomed Justine (Susan Wooldridge), and Victor is rather more attracted to Henry than to his fiancée Elizabeth. All this falls by the wayside of course as Victor obsessively works to bring life to his creation, though there is a sense that he asks Henry to assist him not only for his medical mind but also for the pleasure of his company. The Creature escapes from the lab immediately after being given life and falls into the nearby river.
The scene with the blind man in the cottage in the woods plays more like the similar sequence in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) than most versions of this passage in other contemporaneous films. Like the Hermit in that earlier film, DeLacy lives alone and is grateful for a friend. He teaches the Creature to read using the Bible, where he learns the story of Adam and Eve. DeLacy is murdered by burglars while the Creature is gathering wood for their fire. He returns to find the burglars still in the house with his deceased companion and he kills them both before returning to Frankenstein Manor. As he approaches the house, in a scene that echoes the classic sequence with Maria in the 1931 version, he unintentionally kills William Frankenstein (Graham McGrath) and Justine, seeing the Creature with the boy’s body, runs off in fear and tumbles off a cliff to her death.
There is also a strong underscoring of the theme of man’s relationship to God and the primal sense of being rejected by his Creator. As the Creature enters the house to confront Victor, he falls to his knees saying, “You are God.” Having learned the story of Adam and Eve from De Lacy, the Creature begs Victor to create a companion for him. After Victor refuses and the Creature takes revenge by killing Elizabeth (“If I am to be alone, so will you”) he continues to beg his creator for help. Ultimately, both perish as the Creature pulls several switches in the lab that set the building ablaze. Despite its limitations, the film is not without its charms, largely due to the strong performances of the cast, above all from Warner, who delivers a highly sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of the Creature.
We Are One
Produced by Turner Network Television (TNT) in 1992, Frankenstein also follows the broad strokes of Shelley’s novel while varying wildly in the details. Unlike most versions since the Hammer era, Victor (Patrick Bergin) is more sympathetic, given that dimension from the beginning of the film with the depiction of his pro bono treatment of Ingolstadt’s peasantry which has been stricken by the cholera epidemic. He is also a medical professor rather than the rogue student, which differs greatly from either Shelley’s novel or most film adaptations. The film also underscores scientific responsibility over the more commonly depicted “moral lesson” of a fate that befell “a mortal man who dared to emulate God,” as Mary (Elsa Lanchester) claims in the prologue to Bride of Frankenstein. With Mary Shelley being an atheist, this science rather than religion theme cuts closer to her points than many film adaptations since the 1931 version, though Whale’s films slyly undercut the religious approach in clever ways that snuck past the Hays Code.
More than anything else, the film emphasizes the link between creator and creation in a way that had not been previously explored. Early on as the Monster (Randy Quaid) is being pursued out of town by soldiers, Victor, who is miles away, feels his pulse racing and is stricken with fear as the Creature tumbles off a cliff. Soon after, in a clever reversal of the famous Maria scene, the Monster saves a little girl from drowning but is shot in the shoulder by a hunter who is passing by. At the same moment, Victor is knocked off his feet by the impact and a bruise appears on his shoulder. Victor later confesses to Elizabeth (Fiona Gillies) that he made the Creature using his own tissues, playing on contemporary fears of genetic experimentation, DNA exploitation, and human cloning. Their connection becomes fateful as the Creature finds Victor through an almost mystical means.
The De Lacey scene once again follows closer to the Bride of Frankenstein template than the Shelley template as the man (John Mills) lives alone and teaches the Creature to speak. After hunters discover the Monster at the old man’s home and leave to gather a mob to capture and kill him, De Lacey leads his friend to a road in the woods where they are forced to go their separate ways. This sequence usually ends in tragedy, but here it ends with a tender and emotional parting. As the Creature returns to the Frankenstein estate, the usual tragedies occur in the accidental death of Victor’s younger brother William. Justine is driven mad after seeing the monster, believing she has seen the Devil, and a local clergyman declares her to be possessed. Afterward, Victor confesses to Elizabeth that he is at fault for creating the Monster and leaves in pursuit of his creation and, once again, the monster demands a bride.
In a twist, Elizabeth volunteers to have the mate created from her tissues despite Victor’s protests, and the two travel back to Victor’s laboratory in Ingolstadt. There is some vague hocus-pocus involving magnetic fields and a copy of Elizabeth begins to form in a saline solution-filled tank in the lab. The process is excruciating for Elizabeth and her screams stop Victor from being able to continue the process and he destroys the female creation. Naturally, the Monster is enraged and vows revenge. Victor and Elizabeth return home to marry and learn that Justine has taken her own life. On their wedding night, the Monster kills both Victor’s father and Elizabeth. Victor is arrested for the murders but escapes and runs off in pursuit of his creation, which he vows to pursue the Creature and persist until he has destroyed his shadow self.
As in the novel, the film begins and ends in the Arctic Circle on Caption Walton’s ship bound for the North Pole. After Victor concludes his story, the Monster finds and confronts him on the ship. The Monster begs Victor simply saying, “Help me” to which Victor responds “I will help us both” before pushing both the Creature and himself over the side of the ship into the icy waters where they perish together. Ultimately, the film is rather imaginative in its approach, if more than a little absurd, but strong performances from Bergin and Quaid make the film enjoyable. It falls into occasional tropes of over-dramatics but not nearly on the level of the most famous film version to lay claim to Shelley’s original vision.
Be Warned
Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a big, lavish, grandiose movie with a capital M-O-V-I-E exclamation point! Practically everything about it is over the top, from its performances to its set and costume design, its cinematography to its music. It is an attempt to capture the gothic literary style and everything that entails on film for the MTV generation. Greenlit after the success of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a film whose operatic style looks positively restrained next to Branagh’s, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a film in the mold of Romantic period music, an era defined by drama, passion, and grand emotion. It is the kind of film in which men grab each other’s lapels and demand information from them by practically shouting in their faces. Like Coppola’s Dracula, this Frankenstein film chooses to make its love story the central focus, in this case, the love between Victor (Branagh) and Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter).
As in the novel, the two are close even as children, Elizabeth having been adopted by Victor’s father Alphonse, here known only as Baron Frankenstein and portrayed by Ian Holm. In this sense, the film underscores the semi-incestuous nature of their love. Though not technically related, the two were raised practically as brother and sister. This is just one example of the film attempting to reclaim the radical nature of the novel for modern audiences by underscoring certain elements that are present in the book. Many of those emphasized, however, were not necessarily taboo in 1818 but have become so over time. Due to various epidemics such as cholera and smallpox, for example, many children were left orphans and would be adopted by families of means. The marriage between Victor and Elizabeth from this situation is played as a natural occurrence in the novel, but in the film is given scandalous implications with lines like “brother and sister no more” and Victor asking, “Are you my sister?” to which Elizabeth responds, “Sister, friend, lover.”
This “unnatural” relationship is of course also applied to the father-son relationship between Creator and Creature (Robert De Niro), referred to in the credits as “Sharp Featured Man” because Branagh had demanded that the term “monster” never be used in referring to the creation. De Niro, giving a far more nuanced performance than the rest of the cast, makes the case that this is the correct approach. Per usual, the Creature is sympathetic here. He only rises to the levels of rage and revenge after humans have repeatedly driven him to it. At various points, the Creature is given attributes unique to this film that deepen the pathos of the character. He is believed by the people of Ingolstadt to be responsible for the cholera outbreak, a kind of Masque of the Red Death-like personification of the plague. In another rather brilliant innovation of the film, the parts used to construct the Creature seem to have joined to create a new soul. He quickly learns to speak and play the flute (more of a recorder, really) from the blind man, Claude (Gerard Horan), because some part of him already seems to know how. As he tells Victor when the two finally meet, “Not things learned so much as things remembered.” This is a fascinating exploration of what it means to be human and asks, “Is the whole more than the sum of its parts?” Does the soul reside in the brain? The heart? The hands? Or is it something entirely separate?
The film also creates a new twist on the ideas of the female creature. As in the novel, Justine is hanged for the murder of William, who was actually killed by the Creature, who demands a mate from Victor and promises to be present on his wedding night if he refuses. As he begins work on the female creation, Elizabeth threatens to leave. To stop her, Victor abandons his work and marries her. Enraged, the Creature kills Victor’s father and later Elizabeth when, after delivering the film’s most famous line “Don’t bother to scream,” he tears out her heart with his bare hand. Stricken with grief, Victor carries Elizabeth’s body back to his laboratory, now in the attic of his family home in Geneva, and furiously works to reanimate her, cutting off her head and sewing it onto Justine’s body. The Creature returns just after Elizabeth has been revived and calls her to himself to be his bride. Victor tells him that she was not created for the Creature, but rather for himself. The revived Elizabeth, rather than accepting her new existence, rejects both of them and self-immolates by shattering a lit kerosene lamp over her head. In the fiery moments before she dies, she sets the entire House of Frankenstein ablaze in a climactic sequence that would make Roger Corman (who ended most of his Poe pictures this way) proud.
There is no doubt that the film is a cinematic achievement. No detail is left unexplored down to the Creature’s makeup regenerating (wounds healing, stitches falling out, hair growing) and the meticulous attention to period conventions and styles. The film is so grandiose, however, that it loses sight of simply telling its story. The bizarre choice of electric eels used to animate the Creature, the unnecessarily sweeping and complex camera moves, and the actors’ performances ratcheted up to eleven for every moment, all serve to impress but ultimately distract. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a spectacle to be sure, but it also falls into traps of unintentional humor and camp that make it fun, but rarely substantive and often exhausting.
Some Secrets are Better Left Undiscovered
One of the most surprising films of the reclamation period appeared a bit out of time from most of them. The Hallmark Entertainment television production of Frankenstein from 2004 is a beautifully made, reasonably faithful adaptation of Shelley’s novel that many, including myself, may write off outright before viewing.[2] This is a grave mistake for Frankenstein fans who, rather than finding a shallow, overromanticized version of the story, will instead find one of the richest explorations of the march of science, the secrets of the universe, and the nature of the soul ever found in a film of its kind. Though clearly made on a much smaller budget than Branagh’s film, Kevin Connor’s Frankenstein still features a skilled (and often big-name) cast, lush visuals, and excellent writing, but delivered in a much more restrained and meditative fashion that underscores the deep substance of Shelley’s novel while not distracting from that substance.
Though it generally follows the course of the novel, various details arise, and characters, perhaps because they are played by the most well-known actors in the film, are expanded to far greater roles from Shelley’s book. These changes, for the most part, tend to serve as commentary on the ideas and deepen the richness of the narrative. There is much more explored concerning Victor’s childhood, for example. The young Victor begins an obsession with death when he kills a rabbit while hunting with his father. By age ten, he begins studying and experimenting with halting death in its tracks, setting up a small laboratory in his bedroom. In one of the more “Hallmarkian” moments of the film, the beloved family dog Bruno is killed under the wheels of a carriage, which seems to have a greater effect on his psyche than the death of his mother (Julie Delpy), who dies after contracting scarlet fever. In a moment taken directly from the book, he witnesses a tree being struck by lightning that is “obliterated in an instant.” He goes on, in a nod to Whale and others, to ponder, “If electricity can cause such destruction, imagine what it could create.” This is all intercut with various debates on the march of progress invoking the likes of Galileo being tried as a heretic centuries before, but his findings now accepted as fact. Also entering the discussion is Captain Walton (Donald Sutherland) who listens to Victor (Alec Newman) tell his story as he faces the choice to continue to the North Pole for the sake of progress, likely killing himself and all hands aboard in the process, or turning back.
In this way, the film enters into the age-old debate, sparked at least in part by those medical experimenters who influenced Shelley’s novel, and continually shepherded by the novel itself. Like the novel, however, it is not a knee-jerk condemnation of science but rather a call to responsibility in scientific discovery and a contemplation of the consequences of such actions. Personifying this aspect of the debate is William Hurt as Professor Waldman in a role greatly expanded from the novel or from most film versions. He is the representation of all of Victor Frankenstein’s scientific antecedents. He is something of a radical in the university, encouraging progress and experimentation, but after discovering Victor’s work, he regrets having driven the student in any way toward it, urging him to consider “the unintended ramifications…the consequences.” Late in the film he blames himself for encouraging Victor “to dream” in such ways that would lead to the misery he hath wrought. As the film goes on, Victor begins to agree more and more with his mentor eventually lamenting, “Perhaps there are secrets that are better left undiscovered.”
The film does a marvelous job of creating empathy for both Victor and the Creature (Luke Goss) as few films do. Most pledge allegiance one way or the other, but that is not the case here, nor is it really in the novel. As ever, this is greatly illustrated when the Creature encounters the family in the woods, this time with a scene in which Felix and Agatha’s daughter Eva, again calling back to the Maria scene in Whale’s film, is unafraid of the Creature and brings him into the cottage to meet her grandfather who is playing the violin. The music moves the Creature deeply but of course, the scene is interrupted when Felix and Agatha return home and chase the Creature off into the woods where he sees his reflection in a pool of water and is horrified by his own appearance. Later, after Justine (Monika Hilmerová) is hanged for the death of William, the Creature takes her body down from the gallows and lays her gently before the cross in front of the town church as he whispers “forgive me” to her lifeless body. When the Creature meets Victor, he reveals that William’s death was accidental and that he placed the cameo, a necklace with a photo of Victor’s mother, on Justine’s body knowing it would bring guilt and harm to Victor.
The story mostly plays out as the novel does from there but what sets this film apart from many others is its visual style. It seems to carry a great deal of inspiration not only from previous Frankenstein films but even more from both F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog’s versions of Nosferatu (1922 and 1979 respectively). The long pursuit of the Creature is reminiscent of Harker’s (Bruno Ganz) travels to Dracula’s castle in the Herzog film, while the Ingolstadt and ruined castle scenes carry echoes of Murnau. A watchful eye will also find glimmers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), James Whale’s Frankenstein, and perhaps a touch of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965). For example, the image of Elizabeth’s dead body sprawled across her marriage bed greatly resembles similar moments in both Caligari and Whale’s first Frankenstein.[3]
This Frankenstein is an ambitious film, particularly for a cable television mini-series, but it also largely succeeds in those ambitions. There is some irony in the fact that Mary Shelley’s radical, blasphemous, revolutionary, scandalous-in-1818 novel was adapted in 2004 for a network owned by a company that makes greeting cards and Christmas ornaments, but the film more than delivers considering the often-maligned filmic legacy of the company that produced it. Frankenstein is a very literate film, both in its source material and in the film legacy that preceded it.
Though these films, like many period pieces, have a reputation for being tight-laced and stodgy, the Frankenstein legacy usually tends to buck these trends through the radical nature of the story these films arose from. Still, they can be rather heavy affairs, delving deep into the psychological and metaphysical realms with little relief. Because of this, it seems like a good idea to lighten things up in our next chapter and take on the long tradition of Frankenstein comedies and parodies, several of which qualify as the greatest horror comedies of all time. 🩸
Footnotes
[1] There are multiple variations in the spellings of character names and locations from film to film.
[2] I must admit that I avoided this film for a long time and dreaded watching it for this chapter. It is wonderful, after viewing many, many Frankenstein films, to still be surprised, and pleasantly so, by a film like this.
[3] This shot is most likely inspired by Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare” and has been reproduced in many other Frankenstein-related imagery including Lynd Ward’s illustrations for the 1934 edition of the novel and the poster for Ken Russell’s film Gothic (1986), a fanciful fictionalization of the writing of Frankenstein.
Sources
“A ‘Frankenstein’ That Never Lived” by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, Dec. 30, 2020, updated Jan. 4, 2021
Famous Monsters Funbook by William R. Johnson, 1983
Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Gallery 13 (an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.) Edition, 1983, 2020.
In Search of Frankenstein by Radu Florescu, 1975
Little Shoppe of Horrors #38: The Epic Untold Saga Behind Frankenstein the True Story by Sam Irvin, May 2017
Movie Monsters by Thomas G. Aylesworth, 1975
About
Brian Keiper is a featured writer for Manor Vellum. Brian’s also written for Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, F This Movie!, Ghastly Grinning, and others. Follow him on Instagram @brianwaves42, Threads @brianwaves42, and/or X @Brianwaves42.
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