Faces of Frankenstein: The Weirdos
By Brian Keiper
During the same years that Universal and Hammer were making their respective Frankenstein series, a number of other Frankenstein and Frankenstein-adjacent films were also being made. Some are official spins on the myth itself, while others are variations on the themes of mad surgery (specifically brain transplants) and medical resurrection of the dead. These movies vary wildly in quality and ambition, but all have an aspect in common — they are the misfit toys of the classic era that began in 1931 and continued to roughly 1974 when Hammer released its final Frankenstein feature, and many of them are very, very weird. Still, they do not quite fit the definition of parody since these films are made and presented with straight-faced sincerity. So, it’s time to strap in for robot monsters, apes with human brains, revived gangsters, teenage monstrosities, and even a kaiju. Ladies and gentlemen…the Weirdos.
Not Quite Frankenstein
Many of these films are technically speaking not Frankenstein movies, but the ideas and themes are similar enough that they warrant at least a mention if not occasional full-blown analysis. Most of the films made before Hammer revived the story in 1957 fall into this category. In exploring the more far-afield films here and in other categories, the definition of “Frankenstein film” becomes more nebulous. I have chosen to define it this way: films that depict the reanimation of the dead by deliberate scientific means. One of the earliest riffs on the mythos in this era came from Universal itself in the serial The Phantom Creeps from 1939 starring Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist who creates a rather Frankensteinian robot as one of his weapons of mass destruction. Universal had made a serial in a similar vein before, The Vanishing Shadow (1934). Neither is particularly good, but the mad scientist-infused elements of the story bear more than a passing resemblance to Universal’s far more revered output, down to Edward van Sloan in a supporting role in Phantom.
Far more notable is Michael Curtiz’s The Walking Dead (1936) starring Boris Karloff, one of the most artistically nuanced and intelligent horror films of the 1930s. Curtiz is perhaps the greatest journeyman in Hollywood history with output as diverse as the horror films Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933),(F1) action-adventure films like Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940), the great film noir Mildred Pierce (1945), westerns, gangster films, and perhaps most notable of all Casablanca (1942). The Walking Dead was Curtiz’s third and final foray into horror and stars Karloff as John Elman, a pianist recently released from prison after serving ten years for second-degree murder. He is framed by gangsters for the murder of the judge who sentenced him ten years before and dies in the electric chair just moments before witnesses who can clear his name come forward. Dr. Evan Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn), a benevolent scientist who has been conducting rather Frankensteinian experiments on dead tissue, manages to reanimate Elman in a sequence very reminiscent of the creation scenes from James Whale’s Universal films.
The Walking Dead is a marriage of horror and the genre Warner Bros. (the studio that produced the film) was best known for in the 1930s, the gangster picture, as well as being an exceptional revenge film. Beyond that, it is a powerful interrogation of the great questions of life and death, specifically, is there an afterlife? and could someone return from it? Beaumont very specifically asks, “What effect did the experience of death have on his subconscious mind? Can he remember?” But Elman again passes into death before he can reveal any memories to Beaumont. It is a film that asks, “What is the nature of the soul?” and suggests that very human pursuits such as the arts, specifically music, are the conduits and language of the soul. In the end, the film requests that we “leave the dead to our Maker” which dovetails nicely with the themes of official Frankenstein films of the era. Like many Warner Bros. films, it also does not shy away from hot-button political issues, in this case, one that is still with us nearly ninety years later, the death penalty. All told, The Walking Dead is one of the finest, and most overlooked, horror films of the 1930s.
Related to The Walking Dead for several reasons including the look of the titular character (the shock of white hair), the revival of an electrocuted man, and being the sequel to Michael Curtiz’s first horror film, Doctor X, is The Return of Doctor X (1939). Actress Angela Merrova (Lya Lys) is found dead by newspaperman Walt “Wichita” Garrett, but her body goes missing by the time the cops arrive. Days later, Merrova arrives at the newspaper offices to inform them she’s suing the paper for $100,000 for defamation. Garrett is fired and begins a personal investigation into the matter, coming across a corpse or two drained of blood via surgical means along the way. In visiting the hematologist Dr. Flegg (John Litel), Dr. Rhodes (Dennis Morgan) meets Flegg’s assistant, Quense (pronounced Kane), played by Humphrey Bogart just before he broke into superstardom with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca. It is eventually discovered that Quense is Dr. Julian Xavier who was sent to the electric chair for horrifying experiments on children and brought back to life by Flegg through a combination of blood transfusion, and electrical and chemical means. The loose link to Doctor X is synthetic flesh in the original and synthetic blood in the sequel and the result is a vampire story by way of the Frankenstein mythos.(F2) The Return of Doctor X is a reasonably entertaining B-picture though it has little to do with its predecessor and practically none of its creepiness and style.
Over at Universal, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were teamed up six times between 1934 and 1940(F3) and two of those collaborations had at least undertones of Frankenstein. One was the official series installment Son of Frankenstein (1939) and the other was the last film they both appeared in for the studio, though they do not share any scenes, Black Friday (1940). Karloff plays Dr. Ernest Sovec whose friend, Professor George Kingsley (Stanley Ridges), is injured by gangsters on Friday the 13th. To save his life, Sovec transplants part of the brain of gang leader Red Cannon, who was also injured in the accident, into his friend’s skull with predictably monstrous results. Ultimately the film is a mixture of underworld revenge tale, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Frankenstein with Lugosi in the supporting role of Cannon’s gangland rival Eric Marnay.
Universal danced on the fringes of the Frankenstein myth in several more films in the early 40s. The Monster and the Girl (1941) is another gangland revenge tale with a horror twist. In it, a young woman, Susan Webster (Ellen Drew), is forced into a life of sex work by gangsters. When her ally, Scott Webster (Phillip Terry), is wrongfully executed, he carries out vengeance against her tormentors when his brain is transplanted into the body of a gorilla. Man Made Monster (1941 — aka Atomic Monster),(F4) directed by George Waggner, stars Lon Chaney, Jr.(F5) as Dynamo Dan “The Electrical Man” McCormick, a carnival performer who is mysteriously impervious to electricity. He is experimented upon by self-professed mad scientist Dr. Paul Rigas (Lionel Atwill), who is obsessed with the connections between electricity and life and carries a subtext of Nazi-like motivations often found in villainous characters of the time. The experiments turn Dan into an electrical monster who wreaks havoc at the bidding of Dr. Rigas with only Dr. John Lawrence (Samuel S. Hinds)(F6) and his niece June (Anne Nagel) standing in his way. Atwill also features in The Strange Case of Dr. Rx (1942), a very strange and disjointed film involving a serial killer who has plans to switch the brains of Private Detective Jerry Church (Patric Knowles) and, once again, a gorilla.
The gorilla trend continued with the “Ape Woman” trilogy beginning with Captive Wild Woman (1943), in which John Carradine’s Dr. Sigmund Walters experiments with the glands and brains of women on a gorilla, which transforms into a beautiful woman, Paula Dupree the Ape Woman (Acquanetta), in the process. Paula’s story continues in Jungle Woman (1944), which has little to do with any mad scientist’s work. About twenty-five percent of this film is reused footage from the first film to pad out its already brief runtime. In the final installment, The Jungle Captive (1945), Dr. Stendahl (Otto Kruger) grows tired of reanimating dead monkeys and turns his ambitions toward human resurrection beginning with Paula the Ape Woman, this time played by Vicky Lane, using the blood of his assistant Ann (Amelita Ward) to accomplish his nefarious goals.(F7)
Also tangentially related to Frankenstein is the idea of the stray body part with a life of its own, usually a disembodied head or brain.(F8) This was most popular with the Poverty Row studios that relied on low budgets, sensationalism, and exploitation for their box-office profits. In this era, several examples appeared and would continue on long after the classic horror period gave way to the modern in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. Perhaps the best of these are The Lady and the Monster (1944) and its better-known (though not necessarily superior) remake Donovan’s Brain (1952). Based on a 1942 novel by Curt Siodmak (writer of Universal’s The Wolf Man), the backbone of the plot is essentially the same in both movies, though streamlined in the latter version. In The Lady and the Monster, Professor Franz Muller (Erich von Stroheim) and his assistant Dr. Patrick Corey (Richard Arlen) remove the brain of a man whose body dies in an accident and preserve it suspended in fluid within a tank. The brain, which they soon discover belonged to wealthy tycoon William H. Donovan, remains active and Corey becomes obsessed with communicating with it. He eventually receives telepathic messages from Donovan’s brain and begins carrying out the criminal acts Donovan performed in life beginning with financial fraud and culminating in attempted murder. Donovan’s Brain all but removed the Muller character, making Corey the primary focus, and the “Lady” of the original is now Corey’s wife, played by Nancy Davis, who would rise to her greatest fame as First Lady Nancy Reagan.
Released during the lull in Hammer’s Frankenstein series between The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) came one of the few British non-Hammer films to explore Frankenstein-like ideas, Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1960), directed by one of the more widely-traveled of the journeyman directors, Sidney J. Furie, whose credits include The Ipcress File (1965), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), The Boys in Company C (1978), The Entity (1982), Iron Eagle (1986) as well as two of its sequels, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), and the Rodney Dangerfield vehicles Ladybugs (1992) and My 5 Wives (2000). In the film, Dr. Peter Blood (Kieron Moore) carries out experiments to revive the dead in an old abandoned mine on the outskirts of an English seaside village. The film ends up where most Frankenstein movies begin with Blood’s experiment in reanimation only briefly reviving and meeting its final demise all within the last few minutes of this threadbare and heavily padded film. On the plus side, Doctor Blood’s Coffin does feature The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) alum Hazel Court as Blood’s love interest Nurse Linda Parker.
Perhaps more Frankensteinian in inspiration is the exploitation cheapie The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962). While out for a speedy joyride on a country road, brilliant surgeon and expert in transplants Bill Cortner (Jason Evers credited as Herb Evers) and his nurse/fiancée Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) are in a horrible accident. He is thrown from the car and survives but she is beheaded. Cortner manages to save the head and uses an experimental serum he has developed to keep it alive. He then plans to perform the first head transplant which drives him to rather nefarious acts to find a body for her. Meanwhile, Jan’s head longs for death and colludes with one of Bill’s previous experiments, a hulking monster hidden behind a door for the majority of the film, to exact revenge. The film is pure exploitation complete with an exposed brain, an arm ripped off at the shoulder, physical deformities, a “Miss Body Beautiful” swimsuit competition, a bikini photoshoot,(F9) two buxom erotic dancers wrestling over Bill on their dressing room floor (large sections of the film could be titled “Male Gaze: The Movie”), and a hulking Frankenstein-like monster. Though not acknowledged in the credits, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die seems to take several cues from a 1959 German-produced (and dubbed in English) film titled The Head. The transplant serum, scenes in an exotic dance club, and the image of the disembodied living head are all strikingly similar.
The “Official” Frankensteins
Hot on the heels of the success of Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Poverty Row studios in Hollywood (or perhaps the phrase “off-off Hollywood” is more accurate) rushed several Frankenstein films into production, all of them with the good doctor’s name in the title. These ultra-low budget shockers were interested in only one thing — separating teenagers from their hard-won meager earnings, and most of them managed to do just that. To avoid retreading familiar territory and the eagle-eyed Universal Pictures lawyers, many of these films combined the Frankenstein framework with other popular genres that allowed these studios to shoot modern-day stories on cheap, existing sets.
The earliest notable film of the sound era made outside of Universal or Hammer to bear the name Frankenstein in its title was I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), made by one of the most storied of all low-budget studio operations, American International Pictures (AIP). It was not only a response to Hammer’s success with Curse, but to its own big hit from earlier the same year, I Was a Teenage Werewolf. As much of an attempt to capitalize on the rush of juvenile delinquent films like The Wild One (1953), Blackboard Jungle (1955), and perhaps above all Rebel Without a Cause (1955) as to the ever-insatiable adolescent appetite for horror movies, Teenage Frankenstein takes James Dean’s famous Rebel yell “you’re tearing me apart!” literally. Except in this case, he also puts him back together. Like Rebel, Teenage Frankenstein is about the tensions between generations, particularly fathers and sons, but in this case, the father is a literal creator. The old empty threat “I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it” is taken to a new level here. In the film, Professor Frankenstein (Whit Bissell), a descendant of the original Doctor Frankenstein,(F10) plans to “bring forth a perfectly normal human being able to walk among normal people undetected.” He plans to do this by using “only the ingredients of youth” and declares that “only in youth is there any hope for the salvation of mankind.” Conveniently, there is an auto accident involving teenagers right outside his lab, so Frankenstein and his reluctant assistant Dr. Karlton (Robert Burton) get directly to work with predictable results. In order to keep his work secret, Frankenstein manipulates his creation (Gary Conway under a mountain of makeup) to murder anyone who stands in his way. He also disposes of various bodies using an alligator that he keeps behind a secret door in his lab. The film does not bring much innovation to the table but is serviceable enough as an entry in the Frankenstein canon.
Allied Artists chose a different tack by calling upon the greatest Frankenstein star of all time, Boris Karloff, for its film Frankenstein 1970 (1958). The film follows a movie crew making a pseudo-documentary for the 230th anniversary of the original Dr. Frankenstein’s great experiment. This gets a little confusing because Dr. Frankenstein in this film is not the creation of the young Mary Shelley, but a scientist of the past, Richard Freiherr von Frankenstein I, who began work on his monster in 1740. After a very fun “fake-out” cold open, the crew travels to the Frankenstein home which is now inhabited by the original Frankenstein’s great-great grandson, the scarred and disabled Baron Viktor von Frankenstein (Karloff). Desperately in need of funds to purchase an “atomic power unit,” Viktor agrees to allow the crew to film in his castle. While the crew and actors sleep, Frankenstein works on his creation and sends the mostly complete monster to attack them and gather the last few biological elements needed to finish his creation. In the final reveal, it is discovered that Frankenstein was creating an able-bodied, younger duplicate of himself and, for a few fleeting seconds at least, Boris Karloff appears as a Frankenstein creation one last time. Though clearly made on a shoe-string budget, Frankenstein 1970 is given a touch of class by its sense of humor, Karloff (who never phoned in a performance), and by being shot in the rarest and greatest of formats — black and white Cinemascope.
Also in 1958, Astor Pictures and Layton Film Productions released Frankenstein’s Daughter (aka She-Monster of the Night). The plot, such as it is, involves Dr. Carter Morton (Felix Locher) who is working on a life-extending serum in his home laboratory in modern-day Los Angeles. He is assisted by Oliver Frank who is actually, you guessed it, Dr. Oliver Frankenstein, grandson of the man who made the monster. Frank has a secret lab in the house where he is building a body from various “accident” victims. He is also experimenting with Morton’s serum on Trudy, Morton’s young niece, which turns her into a Jekyll & Hyde-type monster that terrorizes the neighborhood. Strangely, this plot point is abandoned about thirty minutes in and never resolved. Frank eventually finishes his creation by grafting a female head onto a male body with predictably disastrous results.(F11) Frankenstein’s Daughter was interested in exploiting every popular trend it could including the beach movie in the form of a musical group, featuring Harold Lloyd, Jr., performing at a backyard shindig. The movie does deserve credit, however, for Dr. Frank’s use of the phrase “you meddling kids” a decade before Scooby-Doo first aired.
One of the better films of this bunch, largely because of the underrated skills of its director Ishirō Honda, is Frankenstein Conquers the World (aka Frankenstein vs. Baragon, 1965). In 1945, just as allied forces invade Germany, a descendant of Dr. Frankenstein has been working for the Nazis, and the family creature’s heart is seized by the military and sent to Japan via U-boat in hopes of unlocking the secret of creating indestructible soldiers. It arrives at the Hiroshima Military Hospital just in time for the August 6, 1945, bombing of the city. Fifteen years later, the hospital is now a radiation research facility that studies the effects on human tissues in order to save victims of the blast and their descendants from long-term effects of radiation sickness. A researcher, Dr. Sueko Togami (Kumi Mizuno), and Dr. Bowen (Nick Adams), an American working at the facility, discover a feral boy whose body has built up a remarkable resistance to radiation. He also grows at an alarming rate. It is eventually discovered that the boy is Frankenstein’s original creature regenerated from the heart and fortified by the atomic bomb, though the flat head and prominent Karloff-style brows should have been a dead giveaway. Now a giant, the creature (Koji Furuhata) escapes first into Hiroshima and then into other parts of Japan, wreaking havoc along the way. It is decided that Frankenstein must be destroyed (apologies, I couldn’t resist). But then the creature Baragon is awakened by mining and oil drilling in the countryside and the only thing that can stop it is the now gigantic Frankenstein creature. The film climaxes in the kind of epic battle between the two kaiju one would expect from an Ishirō Honda film of the Showa era and is followed by a second battle with a giant octopus that results in Frankenstein’s demise, though there is suggestion of a possible return.
The trend of genre mashup continued in 1966 with Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter,(F12) though the title is something of a misnomer as the Frankenstein descendant is actually his granddaughter, Maria (Narda Onyx). She, along with her older brother Rudolf (Steven Geray), has moved to the American West to take advantage of frequent electrical storms. Meanwhile, Jesse James (John Lupton) and his brute of a companion and bodyguard Hank (Cal Bolder) join forces with Butch Curry and the remains of the Wild Bunch, but U.S. Marshall MacPhee (Jim Davis) is on their tail. As suggested by the title, these two streams of plot join together when Hank is shot in a gunfight and taken to the home of Maria and Rudolf Frankenstein, they are doctors after all. They nurse Hank back to health so he will be strong enough for a brain transplant. Once revived via rainbow-colored army helmets outfitted with antennae and lighted neon tubes, Maria re-christens him Igor and takes over control of his mind. But what is left of Hank remembers Jesse and their traveling companion Juanita Lopez (Estelita Rodriguez) and he strangles Maria Frankenstein. When Hank also tries to kill Jesse, Juanita shoots him, saving her village from both Maria Frankenstein and her creation. The film is a melodramatic, meandering mess with just enough entertainment value to establish something of a cult following — with a title like Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, how could it not?
Produced in Italy and distributed in the U.S. by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, Corman collaborator Mel Welles and an uncredited Aureliano Luppi’s Lady Frankenstein (1971) stars Joseph Cotton as the Baron and Rosalba Neri as his daughter Tania. When Tania discovers that her father is experimenting with human organ transplants and reanimation, she begs to assist him, but he refuses. When Frankenstein is killed by his creation Tania takes over his work. As her father’s creature terrorizes the countryside, she convinces the Baron’s brilliant lab assistant Charles (Paul Müller) to allow her to transplant his brain into the body of the attractive, but mentally impaired stable boy Thomas (Herbert Fux), making the ultimate lover for herself. The film is replete with Frankenstein tropes including graverobbing, sparking and bubbling laboratory sequences, bloody organ transplants, and a torch-wielding mob of villagers. It also has enough gore and nudity to achieve Corman’s exploitation seal of approval. Despite a notoriously troubled production, Lady Frankenstein manages to be one of the more effective Hammer imitators.
As had happened decades before at Universal, several of the last films of this era were monster mashups such as Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (1968), which is more of a werewolf and vampire film than a Frankenstein movie. Assignment Terror (1970) sees the revival of the Frankenstein monster, a mummy, a werewolf, and vampires at the hands of alien invaders who attempt to destroy mankind by feeding on its fears and superstitions. Though it is the final film appearance of Lon Chaney, Jr., there is not much else notable about Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) except that it was directed by Al Adamson, a true original, but also regularly considered among the worst filmmakers of all time. Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972), directed by another one-of-a-kind cult director of an acquired taste, Jesús (Jess) Franco, not only involves the titular creatures but throws in a werewolf for good measure. These films also make it clear that Universal was no longer particularly concerned about major aspects of the look of the Frankenstein monster being borrowed from Jack Pierce’s iconic design, at least when it came to internationally-produced exploitation fare.
As the Hammer cycle came to a close along with the era of imitators discussed in this installment, a new brand of horror was on the rise. The New Hollywood collided the familiarity of classic horror tropes with the 60s and 70s counterculture to create something entirely different. Some subverted the genre into a cinema of sexual exploration mixed with body horror, some filmmakers sought to return to the roots of the mythos by attempting adaptations that adhered more closely to Mary Shelley’s original vision, and humorists found fertile ground for parody. If you thought things got weird before, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. 🩸
Footnotes
F1: These two films, photographed in the so-called “Two Strip” Technicolor process, are generally considered the first color horror films.
F2: For horror fans it is also notable that Dr. X was buried in Greenlawn Cemetery (a real memorial park in Bakersfield, CA) the very same cemetery in which Mrs. Bates was supposed to have been interred in Psycho (1960).
F3: The Black Cat (1934), Gift of Gab (1934), The Raven (1935), The Invisible Ray (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939), and Black Friday (1940). They would also appear in You’ll Find Out (1940) and The Body Snatcher (1945) for RKO, the latter from the famed Val Lewton horror unit at the studio.
F4: The title appears as Man-Made Monster on the poster and in various listings (IMDB, Letterboxd, etc.) but without the hyphen on the title card of the film.
F5: Later in 1941, Waggner and Chaney would reteam for one of Universal’s greatest successes of the 1940s, The Wolf Man.
F6: One of the more active character actors of the 40s, Hinds is perhaps best known as Pa Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
F7: The film also features Rondo Hatton as Moloch the Brute. Hatton’s name and likeness would later be used for the annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards.
F8: Hands would also be a popular self-possessed appendage as in The Hands of Orlac (1924) and its remakes, the brilliant Mad Love (1935) and another in 1960 under the original title, The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) directed by the original director attached to the 1931 version of Frankenstein, Robert Florey, and of course in the form of Thing in The Addams Family.
F9: The alternate version of the scene available on the Scream Factory DVD would have been far more risqué for 1962 audiences as it included a great deal of nudity.
F10: This will become a recurring theme of these films.
F11: The Monster is played by Harry Wilson, a hulking bit player best remembered as a mob henchman in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959).
F12: The film was directed by William Beaudine who made another horror-western, Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, that same year.
Sources
Karloff and Lugosi: The Story of a Haunting Collaboration by Gregory William Mank
The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror Edited by Phil Hardy
Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture by David J. Skal
Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946 (Second Edition) by Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas
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.
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