The Mask of Frankenstein

The ruins of Burg Frankenstein sit on a hill overlooking a small rural community just South of Darmstadt, in Germany.

I don’t know if the locals ever got together and mobbed around the countryside wielding torches and pitchforks, but they do celebrate Halloween every year. The custom was introduced here 30 years ago by American servicemen stationed nearby. It has since grown into a major tourist festival where guests can enjoy dinner-theater on the castle grounds and party all night with goth ghosts, grinning ghouls, sexy vampires and friendly monsters. Much Gluhwein is consumed.

Here’s the Burg Frankenstein Halloween site, and here’s a link to a striking and distinctly Karloffian Frankenstein Folding Mask. Download the PDF file, print it out and test your origami skills. It’s a little complicated if you can’t read the German instructions, but you’ll figure it out. This is a really cool mask!

David Lance Goines' Frankenstein

"My job is to get your attention and keep it long enough for the message to get across.”

— David Lance Goines, Why I Do What I Do (in "David Lance Goines Posters: 1970-1994")

Over time, we must admit, James Whale’s Frankenstein has lost its power to shock. What remains is its poetry, its stark beauty, and its enduring magic.

Filmgoers in 1931 were terrified and outraged over Frankenstein. Today, children are entertained by its sparking mad lab, its quaint cemetery chills, and its sad sack monster. Then again, children always empathized with Frankenstein’s Monster. Boris Karloff noted that youngsters “could see right through the makeup and could see the tragedy of this poor creature, and express great compassion for him”.

In January of 1984, patrons of the Pacific Film Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, were invited to introduce young people to Frankenstein — what a grand idea! — and were rewarded for it with a free copy of the poster seen above.

The Monster’s skeleton (note the telltale neck bolt) appears trapped in clockwork machinery, pistons pounding at it from all sides. The bony hand threads a rose up through exposed ribs and into the chest cavity. A rose as red as a beating heart.

I must say, there are many hundreds of Frankenstein posters, but this my favorite one ever.

The artist, David Lance Goines, is a giant in the world of graphic design. His style evokes Art Nouveau while being resolutely contemporary. His posters are like antiques from the future. Goines' considerable talents as an illustrator and calligrapher — not to mention heraldry and superb draftsmanship — are matched only by his remarkable skills as a printer. Goines oversees the entire process, controlling the quality of the piece from initial concept to final product.

I've included a second piece here, a stinging-insect take on Nosferatu. There's lots more on Goines’ generous website. It literally overflows with images, all of them downright stunning.

Happy Birthday, Mary Shelley

“It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing."

Mary Shelley was born on this day, August 30, in 1797.

Here is a chronology of her extraordinary life, on the University of Maryland’s Romantic Circles site.

The portrait of young Mary, by Reginald Easton, is part of the Abinger Collection of the prestigious Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. In 2003, a three million pound grant from the UK’s National Heritage memorial fund helped the Bodleian acquire the collection that includes, as its crown jewel, the actual manuscript of Frankenstein in Mary’s own hand, with annotation by Percy Shelley.

You can see some of the documents from the collection here, including the first page Mary wrote, in the summer of 1816, that reads: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed”.

The Monster Squad

It took forever, but The Monster Squad, the sincere comedy-horror homage to classic movie monsters, is finally out on DVD in a special, 2-disc, 20^th Anniversary edition.

Dread Central has a Comic-Con video feature on the DVD release, and here’s a very enthusiastic fansite about the film.

Kids today might snicker at the 80’s disco hairdos and expressions (“Bogus!”), but the movie has a BIG heart and it’ll win anyone over. After all, it’s got Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, the Gill man, and Tom Noonan as the good-guy Frankenstein Monster!

Speaking of Noonan, here’s a real treat from the DVD’s bonus features, via Shock Till You Drop, of the actor interviewed in makeup and in character. Check out A Conversation With Frankenstein.

Freakenstein

Freakenstein is a fearsome, funky giant with clutching hands, exposed brains, and a nasty, snapping steam-shovel jaw. And dig that crazy diesel exhaust pipe sticking straight up out of its back!

This mammoth monster, an elaborate combination of makeup, costume and puppetry, is the work of creature-maker Kevin Alvey. His Gore Galore company website seems to be undergoing a revamp, but you can still see a clip of Freakenstein clomping around on YouTube.

If you explore that YouTube page, you can view other Alvey creations like The Wraith, The Bone Warrior, and Freakenstein’s own Bride, zombie-walking around someone’s basement.

Update: The Gore Galore site is back in action. Tons to see there. Check it out!

Frankenstein News

VIRTUAL FRANKENSTEIN

On August 4, 2007, Joined at the Heart, a new adaptation of Frankenstein, became the first ever musical streamed live, online, in Second Life. You can read about the planning in the Cambridge Evening News and The Stage News. The event prompted The Guardian’s Mark Fisher to ask, “Will virtual plays kill real theater?”.

The Creature is played by James Stuart. The photograph, by Mark Easterfield, is from the Sawston Players' website. You can read more about the play itself, its creators, cast and crew, and hear music samples on Joined at the Heart's MySpace page.

CONFIRMED!

Simpson’s creator Matt Groening told The New York Times Magazine that Marge’s towering beehive was inspired in equal parts by his own mother’s hairdo and… The Bride of Frankenstein. We knew it all along, didn’t we?

(Via)

DOWNGRADED

James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) was dropped from the American Film Institute's list of 100 Greatest American Movies. The film had formerly been ranked Number 87.

Er... No comment.

Monsieur Frankenstein

Marion Mousse is a prolific graphic novel artist who is very adept at period pieces, having successfully illustrated such celebrated swashbucklers as Moonfleet and Capitaine Fracasse. In June, Delcourt of France published the first tome of Mousse’s elaborate 3-volume adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Turning a massive novel into three 48-page graphic novels implies a great deal of compression, but Mousse’s adaptation is not only faithful, it is pitch perfect. Mousse is a confident artist whose art style is refreshingly loose and cartoony, yet loaded with accurate detail. Moody chiaroscuro abounds. The sober, subdued colors are the work of Marie Galopin.

You can see roughs and character sketches on Mousse’s blog, and five sample pages (click “extraits”) on the publisher’s site.

Hopefully, this will be available in English soon. If you can’t wait for a translation, this one is worth getting for the artwork alone. You can buy the book through Amazon.fr, Fichtre! in Montreal, or Librairie Pantoute in Québec City.  

By the way, when he's done with Frankenstein, Mousse plans to take on Gaston Leroux' The Phantom of the Opera.

Frankenstein On Stage

“With moonpie eyes and the mentality of an infant, Irakli Kavsadze is both helpless and horrific as the malformed creation living in misery and isolation. In an impressive performance that alternately evokes sympathy and terror, Kavsadze… renders a Creature that is part child, part beast, but entirely human in nature.”

‑ Jolene Munch, Washington Metro Weekly

The startling, split-faced Monster is played by Irakli Kavsadze in Synetic Theatre’s 2006 adaptation of Frankenstein at the Kennedy Center, in Washington.

The play, which strove to be as faithful as possible to the novel — complete with arctic fog descending upon the audience — garnered excellent reviews and a bevy of Helen Hayes Award nominations, including one for Best Resident Play. The multi-tasking Mr. Kavsadze was nominated for Outstanding Sound Design.

The actor was also involved in a Frankenstein-related sketch performed by The Golden Theater: Pantomime for Youth troupe entitled The Misadventures of Dr. Frank-n-Flubber, PhD. That short performance can be viewed in its entirety on the net here.

Reviews of Synetic’s Frankenstein appear here, and on the theater company’s website.

A bit of trivia: Irakli Kavsadze also played Dr. Van Helsing in the troupe’s highly regarded adaptation of Dracula.

Frankenstein Begins

On Monday, August 24, 1931, actors Colin Clive and Dwight Frye dig up a fresh corpse on the cemetery set. Frankenstein — fated to become the most famous horror film of all time — begins shooting, under the direction of James Whale.

Later on, for the film’s climax, torch-wielding villagers will scour this same studio-bound mountain and Frankenstein will confront his Monster under the same sagging canvas sky. The solemn, artificial landscape lends a dream-like quality to the proceedings.

Boris Karloff is seen here wearing an early test makeup. Notice the clamped “horns” on the forehead, the dark greasepaint down the right cheek and the fleshy lips. In the final, refined film version, makeup man Jack Pierce would smooth out the forehead, adding a single vertical scar over the right eye, and the lips would be painted to appear thinner.

The Cabinet of Dr. Frankenstein

Actor Conrad Veidt never essayed the part, but his likeness has been used to represent the Monster.

The first example is an audiobook adaptation from Oxford University Press, Bookworm Edition, 1998. It uses an image cropped from a vividly colored poster for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919).

 

The second piece features artwork recycling Veidt’s dramatic profile and clutching hands from the poster for Orlacs Hande (1924).

Autour de Frankenstein ("Around Frankenstein"), was published in 1994 in the Cahiers Forell collection of the Faculty of Letters and Languages of the University of Poitiers, in France. It is a compendium of scholarly articles in French and English with such titles as Innocence, Injustice and Incomprehension in Frankenstein; Frankenstein and the Excess of Signification: a Case of Unstable Balance; A Map of Russia and Understanding Frankenstein: (A Geo-angelological Folly in Seven Chapters), and Legends of the Animated Body: The Case of the Monster.

Villa Diodati

"A menagerie, with eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon: and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were masters of it."

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

In 1816, Lord Byron rented the manor known as the Villa Diodati, near Cologny, on Lake Geneva. The house already had solid literary credentials. Its original owner, Giovanni Diodati, had translated the Bible into Italian and French, and the poet John Milton (whom Mary would quote in Frankenstein) vacationed there in 1639.

Byron was joined that fateful summer by his personal physician, John Polidori, and his guests: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley), and Claire Claremont. It was here, or perhaps at the nearby guesthouse where she resided, that Mary conceived of Frankenstein and first wrote these words that would eventually open chapter five of the book: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed…”

The villa still stands. It is the square building, right of center, in the GoogleEarth image below.

http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Places/diodati.html

http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/shelleysites/tours/tour1816.html

Dr. Frankenstein : Peter Cushing

"I always regarded 'Baron Frankenstein' as a forerunner to Dr. Christian Barnard, the South African surgeon who was the first man to transplant the human heart, which he did in 1967... I did my first similar experiment with that particular organ (and lots of other bits and bobs as well) in the Hammer Films production of The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957. It was my first appearance as that enterprising individual, the action taking place during the early part of the 19th century. It proved to be an enormous box-office success, and six more of this anti-hero's adventures were made by the same company, over a period of 15 years."

— Peter Cushing, from his autobiography Past Forgetting (1988).

A Bolt From The Blue

“First I gave life to a spider, then I gave life to a fly; After a bit couldn't find it, although I think I know why. Next I gave life to a goldfish, then I gave life to a toad; Then I gave life to a lizard, who helped the toad cross the road. Next I gave life to a tadpole, then I gave life to a frog; Then I gave life to a dog-fish, and it barked just like a dog. Now I'll give life to a human, now I'll give life to a man! Pity it's proving so tricky, but I'll succeed if I can."

— ‘Animal Biology (or Frankenstein’s Song)'          

Frankenstein (or A Bolt from the Blue) is “A Victorian melodrama for Schools
based on Mary Shelley's book… for Narrator, Unison Voices and Piano”. Words and music by Carey Blyton.
Published by Chester Music and Novello & Co, London, 1987.        

Blyton also wrote musical versions of Dracula and Sweeney Todd.

Frankenteen

"Personally I'm a fan of Frankenteen. He's the pale and frail poster boy for skinny nerds with pretty cool personalities. After high school he'll own his own computer company or direct hipster indie films or something. So jocks and bullies beware because Frankenteens coming to his ten year reunion with a smug face and a really pretty wife!"

Justin Parpan’s Frankenteen would make a great model kit, glow in the dark and all. Maybe, someday. Until then, Frankenteen and other cool creatures like Conqueror Crab, The Prehistoric Sea Devil, Dr. Squawk from Planet Fowl and Gamadon The Destroyer can be enjoyed on the artist’s delightful blog.

Parpan has also written and illustrated an enchanting picture book, Gwango’s Lonesome Trail, for young readers, and the young at heart who fondly remember Ray Bradbury’s The Foghorn, and Ray Harryhausen movies. 

The Covers of Frankenstein

A quick search of “Frankenstein” on Amazon yields over 3600 distinct titles. Most are reprints of the novel, its Public Domain status allowing anyone to publish at will. There are also countless scholarly studies about the novel and its characters, accounts of the life of Mary Shelley (and most everyone she’s ever met), and an endless supply of adaptations, rewrites, condensations, retoolings, sequels, prequels, film novelizations, spoofs, takeoffs, rip-offs and children’s picture book versions. The visual key that distinguishes all these titles is, of course, the cover.

Given the book, a set of cover themes emerges. There’s the Landscape approach, featuring appropriately bleak landscapes expressing solitude and loss, or ice fields standing in for the Mer de Glace where Creator and Creation confront each other, or the Arctic wastes where the 2 protagonists meet their respective fates.

Classic paintings are often used. The most popular, by far, are Fuselli’s The Nightmare (1781), as much for it’s disturbing effect as the fact that Fuselli was one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s suitors, and Caspar David Friedrich’s
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), a striking image of a man brooding over nature in an Alp-like setting which happened to be on the artist’s easel even as Mary Shelley’s book was being published.

Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tuip (1632) and Josef Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1769) have also been used, for their depiction of early medical and electrical experiment. Anatomical renderings, preferably archaic, are logical and popular Frankenstein cover themes, perhaps none so graceful as the arm — illustrating this post — painted by Girolamo Fabrici (1537-1619), skin and muscles elegantly flayed. Perhaps Dr. Gunther von Hagens’s controversial plastinated corpses will find their way onto Frankenstein covers one day, if they haven’t already.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of covers for Mary Shelley’s book are directly inspired by the iconic movie versions of the story. Lightning bolts, electrical sparks, elaborate steampunk machinery, bubbling retorts, forbidding castles and foggy cemeteries are all elements from the films, as are the representations of the Monster as a stitched-up ogre, often green in complexion, with screws and studs as body piercing. Mary Shelley suggests the Monster is assembled from parts but she never actually mentions stitches, yet jagged sutures are a common element in cover designs for the book.

One of the most prevalent cover image is, simply, a photograph of the Monster as played by Boris Karloff. His interpretation from the second film, The Bride of Frankenstein, with a photogenic burned face and singed hair revealing a gruesomely stitched and clamped skull is the most popular with art directors. Artwork inspired by the classic Karloffian profile is, of course, ubiquitous. On the other hand, covers depicting the Monster as described by Mary Shelley are rare and generally reserved for art-book versions of the novel featuring top of the line illustrators such as Lynd Ward, Barry Moser and Bernie Wrightson.

Over time, I’ll spotlight original and interesting covers for Frankenstein and its derivatives. Sadly, the artists who drew or designed the covers are rarely credited by publishers.

The cover above is from the Barnes and Noble Classics Series edition of Frankenstein edited by George Stade and was designed, I believe, by Karen Karbiener.

The Monster : Shuler Hensley

Shuler Hensley as the howling Monster in the splendid black and white opening sequence to the otherwise overbaked fuse-blower Van Helsing (2004).

Hensley holds a unique position among Frankenstein actors, having essayed the Monster in three different productions. After Van Helsing, he went on to sing the Monster’s part on a cast recording of Frankenstein: The Musical, a dramatic musical adaptation slated to open off-Broadway in November. Who will inherit the part in that one is yet to be announced, Hensley having since gone on to play the tap-dancing, zipper-necked Monster in the big-budget Broadway adaptation of Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein, currently in rehearsals.

The Frontispiece

“By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs… I rushed out of the room.”

From the third and "definitive" 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus.

Following the book's description, the artist, Theodore Von Holst, depicts the Creature as a muscular giant with flowing black hair and tight, translucent skin that “scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath”. Note the bones visible in the arms and legs, and the curiously displaced head.

Via

The Author

"I busied myself to think of a story... One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror -- one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart… What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow… I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper."
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (30 August 1797 - 1 February 1851)

Painting by Richard Rothwell, 1840.