The Covers of Frankenstein : Mon Film No. 609, April 1958

Frankenstein Has Escaped was the French title for Hammer Films’ The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The cover shown here is a composite using a posed studio photo of Christopher Lee’s Monster overlapped with a film still cutout of Hazel Court snooping around the lab.

Published weekly, the French Mon Film (My Film) was a thin, cheaply produced magazine containing short novelizations of mostly current movies illustrated with stills, which were sometimes heavily retouched because of poor printing and bad newsprint stock. Introduced in the Thirties, the magazine had an incredibly long run, using the exact same cover design — a black and white photograph with monochrome overlay of sepia, blue or green, and the title in a filmstrip — for over 650 issues, well into the Fifties, when a different layout and color covers were introduced, though briefly, before the venerable title finally folded.

Mon Film generally steered clear of horror films — Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954) was a rare exception — with this cover feature indicative of The Curse of Frankenstein’s phenomenal international success.

This issue, number 609 for the week of April 23, 1958, also devoted a few of its slim fourteen pages to Manuela, released in the US as Stowaway Girl, a 1958 film starring Trevor Howard and Elsa Martinelli.