The Defeat of General Frankenstein at Bunker Hill

Here depicted, General Albertus Frankenstein is felled by Colonial forces at the Battle of Bunker Hill, whereupon his mysterious, hulking personal valet flies into a rage as if a monster unleashed!

Pittsburgh-based artist Matthew Buchholz creates alternate histories, with monsters! Buchholz appropriates and transforms historical art, creating new stories of fun and fright. A giant octopus attacks the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883; Martian saucers ignite the Great Chicago Fire of 1871; A map of Pittsburgh outlines the zombie invasion of 1875; Godzilla marches on Santa Monica in 1912, and Ro-Man is sworn in as President in 1925.

In the illustration shown here, American Revolutionary War artist John Trumbull’s The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill is transformed into a Frankenstein story, its Creature sampled from Hammer Films’ Evil of Frankenstein.

Buchholz' Alternate Histories are available from the artist as very affordable prints through his Etsy Shop.

The alternate history of Frankenstein.
A profile of the artist on Artists On-Air.

The Botanical Frankenstein A Guest Post by Niels K. Petersen

Guest Blogger Niels K. Petersen reports on a Frankenstein plant, and a botanical homage to Boris Karloff!

Vienna is associated with a great number of historical persons, scientists, artists and authors. I had, however, not expected to bump into Frankenstein and Boris Karloff in, of all places, a flower bed in the Viennese Botanical Gardens.

But to understand how the two of them, or rather their names, ended up in that place, we need to become acquainted with a gentleman called Nikolaus Thomas Host, who was born in Croatia 250 years ago, in 1761.

Host graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1786, and six years later became the personal physician to Emperor Franz I. His passion, however, was botany, and he carried out botanical field work and published books on the subject until his death in 1834. Today he is primarily known for this work. In particular, the well-known genus of lily-like plants Hosta is named after him.

Another European student of medicine and natural philosophy, Mary Shelley’s fictional Victor Frankenstein studied at the university in Ingolstadt in Bavaria. Although he certainly didn’t specialize in botanics, we may imagine young Frankenstein walking around the botanical garden that had been founded in 1685 by Ingolstadt’s medical faculty to collect and grow plants for medicinal purposes.

The Botanical Gardens in Vienna weren’t founded until 1754, when the personal physician to Empress Maria Theresia, Gerard van Swieten, proposed the idea. Emperor Franz I also listened to his physician, when Host proposed that he should found a Garden of the Crownlands next to the Botanical Gardens. Nowadays, this garden has become a part of the Botanical Gardens which the tourist will find next to the Belvedere Palace.

To commemorate the 250th birthday of Host, the Botanical Gardens invited the artist and landscape designer, or so-called “avant-gardener”, Tony Heywood to celebrate Host with a horticultural installation called Hosta Superstar.

The central part of the installation is shaped as a star with blue edges of artifical material. A green house is placed at the edge of the star, and outside the star there are triangular flower beds. The flower beds contain plants that aren’t simply hosta (or hostaceae), but superhosta (superhostaceae): hybrids plants that are partly natural, and partly artificial. One of them is named after CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and combines a plant with an electrical device that is plugged into a socket!

Apparently, Tony Heywood wants the viewer not only to contemplate the legacy of Host, but also the dichotomies of nature versus artifice, chaos versus order, and art versus science. At the same time, the viewer is forced to consider the differences between the science of Host’s day and that of today.

So it is perhaps not a surprise that another of these hybrid plants is a Aspiratzihosta frankensteinia called Boris Karloff! This particular plant has natural stems and leaves, but plastic tubes protrude from it along with some kind of metallic circuit. The flowers, which are yellow, orange and lilac, are all artificial, probably made of plastic, but inside them are cacti, so the natural and the artificial blend to become a whole, we might say: ‘monster’ of a plant.

This way Heywood, the garden designer, has transcended the borders between nature and artifice, between life and death, and created a new species to bless him as its creator and source, to paraphrase Frankenstein. In terms of so many horror movies, he has probably meddled with things that man is perhaps meant to leave alone, but so has modern science at CERN or at labs, where scientists today can e.g. develop new crops. Where Host collected plants, the modern scientist alters and creates.

So if you happen to be in Vienna, stroll around the Botanical Gardens, take a look at the trees and flowers, and then visit the Superhosta installation to contemplate the border between the natural and the articifial, between science and art, and the development of science.

Niels K. Petersen hails from Køge, Denmark. He holds a degree in physics, works in the field of meteorology and, in his spare time, traces the historical roots of the vampire on his superlative blog, Magia Posthuma.

University of Vienna Botanical Gardens (site in German)

Tony Heywood's Conceptual Gardens website.

Frankenstein Re-release Program Book, Austria 1957

Inimitable. Nobody ever wore the Frankenstein Monster makeup better than Boris Karloff, here on the cover of a 4-page program book for a 1957 Austrian re-release of the 1931 classic.

The inside spread features a selection of stills and a synopsis for the film. Credits list Colin Clive’s character as “Herbert v.” instead of Henry, and The Monster is tagged as “Das Ungeheuer”!

A curious back cover montage has The Monster and Little Maria playing the flower game in the cemetery where Clive and Dwight Frye dig for spare parts.

Via Heritage Auctions.

James Whale's Frankenstein Turns 80

“He’s just resting, waiting for a new life to come!”

On this very day, August 24, in 1931, Frankenstein began shooting. Eighty years on, its influence is still operating and its central character, The Monster, is an icon of the twentieth century.

Among other things, in the months to come, right up to December, we’ll be celebrating James Whale’s Frankenstein here on Frankensteinia, the blog it inspired. Speaking of which, we’re celebrating our own little anniversary, as this blog turned four years old on the weekend. It’s been a good year for Frankensteinia, with the wonderful Rondo Award and a still growing readership, which are two things that thoroughly amaze me.

In the weeks to come, as posting promises to increase dramatically, I’ll be making some minor changes to the blog design and corrections or additions to the menu bars. I’ll be making the film label list correctly alphabetical and I’ll rebuild the Mary Shelley/Frankenstein resources list that has somehow disappeared.

With August rapidly fading, Halloween is suddenly in sight and I’m already planning a series of daily posts all through October. I also have some surprises coming up, stuff that will blow your neck bolts right off. Proper announcements coming soon!

Thank You, Jimmy Sangster

Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster passed away on Friday, August 29. He was 83.

I’ve told the story before, about a fateful summer day in ’61 or ’62 when I fell in love with movies at a neighborhood theatre running a triple bill of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959). A few weeks later, they played The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and I was dazzled again. All these films were made by Hammer Films of England, with the same casts and crews. They all starred Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, all shared the distinctive production design of Bernard Robinson and the magical photography of Jack Asher. They were all directed with uncommon intelligence by Terence Fisher, and they were all written by Jimmy Sangster. No question, these films were driven by the extraordinary collaboration of all these men, but it was Sangster who provided the raw material, the basic scripts that gave Fisher and company something to chew on.

Sangster was, I think, underappreciated. Sangster’s contributions to the horror genre were monumental, yet he was often tagged as a hack, just batting out his scripts, and he didn’t help the impression with his flippantly titled bio, Do You Want It Good, or Tuesday? It reads like a rough draft and Sangster frustratingly glosses over the Hammer years, dwelling on his later work for American television. Yet, he had done so much more. Over time, having seen waves of horror films, I came to appreciate how profoundly original and perfectly subversive films like, say, The Revenge of Frankenstein or Brides of Dracula (1960) had been.

I often thought of Jimmy Sangster throughout my career. I began as a cartoonist and illustrator, writing comics for myself and others. I remembered and tried to replicate how Sangster had told straightforward stories with something original and new at their core. In the mid-90’s, when the illustration field crashed, I became a mostly full-time writer, contributing countless sketches to TV and fixing movie scripts, and I found myself referencing Sangster again.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon an address for Jimmy Sangster and I sent in the only fan letter I ever wrote. I don’t know if it ever got to him, it was neither acknowledged nor replied to. I’ve come to think of it as a message in a bottle, but I’m glad I wrote it. I did not gush, did not embarrass. I simply said thanks. Jimmy Sangster had taught me that you could take a classic story and tweak it into something new. You could take well-worn characters and make them fresh again. I simply thanked him for entertaining and challenging me with his stories. I said thank you for being a model and lighting my way. Simple as that.

Thank You, Jimmy Sangster.

Tim Lucas has written a wonderful piece about Jimmy Sangster. Read Pass the Marmalade!

A fascinating interview with Jimmy Sangster on Cinema Retro.

Related:
Revenge of Frankenstein Wraps
Frankenstein Has Escaped!

The Art of Frankenstein : Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

Born in Chile, moved to Spain, and recently operating out of Manchester, England, Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo is a much traveled, multitasking artist who has worked in film, graphic design and illustration. His art references pop culture with interpretations of classic fashions, famous figures of film, music and the arts, and horror icons.

The paint-spattered Bride is just one of the many movie monsters vividly illustrated by Hidalgo.

This monster grouping is, in the artist’s words, “an allegory of fear, represented by a girl’s dream of horror as she is threatened by the shadows of monsters and other creatures of the night. It is a nostalgic vision in which monsters are represented by icons of the classical horror movies…” Present are a Wolfman, Christopher Lee’s blood-drenched Dracula and the classic Boris Monster. Note the bats and a baying wolf in watercolor silhouette.

The film and TV gallery on Hidalgo’s website is crowded with stunning illustrations. Poke around, you’ll find, among many others, Nosferatu, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and portraits of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Rondo Hatton.

Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo’s website.

A short interview with the artist on VforVlog.

Hidalgo’s Vimeo page, including his remix of the 1962 film, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

Remembering Peter Cushing

Fond thoughts today for Peter Cushing who passed away August 11, in 1994.

In a backstage shot from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), “Saint Peter” poses with Melvyn Hayes, who played the younger Baron. The two actors would share another credit —playing different parts — with 1960’s The Flesh and the Fiends.

There was another actor who would “play” Peter Cushing, a stand-in, if you will. Of all his roles, and he played such remarkable characters as Baron Frankenstein, Dracula’s Van Helsing, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Who — you name it — perhaps the best-known and certainly the most widely seen of all Cushing’s interpretations was his turn as the supremely villainous Grand Moff Tarkin, a character so profoundly nasty that he even bosses Darth Vader around, in Star Wars (1977). When George Lucas made Revenge of the Sith (2005), completing the prequel trilogy that led to the events in the original 1977 Star Wars (aka Star Wars: A New Hope), the character of Tarkin was seen very briefly with the newly minted Darth Vader and the cowled Palpatine, all gazing out a spaceship’s picture window at the dreaded Death Star under construction.

Lucas considered the possibility of using outtakes of Cushing from the original film and animating his lips to new dialog, or even constructing a full digital model of Cushing but, in the end, actor Wayne Pygram was called in, his resemblance to Cushing augmented with prosthetic makeup. He is seen very briefly, and from some distance away, but it was nice to have a recognizable Cushing as Tarkin — first name Wilhuff, don’t you know — bookending the series. A Cushing-like Tarkin — killer cheekbones and all — also appears as an animated figure in the Clone Wars television series.

Peter Cushing is not about to be forgotten anytime soon. Later this month, in the seaside town of Whitstable where he resided from 1959 onwards, Cushing will be honored — after a fashion —with the inauguration of a new pub, The Peter Cushing.

The venue is the venerable Oxford building, once — appropriately — a cinema. I wonder if it ever played a Cushing film, or if Peter and his beloved Helen attended showings there. Bingo was introduced in 1962 and took over permanently in 1984. Now, the JD Wetherspoon chain of pubs is renovating and repurposing the building. One assumes that the decor will include Cushing memorabilia, and hopes it’s as tasteful as Cushing would have liked. The Peter Cushing opens August 23.

An exhaustive and entertaining biography, and tons of background info about the character of Grand Moff Tarkin on the Star Wars Wookieepedia.

Photos of the Oxford building in disrepair, prior to its renovation.

The JD Wetherspoon web page and Facebook page for The Peter Cushing pub.

Bit of a controversy over the naming of The Peter Cushing pub, from This is Kent.

Announcing Monsterpalooza Magazine!

The Monster enjoys a little downtime in the dungeon, catching up on his pumpkin carving and getting a first look at Monsterpalooza Magazine, heading our way just in time for Halloween. The fabulous art is by Jeff Preston.

Otherwise independent, the new magazine shares its name and its love of monsters with Eliot Brodsky’s super convention held every spring in California. Monsterpalooza, the magazine, will be published and edited by Mark Redfield and Michael Heisler. The debut issue can be pre-ordered now through the Monsterpalooza Magazine website, launched today. Check the site for a list of eye-popping contents and contributor profiles. I’m delighted to report that I’ll be doing a piece celebrating the 80th Anniversary of Universal’s Frankenstein!

Monsterpalooza Magazine website and Facebook page.

The Art of Frankenstein : Donald Caron

The Monster springs to sudden life in Premature Birth, a digital painting by Donald Caron. Who is more surprised, Creator or Creation?

The beautifully detailed art is worth a closeup look...

Caron’s fantasy illustrations have graced film posters, games, advertising and comics. He has produced a number of posters for Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival, including this year’s 15th Anniversary edition depicting the Cheval Noir of Québécois legend, the festival’s prize for Best Film.

As a double treat, Caron also produced a spectacular poster for Fantasia’s gala showing of 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera, screening this coming weekend at the prestigious Place des Arts concert hall. The film will be accompanied by a 30-piece orchestra performing an original score by Gabriel Thibodeau.

Here’s a shot of the Concordia University lobby, home base for Fantasia, dominated by a giant copy of Caron’s Phantom. You can see the poster in all its considerable glory on my companion blog, Monster Crazy.

Donald Caron’s website and gallery.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Famous Monsters of Filmland No. 257

Here’s makeup wizard Rick Baker’s digital art cover for the new issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, No. 257, celebrating the first anniversary since the venerable title rebooted.

Baker, who grew up on FM, pays homage with a portrait of Boris Karloff roped to his lab slab against the burning glow of the sulfur pit in 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, done in the vivid portrait style of artist Basil Gogos. Baker adds extra stitches and clamps to The Monster’s face, making this version both referential and original. Universal’s makeup genius, Jack Pierce, whom Baker acknowledges as a vital influence, would have approved.

This cover is one of three alternates. There’s a different newsstand cover, and another one for comic shops. Baker’s Frankenstein cover was offered at the recent San Diego Comicon. There are copies available directly from the publisher, but if you’re interested hurry up, quantities are very limited. The issue is also available as a digital download, with expanded content, including all three covers.

If it’s just the art you want, the Baker illustration is available as a limited edition print.

An interview with Rick Baker about his digital art, on Pixologic.