New Blog! FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER!

Carved pumpkins staring out living room windows at makeshift graveyards planted with cardboard tombstones. Stuffed scarecrows lounging on the doorstep and a plastic skeleton, wrapped in cotton cobwebs, swinging from a tree. Ghosts ring your doorbell and spare you for a piece of candy. It’s Halloween, and it’s a fine time for launching a new blog, especially a skeery one!

With the appropriate help of the venerable Edward van Sloan, who famously introduced James Whale’s Frankenstein eighty years ago, allow me to introduce FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER, the new companion blog to Frankensteinia!

FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER is a tumblelog of Frankenstein images, Frankenstein links and Frankenstein news, for Frankenstein fans.

You might well ask why a new Frankenstein blog, and what for? Simply said, I like Frankensteinia as it is. I want Frankensteinia to be informative, sometimes scholarly — yet unpretentious and, I hope, mostly entertaining. Still, I have tons of material on hand, more than I can handle. There are new Frankenstein books and comics, plays and films, toys and games coming out every week, an endless supply of material that I hardly ever get around to. I’ve considered posting here every day, filling the gaps between detailed posts with images and news, but I feel that would change the focus and my self-imposed mandate on Frankensteinia. A new, complementary but separate blog is the answer.

FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER will serve as a repository, a gallery, a museum perhaps, of Frankenstein-related images. FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER will feature links to new Frankenstein events as they happen. FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER will showcase more artists and illustrators than I have ever had room for on Frankensteinia.

You can reach FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER through the badge on the menu at right, or you might want to bookmark it for direct access. Should you make FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER your first stop, I’ll be sure to post a heads-up there whenever a new post is up here on Frankensteinia.

Frankensteinia will essentially remain the same. It works, I’m happy with it and proud of its success. Now’s the time to expand on the concept, and that’s what FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER is meant for.

FRANKENSTEIN FOREVER is alive NOW. Go Look!

Ben Cooper's Frankenstein

On a sunny autumn day, circa 1974, young Steve Spatucci posed in front of his family’s North Arlington, New Jersey home in his brand new Ben Cooper Frankenstein costume. “In the second photo,” Steve remembers, “I'm wearing a base of green makeup, with red lips and scars to simulate the mask. I made my Mom do this, just in case the mask ripped off, so I would still remain unrecognizable — at least in my mind!”

Created in 1937 by a theatrical costume designer, the Ben Cooper company quickly became one of the biggest party costume manufacturers in America. Operating out of Brooklyn, Cooper flooded five and dime stores at Halloween-time with inexpensive “full costumes” consisting of a silk-screened tunic, originally in fabric, eventually and famously in vinyl, and a thin plastic mask. Classic cowboys, pirates and generic devils shared shelf space with licensed movie and cartoon characters, superheroes, caricatured celebrities, and essential monsters such as Dracula, the Werewolf and the ever-popular Frankenstein Monster. Cooper also offered props, makeup "disguise sets", rubber masks and cheap toys, notably the crude painted rubber figurines called “Wigglers”.

The Cooper company collapsed in the late eighties, its assets bought out by Rubie’s Costumes Co. in 1992. Today, vintage Ben Cooper costumes are collector’s items for nostalgic Monster Kids who fondly remember the cheap vinyl smocks and the garish, paper-thin plastic masks worn with an elastic headband.

Steve Spatucci, who so generously shares his Halloween Frankenstein photos with us, grew up to become a prolific illustrator and designer whose multiple activities include several fun, monster-related websites!

Steve Spatucci’s website.

A 1980 Ben Cooper catalog, on Plaid Stallions.

A Frankenstein Wiggler, on Weirdo Toys.

Monsterpalooza Magazine, Hot Off The Press!

Here’s a real Halloween-time treat: The inaugural issue of Monsterpalooza Magazine is out now!

Published and edited by Mark Redfield and Michael Heisler, beautifully designed by Theresa Ratajczak, Monsterpalooza celebrates monsters, old school to cutting edge.

I’m honored to contribute and humbled to share its pages with writers such as Gary Don Rhodes, Ted Newsom, Raymond Castile, Anthony Taylor, and artists Frank Dietz and George Chastain, to name but a few of the all-star contributors.

Marking the 80^th anniversary of James Whale’s Frankenstein, my article, Dare You See It?, tracks gossip and newspaper articles published early in 1931 as the film was being conceived and created. The article is illustrated with examples of the newspaper ads and ballyhoo that attended Frankenstein’s late autumn release. Together, these parallel narratives explore how the film and its now iconic Monster first percolated into the public consciousness.

Monsterpalooza No. 1 is available now, directly from the publisher. Here’s the magazine’s website and Facebook Page, here’s a special sneak peek at what’s inside the first issue, and here’s how to order your copy of Monsterpalooza Magazine!

Frankensteinian : Gourmelin's Golem

The Golem haunts Old Prague in the 1967 French television adaptation of Gustav Meyrink’s famous novel. The Golem’s mask was designed by artist Jean Gourmelin, who passed away on October 9. He was 91.

Virtually unknown in America, Gourmelin was a celebrated in his native France for his unique jet-black humorous cartoons and meticulous illustrations in a surrealist vein.

As a young man, Gourmelin apprenticed with stained-glass master Max Ingrand and worked in the field for over twenty years before choosing to devote himself exclusively to illustration, coming to prominence in the early sixties as a regular contributor to the legendary Fortean magazine, Planète. Gourmelin published several collections of his drawings and illustrated books by such authors as Gaston Leroux, Guy de Maupassant and H.P.Lovecraft.

In 1966, Gourmelin designed the elaborate, caligaresque sets for the ORTF’s telefilm of Gustav Meyrink’s Le Golem, directed by Jean Kerchbron from a script by Louis Pauwels, author of The Morning of the Magicians. Gourmelin also created the Golem’s mask, closely based on Meyrink’s description of the creature with large, slanted eyes.

In the photographs here, that’s Gourmelin — center — helping actor André Reybaz, who also played the lead role of the gem-cutter, Athanase Pernath.

Le Golem was as a bold experiment in le fantastique, the producers giving veteran director Kerchbron and his team complete control over the project. It is also remembered as one of the last French TV-movies made in black and white — which suited the film perfectly. Within a few months, the network had switched to full-time color broadcasting.

Working with Kerchbron again, Gourmelin designed sets and costumes for the 1971 TV adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs. In 1977, he created the theatre sets for Andrée Chedid’s Nefertiti and he designed the poster for the original theatrical run of Les Misérables, directed by Robert Hossein.

Sadly, over the last decade, Gourmelin suffered from failing health, but he lived long enough to see his work honored in major retrospectives at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the prestigious Centre-Pompidou in Paris and, just one month before his death, the city of Vendôme where stained-glass art created in his younger days adorn the chapels of two local castles.

There’s a ten-minute excerpt of Le Golem — in French, and unfortunately sans title creature — on Ina.fr, where whole film can be downloaded for a very reasonable 4 Euros.

Update: Here is a brief, 60-second montage where the Golem is glimpsed, pursued by an angry mob.

Images from Midi-Minuit Fantastique No. 15-16, December 1966.

Jean Gourmelin’s official website.A collection of drawings from Planète Magazine, on Art Maniac.

Related:

Gourmelin's Golem in color 

The Fortean Times’ Secret of the Golem.

Bela's 129th

Happy Halloween-time Birthday to Bela Lugosi, born October 20, 1882.

Related:
When Frankenstein Met the Wolf Man

The Bride Countdown

Of all the sites celebrating Halloween all this month, one of the most original and beautifully executed is artist Thomas Boatwright’s sketch-a-day homage to Bride of Frankenstein on his Sequential Matinee blog.

Boatwright, a cartoonist and comic book creator, is stepping through the classic film with quick digital drawings, one key scene after another, that capture the characters and the sweep of the film, all done in pitch perfect black, white and grays.

I can’t wait for The Bride to show up!

The Posters of Frankenstein : Joseph Koutachy

The Monster courts his fiancée, a doomed proposition, on this gorgeous French poster from 1935 by Joseph Koutachy.

There’s precious little information to be found about this prolific poster artist. Art sites note Koutachy’s birth as 1907 either in Yugoslavia or in France, of Yugoslav descent. He is often listed, simply, as “European”. He is believed to have passed away in the late 70s or early 80s. As a fine artist, he is remembered for his atmospheric forest landscapes often featuring, upon careful examination, the single small figure of a woman in black skirt and red blouse. He is also remembered for an iconic poster for the French Lottery showing a horn of plenty spilling gold coins.

As a film poster artist, Koutachy’s career spanned at least four decades. In the horror genre, his work begins with Universal classics such as The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936), and runs all the way to Hammer’s Brides of Dracula (1960). Here, rectangular posters for The Invisible Ray (1936) and the Karloff thriller Night Key (1936) show off Koutachy’s bold compositions and striking color choices.

Koutachy’s Bride poster is another beautifully composed image, its two figures creating balance. With heavily textured, ruddy complexions, Bride and Monster are warmly alive, their joined hands becoming part of the film’s title. Note the sketched-in background with lab glassware and Dr. Pretorius’ tiny ballerina in a jar, lending a note of whimsy and surreal poetry.

The Fiancée de Frankenstein poster was sold at auction through Christies of London for a hefty $35,730, an amount bound to appreciate considering the subject matter — golden age horror classics being highly desirable — and the sheer beauty of this particular poster.

Related:
French Magazine cover of The Bride, from 1935.
Newspaper ads for La fiancée de Frankenstein.
The 2008 re-release posters for Frankenstein and La fiancée de Frankenstein.

The Art of Frankenstein : Derek Charm

The Baron and his monsters, a wonderful cartoon portrait by Derek Charm.

A Manhattan-based illustrator and comic book artist, Charm captures Peter Cushing’s cold and cool, crazy and charismatic Frankenstein, surrounded by his creations, cruel experiments in full-body reconfiguration, brain transplantation and even soul transference. All spectacular failures, spurring the Baron to keep trying, whatever the body count.

Derek Charm keeps a blog and his comic book, Trip Fantastic, is serialized online.

The Art of Frankenstein: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo (2)

Based in Granada, Spain, Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo lists such artists as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud as influences, and classic horror film icons as inspiration. I previously posted Mr. Hidalgo’s striking, paint-splattered Bride of Frankenstein, now here’s the companion piece, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, celebrating his 80th anniversary year.

This piece, called “Frankie”, is offered as a very affordable quality art print through Society6.

Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo’s website.

The Monster's Alemite Cups

We know Universal’s patented Frankenstein Monster for his tabletop skull, the dusty black suit, clubfoot boots and, of course, those neck bolts, ostensible electrodes, as if The Monster ran on AC/DC.

Boris Karloff had a name for them.

On November 20, 1957, Karloff appeared on This Is Your Life, a hugely popular show where host Ralph Edwards literally ambushed an unsuspecting celebrity on live TV, parading out acquaintances and family members, and piecing together a superficial biography of his surprised guest. Karloff was dismayed at first, but he played along like the good sport he was, eventually warming up to the proceedings. One of the show’s best moments came when makeup man Jack Pierce showed up. You can see the genuine fondness Boris and Jack had for each other, with Karloff calling his friend “the best makeup man in the world!”.

When Jack Pierce comes out, he hands Karloff a souvenir, one of The Monster’s electrodes. Karloff playfully holds it up to his neck and says, “I used to call it the Alemite cup”.

The Alemite company, founded in 1916, manufactures grease guns, pumps and oil mist systems for the lubrication industry. Among related accessories are a number of pins, couplings and fittings that could very well stand in for The Monster’s neck bolts. Three of these are shown in the photograph above.

The first one is a brass-colored Alemite fitting with locking cross pins that any Monster would wear with pride. The second item is a valved pressure cup that provides lubrication while bearings are in motion. It’s an Alemite cup, but too fancy a design for our purposes. The third one, though, is a good match. It’s an Alemite grease cup, very similar, with its flat, flanged end, to The Monster’s iconic neck ornament.

In the early days, Karloff worked a variety of side jobs, supplementing his meager income as a stage actor. On This Is Your Life, he mentions a stint in a building materials yard. There, or in any number of odd jobs held through the Twenties, Karloff could have handled the Alemite products he’d come to associate, jokingly, with The Monster’s neck bolts.

Here's video of Jack Pierce with Boris Karloff on This Is Your Life...

Related:
The Makeup Man: Jack Pierce

The Art of Frankenstein: Jim Warren

A striking portrait of The Monster in a pensive mood. The painting, by American artist Jim Warren, served as the cover to The Monster Wakes, a 1993 anthology of new stories on the Frankenstein theme, edited by Martin H. Greenberg.

It must be noted that Jim Warren’s soft-focus illustrations and portraits, as delicate as airbrushed art, are all painted with traditional brushes in oils on stretched canvas, attesting to the artist’s exquisite control of the medium.

Warren has painted over 200 book cover illustrations, many of them in the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres, as well as numerous album covers and film posters. He currently paints nature scenes and elaborate celebrity portraits.

A wide selection of Mr. Warren’s art is displayed on his website.

The Art of Frankenstein: Steve Hui

Digitial illustrator Steve Hui’s Frankenstein Monster is all raw muscle and gruesome gristle on a heavy metal skeleton. The California-based artist works in the video game industry, notably contributing to World Of Warcraft at Blizzard Entertainment.

Here’s a portfolio on Concept Art World featuring Hui’s character designs and his re-imagining of Dracula and the Wolf Man.

Cinebeats Go-Goes Frankenstein

Hurry over to Cinebeats, the fabulous blog by the fabulous Kimberly Lindbergs, and swing along with Frankenstein!

Kimberly has compiled a mix-tape of Frankenstein-flavored tunes that you can stream with a single click. It swings from Soupy Sales to France Gall, with The New York Dolls and Edgar Winter in between. A great soundtrack for your pumpkin carving!

Frankenstein-A-Go-Go on Cinebeats.

Frankenstein Wraps

ON THIS DAY, October 3, in 1931, James Whale did some pickup scenes in around the laboratory set and said “Cut!” for the last time, after 35 days of shooting, on Frankenstein.

The film was edited and a first preview held in Santa Barbara on October 29. By all accounts, the audience was shocked and Universal understood they had a powerful, unnerving and potentially problematic film on their hands.

Cuts were made. The infamous drowning sequence was chopped in half. Brief moments thought too violent were trimmed: Close-ups of the hunchback assistant taunting The Monster with a torch, a struggle and a hard blow to The Monster’s head, and a shot of an hypodermic needle jabbed into The Monster’s back. A line of dialog where Colin Clive exclaims, “Now I know what it feels like to BE God!” was buried under the sound of thunder.

New scenes were ordered, bookending the film. An introductory sequence was filmed with actor Edward Van Sloan stepping out from behind a curtain and delivering a “friendly warning”. Frankenstein, we are told, “sought to create a man after his own image, without reckoning upon God”, as if the film was meant as a lesson in divine morality.

Van Sloan cautions the audience that the film might thrill, shock or even horrify, and invites the nervously disposed to leave. The scene was obviously meant to head off critics, censor boards and religious groups who might — and did — take issue with the film. It also serves as good old hype, like parking an ambulance in front of a theater and planting nurses in the lobby.

A new closing scene was tacked on after the original ending, a shot of the burning windmill. Clive’s Henry Frankenstein, meant to be killed in his fall, was given a reprieve. James Whale shot a happily-ever-after epilogue featuring Frederick Kerr toasting his son’s survival, and the Frankenstein lineage. Colin Clive and Mae Clarke are replaced with stand-ins, far from the camera. Henry Frankenstein is bedridden, head turned away.

James Whale moved on to film the largely forgotten Impatient Maiden, with Mae Clarke. Colin Clive returned to London, leaving Hollywood on the 27th. Boris Karloff had to buy a ticket to see Frankenstein in a movie house. In the opening credits, his name was replaced with a gimmick interrogation point. Within a few months, Frankenstein would make him a full-fledged name-above-the-title movie star.

No doubt, everyone involved hoped Frankenstein would do good business, maybe as good as Dracula, the Bela Lugosi film released earlier that year. Nobody, then, could have known that they had just created what would become the most famous horror movie of all times.

Repost, with minor rewriting.

Counting Down to Halloween

Temps dipped way down last night, right on cue. Then the wind picked up, caught in a window with an eerie ghost moan and I thought, yeah, that makes it official: Autumn is here, and Halloween season is underway.

This is a time for cultivating goosebumps and embracing fears. Time to shake our skeletons loose and send them out to dance in the moonlight. This is when we stand up to Death itself, shining a flashlight under our chins and scaring it right back.

I like to think it’s Halloween everyday on Frankensteinia but, still, things get busier and the posting cranks up here in October. And once again, I am participating in the big Countdown to Halloween event organized by — and with congratulations to — John Rozum, Jon K. and Shawn Robare. Thanks, guys!

Click the Countdown badge on the menu and you’ll be taken to a jaw-dropping list of blogs, well over 200!, gone trick or treatin’ and celebrating Halloween all month long. Go look, you’ll have a blast. And check back here now and then. Boris and I are cooking up some scares for you all.