From the Frankensteinia Archives:Genesis of Frankenstein

Significant anniversaries this past week: It was 195 years ago that Mary Shelley first conceived of Frankenstein, and it was 80 years ago that Robert Florey filmed a now legendary and famously lost test reel, with Bela Lugosi, for Frankenstein at Universal Studios. Here, from our Archives, is a post celebrating these events.

June 15, 16 and 17 are important dates in Frankenstein history.

In 1816, on the evening of June 16 and late into the night, the very concept of Frankenstein was first seeded.

In the spring and summer of that year, the extreme weather conditions created by the massive Tambora volcano explosion blanketed Europe with violent thunderstorms. Out on Lake Geneva, at Cologny, the vacationing Lord Byron and his guests were confined within the walls of the Villa Diodati. As rain poured and thunder cannonaded across the Jura, Byron, his physician John Polidori, his friend Percy Shelley, Shelley’s companion and wife to be Mary Godwin, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont gathered around the fireplace and entertained themselves as best they could.

On that appropriately stormy night of June 16, Byron read aloud from a book called Fantasmagoriana, a 1812 French translation of a German collection of ghost tales. Influenced by the stories — as described in the book’s subtitle, of specters, revenants and phantoms — Byron suggested a game. “We will each write a ghost story”, he said.

As Mary wrote in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, “I busied myself to think of a story, a story to rival those which had excited us to this task.” It would take a few days before inspiration struck, as Mary claimed, in a waking dream. The first reference to Frankenstein would appear in her diary on June 24.

One hundred and fifteen years later, in 1931, writer-director Robert Florey and a skeleton crew assembled on the leftover sets from Dracula, the stairs cleaned of their cobwebs and the parquet redressed with lab equipment, to shoot the legendary — and lost — Frankenstein test reel, with Bela Lugosi as The Monster. Rehearsals were held on June 15, filming proceeded on the 16th and 17th. Though accounts differ wildly as to Lugosi’s appearance in makeup, the test, reportedly twenty minutes long, was the talk of Universal. Within ten days, James Whale had exercised his power at the studio and taken over from Florey, and the project was on its way.

Frankenstein was inspired by a book of quaint ghost stories and a parlor game for bored and excitable intellectuals. On the very same day, one hundred and fifteen years later, Robert Florey directed the screen test for the first talking Frankenstein picture.

The first event was the genesis for Frankenstein. The second one made Frankenstein an icon.

Previous posts: The Villa Diodati. Mount Tambora.

Fantasmagoria is available again, complete and in a new English translation.

The Director: James Whale

James Whale was born on this day, July 22, 1889, in Dudley, Worcestershire, England. In a short but spectacular career in Hollywood he, of course, would direct Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

Whale first worked in theater as an actor, garnering good reviews in supporting roles. Of particular interest, in 1928, he appeared in a rare British attempt at capturing the lurid thrills of the French Grand Guignol tradition. The play was called After Death, and the man who would go on to make Frankenstein was cast as a dead man returned to life by electricity!

Here’s another interesting story: Whale, as a young man, had a talent for mimicry and he would entertain friends with pitch perfect imitations. Now zoom forward to 1952. Whale, on a European holiday, stops in London. Upon hearing that the then mostly forgotten director was in town — with only ten days to go before he sailed back to America — a young film writer, Gavin Lambert of Sight and Sound magazine, hurriedly arranged for a tribute at the British Film Institute. Whale was surprised and flattered, and attended an evening showing of his two Frankenstein pictures. It is the only such homage ever given James Whale while he lived.

On that most unique evening, Whale was invited to speak and he made a short presentation about making Frankenstein that, according to Lambert, “included a brilliant impression of Boris Karloff. The audience applauded appreciatively and the film began with an appropriate mix of laughter and horror.”

The speech was not recorded on film or sound. Whale’s few but precious words and his fleeting take on Karloff are lost to us, but what a moment it must have been.

In 2002, the city of Dudley erected a memorial to James Whale. The monument, by sculptor Charles Haddock, features a concrete stack of film cans embossed with the titles of Whale’s films. On top of this is a looping filmstrip of cast iron, with film scenes etched into its frames.

James Whale’s tragic last days were fictionalized by Christopher Bram in his excellent novel Father of Frankenstein. A superb and highly decorated film adaptation, Gods and Monsters, earned its writer-director, Bill Condon, an Oscar for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium and actor Ian McKellen won several international awards and an Oscar nomination as Best Actor.

Related: Other posts concerning James Whale. 

James Whale biographies: James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, by James Curtis (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and James Whale: A Biography or The Would-Be Gentleman, by Mark Gatiss (Cassell Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1997).

James Whale website: The James Whale Nexus.

Genesis of Frankenstein

June 15, 16 and 17 are important dates in Frankenstein history.

In 1816, on the evening of June 16 and late into the night, the very concept of Frankenstein was first seeded.

In the spring and summer of that year, the extreme weather conditions created by the massive Tambora volcano explosion blanketed Europe with violent thunderstorms. Out on Lake Geneva, at Cologny, the vacationing Lord Byron and his guests were confined within the walls of the Villa Diodati. As rain poured and thunder cannonaded across the Jura, Byron, his physician John Polidori, his friend Percy Shelley, Shelley’s companion and wife to be Mary Godwin, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont gathered around the fireplace and entertained themselves as best they could.

On that appropriately stormy night of June 16, Byron read aloud from a book called Fantasmagoriana, a 1812 French translation of a German collection of ghost tales. Influenced by the stories — as described in the book’s subtitle, of specters, revenants and phantoms — Byron suggested a game. “We will each write a ghost story”, he said.

As Mary wrote in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, “I busied myself to think of a story, a story to rival those which had excited us to this task.” It would take a few days before inspiration struck, as Mary claimed, in a waking dream. The first reference to Frankenstein would appear in her diary on June 24.

One hundred and fifteen years later, in 1931, writer-director Robert Florey and a skeleton crew assembled on the leftover sets from Dracula, the stairs cleaned of their cobwebs and the parquet redressed with lab equipment, to shoot the legendary — and lost — Frankenstein test reel, with Bela Lugosi as The Monster. Rehearsals were held on June 15, filming proceeded on the 16th and 17th. Though accounts differ wildly as to Lugosi’s appearance in makeup, the test, reportedly twenty minutes long, was the talk of Universal. Within ten days, James Whale had exercised his power at the studio and taken over from Florey, and the project was on its way.

Frankenstein was inspired by a book of quaint ghost stories and a parlor game for bored and excitable intellectuals. On the very same day, one hundred and fifteen years later, Robert Florey directed the screen test for the first talking Frankenstein picture.

The first event was the genesis for Frankenstein. The second one made Frankenstein an icon.

Previous posts: The Villa Diodati. Mount Tambora.

Fantasmagoria is available again, complete and in a new English translation.

The Director : Terence Fisher

In 1957, The Curse of Frankenstein ignited a new age of cinema gothic. The film, wildly successful worldwide, instantly transformed the careers of its stars, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Hazel Court. It propelled Hammer Films of England to a position as the dominant and highly influential horror film factory — perhaps one should say “boutique” — of the era. It also established the signature Hammer style, with rich colors, elegant costumes, intricate sets and accomplished casts that belied its low-budget underpinnings.

The Curse of Frankenstein was directed with considerable aplomb by Terence Fisher. It would be the turning point of a career that already counted over 30 films. He would almost exclusively devote himself to horror from then on, retooling such characters as Dracula, Dr. Jekyll, the Werewolf and The Phantom of the Opera. Even his Sherlock Holmes movie, The Hound of the Baskervilles, played as gothic horror.

Fisher would direct all but one of Peter Cushing’s six Frankenstein films, plotting the character’s cruel career from youthful arrogance to desperate old age. It is a unique and ever engrossing set of films.

Fisher was known to trust his cast and crew, intervening only to help them focus on the context of the scene at hand. Fisher’s true contribution was cerebral. His films are deeply iconoclastic studies of men and women seduced by evil, pushing at the limits of morality.

It is significant that these films, usually shot in six expeditious weeks with bargain budgets, are still being researched and analyzed today, 27 years after Terence Fisher’s death. This summer, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris held a vast, month-long retrospective of Fisher’s films, screening no less than 40 different titles, celebrating “the exemplary coherence of Terence Fisher’s oeuvre”.

Richard Klemensen’s Little Shop of Horrors, an indispensable magazine devoted to the study of Hammer Films, has just come out with an entire issue about Terence Fisher.

Considering LSoH’s perfect record, I can recommend this one with complete confidence, sight unseen. You can order directly from the publisher, here.

Terence Fisher’s filmography.

The Frankenstein montage painting, by Mark Maddox, appears in the Terence Fisher issue of The Little Shoppe of Horror. Click through to see it, and other art, including the cover of the issue, at glorious full size.