Making The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)

Found on Facebook (with thanks to Tim Lucas) and originally posted by Paul Gallagher on the Dangerous Minds blog, here’s a short, lighthearted BBC report from April 28, 1970, on the making of Hammer Film’s The Horror of Frankenstein. The film, written and directed by Jimmy Sangster, was an attempt at rebooting the Frankenstein series with a younger cast, Ralph Bates stepping up as the cruel Baron.

Running just short of six minutes, the black and white BBC film goes on set with Bates and Dennis Price shooting a scene, and into the makeup room where Tom Smith prepares David Prowse — in spectacular bodybuilding form — for his part as The Monster. Best of all, the generous and ever-affable Peter Cushing appears with Bates for a short interview, effectively passing the baton to his replacement.

The much-maligned Horror would ultimately fail at the box office and Cushing would return to his signature part to wrap up the series with Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). David Prowse would also appear as a different and much shaggier Monster, and both Cushing and Prowse would share the screen again in Star Wars (1977) as, respectively, Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader. 

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.

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 Late Films Blogathon

David Cairns is hosting The Late Films Blogathon all this week on his superlative film blog Shadowplay.

David writes, “The idea is that late in many filmmakers’ careers, when they’re no longer in fashion, they often produce work which is underrated at the time: it’s compared negatively to their Golden Age work, and to the hip hits of the moment, and then consigned to the dustpile. But with nearly every great filmmaker, whatever the problems of the late films (often produced on low budgets, sometimes literally shot in the filmmaker’s back garden), they nevertheless encapsulate the mature reflections of great artists, and are worth appraising with an open mind.”

My contribution to The Late Films Blogathon is a repost, tweaked a bit, of my article on Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, the last of Hammer Films’ remarkable Frankenstein series. The film also marked the end of director Terence Fisher’s career and the impending demise of the studio itself. Here is...

Twilight of the Goths: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Released in May of 1974, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell reflected the end of an era. It was the last of the Hammer Films’ Frankenstein series as well as Terence Fisher’s final directorial effort and, ultimately, it was one of a handful of films that effectively closed out the history of the studio and its gothic horror heritage.

As the Seventies dawned, the market for Hammer’s classy, low budget horrors was shrinking fast. Double bills were being phased out, the small neighborhood cinemas and the second run houses were vanishing from the landscape. The company tried desperately to hang on to its share of the market, but ambitious co-productions deals with Japan’s Toho, Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers and America’s AIP fell apart.

Most damaging to Hammer’s fortunes, sensibilities were changing, too. The Gothics that had made Hammer the most copied horror studio in the world were going out of style. In 1968, a wildly popular independent American film, Night of the Living Dead, yanked horror films out of the Victorian parlors and back into the Twentieth Century, making Hammer’s civilized chills feel suddenly very quaint. The major Hollywood studios entered the horror field with big-budget titles like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). Hammer introduced nudity, the famed, deep-cleavaged Hammer Heroines dropping their bustiers altogether, but still, even with extra helpings of Kensington Gore, a new generation of horror film fans looked upon Hammer’s Victorian settings as old hat.

Despite the best efforts of studio head Michael Carreras, the partnerships and distribution deals that Hammer had always relied upon were disappearing in a sea change of mergers and realignments. Financing was drying up and distribution became problematic. Hammer’s Dracula series, the studio’s most lucrative franchise, ground to a halt with The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Shot in late ’72, the film wasn’t released in England until January 1974 and it would be another four long years before it finally limped onto North American screens.

Likewise, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell wrapped in October 1972, yet it would take a year and a half before it came out in England, to poor box office. It would eventually make it to North America in the Fall of ’74, on a double bill with Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter — a bold but failed attempt at creating a new franchise — sneaking into second rate cinemas for a quick week’s run with no publicity save a newspaper ad. It was an ignominious end to the Hammer Frankenstein series, though the film itself, a true valedictory piece, is quite remarkable. Despite its shrunken budget, it has all the trappings of the classic Hammers, with detailed period sets beautifully lit and photographed, and a sterling cast, every player excellent, headed by the formidable Peter Cushing.

Older now, emaciated, his hands burned and useless, Cushing’s Baron is still at it, hiding under one of his barely disguised names. This time he’s “Dr. Victor”, the resident medical man in an asylum for the criminally insane. Harvesting parts from the inmate population, as he did with the patients of a charity hospital in The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), he is helped in his secret experiments by the mute Sarah (Madeline Smith), a willing but unskilled assistant, beloved by the inmates who see her as an angel come among them. Things go into high gear with the highly coincidental but very timely arrival of Simon Helder (Shane Briant), a young surgeon sentenced to the madhouse for his unholy experiments inspired, as it happens, by the writings of Baron Frankenstein.

Frankenstein’s living canvas is Herr Schneider (David Prowse), a colossal, shaggy brute incarcerated for violence, namely a propensity for attacking people with broken glass. The gorilla-like creature is given new eyes, the delicate hands of a sculptor (a brief appearance by Bernard Lee), and the brain of a genius, but the sum of the parts don’t add up and the violent nature of the beastly Schneider re-asserts itself.

In an unexpected and sobering twist, perhaps hinted at by the very surroundings of the tale, Baron Frankenstein’s solution to his miserably failed experiment is to propose the mating of the mountainous monstrosity with the helpless, innocent Sarah. The creature would be “Reborn… A new version of his true self,” says the Baron to his incredulous assistant. We’d always known the Baron to be a cold, cruel man, but this shocking development betrays a fleeting grasp of sanity. “I think you’re mad,” says Helder. “Possibly,” Frankenstein laughs, “I must admit I’ve never felt so elated in my life!”

Helder squelches the Baron’s ludicrous plan. The Monster, on a rampage, is set upon and literally ripped apart by the assembled inmates. Censors having warned Hammer not to shoot the written scenes of the mad crowd eating chunks of Monster flesh, director Fisher shows one inmate “feeding” strips of flesh to a doll.

In the final scene, Cushing’s Baron shrugs off the loss of his tormented creation. “Best thing that could have happened to him,” he says, “He was of no use to us or himself.” With Helder and Sarah watching in sad silence, The Baron starts sweeping up the laboratory debris, babbling on, “We must get this place tidied up so we can start afresh… We will need new material, naturally. Herr Adler in 106, perhaps…”

The scene fades to an outside shot of the asylum, dark but for the light in the laboratory window, and the end titles crawl up the screen.

In a film curiously devoid of the patented Hammer Glamour gloss — no cleavage to speak of — the gore is ramped up, though it seems very tame by today’s standards. Eyeballs are frequently jiggled in front of the camera, collected in jars and spilled on the floor. There’s an extended scene, almost documentary in detail, where a brain is methodically removed from a freshly sawed skull. When it’s transplanted into the Monster’s head, Cushing dumps the old, useless brain to the floor and kicks it away. The Monster is last seen as a bloodied, disemboweled mess. Most memorably, there’s a brief moment, unfortunately cut from some copies, where Cushing’s Baron, unable to use his hands, helps his assistant re-attach a severed hand by biting down and holding a vein between his teeth.

Peter Cushing turns in a typically commanding performance as the snappish Baron, in full possession of the character, ordering people around with élan and apparently delighted with having an assistant he can teach his dark arts to. Cast as the diligent Simon Helder, Shane Briant had appeared in three other Hammer Films as well as playing Dorian Gray in a television adaptation. He would go on to a busy career as an actor and an accomplished novelist. Sarah, the mute “angel” who wafts demurely through the picture is played by Madeline Smith, a former model used to far sexier roles that included a couple of Hammer vampire films, a Carry On part and being Roger Moore’s first Bond Girl. Of special note, veteran actor John Stratton puts in a rousing performance as the dastardly, corrupt and ever-harried asylum director.

The “Neolithic” Monster is played by David Prowse, unrecognizable in an ugly full-head mask and bulbous upper body suit covered with long matted hair. It was Prowse’s third appearance as Frankenstein’s Monster. He had a tiny walk-on part in the James Bond comedic curio, Casino Royale (1967), as a Universal-style flathead Frankenstein. In 1970, he was the muscular Monster in Hammer’s Horror of Frankenstein, a smirking remake of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and an ill-fated attempt to relaunch the franchise with a younger cast headed by Ralph Bates in the Cushing part. Prowse would play another role in a concealing head to toe costume, opposite Cushing again, in 1977, as Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977).

Director Fisher, though in ill health and insecure, made Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell a sure-handed, sober film that projects a fin-de-siècle weariness. It’s as if Fisher and Cushing understood — with Hammer in slow motion collapse — that this was their last stab at Frankenstein and they conspired to give the Baron a proper sendoff.

In the climactic scene where The Monster lies eviscerated on the flagstone floor, surrounded by the blood-spattered inmates, Cushing’s Baron steps up and orders the inmates back to their rooms…

“There’s nothing more to see,” he says. “It’s over now... All over.”

Related:
After Frankenstein: Almost 40 years on, actor Shane Briant revisits the part of Simon Helder in a short YouTube video.
The Posters of Frankenstein: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell
Who Am I? Frankenstein Created Woman
Peter Cushing
The Director: Terence Fisher

Twilight of the Goths: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Released in May of 1974, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell reflected the end of an era. It was the last of the Hammer Films’ Frankensteins and the last screenplay for the studio by Anthony Hinds, writing as John Elder. It was Terence Fisher’s final directorial effort and, ultimately, it was one of a handful of films that effectively closed out the history of the studio and its gothic horror heritage.

In the early Seventies, the film industry in England entered a period of crisis. Despite the best efforts of Michael Carreras, back at Hammer after a stint as an independent producer, the partnerships and distribution deals that the studio had always relied upon were disappearing in a sea change of mergers and realignments. Financing was drying up, distribution became problematic. Hammer’s Dracula series, the studio’s most lucrative franchise, ground to a halt with The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Shot in late ’72, the film wasn’t released in England until January 1974 and it would be another four long years before it trickled onto North American screens.

Problems multiplied. The market for Hammer’s classy, low budget horrors was shrinking fast. Double bills were being phased out, the small neighborhood cinemas and the second run houses were vanishing from the landscape. Most damaging to Hammer’s fortunes, sensibilities were changing, too. The Gothics that had made Hammer the leading and most copied horror studio in the world were going out of style. In 1968, a wildly popular independent American film, Night of the Living Dead, made Hammer’s civilized chills feel suddenly very quaint. The major Hollywood studios entered the horror field with big-budget titles like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). A new generation of horror film fans looked upon Hammer’s Victorian settings as old hat. The company tried desperately to hang on to its share of the market, but ambitious co-productions deals with Japan’s Toho, Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers and America’s AIP fell apart. Nudity was introduced and the Kensington Gore flowed more freely but, in the end, the studio could no longer compete.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell wrapped in October 1972, yet it would take a year and a half before it came out in England, to poor box office. It would eventually make it to North America in the Fall of ’74, on a double bill with Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter — a bold but failed attempt at creating a new franchise — sneaking into second rate cinemas for a quick week’s run with no publicity save a newspaper ad. It was an ignominious end to the Hammer Frankenstein series, though the film itself, a true valedictory piece, is quite remarkable. Despite its shrunken budget, it has all the trappings of the classic Hammers, with detailed period sets beautifully lit and photographed, and a sterling cast, every player excellent, headed by the formidable Peter Cushing.

Older now, emaciated, his hands burned and useless, Cushing’s Baron is still at it, hiding under one of his barely disguised names. This time he’s “Dr. Victor”, the resident medical man in an asylum for the criminally insane. Harvesting parts from the inmate population, as he did with the patients of a charity hospital in The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), he is helped in his secret experiments by the mute Sarah (Madeline Smith), a willing but unskilled assistant, beloved by the inmates who see her as an angel come among them. Things go into high gear with the highly coincidental but very timely arrival of Simon Helder (Shane Briant), a young surgeon sentenced to the madhouse for his unholy experiments inspired, as it happens, by the writings of Baron Frankenstein.

Frankenstein’s living canvas is Herr Schneider (David Prowse), a colossal, shaggy brute incarcerated for violence, namely a propensity for attacking people with broken glass. The gorilla-like creature is given new eyes, the delicate hands of a sculptor (a brief appearance by Bernard Lee), and the brain of a genius, but the sum of the parts don’t add up and the violent nature of the beastly Schneider re-asserts itself.

In an unexpected and sobering twist, perhaps hinted at by the very surroundings of the tale, Baron Frankenstein’s solution to his miserably failed experiment is to propose the mating of the mountainous monstrosity to the helpless, innocent Sarah. The creature would be “Reborn… A new version of his true self,” says the Baron to his incredulous assistant. We’d always known the Baron to be a cold, cruel man, but this shocking development betrays a fleeting grasp of sanity. “I think you’re mad,” says Helder. “Possibly,” Frankenstein laughs, “I must admit I’ve never felt so elated in my life!”

Helder squelches the Baron’s ludicrous plan. The Monster, on a rampage, is set upon and literally ripped apart by the assembled inmates. Censors having warned Hammer not to shoot the written scenes of the mad crowd eating chunks of Monster flesh, director Fisher shows one inmate “feeding” strips of flesh to a doll.

In the final scene, Cushing’s Baron shrugs off the loss of his tormented creation. “Best thing that could have happened to him,” he says, “He was of no use to us or himself.” With Helder and Sarah watching in sad silence, The Baron starts sweeping up the laboratory debris, babbling on, “We must get this place tidied up so we can start afresh… We will need new material, naturally. Herr Adler in 106, perhaps…”

The scene fades to an outside shot of the asylum, dark but for the light in the laboratory window, and the end titles crawl up the screen.

In a film curiously devoid of the patented Hammer Glamour gloss — no cleavage to speak of — the gore is ramped up, though it seems very tame by today’s standards. Eyeballs are frequently jiggled in front of the camera, collected in jars and spilled on the floor. There’s an extended scene, almost documentary in detail, where a brain is methodically removed from a freshly sawed skull. When it’s transplanted into the Monster’s head, Cushing dumps the old, useless brain to the floor and kicks it away. The Monster is last seen as a bloodied, disemboweled mess. Most memorably, there’s a brief moment, unfortunately cut from some copies, where Cushing’s Baron, unable to use his hands, helps his assistant re-attach a severed hand by biting down and holding a vein between his teeth.

Peter Cushing turns in a commanding performance as the snappish Baron, in full possession of the character, ordering people around with élan and apparently delighted with having an assistant he can teach his dark arts to. Cast as the diligent Simon Helder, Shane Briant had appeared in three other Hammer Films as well as playing Dorian Gray in a television adaptation. He would go on to a busy career as an actor and an accomplished novelist. Sarah, the mute “angel” who wafts demurely through the picture is played by Madeline Smith, a former model used to far sexier roles that included a couple of Hammer vampire films, a Carry On part and being Roger Moore’s first Bond Girl. Of special note, veteran actor John Stratton puts in a rousing performance as the dastardly, corrupt and ever-harried asylum director.

The “Neolithic” Monster is played by David Prowse, unrecognizable in an ugly full-head mask and bulbous upper body suit covered with long matted hair. It was Prowse’s third appearance as Frankenstein’s Monster. He had a tiny walk-on part in his first film, Casino Royale, in 1967, as a Universal-style flathead Frankenstein. In 1970, he was the muscular Monster in Hammer’s Horror of Frankenstein, a smirking remake of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and an ill-fated attempt to relaunch the franchise with a younger cast headed by Ralph Bates in the Cushing part. Prowse would play another role in a concealing head to toe costume, opposite Cushing again, in 1977, as Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977).

Director Fisher, though in ill health and insecure, made Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell a sure-handed, sober film that projects a fin-de-siècle weariness. It’s as if Fisher and Cushing understood — with Hammer in slow motion collapse — that this was their last stab at Frankenstein and they conspired to give the Baron a proper sendoff.

In the climactic scene where The Monster lies eviscerated on the flagstone floor, surrounded by the blood-spattered inmates, Cushing’s Baron steps up and orders the inmates back to their rooms…

“There’s nothing more to see,” he says. “It’s over now... All over.”

Related:
The Posters of Frankenstein: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell
Who Am I? Frankenstein Created Woman
Peter Cushing
The Director: Terence Fisher

Who Am I? Frankenstein Created Woman

Frankenstein Created Woman, Hammer’s fourth entry in the series, was released in America on March 15, in 1967.

The story unfolds like a gruesome fairy tale. Imagine Romeo and Juliet with Juliet resuscitated and exacting slasher-like revenge on her and her lover’s tormentors. The Monster To Be is Christina (Susan Denberg), a gentle girl who, despite disfigurement and a clubfoot, has found love with the handsome, kind-hearted Hans (Robert Morris). When her beloved is framed for murder and guillotined, Christina, with nothing left to live for, throws herself off a bridge.

Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) swings into action: He captures the decapitated Hans’ soul — which appears as ball of light — in an electrical field and transfers it to the drowned Christina. Her limp is repaired and she is restored to stunning beauty.

Cushing’s Frankenstein, but for his scientific intervention, is largely relegated to the background in this one. It’s very much Christina’s story. Possessed by her lover’s vengeful soul, she uses sexual attraction to draw the guilty to their bloody deaths. In the end, when Christina again commits herself to a watery grave, The Baron, too late in figuring out what had happened and incapable of saving Christina from her fate, is seen simply walking away as the end credits roll.

Cushing is in fine form, as always. One critic noted that he played Baron Frankenstein as earnestly as if he was doing Hamlet. Though underutilized, he effortlessly nails every scene he’s in. The usual good supporting cast is led by Thorley Walters, a favorite of director Terence Fisher, as a somewhat bumbling Watson (a role he, in fact, played) to Cushing’s cold and calculating character.

Susan Denberg’s screen career was a very short one, spanning barely two years. Introduced in 1966 as a Playboy centerfold, she is remembered today for her Frankenstein film and a Star Trek appearance, in Mudd’s Women. Christina was her only starring role, and her last one. Ironically, she was dubbed throughout because of her germanic accent. The young Denberg fell in with the drug-fueled jet-set crowd of the Sixties and soon dropped out of sight. Happily, sensationalistic rumors of her death proved false. She quit the limelight and retreated to a quiet life in her native Austria.

The film’s title was first suggested a decade earlier by producer/writer Anthony Hinds as a possible follow-up to Hammer’s immensely successful Revenge of Frankenstein. The Roger Vadim-Brigitte Bardot God Created Woman was then a boxoffice sensation. The half-spoof, half-blasphemous title was set aside until Hammer’s American partner, Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth-Century-Fox, offered enthusiastically support for it. Elements of the script can be found sprinkled among the storylines originally written for a planned (and abandoned) Frankenstein television series in 1958. One story featured a homicidal female creation without a soul, and another dealt with cryogenics. In the film, Cushing, experimenting on himself, is first introduced flash-frozen and shocked to life with electricity.

The film’s script, by Hinds, writing as John Elder, is full of ideas, but none are developed in depth, as if not to get in the way of the action. The whole thing bathes in the murky metaphysics of soul transference. Most intriguing is the transsexual context, Hans inhabiting Christina’s body and using her sexuality to attract his/her victims. Hammer would explore the dual sexuality angle to greater effect in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971).

There’s an interesting symmetry to the film, with Hans suffering the same horrible fate as his father, also unjustly guillotined, and Christina’s double drowning. There are many elements typical of Terence Fisher’s films, such as Christina’s confused identity, a condition visited throughout the Frankenstein series upon several of The Baron's brain transplant victims, and a familiar charge against arrogant and cruel authority. The villains in this tale are the dandies who pin their murder on the powerless, low-class Hans, and they behave like the vicious aristocrats in Fisher’s The Hound of the Baskerville (1959) and The Curse of the Werewolf (1961).

Special mention must be made of Bernard Robinson’s wonderful, prop-laden sets, and the beautiful cinematography by Arthur Grant, two men whose work made Hammer’s modest expenditures look like big budget films. Grant’s work is sharp throughout, tense scenes punctuated with pools of colored light. Memorably, the restored Christina is first seen in extreme closeup, her head wrapped in snow-white bandages, resting against a blindingly red blanket.

The film’s promotion, naturally, relied heavily on the shapely Susan Denberg. One photo session involved lab scenes with Cushing in dead serious Frankenstein mode posing with Denberg in a skimpy bandage bikini.

The shots are perfectly misleading, having nothing whatsoever to do with the actual film, but they fit the film’s title and received wide exposure. An illustrated version was used for the film’s poster.

Frankenstein Created Woman is one of Hammer’s most famous titles, and certainly their most unusual Frankenstein film. I find I like it better with every viewing, a reflexion I can probably apply to all the films in this series. There is an attention, an intelligence to these films that cannot be denied.

A very good, elaborate trailer for the film.

Another trailer, featuring the most deadpan narration ever, of the film and its double-bill companion, The Mummy’s Shroud.

Christina’s awakening scene, an excerpt from the film.

A very perceptive review of the film by Tim Lucas.

Frankenstein Created Woman is available on DVD.

Related:
Tales of Frankenstein

Hammer Horrors Playing Cards

Found on the delightful and deliciously deranged (and sometimes nsfw) Deadlicious blog, these Hammer Films playing cards were produced by the Heritage Toy and Game Company in the early 90’s.

Nothing fancy here, just card faces decorated with stills, most of them in black and white, from classic Hammer Horrors, including a handful of Frankensteins.

The Deadlicious blog, by its own definition, celebrates “lowbrow art to hardcore bikes, trash literature, tattoos, weird things of all kinds”. Our hosts, if you can get your brains around this, are Frenchmen who wear luchadores masks and, among other things, create unique rock n’roll pastries and pies. No kidding. I, for one, know where I’m heading first next time I’m in Paris.

You can follow their gigs and gatherings on Deadlicious Nation, and be sure to visit the Deadlicious website to discover their amazing patisseries. Deadlicious also keeps a lively MySpace page.

Filo Loco of the Deadlicious crew, has invited Frankensteinia to join the Deadlicious Hot Blog Circle, an informal gathering of blogs that display “cool stuff, free spirit and attitude”. I'm game!

Merci, Filo!

More Hammer Cards on Deadlicious.

Revenge Released

Hammer Films’ The Revenge of Frankenstein premiered at the venerable Plaza cinema in Piccadilly Circus on this date, August 27, fifty years ago.

No sooner had The Curse of Frankenstein wrapped, in January 1957, that a script for a sequel was commissioned of writer Jimmy Sangster. Promotional materials appeared in trade papers featuring Christopher Lee’s disembodied head — The Monster from the original film — floating above the working title, The Blood of Frankenstein. Shooting eventually kicked off in January 1958, reuniting Cushing with director Terence Fisher, but sans Lee, whose Dracula (aka The Horror of Dracula) was released in May ’58.

Francis Matthews, sitting in attendance at the Revenge premiere with Peter Cushing, remembers the audience laughing as his character prepared to transplant Dr. Frankenstein’s brains. “My dear boy,” Cushing whispered, “What have we done?”

British critics would lavish odium on the film, as they had for The Curse of Frankenstein. The Observer’s critic called the film “vulgar, stupid, nasty”, adding, “I want to gargle it off with a strong disinfectant, to scrub my memory with carbolic soap.”

Mr. Cushing need not have worried. With an intelligent, provocative script, a superlative cast and outstanding production values that belied the film’s actual budget, The Revenge of Frankenstein was a rare gem of a horror film, an instant classic, and a solid box-office hit.

Nervous laughter and contemptuous critics aside, audiences world-wide would embrace Hammer Film’s brand of gothic gore and Cushing would get to pursue and refine his sardonic Frankenstein in four more films over the next 16 years.

Related Posts:
The Revenge of Frankenstein Wraps
Frankenstein 1958

The Stamps of Frankenstein

News has come that the Royal Mail of Great Britain will be issuing stamps celebrating Hammer Films this summer (2008). The set will include a Curse of Frankenstein stamp, based on the poster shown here.

Frankenstein philatelic history spans back a mere decade. In 1997, Royal Mail plans for a Mary Shelley bicentennial stamp were abandoned, and — not for the first time — the author was supplanted by her creation. A Tales of Terror set appeared, itself a subset of an ongoing Tales and Legends series, featuring four famous British monsters painted in a vigorous caricature style by Ian Pollock. The watercolors included a bushy-haired Dracula, a split-face Jekyll and Hyde, a fiery-eyed Hound of the Baskervilles, and a subdued, laconic Frankenstein Monster.

The same year, at Halloween, after intensive lobbying by the Karloff, Lugosi and Chaney estates, the American Postal Service issued a heavily promoted Classic Movie Monsters series featuring Universal Pictures’ family of creatures: Lon Chaney’s Phantom, Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman, Lugosi’s Dracula, and Boris Karloff on two stamps: The Mummy and Frankenstein.

Thomas Blackshear II provided excellent portraits of the characters, notably a baleful, lizard-lidded Karloff Frankenstein, though monster fans, understandably, had hoped for paintings by the legendary Famous Monsters cover artist, Basil Gogos.

The USPS distributed thousands of promotional kits to schools. “We are using the fun of these 'monsters' to get kids interested in collecting stamps," said Azeezaly Jaffer, manager of Stamp Services. “The subject matter of these kid-appealing stamps offers employees the opportunity to promote the hobby.”

The USPS would use The Monster again, in February 2003, this time a closely cropped photograph of Karloff in mid-transformation at the hands of Jack Pierce. The picture served as the “Makeup” entry in a series called American Filmmaking: Behind The Scenes.

Date unknown, a curious Hollywood Horror Classic set was issued by the West African Republic of Sierra Leone, with art by American painter Zina Saunders. The collection includes Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreau and Lionel Atwill from The Mystery of the Wax Museum, along with the familiar Universal monsters, and features the world’s first Bride of Frankenstein stamp. Karloff appears in a scene from Son of Frankenstein.

The new stamp set, coming June 10 from the Royal Mail, honors popular British films, notably the three Hammer Film lynchpins, Curse of Frankenstein, (Horror of) Dracula, and The Mummy. Much has been printed in the UK about Christopher Lee, featured on all three stamps, becoming the first living non-royal to be featured on a British stamp. In a statement published in the Telegraph, Lee says “I suppose its an honour. Her Majesty is rather more recognisable than me, though. In all but one of the stamps I have seen I have my head in bandages. It’s probably a mercy.”

Interestingly, the other stamps in the Film set honor the bawdy Carry On Series, including their Hammer Film spoof Carry On Screaming.

The stamp design is a bit awkward, using horizontal film posters with the Queen’s cameo and postage overlaid and competing with the already busy images. Nevertheless, it’s amusing to see the Queen’s profile sharing space with the once critically reviled Hammer horrors, and Screaming’s pneumatic Fenella Fielding.

Closeups of the British 1997 Tales of Terror series.

USPS pages for the 1997 Classic Movie Monsters series, and 2003 Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes.

A fascinating page of Dracula stamps from around the world, including a full sheet of the Sierra Leone Hollywood Horror Classics series.

Two wonderful blogs: Literary Stamps, and Fantastisk Filateli.

Elizabeth : Hazel Court

No sooner had I posted a birthday celebration for Valerie Hobson that news came of another screen Elizabeth. Hazel Court, the ingenuous fiancée to Peter Cushing’s cruel Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein of 1957, passed away on April 15. An autobiography, Horror Queen, is due for publication on the 23rd.

I am surprised how sad the news made me. I can’t believe how deep my heart sank. I realize now how important Hazel Court was to me. I remember how I sought out her pictures and how her presence elevated so many films that I loved. Her list of horror films is long and storied, with significant contributions made at Hammer Films of England and American International of Hollywood.

In the winter of 1956, Court joined Cushing, Christopher Lee, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and director Terence Fisher at Hammer’s Bray Studios to make cinematic history, in the form of The Curse of Frankenstein. Court’s four-year old daughter, Sally Walsh, appeared briefly as a young Elizabeth. When the film went out around the world in the summer of ’57, despite being shredded as sadistic and repulsive by British critics, it was box-office gold, and the Hammer era of Gothic Horrors was launched.

Hazel Court was ravishing, “a beauty among the beasts” as one reviewer put it. You couldn’t possibly miss her, of course. Imagine: A redhead with green eyes, and generous cleavage bound in Victorian corsets. She was tagged as a “Scream Queen”, and she did have to shriek off the threats of monsters and villains, but she was also one hell of an actress. When given a proper role, she could make it swing. Look at her beguiling turn in Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963) — see a YouTube clip here — and see how she holds her own in a scene with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and a desperately young Jack Nicholson.

By the late sixties, Hazel Court was mostly working in American television, and then she walked away and went on to other things. Encouraged by her friend, art expert Vincent Price, she became an artist, another thing that made me connect with her. She was a painter first, then a sculptor of Italian marble. Admirably, Hazel Court was proud of her horror films, always willing to share her memories, and generous in her recollections of fellow actors and co-stars.

Thinking back, there are three brief scenes that instantly come to mind when I think of Hazel Court. She always seemed to be wearing one of those spectacular opera dresses. In The Raven, she exchanges lines with the venerable Boris Karloff, her back turned to him as he fixes her dress. In The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), she backs up the stairs, keeping a horrified distance from a clawing Anton Diffring, disintegrating before our eyes as his rejuvenation experiment fails. And the most memorable scene, an instant, indelible recall for me, comes in The Curse of Frankenstein, as she prowls the abandoned laboratory and steps out on the balcony…

That’s how I remember the unforgettable Hazel Court, in her bustled, off-the-shoulder dress, holding a gasoline lamp, unaware of The Monster lurking close behind.

Hazel Court's autobiography, from Tomahawk Press.

An obituary in The International Herald Tribune.

Wonderful, touching posts about Hazel Court by Arbogast and Tim Lucas.

A fan page.

The trailer for The Curse of Frankenstein.

Updates:

A recent interview with Hazel Court in a Lake Tahoe paper.

An obituary at Cinefantastique Online.

A rememberance by Tom Weaver on Fangoria.com.

Tales of Frankenstein

Fifty years ago this week, on March 25 to be precise, Hammer Films executive producer Michael Carreras fired off a letter to his counterpart Ralph Cohn of Screen Gems in New York. The subject was the recently completed pilot for Tales of Frankenstein. The proposed television series was to be co-produced in equal measure, thirteen half-hour episodes apiece, by Hammer in England and Screen Gems, the television arm of Columbia Pictures, in America.

Carreras had not yet seen the pilot, The Face in the Tombstone Mirror, shot in Hollywood, but when news came that it had cost $80,000, Carreras complained that the episode could have been made at Bray Studios for roughly half the price. “The reason I am making such a bloody nuisance of myself” he wrote, “is because I have tremendous faith in this series and I honestly believe that we can make them better than anyone else.” Somewhat presumptuously, he added, “Let me know when you are ready to start.”

The pilot turned out to be competent enough to attract cautious interest by the ABC network. Development of the series continued through the coming months, but the collaboration between Hammer and Columbia was never an easy one. Hammer producer Anthony Hinds had dropped out of the project after a frustrating visit to America, and Carreras would later refer to the project as “one of the unhappiest experiences of my screen career”. The project, perhaps inevitably, fizzled. The pilot aired occasionally as late-night filler on American TV and eventually fell into the Public Domain.

The Face in the Tombstone Mirror is a curious hybrid, mixing the classic Universal Frankensteins with a distinct Hammer Film vibe. Curt Siodmak, who, a dozen years previous, had written Universal’s Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman (1943), and House of Frankenstein (1944) wrote the story, produced and directed the episode. The script was finished by Catherine and Henry Kuttner (also known as Lewis Padgett). Henry was a famous science fiction writer who had been friends with H.P.Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. He passed away suddenly, of a heart attack, in February of 1958, shortly after delivering the script.

For all the name talent, the script proved to be simple-minded and clichéd. The direction was workmanlike and pedestrian. Spark was provided by the curt, calculating Anton Diffring as Baron Frankenstein, very much in the cold-hearted Peter Cushing mold. The striking Helen Westcott was also effective as the devoted wife of a doomed artist. The doughy-faced Monster is played by six foot six character actor Don Megowan, who holds the distinction of being the only actor to have played both the Frankenstein Monster and the air-breathing Gillman, in The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).

As this Tale opens, in a scene reminiscent of Hammer’s then recent Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the Monster is no sooner brought to life that it lunges to strangle its creator. There’s an explosion and The Monster shorts out. Frankenstein reflects over the fallen Creature: “Your brain came from the skull of a murderer. You still wanted to kill. But, with the right brain, the brain of an intelligent man, a good man… Where will I find it?”

Enter Christine Halpert (Westcott), seeking urgent help. Her husband, Paul (Richard Bull), is dying of some unspecified “critical” illness. The Baron turns them away, but not before registering interest in Paul’s “good hands” and artistic bent.

In quick succession, Paul dies and is buried in the local cemetery. Frankenstein promptly digs him up and performs a brain upgrade on his hulking Monster. Meanwhile, visiting the grave, Christine finds a discarded locket that had been buried with her husband. She gets the caretaker, Frankenstein’s grave-robbing accomplice, to spill the beans, and heads for the castle. The Monster recognizes her and carries her away, but stops in his tracks when he sees himself in a mirror.

The Monster now turns on the Baron and the chase takes them back to the graveyard where Christine reasons with The Monster: “The life you had was brief, but it was decent and good. Don’t destroy everything now because of a hideous face and grotesque body… that aren’t yours!”

The Monster contemplates his situation and hurls himself into the open, collapsing grave, embracing the death he had briefly cheated. A constable appears and arrests the Baron for grave robbing.

“You have your job to do,” Frankenstein says, “and so have I. And I don’t think either of us would let anything stand in the way of fulfilling our respective destinies. Time is of small matter, you see… There’s always tomorrow!”

Before the project was finally canned, Hammer Films hired a handful of writers to come up with potential script material. Jimmy Sangster, author of Hammer’s Frankenstein, Dracula and Mummy pictures, came up with a dozen one-line story ideas (“He has a set to with Zombies”). Other writers provided themes that would be recycled in upcoming Frankenstein movies, notably a mesmerist episode that wound up as the core of Evil of Frankenstein (1964), and a beautiful, but soulless female monster that anticipates the character in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967).

One understands Michael Carreras’ enthusiasm and frustration. Hammer Films had just recently exploded on the scene, its gothic horrors were box-office gold. In 1958, Monsters were beginning to hit big. The Shock Theater package of Universal horror movies was a late-night TV phenomenon. Today, we know that monster magazines, bubble gum cards, plastic kits and toys, the Corman/Price pictures of AIP, The Addams Family and The Munsters were all coming down the pike. In retrospect, it seems that there was a Monster Kid audience out there that would have embraced a Frankenstein TV series.

Tales of Frankenstein: The Face in the Tombstone Mirror can be seen online or downloaded from Archive.org. It’s definitely worth a look.

Some of the details in this post were found in the excellent The Hammer Story (1997, revised 2007) by Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes.

The Revenge of Frankenstein Wraps

We Dare You To See It! We Double-Dare You To Forget It!
— Advertising slogan for The Revenge of Frankenstein.

Fifty years ago today, March 4, 1958, filming wrapped on Hammer Films’ The Revenge of Frankenstein.

In January, actor Peter Cushing, director Terence Fisher and crew had gone directly from making (Horror of) Dracula to the new Frankenstein film with barely three days off between shoots. The Revenge of Frankenstein, originally advertised in the trades as Blood of Frankenstein, was a direct sequel to the hugely successful Curse of Frankenstein, shot almost exactly a year earlier and still in distribution. The action picks up as Baron Frankenstein is led to the guillotine, delivering the first of several shocking twists that drive the grisly and literate script, probably writer Jimmy Sangster’s finest.

The film features impeccable period sets by Bernard Robinson, gorgeous photography by Jack Asher, and a superlative cast. Francis Matthews plays Frankenstein’s studious assistant, Eunice Gayson appears in standard issue Hammer Glamour décolletage, and Richard Wordsworth plays a conniving orderly. The always reliable Wordsworth had played the infected astronaut, Carroon, in The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and would essay the doomed beggar in The Curse of the Werewolf (1961). In smaller parts, Hammer regular Michael Ripper teams up with Lionel Jeffries as a memorable pair of grave robbers.

Michael Gwynn is outstanding as the woebegone hunchback who submits to a brain transplant, swapping his broken body for Frankenstein’s handsome creation, only to transform into a violent and brutally twisted monster with cannibalistic appetites. Gwynn’s performance is heart wrenching. Scenes where he stuffs his old body in a fiery furnace, and his poignant confrontation with Frankenstein, interrupting a society evening, are highlights.

Topping the cast, Peter Cushing delivers a crowning performance, a career tour de force, adding layers of nuance to his reading of the energetic Baron, a part he would have the unique opportunity of developing further in four more films. In the Revenge’s ultimate switcheroo, the Baron is subject to his own experiments and Cushing gets to play both creator and created in the same film, a trick also used with Boris Karloff in Frankenstein 1970 (1958), and Ian Holm in television’s Mystery and Imagination: Frankenstein (1968).

In the summer of ’58, (Horror of) Dracula and The Revenge of Frankenstein would consolidate Hammer’s growing reputation. The posters for the Frankenstein film featured Gwynn’s leering pop-eyed face, and a hairy claw. The unique and unusual trailer has Peter Cushing talking directly to the audience, establishing Hammer’s Frankenstein era by placing his botched execution in the year 1860.

“I, Baron Frankenstein… have escaped the guillotine” he says, “and I shall avenge the death of my creation!”

The trailer is online, on YouTube.

Poster from the Belgian release courtesy of Jean-Claude Michel.

Frankenstein Has Escaped!

Early sixties, maybe '61 or '62, on a lazy summer day in Montreal’s East End. The Orleans, a small, neighborhood theatre about 6 blocks from where I lived, ran a horror triple-bill. I remember the posters crowded in the small display window: A cartoon Dracula with phosphorescent eyes and blood dripping from his fangs, a gingerbread man-like Mummy with pursuers shining a flashlight beam through the clean, dinner plate-sized hole in its chest, and a variation of the poster shown here, an intense Dr. Frankenstein and his haphazard-faced Monster with heads together in extreme closeup. Three films, three cool monsters. All starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. All written by Jimmy Sangster, all directed by Terence Fisher. All Hammer Films.

I attended with two friends, first showing, first day, at noon. Partway through that afternoon, shrill music cannonading, the swashbuckling Van Helsing sprang to the window, yanked back the drapes, grabbed two candleholders and made a cross of them, pinning the snarling, spitting Dracula in the acid beams of the sun. As Christopher Lee melted and crumbled into dry oatmeal, my friend Serge suddenly sprang up, leapt over me, and ran up the aisle and out of the theater. I saw him again the next day, but he refused to talk about it.

By late afternoon, after the three films had unspooled, my friend Gilbert got up to leave. I asked him to call my Mom and tell her I’d be late. I had to watch this again. With a bag of chips for dinner, I sat through the triple-bill again.

That evening, as I straggled home, head spun with stylish Gothic horrors, I knew everything had changed. I had gotten a thrilling, dizzying crash course in the recent, still young Hammer Films history, and I had been made into a fan forever. I went back that week and sat through the three films again. For years to come, into adulthood, I never missed a new Hammer film. I’d see them as they came out, usually at the Strand downtown, and I’d catch them again in the neighborhood, when they circled back in French.

I always loved the French titles. They often seemed to be more imaginative than the original ones. They sounded better, more exciting. Nowadays, film titles are usually translated straight up, and sometimes they even keep the English title, though the film itself is dubbed. That unforgettable day when I discovered Hammer films — and just plain fell in love with movie going — the triple-bill titles were (re-translated into English): The Nightmare of Dracula, The Curse of the Pharaohs and, my favorite, Frankenstein Has Escaped!, a screaming headline title fraught with urgent menace. It’s Escaped! It’s Out There Right Now! And it’s FRANKENSTEIN!!! Maybe it’s just me, but I think those three titles have more buzz to them than Horror of Dracula, The Mummy, and The Curse of Frankenstein.

I always had fun comparing alternate or translated titles. Curse of the Werewolf played in French as The Night of the Werewolf, the Loup-Garou staking its claim to his full-moon time. The Reptile was presented more accurately as Reptile Woman. Plague of the Zombies became The Invasion of the Living Dead, setting the table for George Romero, due just two years hence. Hands of the Ripper was called The Daughter of Jack The Ripper. Terror of the Tongs sounded even more pulpish as Mark of the Red Dragon. The Rider Haggard epic, She, was called The Goddess of Fire, and The Vengeance of She became The Goddess of the Sands. Evil of Frankenstein was called The Mark (or The Imprint…) of Frankenstein. The Mummy’s Shroud was energized as In the Claws of the Mummy.

Among non-Hammer films, Scream and Scream Again, a pretty decent horror film title in and of itself, played in French with the in-your-face title, Release the Monsters! And for reasons I simply cannot fathom, Frankenstein 1970 (a Boris Karloff b-movie made in 1958) was translated as… Frankenstein Meets The Invisible Man.

Monster Brides were given more suggestive titles. The classic Universal Bride of Frankenstein was called The Fiancée of Frankenstein in French. Franc Roddam’s The Bride was called La promise, i.e. The Promised One, or The Betrothed. Hammer’s Brides of Dracula became the more alluring Mistresses of Dracula, and the Harry Alan Towers Brides of Fu Manchu went to the limit with The Thirteen Fiancées of Fu Manchu!

As time went on and Hammer took to more complex and original titles, there was a curious reverse action in French translations. Taste the Blood of Dracula, a satisfyingly lurid title became the simpler and barely blasphemous A Mass for Dracula. Even worse, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, a vivid, apocalyptic title promising pulse-pounding action was saddled with the exceedingly pedestrian The Return of Frankenstein.

Foreign or alternative titles are interesting, sometimes amusing, but in the end, we must logically revert to the original title, in whatever language that was. Except for The Curse of Frankenstein. That one, in my heart, will always be… Frankenstein Has Escaped!

Images courtesy of Jean-Claude Michel.