The Step of Frankenstein

Part Two of 'Jean-Claude Carrière’s Frankenstein', my contribution to the Luis Bunuel Blog-a-Thon hosted by Flickhead.

Under the Benoit Becker pen name, Jean-Claude Carrière wrote six Frankenstein novels between 1957 and 1959 for the Paris-based Editions Fleuve Noir’s Angoisse (“Dread”) collection. The titles translate as: The Tower of Frankenstein, The Step (or, Footstep) of Frankenstein, The Night of Frankenstein, The Seal of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Prowls, and The Cellar of Frankenstein. The original editions were true pulp paperbacks, bound in cheap cardboard covers, with thick, rough-cut newsprint interiors.

The inspiration for Le pas de Frankenstein is the Orkney Island sequence from the Mary Shelley original. This is where Victor Frankenstein undertook to build a mate for The Monster. At the last moment, just short of galvanizing his new creation to life, Frankenstein reneged and destroyed the female monster, provoking The Monster’s wrath and dooming his own bride, Elizabeth.

Carrière's story takes place 100 years later on Frankenstein’s desolate retreat which he calls, awkwardly, “Cround” Island. This is typical of the somewhat ridiculous, made-up English surnames used throughout the novel, names like Flawtter, Bobsom, Pilljoy, and a village called Plosway, all meant to sound like what an English name should sound like, at least to the ears of a young French writer in 1957.

The villagers of Plosway, on Cround, live hard, isolated lives, at the mercy of sea and superstition. The island’s most unusual inhabitant, incongruously, is a mysterious Caribbean man named Percy. He is believed to practice voodoo and is suspected of grave robbing, no less, but no one dares or bothers to venture out to his remote, decrepit shack.

Into this world arrives Dr. Pilljoy, a mad scientist type looking for the site of Victor Frankenstein’s experiments. He soon zeroes in on Percy’s isolated cabin, confronts the voodoo man, and uncovers the remains of the dismembered bride and Victor Frankenstein’s journal.

Cue The Monster…

Gouroull rises out the sea, having literally walked to the island. The implacable Monster doesn’t breathe, its heart doesn’t beat, and blood doesn’t circulate in its black veins. Guided by distant memory and primitive instinct, the giant makes a beeline for Percy’s cabin. Percy and Dr. Pilljoy hear his step, as if announcing imminent doom, as he approaches.

When Gouroull bursts in, Dr. Pilljoy greets him a la Pretorius and lays out his plan for world domination. Combining the remains left by Frankenstein with “materials” of his own invention, Pilljoy proposes to mold, Golem-like, a new Bride for Gouroull so that they may populate the world with their superior monster offspring and rid the planet of its useless humans. Horrified, Percy makes a break for it, but Gouroull catches up with a leap and a stride, and kills him with his patented neck chomp.

Pilljoy gets down to business. When a handful of villagers work up the courage to investigate the weird goings on, Gouroull goes on a rampage, killing and maiming all who dare approach.

As his work nears completion, Pilljoy sends The Monster out to fetch a young woman from nearby Plosway so that he may perform a full-body blood transfusion to the new Bride and thus bring it to life.

Here, the novel reaches its lurid, Grand Guignol climax. A young widow, Mary Flawtter, her husband having drowned in a fishing accident, is captured and strapped — nude, of course — to a slab next to the fetid, waiting Bride. Just as Pilljoy is about to proceed and drain the helpless woman of every last drop of her blood, something stirs among the piles of baskets left behind by Percy. The voodoo man is exerting revenge from beyond the grave, willing his zombies to life.

Pilljoy and The Monster are tackled by the walking dead. When Gouroull rips a zombie limb from limb, every torn piece of it continues to writhe with supernatural life. Complicating matters, a severed hand lands on the tied-down widow and begins a slow crawl up her nude body to her throat.

All is lost. Pilljoy perishes and the Monster, for all its inhuman strength, is overwhelmed by the hordes of clawing zombies. Roaring in frustration, lightning booming all around, Gouroull escapes, trailing zombie parts, "never to be seen again". Or, at least until the next adventure.

In the end, villagers rescue Mary and the cabin of horrors is consumed in flames. Unbeknownst to the widow, we learn that the most ferocious of the attacking zombies had been her lost husband, risen from the grave to save his forever beloved.

Carrière’s Step of Frankenstein is simple, straightforward pulp horror, with its requisite monsters, bloodbaths, cliffhangers, and naked lady. Characters are barely sketched out, relying on clichés to register with the reader. The plot, in pure pulp tradition, stretches to fill the space between the brief bursts of action parsimoniously peppered throughout the novel. The scene where Pilljoy arrives by boat and disembarks at a pier uses up several pages. Sometimes you wish the writer would just get on with the story, but it must be said that Carrière maintains a palpable feeling of menace throughout the book, the proceedings are steeped in an oppressive atmosphere of doom and gloom, and the payoff is so over the top that readers must have come away wanting to read the next one in the series.

If not for Carrière’s reputation, and the Frankenstein Monster’s brand name, these books would probably be forgotten today and collected solely for their wonderful covers.

The artist, Michel Gourdon, produced the near totality of covers for the Fleuve Noir paperbacks, some 20 different covers per month. In a period covering 1950 to 1978, in addition to his other book cover contracts, advertising and film poster work, Gourdon created a staggering 3500 covers for Fleuve Noir alone.

Today, he is best remembered for his San Antonio series of covers, and his crime and espionage covers that always seemed to feature a prominent topless blonde. It’s nice to know that Gourdon himself is most fond of his old Angoisse horror pulp gouaches.

In 1972, Aredit Pocket Comics adapted Carrière’s Frankensteins in their Hallucinations title (artist not identified), throwing in a seventh issue based on Mary Shelley’s book.

The black and white excerpts I posted here are taken from an overview of the Hallucinations Frankenstein comics on the excellent Beyond The Groovy Age of Horror blog.

See more Gourdon covers here, and here.

The Bunuel Blog-a-Thon continues through the weekend at Flickhead. Click over there for all the links. There's lots of wonderful posts to read.

The Updates of Frankenstein

Updating recent posts with new information…

Broadway Frankenstein

There’s no lack of info — and hype — on the web about Mel Brook’s musical version of Young Frankenstein opening on Broadway this October.

I just thought I’d mention that the show’s website was significantly upgraded this week with new info, cast pictures, video and goodies to download.

Cryptic Cartoons

Demented cartoonist Eric Pigors, whom I profiled earlier, announces that his Cryptic Art book is completely Sold Out… but you can STILL get a copy. I told you he was demented!

‘Unkle’ Pigors is offering a very special Halloween-cover, numbered and signed edition of the book, strictly limited to 30 precious copies. The hardcover, 120-page, full-color book comes augmented with 50 new drawings, and it all goes for 40 well-wasted smackeroos. Go ahead, give your eyeballs a treat!

Get it direct from the master at Toxictoons and tell him Frankensteinia sent you.

Frankenskulls

Picking up on my Skull of Frankenstein post, Max, The Drunken Severed Head (by the way, he’s demented, too!) has posted some wild morphing x-rays (by dadabigelow) of the Frankenstein Monster’s crazy cranium.

Fun stuff!

Frankenstein in Motion

A brilliant solution for a Frankenstein poster, using photography.

A face seems to form out of the blur, indecipherable and unsettling. It changes even as we look.

The kinetic poster and distressed graphics were created by Dutch designer Peter Boorsma for the Noortje Licht Theatre Company’s Frankenstein (2007). Boorsma websites here and here.

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.

Unkle Pigor's Frankentoxic Toons

"Unkle" Eric Pigors is the demented, mutant cartoonist offspring of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Basil Wolverton. His delightfully deranged lowbrow art channels E.C. Comics, Dr. Caligari, Hot Stuff, Zacherley, and Old School tattoos of dice, daggers and flying skulls, all in radioactive colors playing to a Death Metal soundtrack.

Pigors worked for 15 years as a Disney animator but, like Tim Burton, it was only after he severed that relationship — with an executioner’s bloody rubber-bladed axe, no doubt — that he was able to give full vent to his demons, unleashing a toxic torrent of terrifying toons etched with equal parts sulphuric acid and Kool-Aid on all manner of merchandize including comic books, t-shirts, shot glasses, greeting cards, posters, belt buckles and toys. He has also committed a slew of CD covers and kustom kreature designs for the kind of rock bands whose names evoke industrial accidents, and who turn their amps up to eleven.

Pigors draws ghastly graveyard ghouls and dilapidated corpses with exposed ribs and lolling tongues; busty, bat-winged babes in red satin-lined coffins, and two-headed, chainsaw-wielding morgue attendants.

I am particularly fond, wouldn’t you know, of his oversized dayglo-green Frankenstein Monsters with goofy grins, gorilla-length arms and way, WAY too many stitches and clamps barely keeping the parts together. His "Bridensteins" are pneumatic, purple-skinned pinups, hourglass-wrapped in tight mummy bandages.

Pigors’ art is sick, warped, disturbing, in extreme bad taste, and very, very funny. There’s a ghoulish sweetness to his work, something unusual and endearing that brings out the monster-loving kid in all of us.

Check out Eric Pigors’ Toxic Toons website and his new book, Unkle Pigor’s Cryptic Art.

Monsieur Frankenstein

Marion Mousse is a prolific graphic novel artist who is very adept at period pieces, having successfully illustrated such celebrated swashbucklers as Moonfleet and Capitaine Fracasse. In June, Delcourt of France published the first tome of Mousse’s elaborate 3-volume adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Turning a massive novel into three 48-page graphic novels implies a great deal of compression, but Mousse’s adaptation is not only faithful, it is pitch perfect. Mousse is a confident artist whose art style is refreshingly loose and cartoony, yet loaded with accurate detail. Moody chiaroscuro abounds. The sober, subdued colors are the work of Marie Galopin.

You can see roughs and character sketches on Mousse’s blog, and five sample pages (click “extraits”) on the publisher’s site.

Hopefully, this will be available in English soon. If you can’t wait for a translation, this one is worth getting for the artwork alone. You can buy the book through Amazon.fr, Fichtre! in Montreal, or Librairie Pantoute in Québec City.  

By the way, when he's done with Frankenstein, Mousse plans to take on Gaston Leroux' The Phantom of the Opera.

A Bolt From The Blue

“First I gave life to a spider, then I gave life to a fly; After a bit couldn't find it, although I think I know why. Next I gave life to a goldfish, then I gave life to a toad; Then I gave life to a lizard, who helped the toad cross the road. Next I gave life to a tadpole, then I gave life to a frog; Then I gave life to a dog-fish, and it barked just like a dog. Now I'll give life to a human, now I'll give life to a man! Pity it's proving so tricky, but I'll succeed if I can."

— ‘Animal Biology (or Frankenstein’s Song)'          

Frankenstein (or A Bolt from the Blue) is “A Victorian melodrama for Schools
based on Mary Shelley's book… for Narrator, Unison Voices and Piano”. Words and music by Carey Blyton.
Published by Chester Music and Novello & Co, London, 1987.        

Blyton also wrote musical versions of Dracula and Sweeney Todd.

Frankenteen

"Personally I'm a fan of Frankenteen. He's the pale and frail poster boy for skinny nerds with pretty cool personalities. After high school he'll own his own computer company or direct hipster indie films or something. So jocks and bullies beware because Frankenteens coming to his ten year reunion with a smug face and a really pretty wife!"

Justin Parpan’s Frankenteen would make a great model kit, glow in the dark and all. Maybe, someday. Until then, Frankenteen and other cool creatures like Conqueror Crab, The Prehistoric Sea Devil, Dr. Squawk from Planet Fowl and Gamadon The Destroyer can be enjoyed on the artist’s delightful blog.

Parpan has also written and illustrated an enchanting picture book, Gwango’s Lonesome Trail, for young readers, and the young at heart who fondly remember Ray Bradbury’s The Foghorn, and Ray Harryhausen movies. 

The Frontispiece

“By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs… I rushed out of the room.”

From the third and "definitive" 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus.

Following the book's description, the artist, Theodore Von Holst, depicts the Creature as a muscular giant with flowing black hair and tight, translucent skin that “scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath”. Note the bones visible in the arms and legs, and the curiously displaced head.

Via