Frankenstein Cannot Be Stopped!

Art/Horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden, Spirit Award winner and Fangoria Hall of Famer, knows his Frankensteins. We previously posted his Frankenstein Mashup, a glorious edit of 27 different Frankenstein films — Be sure to follow the link if you haven’t seen it yet! Now, Fessenden revisits The Monster with FRANKENSTEIN CANNOT BE STOPPED, a music video for the New York-based band Life in a Blender.

The classic Monster is evoked with a rigid, kabuki-like mask, with lighting, shooting angles and context bringing it to life. Fessenden also uses an animated puppet to introduce The Monster, and again at the end for its fiery demise in the requisite burning windmill.

“I have always loved the design of the classic flat-top Frankenstein Monster,” Fessenden says, “and as I patched these images together I was amused to see how subtle differences in the performance of the puppet and of Mike Vincent in the mask would evoke specific cinematic incarnations of the monster.”

The filmmaker had Frankensteinia readers in mind! “I thought of your readers...” he writes. “Who else could distinguish between Karloff, Glenn Strange, Herman Munster and the Aurora model kit!”

The clip is a loving homage to the James Whale original, and the song is a tragic ballad of The Monster’s disastrous flower game with the little girl.

With thanks to Larry Fessenden.

Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix Productions

Life in a Blender website

Related:

Frankenstein Mashup by Larry Fessenden

Robby Hecht's Melancholy Frankenstein

The Monster and his Bride have enjoyed a busy music video career as stand-ins for star-crossed lovers, often to comedic effect. Here, set to Robby Hecht’s plaintive, country-styled “Soon I Was Sleeping”, the tone is downright mournful as our jigsaw couple’s perennially problematic love affair is irrevocably wrecked by alcohol. Brian T. O’Neil plays the beat-up Monster and Kayla McKenzie Moore is the ethereal Bride. Ryan Newman directed in appropriately moody black and white.

Robby Hecht is a Nashville-based singer/songwriter whose insightful compositions have made him an important new voice in contemporary folk. With a talent for surrounding himself with blue-chip talent, he is accompanied on the song at hand by Canadian vocalist Rose Cousins. “Soon I Was Sleeping” appears on Hecht’s new album, released in March.

Robby Hecht’s website.

Reviews on the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy, UK’s The Telegraph, and USA Today.

Related:

The Rockabilly Bride of Frankenstein

The Country Bride of Frankenstein

The Rockabilly Bride of Frankenstein

Though her total time on screen, way back in 1935, was limited to a brisk 12 minutes, the Bride of Frankenstein remains one of the most famous movie characters of all time and is still a reference 79 years on. The Bride, sporting her spectacular hairdo, has appeared in everything from commercials to musical reviews and pop videos.

Here, she is stunned back to life again to the tune of It’s Good to be Alive, the first single off an upcoming album by Imelda May, a roots and rockabilly artist by way of Ireland.

In this revisionist version, The Bride and her Monster fall head over big boots for each other and go on to the ups and downs of marital life. I don’t really think it’s a spoiler for me to say that in the end, love conquers all.

Related:
The Country Bride of Frankenstein

The Country Bride of Frankenstein

Here’s a perfect Countdown to Halloween musical interlude!

Edna’s Kin, as the name reveals, is a family band. Warren Koontz and sons Daniel and Andrew play roots music — old time, bluegrass, blues and traditional Irish. The Kin, based in Sag Harbor, has enjoyed YouTube success with their folksy version of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man drawing over 90,000 views. Here’s their followup, an original composition called She’s Got Pulchritude, staged as a heartfelt homage to our favorite Bride.

As video director, fiddler Andrew Koontz studied the classic film and pulled together a fun little package featuring castle wall backgrounds, a mad lab, a Karloff cameo and a neat performance by New York actress Megan Larsen who hisses on cue, in requisite black and white.

Kick back and enjoy The Country Bride of Frankenstein!

Edna’s Kin Facebook page.

Band profile on the Sag Harbor Express site.

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.

The Art of Frankenstein : Jason Krekel

Peter Cushing’s deadly serious Baron poses with his first creation, played by Christopher Lee, in linocut art, handprinted on a vintage press by North Carolina artist Jason Krekel. It’s one of several extremely affordable “Action Monster Prints” available through the artist’s Etsy shop.

Jason’s love of monsters spills into his other career as the multiple-instrument playing half of a highly original, upbeat, garage rockabilly duo with singer and electric ukulele player Ami Worthen. Known since 2004 as Mad Tea Party, Krekel and Worthen proudly hang on to their band name despite it having since been co-opted by the political extreme right.

MTP’s latest recording, a four-song horror-themed EP called Rock N Roll Ghoul features, among others, a song called Dr. Phibes and an exhilarating version of The Hollywood Flames’ Frankenstein’s Den. It’s available as a digital download or on vinyl, with an EC horror comic-inspired cover by Gus Cutty.

Explore The Mad Tea Party’s website for bios, background info, photos, and links to MTP videos.

Preview and download Rock N Roll Ghoul and other Mad Tea Party music.

See Jason Krekel’s Krekprints and a video demonstration of his lino art and printing process.

Stitched Together

Drs. Frankenstein and Pretorius dial up a storm and listen to its secrets.

Stitched Together is a perfect title for this short-short film, an experiment in “reverse soundtracking” created in 2006 by Nick Sherman of MassArt, the Massachusetts College of art and Design.

Quote Mr. Sherman, “First I recorded and mixed an abstract guitar composition on its own — not knowing what I was going to do with it — then I animated it, using chopped up video taken from the famous lab scene in Universal's 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein.”

The resulting 74 seconds of film is spellbinding. The jangling soundtrack hums and crackles with electricity and static as if powered by the machines in Frankenstein’s lab, bouncing off the stark images of The Bride’s creation, “creating new meaning through the juxtaposition of visuals and audio”.

Stitched Together by Nick Sherman.

Additional info found on Nick Sherman’s website news archives.

Nick Sherman’s MySpace page.

Frankenstein Music

I’m guessing that Mary Shelley Overdrive took their name off a Sabertooth mini-series published by Marvel Comics in 2002. The South Carolina, post-punk band madly mixes original material — self-professed “unmitigated foolishness” — with reckless covers of everything from Devo to Bo Diddley to the Batman Theme. And if that’s not crazy enough for you, they give most of their music away.

Dial up the band’s website to access free downloads, and admire the splendidly trashy record covers and graphics.

Freakenstein hails from Pori, “the Liverpool of Finland”. The band describes its music as “melodic aggressive punk rock” with gothic themes influenced by “horror movies, comics and splatter nightmares”.

Check out Freakenstein’s website for news, bios and band photos. The comic book-style illustration of the Freakenstein character and its victim is by Kari Kuusinen.

The Newcastle-based alternative pop band Dog Years has released a CD entitled Frankenstein Songs, suggesting something patched together and out of control. The band keeps a MySpace presence.

The fabulous cover art for Frankenstein Songs is by Richard Thomas Short. His website is a delight.

Indie Frankenstein

Indie band Willoughby, led by singer-songwriter Gus Seyffert, perform a lovely, bittersweet ballad called Frankenstein, part of their debut album I Know What You’re Up To.

Evoking such influences as Chet Baker, Harry Nilsson and The Zombies, Seyffert recorded to analog tape, and the album will be released in both CD and vinyl editions.

A simple, unpretentious video features Seyffert as The Scientist and band member Charlie Wadhams as a wandering hobo Monster with a curiously pointy nose. The song is said to be “a love letter” from Frankenstein to his creature.

See the video on the Willoughby site, or on YouTube.

The band’s site carries additional info about the song, and the photo section has backstage pics from the video shoot.

Frankenstein Meets The Beatles

Myths are infinitely malleable. They mix and merge easily. The Monster Kid generation, by and large, was also The British Invasion generation, and it was absolutely inevitable that someone would jam together such powerful icons as the Frankenstein Monster and The Beatles.

The combination was exploited by novelty artist Dickie Goodman, in 1965. In the manner of, but never attaining the phenomenal success of Bobby Pickett’s Monster Mash, Goodman created a number of monster themed tunes with titles like The Ghoul From Ipanema, My Baby Loves Monster Movies and, ultimately, Frankenstein Meets The Beatles. Listen to it on the net here. Read about Dickie Goodman’s Monster Album here.

For anyone who grew up on Frankensteins and Beatles, there’s a Wow! moment in George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine (1968) when John Lennon is introduced, morphing out of a garish, psychedelicized Frankenstein Monster. The cartoon Ringo quips, “I used to go out with his sister… Phyllis”.

Ringo Starr admits a love for science fiction and fantasy, witness his posing with Gort, the robot from The Day The Earth Stood Still on the cover of his solo album Goodnight Vienna.

He was also instrumental in getting an unfortunate musical comedy called Son of Dracula (1974) off the ground, but redeemed himself with his engaging participation in the delightfully dopey dinosaur romp Caveman (1981).

Of more specific interest to us, Ringo embraced the Frankenstein Monster as a kindred soul in connection with a very successful single called Back Off Boogaloo, in 1972. The record's cover features a dour Frankenstein Monster, smoking a large and perhaps “funny” cigarette.

A much more agreeable, flower-power version of the Creature co-stars with Ringo in the song's video. See them cavorting together on YouTube.

Should anyone compile a list of Frankenstein appearances in popular music or collect Frankenstein and monster novelty records into a single package, I’d recommend using John Bertges’ amazing illustration (at the top of this post) for its cover. The picture masterfully monster-mashes a gallery of movie Frankensteins with the Fab Four’s most famous album image. It was originally posted on The Universal Monster Army’s Yahoo Group website.

Update: There are many more of Jim Bertges’ ingenious and hilarious Frankenstein/Beatles album cover parodies posted by our friend Max over at The Drunken Severed Head.

(Big Thanks to Stuart Gardner and Jim Bertges!)