The Curse of Frankenstein: Hammer's Bloody Rebirth

The reviews were a bloodbath. C.A. Lejeune of the Observer, one of the most respected critics in the country, walked out before the end and said so in print. Derek Hill in Tribune declared that the only excuse for the film’s existence would be a sudden national outbreak of sadism. The Monthly Film Bulletin was witheringly cold. British criticism in 1957 treated The Curse of Frankenstein as a moral emergency, and the public treated it as the best night out available, returning something in the order of seventy times its roughly £65,000 budget and converting a small company in a converted country house at Bray into the most identifiable brand in horror for the next twenty years.

That gap between the notices and the queues is the film’s actual subject, in a sense. Everything the critics hated about it — the colour, the blood, the coldness, the absence of any tragic grandeur — was deliberate, and every one of those choices is why the picture still functions.

The Baron is the monster

Universal’s Frankenstein films belong to the creature. Karloff’s mute, wounded thing is the emotional centre of the 1931 film and the entire soul of Bride of Frankenstein; Colin Clive’s Henry is a hysteric who mostly needs a lie down. Hammer inverted the arrangement completely, and the inversion is the single most consequential decision the studio ever made.

Peter Cushing’s Baron Victor Frankenstein is the film’s protagonist, its most charming presence and its horror. He is elegant, amused, superbly well-mannered and entirely without conscience. He seduces the maid and arranges her disposal when she becomes inconvenient. He murders Professor Bernstein — an old and distinguished guest in his own house — by engineering a fall, purely to harvest a brain he admires, and then discusses the funeral arrangements with perfect composure. Cushing plays every one of these acts with the light, dry courtesy of a man conducting an experiment that is going rather well, and the effect is far nastier than any amount of raving.

The craft in the performance is worth naming. Cushing’s Baron is always busy — hands occupied, dissecting, pouring, adjusting, writing up — and he delivers his worst lines while doing something else, so that murder registers as an item on a list. He was a meticulous actor who worked out the physical business of every scene in advance, and the business is the characterisation. Robert Urquhart’s Paul Krempe stands in for the audience’s conscience, objecting steadily and ineffectually throughout, and the film’s contempt for him is one of its sharpest jokes: the decent man in a Hammer film achieves nothing at all.

Jimmy Sangster’s script keeps this pitiless. There is no scene in which Victor doubts, no midnight of the soul, no lesson. Hazel Court’s Elizabeth is a fiancée he is fond of in the way a man is fond of good furniture. Six sequels followed, and Cushing played the Baron in five of them, growing colder each time until Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed in 1969 arrives at something genuinely monstrous. The studio had found its recurring villain and, unusually, the villain wore the hero’s clothes.

What Universal’s lawyers forced

Phil Leakey’s makeup for Christopher Lee’s Creature is the film’s most argued-over element and its most misunderstood. Universal held the copyright on Jack Pierce’s flat-headed, neck-bolted design, threatened action, and Hammer therefore could not go anywhere near it. Leakey had to invent from scratch under a legal constraint, and what he produced is a ruined patchwork face — a clouded dead eye, visible sutures, skin like wet paper, the whole thing looking assembled rather than sculpted.

The result is better suited to the film’s argument. Pierce’s design is iconic and, crucially, coherent; it reads as a character. Leakey’s reads as material, which is exactly how the Baron sees it. Lee, cast partly because he was six foot five and Hammer needed height, plays the Creature as a damaged animal with no interior at all — no learning, no speech, no blind hermit, no bread and wine. He is a failed experiment lurching about, and there is nothing to sympathise with, because a film in which the Baron is the monster cannot afford a second one. Lee got the part with almost no dialogue and no face, met Cushing on the set, and the pair would work together more than twenty times.

Colour did the rest. Jack Asher’s Eastmancolor photography and Bernard Robinson’s Bray sets give the laboratory a jewel-box density — glass, brass, green fluid, and blood that is unmistakably blood. Monochrome had always allowed the audience a degree of deniability about what it was looking at, and Asher removed it. The whole case for that transition is set out in Hammer’s colourising of the gothic, and Curse is its opening argument.

The X certificate as a business model

Hammer’s genius was commercial. The BBFC’s X certificate, introduced in 1951, barred under-sixteens and was regarded by respectable producers as a mark of shame. Hammer read it as a marketing category and aimed straight at it, correctly identifying an audience of adults who wanted to be disturbed and had nowhere to go for it. The blood in Curse is not incidental; it is the product. Every subsequent argument about horror and censorship in Britain — up through the video panic that the desk covers in what the BBFC was really afraid of — starts from the moment a British studio worked out that a restrictive certificate sells tickets.

Hammer had already tested the theory. The Quatermass Xperiment in 1955 spelled its own title with an X to advertise the certificate — a piece of marketing so brazen it is still funny — and the science-fiction success of that film is what emboldened Anthony Hinds to commission a gothic in colour. The lineage runs the other way too: Hammer’s relationship with Nigel Kneale’s professor stretched across the whole boom and produced the studio’s most intelligent film in Quatermass and the Pit a decade later. Curse was shot at Bray from November 1956, reached British screens the following May, and went out in America through Warner Bros., which is how a picture made in a country house by a company with no international profile ended up playing drive-ins across the United States within months.

The success bought Fisher, Sangster, Cushing, Lee, Asher, Robinson and Bernard a decade together, and the very next year the same core team produced Dracula, which is the better film. Curse is where the machine gets assembled; Dracula is where it runs. Both belong on the Hammer essential ten.

The verdict rests on Cushing. The Curse of Frankenstein is talky in its middle stretch, its Creature is a shambles by design, and its supporting cast exists to be lectured. It is also the film that recognised that Mary Shelley’s story has a villain and that the villain is the doctor, and it gave that villain to an actor who could make cruelty look like good breeding. Eighty-two minutes, and it built an industry.

Spoilers below

The frame is the cruellest thing in the picture and it is set up in the first shot. Victor is in a cell awaiting the guillotine, telling his story to a priest, and the film we watch is his account. He needs the priest to believe that a creature existed and that the creature committed the murders, because it is the only defence available to him.

Nobody believes him. Paul Krempe — the tutor who objected to everything, the decent man — visits and refuses to corroborate a word. Asked directly whether he ever saw the Creature, he declines to confirm it. He then leaves with Elizabeth on his arm. The Baron’s account, which the audience has just watched in full colour for eighty minutes and knows to be true, is worthless because the only surviving witness has quietly decided to let him hang and take his fiancée.

Fisher’s last move is to give the story no supernatural escape at all. The Creature was destroyed in a vat of acid; the body is gone; there is no evidence. Victor Frankenstein is executed for a murder he committed and a monster nobody will admit existed, which means the film’s structure delivers a fair outcome by an entirely corrupt route. Krempe’s silence is the closest thing to a moral act in the film, and it is perjury.

That ending should have closed the series. Hammer, having built a franchise on a man walking to the guillotine, simply had him survive off-screen and open a practice under an assumed name in The Revenge of Frankenstein the following year — a resurrection more shameless than anything the Baron attempted in the laboratory, and the exact moment British horror learned that death is a scheduling problem.