When Guillermo del Toros”Frankenstein” hits theaters today, it will join an honorable line of Mary Shelley adaptations which began in 1910, continued throughout the silent era and helped create the template for modern studio horror film just a few years after the arrival of sound. Del Toros take on Shelley’s 1818 novel is more faithful to the source material than James WhaleThe 1931 incarnation with Boris Karloffand follows the premise’s potential with greater philosophical depth and visual detail, but when it comes to impact and impact, Whale’s “Frankenstein” will probably never be topped.
That’s because “Frankenstein,” along with an earlier 1931 release, Tod Browning’s “Dracula,” introduced the horror genre as a viable form of artistic expression and commercial success within the studio system. Both films were made at Universala studio that became synonymous with horror after the success of “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” gave way to “The Wolf Man,” “The Mummy,” “The Invisible Man” and countless sequels and spinoffs well into the mid-1950s.
Although Universal had made few horror or horror films in the silent era, the boom in sound horror came thanks to boss Carl Laemmle Jr., whose father, Universal founder Carl Laemmle, made his son production manager in 1929 as a 21st birthday present. A passionate proponent of horror, the younger Laemmle pushed for “Dracula,” a film his father didn’t really believe in; the main reason Laemmle Jr. was able to greenlight Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel was that the young director had recently enjoyed major success with his World War I epic “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
Starring Bela Lugosi in the title role, “Dracula” was a hit when it was released in February 1931 and confirmed Laemmle Jr.’s belief in horror. As the studio rushed to capitalize on the film’s success, “Frankenstein” emerged as a promising sequel. Shelley’s tale of a scientist who creates a sentient being from body parts pieced together from various corpses was tailor-made for the screen – in fact, it had already been filmed at least three times.
The first adaptation, a 14-minute version made by the Edison Company in 1910, is probably the world’s first horror film. However, making these kinds of claims is always questionable given how many silent pictures did not survive the era. Indeed, that was the case for two subsequent “Frankenstein” adaptations, the 1915 film “Life Without Soul” and an Italian iteration called “The Monster of Frankenstein.” Only Edison’s “Frankenstein” still exists in any visible form, via a restoration currently streaming on the Library of Congress YouTube channel.
Universal’s 1931 “Frankenstein” shouldn’t necessarily have been a game changer — rushed into production after “Dracula” became a hit, the film gave its creators just a handful of months from conception to release to make their classic. But somehow the stars aligned. “Frankenstein” was not only a better film than “Dracula” — wittier, more visually dynamic, and more poetic and poignant as well as terrifying — but also an influence on all future “Frankenstein” films and a model for much later horror films like Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” and Lucky McKee’s “May.”
As in those films, “Frankenstein” gets a lot of mileage out of creating a central figure who alternates between being the monster, the victim and the hero in the same film. Frankenstein’s monster, played by Boris Karloff, is one of the all-time great horror characters, a figure both terrifying and full of pathos as an innocent drawn into a world he didn’t create and that doesn’t want him.
This remains consistent through nearly all the “Frankenstein” films that would follow Whale’s, up to and including del Toro’s iteration, which is overall more true to Shelley’s conception of the monster as a verbal being than Karloff’s grunting hulk. The monster’s lack of verbal sophistication was actually one of the things that caused Bela Lugosi to turn down the role after he was announced as the film’s star, although reportedly no one was particularly interested in seeing Lugosi in the role after a screen test with the actor in full monster make-up was met with unintentional laughter. (Lugosi finally played Frankenstein’s monster years later, in 1943’s “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.”)
When Lugosi and original director Robert Florey left the project, the door was open for the filmmakers who would make “Frankenstein” iconic. James Whale recently joined Universal whose previous work included directing the dialogue scenes of Howard Hughes’ aviation epic “Hell’s Angels.” He started his Universal contract in 1931 by directing “Waterloo Bridge,” a film that Laemmle Jr. was high enough to give Whale his choice of material for his next project.
Whale answered “Frankenstein” and he knew who he wanted for the monster: Boris Karloff, whom he had seen in Howard Hawks’ “The Criminal Code.” (Karloff also had a small role in Hawk’s gangster classic “Scarface,” which had been filmed but not released when “Frankenstein” went into production.) When Karloff put on Jack Pierce’s prosthetics and makeup (which took several hours each shooting day to apply), he wasn’t stupid like Lugosi. He looked both ghostly and obsessedsad and scary.
Pierce was a master makeup artist (he would go on to create other Universal monsters such as the Werewolf and The Mummy), and he meticulously adapted his design for Frankenstein’s monster to the contours of Karloff’s face, giving the actor maximum opportunity to convey emotion through facial expressions and gestures. This was key given that Karloff had no real dialogue, although he would be given a limited vocabulary in the 1935 sequel, “Bride of Frankenstein.”
Karloff’s entrance in “Frankenstein” is one of the great introductions in horror movie history, as Whale blocks the scene of the monster backing into a room, keeping his view from the audience for as long as possible. As Karloff slowly turns, Whale pans the camera closer and closer to him in a series of cuts that plunge the viewer into the monster’s space—revealing the flawlessness of Pierce’s design in unblinking close-ups.
It’s still a powerful moment nearly a hundred years later, and the poignancy of the performance that follows is only more potent after decades of other—mostly inferior—presentations of the character. Certainly, none of the actors who took on the role in Universal productions after Karloff left the monster behind in “Son of Frankenstein” (1939) replicated Karloff’s subtle emotional effects, and even an actor as capable as Robert De Niro remained in Karloff’s shadow when he played the monster in Kenneth Branagh’s “Mary9stein4” in Kenneth Branagh’s 1 Franken9stein Shelley.
One of the many commendable aspects of del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is the performance of Jacob Elordi, which invites and deserves comparison with Karloff’s characterization in its depth and complexity; del Toro’s deep empathy for the monster and Elordi’s subtly calibrated development of the monster’s consciousness make this the best “Frankenstein” since 1931. Elordi is so likable that it doesn’t quite feel right to even call him the monster; Oscar Isaac’s Dr. Frankenstein is by far the more terrifying of the characters in del Toro’s conception.
Revisiting Whale and Karloff’s “Frankenstein” after watching del Toro and Elordis, the original film’s performance is all the more impressive. Unlike “Dracula,” it really hasn’t dated aside from some stale digressions involving Dr. Frankenstein’s fiancée and a generic rival for her affections. One reason is the film’s lack of points; modern horror enthusiasts will be surprised to find that apart from the opening and closing credits, there is no music in “Frankenstein” – which was typical in 1931, as underlining did not come into widespread use for another year or two.
In “Frankenstein,” the lack of score creates an austere purity, as our attention is focused on the intricacies of Whale’s vertically oriented visual design and the nuances of Karloff’s performance. The film is still as effective as it probably was in 1931, when it opened to blockbuster business and established Universal as a house of horrors for decades to come.
In fact, the brand is still probably the major studio most associated with the genre thanks to its partnerships with filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Jason Blum, whose “The Black Phone 2” opens in theaters today alongside del Toro’s “Frankenstein.” Whale and Karloff’s classic may now be 95 years old, but its impact and influence is still felt at the multiplex practically every month.
