Of Monster and Man

I need to start with an apology: I’ve been referring to Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein as The Evil of Frankenstein all week. Evil is indeed one of Hammer Studios’ Frankenstein pictures – the third in the series, directed by Freddie Francis – with Peter Cushing’s mad Victor Frankenstein enlisting the aid of a carnival hypnotist to sort out the creature’s broken brain.

I suspect Evil was the first one I saw, which is why the title sticks in my head. But Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein is the original, and easily the best, minting Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as genre stars and launching Hammer as a major player in British horror cinema. People think Hammer started with Lee’s Dracula, but The Curse of Frankenstein arrived in 1957, a full year earlier. And obviously, now that Guillermo Del Toro’s own luxurious adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel is shambling through cinemas, there’s no better time to put this smaller but no less ambitious film back into circulation.

In collaboration with Hammer Studios, Warner Archive has just improved on its excellent 2020 Blu-ray special edition with last month's a three-disc 4K release, built around an excellent new Ultra High Definition restoration and packed full of extras old and new. What better Halloween present could a monster fan ask for? It was so packed I couldn't even finish this review until November!

The Curse of Frankenstein doesn’t go in for explosive laboratory scenes or grandiose, hubristic speeches. The clever, understated script – written by Hammer mainstay Jimmy Sangster – quickly positions Cushing’s obsessive, egomaniacal Victor as the film’s real monster, with Lee’s shambling Creature a figure of genuine pity.

Unable to use the blockheaded design created for Boris Karloff by Jack Pierce, makeup artist Phil Leakey came up with a more disturbing vision of the Creature, piling slabs of latex flesh on top of one another on Lee’s face to imply a different sort of patchwork man. And Fisher and director of photography Jack Asher take advantage of EastmanColor’s rich palette to create an almost garish world of brightly colored chemical solutions, heaving flesh and spurting blood, offering a very different atmosphere than James Whale’s somber Gothic monochrome. They’re both period pieces, but Fisher’s film feels modern and edgy, finding as much horror in the way Victor’s mania destroys his relationships as it does in the Creature’s inevitable rampage.

Made on a modest budget, and marketed as the most lurid and graphically violent adaptation of Frankenstein yet attempted – which is true, even if the film feels quite restrained seven decades later – The Curse of Frankenstein was a massive hit, inspiring Hammer to tackle other classic monsters in turn: Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man. And now that the Hammer brand has returned, this magnificent special edition gives Fisher’s breakthrough the celebration it deserves.

Warner Archive’s earlier Blu-ray spared no expense, with a new 4K scan of the film (presented in all three of its theatrical aspect ratios, about which more shortly) supported by a celebratory audio commentary from historians Constantine Nasr and Steve Haberman and four featurettes exploring the film’s place in the Hammer canon. For this 4K edition, the Warner Archive team collaborated with both Hammer and Silver Salt Restoration to overhaul the film from its component parts, using both the original camera negative and the original Eastmancolor yellow, cyan and magenta layers. There’s a whole featurette about the effort on the disc, and if you’d like to know even more about the process Hammer published an excellent interview with archivist Steve Rogers on the occasion of the UK limited-edition release earlier this summer.

Arriving in theaters before exhibitors had fully figured out matted widescreen projection, The Curse of Frankenstein was screened in three different aspect ratios – matted to 1.66:1 in European cinemas and to 1.85:1 in US theaters, and screened full-frame at Academy 1.37:1 in older venues (and eventually on broadcast television). A featurette on the restoration makes a good case that, judging from elements in background paintings that would have been cropped out in the wider versions, the film was intended to be seen unmatted – but the wider versions do look pretty great.

Warner Archive’s set offers all three of those presentations in UHD, with the 1.37 and 1.66 versions on Disc One and the 1:85 version on Disc Two, and throws in so many extras – both new and archival – that an additional Blu-ray platter was required to hold them all. (Like the recent Warner Archive edition of Get Carter, this is a joint venture with a British partner that released its own domestic disc earlier this month.)

Warner’s Nasr/Haberman commentary is now one of four tracks, offered on Disc Two underneath the 1.85 version of the film, along with a newly commissioned commentary from Heidi Honeycutt and Toby Roan. Over on Disc One, the 1.37 version can be watched with a 2012 commentary – recorded for Lionsgate’s UK Blu-ray – featuring writers Marcus Hearn and Jonathan Rigby, while the 1.66 version is accompanied by another newly recorded track with Kim Newman, Barry Forshaw and Stephen Jones, all of whom are venerable Hammer nerds eager to trade anecdotes and memories. Gorge away.

That Lionsgate disc also yields two featurettes, the retrospective making-of “Frankenstein Reborn” and “Life with Sir,” a pleasant reminiscence of Peter Cushing by his former secretary Joyce Broughton. (They’re on the Blu-ray disc, along with the extras from the 2020 Warner Archive BD and the ten-minute 8mm version of the film, in gloriously grainy black-and-white.)

Hammer has also commissioned another memorial to Cushing, “Beside the Seaside,” where he’s celebrated by his occasional co-star Madeline Smith (The Vampire Lovers, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell) and author Wayne Kinsey at the Whitstable Museum and Gallery.

Also new to this edition are featurettes on screenwriter Sangster, DP Asher, costume designer Molly Arbuthnot – who gets two separate salutes, one recounting her remarkable biography and another in which actor Melvyn Hayes recalls wearing her designs as the young Victor F. – and the aforementioned piece on the film’s restoration. The screenwriter Stephen Volk offers his thoughts on where Curse fits into the canon of Frankenstein adaptations, and there’s an extensive image gallery set to James Bernard’s lavish musical score.  

Not everything from the UK special edition has made it over here; the two-part 1994 television documentary Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror didn’t make it, and there’s apparently an audio recording of Cushing and Lee chatting between narration sessions for that project, as well as twenty minutes of outtakes from the day. I’m likely to be visiting the UK next summer, so if any of my UK readers would be willing to let me borrow that disc for an afternoon, I’d be right appreciative.

The Curse of Frankenstein is now available in a glorious 4K special edition from the Warner Archive Collection; Hammer’s 4K/Blu-ray Limited Collectors’ Edition is also on shelves in the UK, and you’re going to want to move fast on that one.

Up next: Shout Studios 4K edition of Catch-22 arrives in chaos, and an Ang Lee trilogy arrives from Australia. See you soon!