The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), directed by Terence Fisher

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Frankenstein", by New York Dolls

      Universal Studios. Not only are they responsible for producing and distributing films which laid down the foundation for horror in cinema, but they also made sure it would always be seen as cheaply made pablum thrown out for a quick buck. Yes, decades before films like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street would be mocked and parodied for the seemingly endless additions to its canon, it was actually Universal that wrote the book on horror ‘franchises’. Dracula suddenly had a daughter crawl out of the woodwork, and later a son. The Invisible Man gave way to The Invisible Woman, and later another man (although this one was an agent) before he got his revenge. The Mummy got into a whole mess of trouble, and even The Creature from the Black Lagoon had a few adventures before the curtains closed. No, not all of them followed established continuity or feature the same actors, but that wasn’t the point. You remembered Universal’s Dracula, so maybe if we put his name on this film it’d sell a couple more tickets, and so on and on. Didn’t matter if the movie was good, as long as it could make money. Which is why movie studios nowadays get straight to the point and just remake films and give them the exact same name, Halloween (1979), Halloween (2007) and Halloween (2018) for example, no matter how confusing that might be for the movie-going audience. Thanks Universal!

Of the Universal Monster line, Frankenstein had it a bit better than most. Four years after the whirlwind success of the original Frankenstein in 1931 we’d see a sequel in Bride of Frankenstein; James Whale would return to the director’s chair, Boris Karloff would return as The Monster, and aside from being a good film it’s introduction of The Bride into pop culture would go on to ensure its status as a classic and fixture of shitty film blogs on the internet. Four years after that Universal would close out the decade with Son of Frankenstein; James Whale was out in favor of Rowland Lee and Karloff would make his final appearance in his famous role, but the inclusion of Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi as a hunchback by the name of Ygor (bet that’ll never come up again) ends up pushing it into recommended viewing territory, at least it did when I reviewed it. After that...eh. There was The Ghost of Frankenstein, which saw Lugosi return but didn’t really drive me to do the same. After that would be Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, also known as one of the biggest cockblocks in horror cinema history, and then House of Frankenstein, which was actually a sequel to one of the biggest cockblocks in horror cinema history (also Son of Dracula). Finally in ‘48, and I do mean final because there were only 5 movies after this, we got Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was actually pretty good and a movie that I might return to in a review someday, but it does seem a rather ignominious end. Once a menace to movie-goers, now reduced to a walking parody used to spook comedians. Jeez, you’d think everyone had just come off of a worldwide war or something.

Anyway, forget about Universal. It’s Hammer time.

Released in 1957, The Curse of Frankenstein was the first of three movies directed by Terence Fisher upon which the name of Hammer Horror would be built, followed subsequently by The Horror of Dracula and The Mummy. Peter Cushing stars as the titular Baron Victor Frankenstein, a man possessed with an intelligence as great as his arrogance. Ever since he was a baby baron Victor had explored the mysteries of the life, spending his adolescence in research and study with his friend and tutor Paul Kemper (Robert Urquhart). Then one day, a breakthrough: they manage to take a dog that was dead and bring it back to life, in complete defiance of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. The greatest medical discovery the world has ever known, if you let the world know that is, and yet Victor hesitates. Bringing life back to something that was previously dead is certainly an amazing feat, but wouldn’t it be even more amazing to bring life to something that had never lived at all? To create life, in a way humanity has never seen before? Then you’d not just be the most important scientist of your generation, you’d be the most important human being that’s ever lived. For a prize like that Victor’d be willing to do just about anything. Maybe even...murder?

Even though Universal’s Frankenstein and Hammer’s Frankenstein films were released 26 years apart, you get the sense that Fisher and Hammer wanted to be as different as possible from that earlier. The Monster (played by Christopher Lee) is not the sympathetic creature that Karloff’s Monster was nor is he given that much focus, he’s just a monster who doubles as a plot device. Similarly Victor Frankenstein is not the repentant figure driven to undo his own grisly work, as it was in the ‘31 film and the original novel, he is out and out the villain of the film. Curse of Frankenstein doesn’t even have a mob of angry villagers wielding pitchforks and torches, although it is teased at one point. ‘This wasn’t your daddy’s Frankenstein’, it all seems to say, and it was the same philosophy that seemed to carry over as Hammer went on. Dracula would turn up the sleaze as much as late 50’s British society could stand, The Mummy...well, he’s basically The Monster with a tragic backstory. Even Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde got its own little Hammer twist, although in that case I doubt the Paramount movie was much of a factor in the decision.

Not only did this film kickstart Hammer as the gold standard in horror cinema for a while, it also established Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as staples of genre cinema for the rest of the careers. Not quite as much for Lee, who as I said is far less of a character than Karloff’s Monster was, but Cushing is far and away the highlight of the film. His portrayal of Frankenstein is fantastic, the very model of a gentleman on the surface but willing and able to throw away ethics and human decency when it benefits him or his work. The living embodiment of that ‘you thought so much about whether or not you could you didn’t think about whether or not you should’ line from Jurassic Park (a version of which even makes it way here). He reminds me a bit of ol’ Herbert West from one of my favorite horror movies actually, Re-Animator, except even worse if you can believe it. Herbert was a contemptible person, true, but he really presents himself as anything else. Victor on the other hand, while it seems like he’s capable of empathy at certain points, you’re never sure whether he’s being sincere or whether he’s being plainly manipulative. Occasionally it feels like they are trying a bit too hard to make him the bad, like stealing human body parts so he can stitch them together into some hideous flesh ogre wasn’t bad enough, but Cushing is so damn good at being a sociopath it’s not hard to see why Hammer revisited the character several more times over the years.

I also really like the art direction in Curse of Frankenstein. While the Universal monster films had that mix of Expressionism, the then-modern era and the era of the source material (at least the early ones), CoF is much more grounded and period-appropriate. Which might seem contradictory, given how often I’ve praised weird aesthetics in film, but there’s something about this slightly grimy, yet almost color saturated Georgian design that I find appealing. Especially when it comes to Frankenstein’s laboratory, as I’ve loved the concept of steampunk and otherwise ‘old’ technology ever since I first read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Time Machine. Again it doesn’t match the iconic look of Universal’s spark-spitting dynamos and what have you, but I think Curse of Frankenstein’s collection of bubbling beakers and tubs of strange liquids lends itself more to the idea of Frankenstein being this medical genius who has bridged the worlds of science and alchemy rather than just some guy who stuck some body parts together and shocked it a couple times. Curse of Frankenstein feels ‘real’, I guess, and the easier it is to suspend your disbelief when you’re watching genre films, the better off you are.

Unfortunately Curse of Frankenstein does suffer from a bit of ‘Escape from the Planet of the Apes’ syndrome, by which I mean it was a small production (270,000 dollar budget) and it feels like it. As nice as Castle Frankenstein looks on the inside, the fact that we spend so much time there makes things feel claustrophobic, especially when it’s the same four people talking to each other as well. You do get the occasional scene outside, but the way they’re shot is usually locked in on the characters so you don’t get much of a sense of space. It would make sense in context, since this is Frankenstein telling his story, but since there are moments that happen that he couldn’t possibly have known about, there’s not an excuse beyond ‘we’ve got no money’.

We’ve also got a small cast, and like I said, Peter Cushing is the reason you watch this movie. Robert Urquhart is okay as Paul Kremper, but like 80 percent of this movie is entering a room and complaining about something, and it feels like they subtly try to push a romance between him and Elizabeth despite him looking like he was in his early 30s when she was like 6, which is just fucking creepy. Hazel Court as Elizabeth Frankenstein, is...there. That’s not meant as a slight against the actress, she’s literally a Chekov’s Gun to build tension for the climax, otherwise it makes no sense that if Paul was so disturbed by Victor’s experiments that he was worried for her life that he wouldn’t have told her in the scene when he tried to get her to leave. Or later on, when they basically redo the scene and Paul has even more reason to want her to leave. Maybe if they actually pushed that romance angle, despite my reservations about it, there could have been some drama there, but they don’t, so she’s just...there. Waiting.

While she’s waiting, I’m going to go ahead and give The Curse of Frankenstein the recommendation. Putting aside all the smoke I’ve blown up Hammer’s ass, it really is an intriguing adaptation of Mary Shelley’s work, not all that accurate to the novel but it approaches the concept from a perspective that I haven’t seen a Frankenstein adaptation really do since then, which is a shame. If I were looking to be controversial I’d say Horror of Dracula and The Mummy suck so just watch this, but I do think if you’re a rookie looking into Hammer Horror or older horror movies, this is a good place to start. A bit like a mild cheddar cheese: It’s got a little bit of a bite, but it goes down smooth.

Don’t ask me what Frankenstein has to do with cheese. It should be obvious.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: The Seventh Seal (1957), directed by Ingmar Bergman

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Dance of Death", by Andrew Bird

       When many people think of the works of Ingmar Bergman, there’s a good chance that what they envision is pretty similar to that one popular skit from that one popular comedy show, Mystery Science Theater 3000: Movies cloaked in deafening silence, where frigid, Teutonic people toss vague comments at each other as they stare off into the distance, contemplating the meaning of existence. Rather basic for a spoof, I believe they center it around herring because that’s literally all that Sweden’s allowed to be associated with, but I think the fact that the parody even existed speaks to Bergman’s talents and creative vision. Fellini was a great director, as was Truffaut, Kurosawa and the like, but how many people beyond the hardcore cinephiles would recognize a spoof or satirization of their films? Bergman, however, by being so famously dour, stands amongst the likes of Hitchcock and Lynch in that his ‘reputation’ preceedes him. You step into a film 5 minutes in or 10 minutes in or an hour in and you instantly know it’s a Bergman film. That’s power, ladies and gents. That cinematic immortality.

       Of course it’s also possible that the MST3K guys were just making an in-joke and none of viewing knew or cared what the fuck was going on, making that beginning paragraph all bullshit, but we’re down to the wire and I’m writing on fumes here. Anyway, my first non-MST3K taste of the work of our esteemed Mr. Bergman was the Virgin Spring back in Marathon ‘14 (and yes, fucking hell I’ve been doing this for too long), a tragic story of lost innocence and revenge. Since I’ve been bringing back so many other filmmakers back from the past, I figured he was long overdue for a return. A big return, and how much bigger can you get than a film that was referenced by Bill & Ted and Last Action Hero? This is the last time I’ll get to utilize that lead in this month, so let’s make it count with The Seventh Seal.

       Sometime in the middle of the 14th century, knight Antonius Block and his squire J return home to Sweden after spending a decade fighting in the Crusades. While resting on a beach Block is approached by Death, intent on taking him away, but instead Block challenges the reaper to a game of chess, wagering his life on the outcome. The gamble earns him some respite and Antonius and J make the long trip back to Block’s estate, but said trip is anything but peaceful. Sweden has been hit with the infamous Black Plague, and any sense of reason or order is being drowned out under the screams of hundreds or even thousands of the dead and dying. Why is this happening? Is this some punishment from heaven for some unknown transgression? Does god even exist, that he would allow these things to happen? These are the questions that Antonius and his traveling companions face as they make their journey further and further into a world gone mad. Yet no matter how mad it gets, no matter how far they go, death is never far behind.

       So as you’d expect from a film where Death is a character, this movie is about death. How we confront the inevitability of death, on an individual level as well as a collective one. Which is interesting, because it allows for a shift in tones without ever generating a feeling of whiplash. The scene where a parade of people are whipping themselves and crying for god to protect them from this disease they do not and cannot understand (one of the most tragic moments in the film) can fit right alongside a scene where Death kills a guy by sawing down the tree he’s resting on because that’s the way she goes, sometimes a person’s death is a huge tragedy and sometimes their dumb ass fell out of a tree. Antonius’ desperate search for proof of god’s existence to justify the suffering fits right alongside J’s war-hardened nihilism for the same reasons, the looming sense of manic dread in the face of what seems to be the apocalypse is counteracted by songs about farting and horses acting like crows. Even the ending is this mixture of light and darkness, of endings and beginnings. Death comes for us all, The Seventh Seal seems to imply, but you can’t let that keep you from living.

       This is also the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s collaboration with Max von Sydow by the way, which would last until 1971’s The Touch. Seeing him here and in the Virgin Spring those jokes about Bergman films being silent and dour gain some weight, but I found Antonius’ stoicism barely containing this geyser of self-hatred and existential panic rather compelling. I found he was often overshadowed by the stronger personalities, most commonly J, but I believe that was Bergman’s intention, that Block’s experiences had made him withdraw from the world and fed into his depression. It’s a bit of a trip to watch his work here and remember that thirty some years later he’d be playing a side character in Dreamscape, a movie that most people haven’t even seen, much less set it alongside Ingmar Bergman’s most famous film. What a wild career this dude has had, from Swedish classics to Flash Gordon to The Force Awakens.

One thing I do find a bit weird in hindsight is how much emphasis pop culture places on the chess game portion of The Seventh Seal. Chess is an important part of the film of course, kicking off the plot and setting up scenes but the amount of chess playing in the film is actually quite small, you could count the number of moves made on screen with one hand. Prior to this review, I thought The Seventh Seal WAS the game of chess, some kind of bottle movie where Death and the protagonist played each other for an hour and change, interspersed with conversations about philosophy and meaning (and no, you can’t have my idea Jim Jarmusch). It’s still a film about the struggle between man and death, but I guess the competition with the grim reaper aspect of The Seventh Seal is more appealing than the ‘struggling against the inevitability of death and an indifferent universe’ thing. Maybe Antonius should have challenged him to a fiddle contest.

       The Seventh Seal is probably one of those movies that’s too good to be on a Halloween movie list, but since I’m the one writing the reviews, it’s going in anyway. There’s nothing in the way of spooks, Death is the only fantastical bit here and he’s just some bald dude in a robe, but it does deal in some heavy subjects which can be scary to think about when you’re lying in bed trying to sleep. Yet there’s this calming presence to this film as well, a feeling of peace not unlike those childhood days after a good night of trick-or-treating. The perfect atmosphere to end this long, dark marathon of the soul, a perfect film to recommend. Hope you have a good time, and I hope to see you again on the next review.

Happy Halloween!!! 

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), directed by Jack Arnold

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "A Small Victory", by Faith No More

     While the horror of the 1930s was supernatural, haunted houses, caped foreigners with dark gazes and so on, the horror of the 1940s onwards was science. With the onset of a World War larger and more dreadful than the one before it, the creation of bombs that could level cities and war machines that could cut through soldiers like paper, the discovery of camps where people were burned alive by the dozens, mankind had finally reached the point technologically where it could destroy itself. Not just kill some people or destroy a town, we were doing just fine with that, but actually eliminate the human race off the face of the Earth, what little of it there would be left that was inhabitable. Unlike the modern day, where people are calling for america to nuke Iran or Iraq or any other country they couldn’t point out on a map, I imagine the idea of our planet erupting in a cloud of nuclear fire was probably was a pretty sobering thought.

     In the world of Hollywood, that meant vampires and werewolves were out and mad scientists and aliens were in. As scary as science could be in the real world, audiences just couldn’t get enough of science-fiction. In the world of science-fiction, it seemed like invading tyrants from beyond the stars were showing up every other week, at least on the days when out all-caucasian crew were flying to Venus for the weekend. Robots were always murderous monsters, their bulky mechanical frames covered in buttons and blinking lights. Radiation can do anything, from healing the sick to granting superpowers and enlarging animals to gargantuan sizes (fire breath is optional). Despite that possibility of annihilation, suddenly it seemed like the world was awash with new opportunities and interesting possibilities, and that the time we were living in now was only a few steps away from that glorious utopia that Thomas More wrote about all those centuries ago. Hell, we were practically in a utopia already compared to the living conditions in 1516. Toilet paper would have blown their fucking minds.

     Some of the big sci-fi movies concepts have survived the test of time, aliens, giant insects, radioactive waste that does something other than give you cancer, but here’s one that hasn’t been trotted out in a while: Tiny, minuscule and otherwise shrunken people. There’s been a few, Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage, DC and Marvel have played around with The Atom and Ant-Man, and Honey I Shrunk the Kids, but it seems like it’s died out in recent years I mean, there are plenty of movies where humans have to contend with something bigger than we are, insects, apes, lizards what have you, but what about when you are smaller than everything? In an existential sense you could argue that we’re all specks, but our world is the right size for us, and it is built with a sort of immutability of self in mind. If you woke up one morning and the bed that was once the right size stretched out like a football field and the pencil on the nightstand was as large as a redwood, would your bedroom really feel any less alien than Venus or the moons of Saturn? Top of the food chain to the family dog’s newest chew toy. How could that not be interesting?

     That, I imagine, was American International’s justification for getting behind The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold back in 1957. Based on a novel by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson (who also wrote the screenplay), Shrinking Man tells the story of a writer named Robert Scott Carey, who is engulfed in a mysterious mist while on a boating trip with the wife. A bizarre but seemingly harmless incident, until Carey discovers the horrifying truth: He is shrinking at a steady rate, and there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do to prevent it. How can a man survive in a world that seems to grow more and more vast by the day, a world where a staircase would take months to climb or spiders seem to rival grizzly bears in girth? Well, if Carey does want to live he’s going to have to find out, because a world that’s hard enough for a 6 foot tall man is going to be pure hell for a three inch one.

     I suppose what I’m impressed with the most about this film is how they went the distance. By the time the 50s rolled around I guess I assumed that pretty much sci-fi/horror films were doing their best to do as little as possible to sell a movie. You know, green screens, forced perspective tricks, monsters that look like trash bags with tentacles glued on them, that sort of thing. While there are a couple of camera tricks going in The Incredible Shrinking Man, a lot of it is just plain old practical effects. When Carey is living in a dollhouse, they really recreate the room of a dollhouse in life-size. Gigantic cake crumbs, matchboxes the size of sheds, nails the size of 2x4s, you can actually believe for a moment that Carey has actually shrunk. To be fair, like many sci-fi and horror films of the period you’ve got to wait to around halfway through to get to those bits I was talking about, but I still appreciate the commitment. Like I said, a lot of movies that came out around the same time wouldn’t have even bothered.

     I also like The Incredible Shrinking Man for the fact that it doesn’t feel like a sci-fi movie, if that makes any sense. A sci-fi movie in the context of that era brings to mind images of Them or Plan 9 From Outer Space, cinematic elevator music that pile on the vapid acting, screaming women and square-jawed whitebread protagonists and still only barely manage to fill out 60 minutes. The studio didn’t think they needed a story to sell a movie, so the story in unimportant. TISM on the other hand actually feels like a classic science-fiction story being told in film form, where there’s a message trying to be conveyed beyond ‘buy something from the snack bar’. That Richard Matheson was a science fiction author as well as the author of the original story probably helped, although having the writer writing the screenplay doesn't always mean that the writer’s voice makes it through the adaptation process intact (just Harlan Ellison). The Last Man on Earth (the first adaptation of I Am Legend, starring Vincent Price) also featured Matheson on writing and also shares a similar tone to TISM, so I’d like to think the book-to-film process wasn’t as hard for him as it was for others.

     Part Robinson Crusoe style man vs. nature, part philosophy on man’s place in the universe, The Incredible Shrinking Man deals with both subjects while managing to tell a compact and concise story at the same time. A hidden pearl in a schlocky B-movie sea basically, and that’s why it gets the recommendation from me. I know some of you out there probably aren’t a fan of older movies, some of you might not even watch a movie that isn’t in color, but if you are interested in delving into the archives of science fiction film, then I’d say this would make a worthy addition to your watch queue. Keep an eye out for any mysterious mists while you’re at it, you don’t want to end up sword-fighting with your bed-bugs.

     Trust me on that one.