A Turn for the Curse

Time is not always kind to old movies and time has a tendency to be especially unkind to old horror movies. Perhaps this is because horror movie fans inevitably grow up and seek different thrills than the ones they experienced in youth. More often, it is because the things that scare one generation don't always scare the next to the same degree.

Thus I have always been amused by those rare horror movies that have actually managed to grow more respectable with age. The Hammer films, for example, were rarely popular with critics when they first came out and as recently as the 1970s, it was popular for old school horror critics to blame the House of Hammer for the decline and fall of the old-fashioned horror film. Yet judging from most film critics nowadays, one would never imagine there was a time when the Hammer films were less than respectable.

Of course, part of this might lie in the fact that Hammer Studios were among the last people -- apart from the good people at Roger Corman's American International -- to set horror in the past and make it work. There has been many cinematic attempts to create horror period pieces since Hammer quit making such films but unfortunately, few such films have been as successful as the early Hammer films and indeed, my mind winces at the thought of having to rewatch such works as Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula in a way that it doesn't wince at watching, say, Hammer's Horror of Dracula.

But as good as the 1958 Horror of Dracula is, it would have never come about were it not for the success of the 1957 flick The Curse of Frankenstein. Curse was Hammer's first attempt at remaking the old Universal classic and it was a doozy. It was not necessarily all that perfect on an artistic basis. For example, as much as I admire the way Hammer makeup artists created a look for Christopher Lee's creature which was as convincing as the makeup used for Universal's Frankenstein Monster, it is hard for me to pretend that Lee's portrayal was an improvement on the more sympathetic Boris Karloff version. Indeed, one of the failings of Curse is the way it doesn't even try to portray the Frankenstein Creature as a being worth caring about.

Then again the movie doesn't try to create any sympathy for the monster's creator, either. If the creature is bad, its creator -- Baron Victor Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing, natch) -- is worse. In order to achieve his ends, the Baron is not above robbing graves, cheating on his own bride-to-be and even murdering innocent people. Even on his wedding night to his cousin Elizabeth (played by the always gorgeous Hazel Court), he can't bring himself to think of anyone else but himself and his creation.

In the end, the Baron finally succeeds in either killing or alienating everyone close to him. And ironically, his own creation comes closer to bringing him to justice than any mere human...

As you might guess, Curse doesn't even pretend to be faithful to the original Mary Shelley novel and given the legal necessity of avoiding any close similarity to the original Universal movie lest Hammer be sued for plagiarism, it's probably just as well. All the same, Curse manages to be more memorable than I expected as well as a fitting beginning to Peter Cushing's long career as a horror movie icon. Come to think of it, Christopher Lee's career since this film has not been too shabby, either.