The worst Frankenstein movies share something in common: Frankenstein’s monster doesn't slowly descend into villainy by choice, he has a bad brain.
The Big Picture The specter of the 1931 Frankenstein looms over the entire canon of Universal Monsters and anyone who comes into it fresh. I can remember my first time going through these classic horrors; reviews, commentaries, documentaries, and pop culture referred to James Whale’s film more than any other, except for maybe Tod Browning’s Dracula. It wasn’t just parodies and references to Jack Pierce’s makeup job either.
Such changes are aesthetic, and the departures made in Whale’s film have inarguably made for delightful and iconic images. But a more crucial difference concerns the stuff the monster is made from. The book has him manufactured out of parts appropriated from dissection tables and slaughterhouses, but nowhere does Shelley say anything about the creature’s brain, much less there being anything wrong with it.
Universal’s “Brain” Choice Lives On in Adaptations Like ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’ This business of bad brains and a monster with a muddled sense of pathos isn’t a fatal flaw to the first Frankenstein, though it does create a few logistical issues for the plot Clive and Karloff carry the film. Scenes like the monster’s creation, the death of Maria, and the mob’s hunt for the creature are everything one could want from a horror film.
Like the Universal film, The Curse of Frankenstein rises above its narrative and thematic shortcomings through performance and atmosphere, but the hollowness of the creature and his diseased brain exacts a stronger toll. Nearly every subsequent entry in the Hammer Frankenstein series found some way to predestine the mad doctor’s experiments to violence and destruction, with increasingly little attention paid to anything but raw horror and titillation.
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