🧪 The Madman’s Premise
Hammer Films, fresh off the film reanimation table, set their sights on Frankenstein and hired Terence Fisher to give the classic a facelift—complete with lush color, Peter Cushing as Victor, and Christopher Lee as the monster. You’ve got ambition: Victor Frankenstein (Cushing) murders a professor to extract a smart brain, pieces together a patchwork creature, and then spends the rest of the film nursing his intellectual vanity while his Frankensteinian patchwork mercilessly off-lights townsfolk in the woods. The plot’s straightforward: meticulous murder, shocking reanimation, finger-pointing, betrayal, tragic revenge, and a finale that erects a one-way ticket to the guillotine.
This is Hammer Films’ first big swing at full-color horror, the movie that brought blood-red gore to the otherwise black-and-white cemetery of classic monsters. And it’s… fine. Not terrible. Not amazing. Just fine. Like ordering a steak medium-rare and getting meatloaf. Technically correct, vaguely enjoyable, but you won’t write home about it.
The plot, ripped from Mary Shelley with the subtlety of a taxidermist on a Red Bull bender, finds young Victor Frankenstein growing up rich, brilliant, and suspiciously sociopathic. Played with arch snobbery by Peter Cushing, Victor wastes no time moving from dissecting frogs to snipping bits off corpses to eventually killing his mentor for a brain like it’s just another item on the grocery list.
This version of Victor doesn’t wrestle with morality. He doesn’t reflect on the danger of playing God. He’s just a smug little bastard with a scalpel, a god complex, and a lab that looks like it was furnished entirely by a haunted thrift store. Cushing plays him with gleeful malice—the kind of guy who’d be charming at a dinner party until you realize the red wine is spinal fluid.
Enter the Creature. Christopher Lee, encased in crusty makeup that looks like someone tried to glue a leather purse onto his face during a blackout, plays the Monster like a malfunctioning scarecrow. He lumbers, he growls, he punches a few peasants in the throat, and then he disappears for long stretches like even the script forgot he was supposed to be the main event.
Which brings us to the weirdest issue with this film: for a movie about Frankenstein’s monster, the monster is barely in it. He’s like the drummer in a doom metal band—there, technically, but not really driving the show. Instead, the bulk of the film focuses on Victor being an amoral ghoul while his increasingly exasperated friend Paul mutters things like, “Victor, surely you don’t mean to inject a child’s pancreas into this goat?”
The pace is slow. Real slow. Not suspense-building slow—more like Victorian tea party slow. You sit through long conversations about science and ethics, waiting for something horrible to happen, only for it to be a mildly disturbed lab assistant or a corpse getting a new eyeball. The horror never quite boils; it just simmers endlessly like a stew that’s forgotten it’s on the stove.
That said, the film looks gorgeous, in that musty British way. Rich reds, dramatic shadows, rotting bodies, and drawing rooms where everyone looks vaguely constipated. Terence Fisher’s direction is classy to a fault, and the set design feels both theatrical and deeply unsafe, like your grandmother’s attic if she collected surgical equipment and unresolved trauma.
And let’s not forget the “romance” subplot. Elizabeth, Victor’s sweet and oblivious fiancée, spends most of the movie smiling nervously and getting gaslit to hell and back. It’s less “love story” and more “tragic victim of an upper-class psychopath’s science hobby.” She’s basically a walking excuse for Victor to lie about what’s in the basement.
The finale picks up slightly—there’s some actual tension, some monster-on-scientist violence, and finally a dash of karmic comeuppance. But even the climax feels restrained, like it’s afraid to really let loose. The monster gets destroyed, Victor ends up condemned, and we’re supposed to feel like justice has been served. But really, it just feels like the end of a very long dinner party where someone eventually admitted to murdering the host.
Now, all this sounds like I hated the movie. I didn’t. It’s a competent, classy, and occasionally nasty little film. But it’s also tame. Even its so-called gore—which caused clutch-the-pearls outrage in 1957—is pretty mild today. There are severed limbs, yes, but they look like props from a butcher’s window, not the stuff of nightmares.
The true horror of The Curse of Frankenstein is less about reanimated corpses and more about unchecked ego in a lab coat. Peter Cushing absolutely carries the film, smirking his way through surgical ethics violations and casual murder like he’s ordering lunch. Christopher Lee, buried under prosthetics and moral ambiguity, does what he can—but the Creature never gets to be sympathetic or even all that scary. He’s more of a sad science project gone mildly rogue.
So here we are: a movie that broke barriers but now feels like an antique. A bit musty, a bit charming, and more interesting for what it started than what it actually did. It’s like your grandpa’s dusty old horror comic—historically cool, sure, but don’t expect to lose sleep over it.
Final Verdict: 3 out of 5 Brains in a Jar
The Curse of Frankenstein is respectable horror—sharp suits, creepy castles, and enough blood to get your grandmother to clutch her pearls. But it never goes for the jugular. It’s all lead-up and very little payoff. Worth a watch if you want to see where Hammer Horror started… but don’t be surprised if you start rooting for the monster just to liven things up.
