Empire Down: The Curse of Frankenstein/Dracula

For spooky season, here’s a miniseries of essays on Hammer Studio’s classic Gothic horror movies.

Hammer’s movies live in the ruins of their source material and the Universal films — cheap post-war B-pictures produced with the conviction of masterpieces. And they’re pretty much bloody perfect.

Hammer’s first two Gothic horror classics The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula are not exactly beholden to the novels they adapt. They start almost their own alternative canon to the 19th Century Gothic literary one. It’s hard to treat the two as separate movies, as they share a director, writer, lead actors, cinematographer, composer, aesthetics, and the fact they adapt possibly the two most celebrated works of Gothic literature. The films tap into the latent sexuality of Shelley and Stoker, reveling in outbursts of blood and cruelty. While Hammer’s movies are Catholic at their core, assuring that evildoers are punished, they make sure to enjoy their monsters’ evil first.

The Curse of Frankenstein in particular is grimmer than its source material. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (not to be confused with Kenneth Branagh’s execrable Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) is a story of heartbreak and the grief and trauma that come with parental abandonment. Victor Frankenstein’s childhood is an Eden disrupted by the original sin of death. His endeavor comes as much out of idealism and youthful excitement about alchemy and natural philosophy as hubris.

Peter Cushing’s Frankenstein, on the other hand, validates the supposedly incorrect practice of referring to the monster as Frankenstein. Cushing is the evil at the heart of the story: violating natural law to bring about a negative being, a punishment to the Creature itself as much as those close to Frankenstein. It’s a shame Peter Cushing never appeared in a Tolkien adaptation: he would have killed it as Annatar, Sauron’s gorgeous and seductive facade who leads the Elves into temptation. Cushing’s Frankenstein is sexy, vicious, capricious, and willing to obliterate anyone who gets in his way. And it’s kinda extremely fucking hot. 1950s Cushing is gorgeous, obviously (which was a surprise to me, as someone who first encountered Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin), but his sex appeal goes deeper than that: he attacks his work with a rigor that can only be described as libidinous. In the post-imperial days of Britain, The Curse of Frankenstein introduces its own little empire: the empire of Victor Frankenstein, a vicious, pathetic little baron from a bygone age, whose desperation for power only destroys him.

Perhaps its greatest departure is its depiction of The Creature, which removes the character’s tragic “abandoned child” status in favor of an obviated figure. The Creature, played by Christopher Lee at his least elegant, is a vacuum of a being, lacking identity, never making decisions, purely reacting to things. It’s like the Catholic evil of Middle-earth: negating goodness but unable to replace it (you can see why Lee was perfect for The Lord of the Rings). Lee doesn’t pluck the heartstrings the way Boris Karloff’s monster did (Karloff’s version of the character is quietly heartbreaking), but he scares more profoundly than Hammer probably intended to.

In Dracula, on the other hand, the empire isn’t crumbling in its infancy: it’s already established, and slowly invading Britain. The incipient xenophobia of Bram Stoker is shot through with Hammer’s sexual glee. Christopher Lee’s Dracula is again, devastatingly sexy: a horny monster whose exsanguination of young women (and pointedly, men) is explicitly seductive — just look at the way young ladies lay in bed and invite him over to “suck” their “blood.” Dracula knows exactly what it’s doing. This isn’t simply an imperial invasion: it’s an Eastern European goth taking over Britain by cuckolding its upstanding Englishmen.

Both movies are devastatingly horny. And both make sure the monsters get their just deserts in the end. But by the end, it’s too late: the real pleasure of Hammer is the libidinous evil of it all. And no matter how delightfully ugly the monsters’ demises are, there’s always the assurance they’ll return in the next movie.