The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Peter Cushing walks into a scene and you feel it immediately. There's a stillness to him, a precision, like every word is being weighed before it leaves his mouth. As Baron Victor Frankenstein he's not playing a mad scientist in the cackling, wild-eyed tradition. He's something far more unsettling: a man of impeccable manners and absolute moral vacancy. Coldly intelligent, ruthlessly ambitious, utterly convinced that the rules governing lesser men simply don't apply to him. It's a magnificent performance, and it's the engine that drives The Curse of Frankenstein from start to finish.

Hammer Horror's 1957 reimagining of Mary Shelley's novel isn't really interested in the philosophical weight of the source material. It trades the questions about creation, responsibility and what it means to play God for something brasher and more visceral: stylish decadence, blood-red velvet, candlelit dread. And honestly, I respect the choice. This isn't a film that wants to make you think too hard. It wants to seduce you, unsettle you, and leave you slightly breathless. In that ambition, it largely succeeds.

The production design is gorgeous. The costumes are rich, the sets are lush, and the Technicolor cinematography makes the whole thing glow like a fever dream. But the practical effects deserve a special mention. The grotesque, pulsating brain in a jar and the Creature's stitched-together, scarred visage are genuinely impressive work for the era, and they still carry a visceral punch today. Hammer weren't just making horror on the cheap and hoping nobody noticed. There's real craft here, real intent.

Christopher Lee, towering and nearly mute beneath that extraordinary make-up, brings a tragic physicality to the Creature that lingers long after the credits roll. He can't rely on dialogue, so everything comes through the body: the lurching gait, the hollow eyes, the way he occupies space like something that doesn't quite belong in it. It's the kind of performance that could easily be overlooked because it doesn't announce itself, but strip it away and the film loses something essential. Lee and Cushing together are a genuine screen partnership, and it's no surprise Hammer kept bringing them back. I was reminded of that chemistry again when I watched Dracula, made the following year with the same duo, and if anything even more assured in its confidence.

Where the film stumbles, though, is in getting to the good stuff. For a movie that runs barely 82 minutes, it spends a surprising amount of time in drawing-room scheming and romantic subplot territory before the horror properly kicks in. The early acts feel closer to Victorian melodrama than monster movie, and while I can see the argument that this grounding makes the later shocks land harder, in practice the pacing just drags. The tension only truly ignites in the final third, and for a film built on shock and sensation, that's a long time to ask an audience to be patient.

It's worth saying that this was genuinely bold filmmaking for 1957. The explicit gore, the moral ambiguity, the refusal to offer any real redemption arc for Frankenstein, all of it felt dangerous and modern in ways that studios weren't really doing at the time. Compare it to something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, made just a year earlier, which smuggles its anxieties under genre clothing in a very different way. Hammer weren't smuggling anything. They were kicking the door open and daring you to complain.

So yes, it's a mixed bag. The pacing is uneven, the romantic subplots are a drag, and the film never quite delivers the wall-to-wall chills it promises. But Cushing is magnetic, Lee is haunting, the visuals are sumptuous, and the ambition is undeniable. This Frankenstein is more interested in sin than science, more concerned with seduction than suspense. That's not quite what I always want from a horror film, but it's a particular flavour done with enough style that I can forgive the flaws.

Three stars. A flawed classic, but a classic nonetheless.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1957  | Watched: 2026-05-11

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