Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

After the unfortunate attempt at updating the Frankenstein saga with a feeble reboot (1970’s “The Horror of Frankenstein“), some bigwigs at Hammer Films – especially producer Roy Skeggs – manage to convince the company’s powers that be to produce a new chapter in the long-running series. The success of this campaign for a new Frankenstein film was anything but certain given the problems Terence Fisher had gone through (after a string of accidents, he wasn’t particularly inclined to return to the director’s chair) as well as the misfortune that befell poor Peter Cushing (he was never the same after the loss of his beloved wife Helen in 1971).

The resulting film is a crepuscular work that, although not up to par with the best, still stands with dignity, symbolizing the end of an era. Its tight budget (which made Paramount’s financing indispensable, provided in exchange for the film’s distribution rights outside England), the quick review of the director’s pet themes, and even the protagonist’s sunken face are all elements that contribute to making the film seem like an epitaph, a sort of melancholy ode to an era. And in fact, over the prior half decade, Gothic horror had become passé.

This celluloid farewell is far from painless if you consider the contradictory statements screenwriter John Elder (credited as “Tony Hinds”) puts in the mouth of a baron unable or unwilling to accept the new zeitgeist. Lines with a conclusive tone (“If I’ve succeeded this time, then every sacrifice will have been worthwhile“; “There’s nothing more for you to see. It’s all over now. All over“) alternate with others of a somewhat less conciliatory nature (“No, I haven’t given up. I never shall“; “For the moment, we must get this place tidied up so that we can start afresh. Now, we shall need new material, naturally“).

At the end of the day, other than the decision to set the entire story within the walls of an insane asylum, the characters and situations are basically copied from earlier films in the series: there’s an assistant (“The Revenge of Frankenstein“, 1958), a lovely mute woman (“The Evil of Frankenstein“, 1964), and even a brain transplant (“Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!“, 1969). Despite its scant narrative innovation, “Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell” assumes an allegorical value, and it’s no coincidence that it marks the swan song for a director whose tragic literary conception of the genre is no longer in tune with the tastes of a public caught up in contemporary horrors.

They sat on the movie for two years before releasing it to theaters where it met its inevitable fate as a box-office disaster.