HAMMER HORROR WEEKEND: Frankenstein Created Woman

The fourth of Hammer’s seven Frankstein films, ‘Frankenstein Created Woman’ follows on from ‘The Evil of Frankstein’ (the odd-film-out in the series, with its awkward flashbacks which contradict the continuity of the earlier movies) and gets the franchise back on track.

As with the final entry, ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’, a lurid title gives the lie to a script that engages with metaphysical considerations. Perhaps the film’s greatest success is that it develops Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing)’s experiments in revivification beyond straightforward scientific enquiry and questions the existence of the soul.

It’s telling that the film opens – after a grisly prologue depicting the Baron’s assistant Hans (Robert Morris) witnessing his father’s execution as a child – with Frankenstein himself being brought back to life by village physician Dr Hertz (Thorley Walters) after being clinically dead for an hour. Frankenstein takes the fact that he is still in possession of his faculties and memories – his animus – as proof that the soul remains in the body after death.

He begins working on a means of isolating the soul in an electro-magnetic field (look, I said the film had metaphysical considerations, okay; I didn’t say the science wasn’t bunkum), i.e. holding the essence of a personality in storage while its dead or worn out body is surgically repaired.


In the meantime, Hans is bunking off assistant duties to pay court to innkeeper’s daughter Christina (Susan Denberg). Facially disfigured and lame, Christina is self-conscious. Her stern but well-meaning father Kleve (Alan McNaughton) spends most of his earnings sending her to specialists. He’s unhappy at Hans’s attentions towards Christina, even though the lad plainly loves her for who she is, yet he doesn’t intervene when a trio of upper class wastrels – Anton (Peter Blythe), Karl (Barry Warren) and Johann (Derek Fowlds) – make her into a laughing stock. Hans does intervene, however, and bests them. He’s arrested, but slips away and returns to Christina’s room. Anton and his buddies, disgruntled, break into Kleve’s tavern and start drinking his stock of wine like it’s going out of style. Kleve returns unexpectedly and they set on him. Next day, after Christina leaves by an early coach for another appointment, Hans is arrested for the crime.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?


Long story short, Hans refuses to compromise Christina and is therefore unable to provide an alibi. Frankenstein and Hertz testify on his behalf, but the stigma of Hans’s executed father sways the jury. He’s taken to the guillotine just as Christina returns. Distraught, she drowns herself.

Frankenstein deals with his inability to save Hans by having Hertz obtain the body, from which he isolates the soul. At the same time, a group of villagers, having fished Christina’s corpse out of the river, bring it to Dr Hertz on the slim chance that he can do something. Frankenstein is only too happy to relieve them of the cadaver.

I don’t really need to tell you what happens next, do I?

‘Frankenstein Created Woman’ succeeds in ticking all the boxes required of a Frankenstein movie – esoteric experiments, nefariously obtained corpses, reanimation, a horde of angry villagers (no burning torches this time round, but – hey! – you can’t have everything) – as well as bringing some new material to the table. The revenge element imbues the first hour with a slow-burn tension as director Terence Fisher and scripter John Elder put all the pieces in place. The youths’ harassment of Christina makes for an extended and uncomfortable set-piece. Their subsequent attack on Kleve, all top hats and brass-topped walking canes as they set about him, prefigures the imagery of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ by several years. Kleve’s earlier cowerings – the middle class business-owned toadying to the aristocracy – says something about the British class system, particularly when compared to the gruff, working class bartender who takes over the establishment after Kleve’s death; this guy has none of it, and physically throws Anton out over a spilled glass.


Elsewhere, the trapping of the soul by scientific means, notwithstanding some slightly cheesy effects work, demonstrates more chillingly than in any of the earlier films that Frankenstein is essentially playing God. There’s an interesting contrast to the youths’ louche amorality in Cushing’s portrayal of the Baron as, although charismatic, an aloof and patriarchal aristocrat, a man used to giving orders and having them obeyed. On a trip to the tavern he barely acknowledges Kleve except to demand champagne and a menu, he casually expects Hertz to foot his bills, and – having failed to sway the jury as to Hans’s innocence – delights in the research opportunities presented by his imminent demise. There’s almost a swagger about him, except that he’s too wrapped up in his work to play cock of the walk.

Cushing’s performance is absolutely pitch perfect, and the key reason for the success of even the lesser Frankenstein titles. He treats the character completely seriously. There’s never a self-knowing nod or wink to the gallery. Cushing plays Frankenstein as meticulously as, say, Dirk Bogarde played Aschenbach in ‘Death in Venice’. And no matter how ropy or bereft of budget some of the Hammer Frankenstein titles are, a performance of Cushing’s calibre is what gives them their longevity.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Although the Frankenstein franchise notched up almost as many entries as Hammer’s Dracula series, it never quite captured the popular consciousness the way the caped bloodsucker from Transylvania did. Maybe because Peter Cushing wasn’t as dangerously sexy as Christopher Lee. Maybe because reanimated corpses aren’t as darkly appealing as aristocratic vampires.

What the Frankenstein films can lay claim to, however, is that they didn’t suffer the drop-off in quality that beset the latter Dracula titles, particularly when Hammer took the decision to update the Count’s milieu to a horribly psychedelic version of 1970s London. Hard to imagine Baron Frankenstein swanning around Carnaby Street in a velvet smoking jacket, doing LSD and listening to the Velvet Underground.

Just as well that the studio allowed Frankenstein to go out in fine style, unrepentant in his experiments in playing God, against a particularly apposite Gothic backdrop. Sure, ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’ is saddled with a lurid title that suggests Hammer were scraping the bottom of the barrel, but it scores highly in virtually every respect.


The film starts with a grubby bodysnatcher (Patrick Troughton) only just evading the clutches of a passing constable as he makes off with an unofficially exhumed corpse. He delivers said item to the house of Dr Simon Helder (Shane Briant), who greets him with a raised eyebrow and the satirical homily, “That smell: is it you or him?” Immediately, this touch of mordant humour establishes Helder as a likeable character even if his experiments are macabre.

Inspired by the works of Frankenstein, whose publications he owns, Helder is attempting reanimation. His attempts are short-lived as the bodysnatcher is promptly arrested and sings like a caged canary. The police come calling on Helder, he’s hauled up in court and the judge – who previously sentenced Frankenstein for similar offences some years earlier – loses no time in sentencing Helder to a period of five years in an asylum for the criminally insane.

It’s at this establishment, nominally run by Adolf Klauss (John Stratton), a licentious alcoholic hiding a dark secret, that Helder meets the asylum’s doctor, Karl Victor (Peter Cushing) and realizes that Frankenstein, long believed dead, is using the anonymity of the facility to continue his experiments. Initially drawn to the older man as a mentor figure, Helder eventually comes to the reluctant conclusion that playing God has its consequences.


Although beset by a budget as small as its title is misleading, ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’ injects some new blood into the formula. Helder’s character arc – from arrogant and self-confident scientist to a man who discovers his humanity when faced with the greater and more amoral urge to scientific gain of his supposed hero – is contrasted with both that of Frankenstein, initially a benign presence who saves Helder from the heavy-handed treatment of Klauss’s goons, but whose hold over Klauss comes only at the subjugation of angelic mute Sarah (Madeline Smith). Frankenstein’s plans for Sarah in the last act cross a line Helder cannot tolerate.

Another interesting juxtaposition is that of the creature (Dave Prowse) to the two scientists. Created from the body of a thug, the hands of an artisan and the brain of a genius, the disparate elements rebel against each other, causing the creature physical, emotional and cerebral agonies. Never mind the horrible “monster from hell” part of the title, Prowse arguably conjures one of the most pitiable incarnations of Frankenstein’s monster put on screen; that he does so from behind a plastic mask that is simultaneously groteseque and almost laughable only proves how good a job he does. One of the best scenes segues from Frankenstein and Helder, sharing a drink to celebrate the creature’s resurrection, to the create itself, abandoned, alone and desperately melancholy.

In fact, the performances are uniformly good. Cushing never took the easy way out in playing Frankenstein: there was nothing self-deprecating about his performance, nary a wink to the gallery. He always played the character straight, and never more so than here. Briant’s Helder is not just a foil to Frankenstein, but the opposite side of the coin. Helder could easily become Frankenstein; inherit his mantle. The drama is in the dichotomy between Helder’s scientific curiosity and his sense of humanity.

The closing scenes toy ironically with the old concept of the lunatics running the asylum, a melee which it requires Frankenstein’s aristocratic air of authoritarianism to rectify. In consolidating Frankenstein’s status as both instigator and invigilator – as well as delivering a gut-wrenching climatic scene that says as much about the human condition as any art film – ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’ asks some probing questions about mortality, science, advanced knowledge and intellectual responsibility. If only Hammer could have rethought the title!