Andre Ferreira is a mechanical engineer by day and a film buff by night. He claims to be moderately competent in both. The following is his spectacular tribute to Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, a superb piece of writing that I am very proud to share.

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What is scary?

Can a film approaching it’s 100th year, whose foundation within the horror canon is so secure that every scene should theoretically be a mere ritual towards the next predictable cliche, that exists within the strictures of both censorship and the technological limitations of sound still retain any power?

I recently had the awesome experience of showing “Frankenstein” and ‘Bride of Frankenstein” to a group of friends, and am delighted to report they were absorbed by both. What surprised me was that some preferred the original to the technically slicker and more ironic “Bride”. I’m actually a “Bride” partisan myself, but this is heartening for two reasons:

1. It represents the triumph of the sincere over the ironic
2. it represents the power of imagination and storytelling over technology.

Yes, “Frankenstein” has a raw symbolic power and powerful empathy generated by the core theme and tale of a creature turned monster by the abandonment and callousness of the creator and society, and that’s what has given it a chilling residence in our collective dreams. Yes, the powerful sympathy wrought by the extraordinary performance of Karloff is why this monster just won’t stay dead. This is totemic. it’s a key figure in the Tarot of pop culture, to borrow Stephen King’s phrase from “Danse Macabre”. On this most recent rewatch, I noticed even more reasons for it’s stark power. So, in examining the key horror film, the one that permanently cemented the artistic legacy of the genre in American and world consciousness for almost a century, let’s ask: What is scary?

(1) Hands

Hands are associated with action, with violence, with our psychic control or the lack of it. The image of a hand out of control forms the basis of “The Hands of Orlac” and its progeny from “Mad Love” to “Santa Sangre”. They’re often the locus of Ingmar Bergman’s Gothic works. In slasher and giallo films, it’s the killer’s hands that are a semaphore for their destructive will. In Metzger’s “The Cat and the Canary” and even an incompetent wreck like “Manos”, the erotic charge of touch forms a key visual motif. Lugosi’s digital dances with his hands presaged mind control.

In “Frankenstein”, watch how Karloff uses his hands. Outstretched towards his creator, begging for acknowledgement. Stretching towards a light does not understand, and cannot fully grasp. Furiously waving at flames that terrify him. Plucking a daisy in the films most devastating scene. Grappling and strangling his tormentors. Karloff’s massive hands with their elongated digits, made shrivelled and skeletal by Pierce’s makeup are the first thing to notice about his performance. In this film, while laying on a table, he reaches behind van Sloan to strangle him. In the hermit scene in “Bride”, the same hand gesture and framing is re-used as Karloff lays down, but this time for an embrace.

There is more sheer shock in a clawed hand unexpected emerging from the shadows than in all the effects of ‘Armageddon’ because ‘Armageddon looks realistic, and horror taunts us that reality is an illusion

– Roger Ebert, “Bride of Frankenstein” review

(2) Obsession

Karloff’s shadow over this film looms so large that it’s easy to overlook the first billed Colin Clive. Yet look at the furious intensity of his close-ups. They are highlighted by the still unusual technique of filming them frontally, looking straight at the camera. In the extended opening as the friends of Frankenstein come into his castle to try to rescue him from the grips of his obsession, Clive is absolutely chilling. His detachment from reality and indifference are excellently conveyed in his intense performance. The silence only adds to it. Anyone looking for evidence that the doctor is indeed the real monster needs only to look at his thousand yard stare in these early moments. 

(3) Fritz

This is not the sympathetic and sometimes comical Igor of parodies and pop culture. Frye’s deranged Fritz is an abusive bully perfectly comfortable with the desecration of the lifeless. If the locus of Clive’s horror his determined focus, and Karloff’s his confusion, Frye’s is in his leer. His horrific sadism, coupled with Frye’s spiderlike movements and disgusting design has not dated.

(4) Rooms

A technique Whale pioneered is the lateral move through three walled sets, akin to a dollhouse. This is a film where the thematic and visual focus is on what remains hidden. Frankenstein hides his creation and obsession from all, and all are willing to comply with this deception. Horror normally happens in another room. When it happens, the camera tracks across the clutter and observes as crowds react as a character follows. Right to left – the submissive, less dominant motion – is the most common direction. The whole atmosphere of a room changes.

In a film that could not have explicit violence, I have rarely seen a more chilling technique than having one scene where a beautiful room is intact, and then a cut later to when the room is spoilt, the horrible violence being implied. That is why the scene of the wedding is horrifying. Whale the designer uses his sets to tell his story. A place of beauty has been completely destroyed.

(5) Composition and Decomposition

There’s a word sometimes used when writing about silent films called “semaphore”, where a deliberately symbolic visual joke or pun is used as a visual synecdoche. Hitchcock was famous for that, and what he had in common with Whale was that he was a cartoonist and set designer prior to directing. The use of shorthand and exaggeration (though not quite as visionary and wild as “Bride”) is masterful. 

This is a profoundly morbid film. Dead bodies and bodies in repose abound and are thrust into the center of compositions. It’s there in the scenes of Fritz’ grave robbing (you can almost feel the clamminess in his hands as he goes through his ghoulish work). It’s there in the shot of a hanging body, or the feet on a gurney thrust into the foreground of a shot, or limp hands (there’s that image again!) dangling from under a sheet. The obsession with death is right there in the design, and in the contrast with its scenes of life. The depthless panoramas combined with accentuated decor in the frame, and those high ceiling that go to nowhere add an aura of unreality. like a near Expressionist cartoon – but the physical reality of decay and death is always the locus of the scene.

(6) Cliches

Here’s the weird thing: every scene in the film has been seen before in some way or another. There is no surprise. This should be a ritual. Except this was where they were minted, and the truth of cliches is you can always feel when the makers didn’t think they were. This film isn’t progressing through a rote ritual – it’s following the logic and feeling of the story. Despite the age, they still feel fresh because to Whale, the outsider and the mob meant something to him. It’s felt in the eloquence in the way the story is told – the intuitive use of a lateral track to indicate panic, or a push-in. They’re cliches, but the camera is looking at them for the first time.

(7) Complacency

Don’t be fooled into the thinking the normal scenes of Henry, his Bride and his father are mere padding – they’re the final twist of the knife. While the monster suffers and the town reaps the whirlwind Frankenstein sowed, Henry is living the high life. His gilded, lush scenes feel like something out of a Lubitsch film. And reading about Whale, it always seems as if he wanted to be Lubitsch and that horror and war films were his trap. That must have been one source of his extraordinary sympathy for outsiders and those who don’t fit in, along with his closeted homosexuality. The resentment at the “square” world would explode with “Bride”, but it’s still here. 

The great horror scholar Jonathan Rigby lamented the end of “Frankenstein” because it seemed like a limp and inappropriately glib climax after the inferno of the climax. This viewing it was the final turn of the screw. While Frankenstein Sr. dodders and jokes about a “son of Frankenstein”, the real abandoned son has been forgotten, ignored and erased. 

Now that’s scary