Horror Film Friday: James Whale's 'Frankenstein' starring Boris Karloff

There are plenty of iconic moments throughout the history of cinema, but there truly is nothing as memorable as Dr. Henry Frankenstein yelling "It's alive!" It's a chilling moment, when all of cinema seems to turn down another road. We have officially moved on from a world of moody, quiet horror and are now in a new realm - a world where the monsters of our nightmares are now alive.

While there are plenty of good, spooky horror movies in the vein of Tod Browning's Dracula, James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) truly changes the game. Released only months after Dracula, Frankenstein presents a new kind of horror, where both sound and visuals collide. There's even a new element of sympathy introduced, as Whale makes us question who really is the monster in the film.

Loosely (and we mean loosely) based on Mary Shelley's novel, the film has a lot to get through in 70 minutes. Yet, just like the other Universal horror movies, the film can be used as a tool to explain how a story can go full circle in that short amount of time.

It starts during a funeral, where we first spot Henry (Colin Clive) and his hunchback assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) watching the body being put in the ground. Next, they pull the body out of the ground and gather a second that is hanging dead. Henry is trying to be god by stitching these bodies together with a new brain to bring it to back to life. Henry's old professor, Waldman (Edward Van Sloan, who also appeared in Dracula and The Mummy), his fiance Elizabeth (Mae Clark), his father (Frederick Kerr) and close friend Victor (John Boles) find this idea dangerous. But Henry must go on, obsessed with a desire to play god.

Unfortunately, Fritz forgot to tell his boss that he dropped the normal brain jar, so his creation turns out to have an “abnormal” brain when it wakes up. The creature (“?,” but also known as Boris Karloff) poses a danger to all humanity, or does he? Once the monster finally breaks free, we learn that he is actually just like a child hoping to learn from the world. It's just sad that his first attempt at having fun is throwing a little girl in the river like she's a flower.

That, of course, sparks the film's famous mob sequence, in which Whale goes all “Fritz Lang” on us and teaches the audience about the danger of mob rule and kangaroo courts. Everyone, even Henry, turns against this poor creature who just wants to understand the world he has suddenly been thrust into. The genius of Boris Karloff's performance is cemented in the final moment in the windmill, where Henry, his creator and the only person who should be on his side, decides he must destroy him. Karloff shows us that the monster has realized that no one is really going to help him.

This is also why Whale's 1935 sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, is probably one of the best sequels ever made. It continues the monster's character development, as he finds the blind man who becomes the first person he has ever encountered that doesn't try to kill him or run away. The monster has finally found his equal in another person shunned by society.

Karloff was a real artist, which is why we can fully understand the creature's intentions and feelings without needing dialogue. Whale was much more interested in using dialogue to tell his horror story that Brown was with Dracula, as the two had very different backgrounds (Whale came from the stage, Brown from silent cinema), but Whale realized that dialogue would only make the monster seem silly. Jack Pierce created iconic make-up and Karloff had already established himself as a good Hollywood bit-player (he was in the original Scarface, after all). So Whale let these two masters do their job to help tell the story and it works. Karloff could somehow be expressive, even with all that make-up on.

While we have all been falling at Karloff's feet for nearly eight decades now, it is important to realize that Colin Clive is also giving a truly chilling performance as the obsessed Henry. Yes, most of his colleagues are pretty bland, but Clive really sticks out here. We are still in an era where actors are giving stagey and cardboard performances, but Clive is the opposite of that here. When he yells “IT'S ALIVE!!!” we feel that. We see a man going completely mad and a man completely in turmoil late in the film. Few British actors in Hollywood at that time could pull that off.

There are countless aspects of Frankenstein that have kept it alive all these years, but another one that must be pointed out is the film's unique art direction and cinematography. Whale was influenced by the German expressionists of the silent era, although Robert Florey, who was Universal's first choice to direct the film might also be responsible for bringing that in. But Whale did have considerable control over the production, so if he didn't like it himself, he wouldn't have let it make the final movie. It's amazing how every aspect of the film is precisely designed to create fear and tell the audience how we are supposed to feel about each character in their situations.

Frankenstein, just like the monster in the film, has come back to life countless times over the years, but the 1931 original is etched in horror history. It's the first time audiences were presented with a creature that might not really be the villain of the piece, but really the sympathetic character. As children, we learn that the monster is just like us, someone the adults can just never understand. When we grow up, it is still hard to shake off that feeling.

“Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous?” Henry asks his mentor in the key speech of the film. “Where should we be if no one tried to find out what lies beyond? Have your never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud? And what changes the darkness into light? But if you talk like that, people call you crazy. Well, if I could discover just one of these things, what eternity is, for example, I wouldn't care if they did think I was crazy.”

That speech applies to the makers of Frankenstein itself because if they never wanted to make something so dangerous and earth shattering, pop culture would look very different.

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