Horror

When Guillermo del Toro‘s “Frankenstein” hits theaters today, it will join an honorable lineage of Mary Shelley adaptations that began in 1910, continued throughout the silent era, and helped create the template for the modern studio horror film just a few years after the arrival of sound. Del Toro‘s take on Shelley’s 1818 novel is more faithful to the source material than James Whale‘s 1931 incarnation with Boris Karloff, and follows through on the premise’s potential with greater philosophical depth and visual detail, but when it comes to influence and impact Whale’s “Frankenstein” will likely never be topped.

That’s because “Frankenstein,” along with an earlier 1931 release, Tod Browning’s “Dracula,” introduced the horror genre as a viable form for artistic expression and commercial success within the studio system. Both movies were made at Universal, a studio that became synonymous with horror after the success of “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” gave way to “The Wolf Man,” “The Mummy,” “The Invisible Man,” and myriad sequels and spinoffs well into the mid-1950s.

Although Universal had made a few horror or horror-adjacent films in the silent era, the boom in sound horror came courtesy of executive Carl Laemmle Jr., whose father, Universal founder Carl Laemmle, made his son head of production in 1929 as a 21st birthday present. The junior Laemmle was a passionate proponent of horror and pushed for “Dracula,” a film his dad didn’t really believe in; the main reason Laemmle Jr. was able to greenlight Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel was that the young executive had recently had a major success with his World War I epic “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

With Bela Lugosi in the title role, “Dracula” was a smash hit upon its release in February 1931 and validated Laemmle Jr.’s faith in horror. As the studio scurried to capitalize on the film’s success, “Frankenstein” arose as a promising follow-up. Shelley’s story of a scientist who creates a sentient creature out of body parts cobbled together from various corpses was tailor-made for the screen — in fact, it had already been filmed at least three times.

The first adaptation, a 14-minute version made by the Edison Company in 1910, is quite possibly the world’s first horror film. Making these kinds of claims, however, is always dubious given how many silent pictures did not survive the era. Indeed, that was the case for two subsequent “Frankenstein” adaptations, the 1915 feature “Life Without Soul” and an Italian iteration called “The Monster of Frankenstein.” Only the Edison “Frankenstein” still exists in any kind of viewable form, via a restoration currently streaming on the Library of Congress YouTube channel.

Universal’s 1931 “Frankenstein” shouldn’t necessarily have been a game changer — rushed into production after “Dracula” became a hit, the film only gave its creators a handful of months from conception to release in which to make their classic. Yet somehow the stars aligned. “Frankenstein” was not only a better film than “Dracula” — wittier, more visually dynamic, and more poetic and poignant as well as scarier — but also an influence on all future “Frankenstein” movies and a model for much later horror films like Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” and Lucky McKee’s “May.”

As in those films, “Frankenstein” gets a lot of mileage out of creating a central figure who alternates between being the monster, the victim, and the hero all in the same movie. Frankenstein’s monster, as played by Boris Karloff, is one of the all-time great horror movie characters, a figure both terrifying and filled with pathos as an innocent dragged into a world that he did not make and that does not want him.

This remains consistent throughout nearly all of the “Frankenstein” movies that would follow Whale’s, up to and including del Toro’s iteration, which is overall more faithful to Shelley’s conception of the monster as a verbal being than Karloff’s grunting hulk. The monster’s lack of verbal sophistication, in fact, was one of the things that made Bela Lugosi reject the role after he was announced as the film’s star, though reportedly no one was particularly interested in seeing Lugosi in the part after a screen test featuring the actor in full monster makeup met with unintentional laughter. (Lugosi did ultimately play Frankenstein’s monster years later, in 1943’s “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.”)

Once Lugosi and original director Robert Florey left the project, the door was open for the filmmakers who would make “Frankenstein” iconic. James Whale was a recent arrival at Universal whose previous work included directing the dialogue scenes on Howard Hughes’ aviation epic “Hell’s Angels.” He kicked off his Universal contract in 1931 by directing “Waterloo Bridge,” a movie Laemmle Jr. was high enough on to give Whale his pick of material for his next project.

Whale responded to “Frankenstein,” and he knew who he wanted for the monster: Boris Karloff, whom he had seen in Howard Hawks’ “The Criminal Code.” (Karloff also had a small role in Hawks’ gangster classic “Scarface,” which had been shot but not released at the time “Frankenstein” went into production.) When Karloff put on Jack Pierce’s prosthetics and makeup (which took several hours each day of shooting to apply), he wasn’t silly like Lugosi. He looked both haunting and haunted, sad and terrifying.

Pierce was a master makeup artist (he would go on to create other Universal monsters like the Wolf Man and the Mummy), and he carefully adapted his design for Frankenstein’s monster to the contours of Karloff’s face, giving the actor maximum opportunities to convey emotion via facial expressions and gestures. This was key given that Karloff had no real dialogue, though he would be given a limited vocabulary in the 1935 sequel “Bride of Frankenstein.”

Karloff’s entrance in “Frankenstein” is one of the great introductions in horror movie history, as Whale blocks the scene with the monster backing into a room, withholding his visage from the audience as long as possible. Once Karloff slowly turns, Whale pushes the camera closer and closer to him in a series of cuts that thrust the viewer into the monster’s space — and which reveal the flawlessness of Pierce’s design in unblinking close-ups.

It’s still a powerful moment nearly a hundred years later, and the poignancy of the performance to follow is only more potent after decades of other — mostly inferior — presentations of the character. Certainly, none of the actors who took on the role in Universal productions after Karloff left the monster behind in “Son of Frankenstein” (1939) replicated Karloff’s subtle emotional effects, and even an actor as capable as Robert De Niro remained in Karloff’s shadow when he played the monster in Kenneth Branagh’s “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” in 1994.

One of the many laudable aspects of del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is the performance by Jacob Elordi, which invites and earns comparison with Karloff’s characterization in its depth and complexity; del Toro’s deep empathy for the monster and Elordi’s subtly calibrated evolution of the monster’s awareness make this the best “Frankenstein” since 1931. Elordi is so sympathetic that it doesn’t quite feel right to even call him the monster; Oscar Isaac’s Dr. Frankenstein is by far the more horrific of the characters in del Toro’s conception.

Revisiting Whale and Karloff’s “Frankenstein” after seeing del Toro and Elordi’s, the original film’s achievement is all the more impressive. Unlike “Dracula,” it really hasn’t dated aside from a few stale digressions involving Dr. Frankenstein’s fiancée and a generic rival for her affections. One reason is the movie’s lack of score; modern horror enthusiasts will be surprised to find that aside from the opening and closing credits, there’s no music in “Frankenstein” — something that was typical in 1931, as underscoring didn’t come into widespread use for another year or two.

In “Frankenstein,” the lack of score creates an austere purity, as our attention is focused on the intricacies of Whale’s vertically oriented visual design and the nuances of Karloff’s performance. The movie remains as effective as it presumably was in 1931, when it opened to blockbuster business and firmly determined that Universal would be a house of horror for decades to come.

In fact, the brand is still probably the major studio most associated with the genre thanks to its partnerships with filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Jason Blum, whose “The Black Phone 2” opens in theaters today alongside del Toro’s “Frankenstein.” Whale and Karloff’s classic may now be 95 years old, but its impact and influence are still felt at the multiplex virtually every month.