The Gothic horror tradition in both film and literature can ultimately trace, if not its genesis, then its apotheosis back to that legendary storm-wracked three day weekender on the shores of Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 when the legendary 'Mad, Bad and Dangerous' George Gordon, Lord Byron gathered together the elements of himself, his fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's soon to be wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Byron's personal physician Dr John Polidori - and together they infused the spark of undying life into the nascent Gothic genre.
The horror movie's debt to literature was recognised in James Whale's seminal 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, which opened with a prologue set at the Villa (recast as the standard Universal Horror storm-lashed turret upon a craggy peak) with Mary (Elsa Lanchester) recounting her tale to Byron (Gavin Gordon) and Shelley (Douglas Walton), a scenario fully fleshed out on film by Ken Russell in Gothic (1986) - a superlative filmic fictionalisation of the epoch-making events of that eventful eldritch evening.
Long before Whale's dramatisation of this dark genesis of not only the nascent Mrs Shelley's Frankenstein but also Polidori's The Vampyre and two decades before William Henry Pratt changed his professional name to Boris Karloff and strapped on the iconic asphalt-spreader's boots and neck bolts in 1931, yet almost a century after that dank and dismal day of dreadful dreaming, the first Frankenstein was filmed by the Edison company at their New York studio facility in the Bronx.
Condensing the plot of the novel down to a one-reeler running a scant silent fifteen minutes, Searle's adaptation introduces us to medical student Victor Frankenstein (played by the splendidly-named Augustus Phillips) saying his goodbyes to his fiancee Elizabeth (Mary Fuller, whose life spanned a tragic arc from being an actress as lauded as Mary Pickford in such roles as the lead in the first ever American film serial What Happened to Mary [Charles Brabin and Ashley Miller, 1912] and the dual role of Mary Mayne and her mother Mrs Mayne in Lucius Henderson's Mayne main event of 1916 The Girl Who Feared Daylight before her career ending abruptly in 1917 and spending her last quarter century in the mental hospital in which she would die) before leaving home to dwell and toil amidst the shaded groves of academe.
After a time jump of two years (swiftly conveyed through an intertitle that also explains to us that Frankenstein has, in this brief span, "discovered the mystery of life" [though not how sweet it is or how he found it - we'd have to wait until Mel Brooks' 1974 Young Frankenstein to have that conveyed to us through the medium of song]), we find the student of the metaphysical sciences pacing pensively in his cluttered quarters, before deciding to pen - or, rather, quill - a letter to his beloved before beginning his alchemical wedding of science and nature:
"Sweetheart: tonight my ambition will be accomplished. I have discovered the secret of life and death and in a few hours i shall create into life the most perfect human being that the world has yet known", he writes, shortly before all his dreams of an alpine ubermensch are torn asunder.
The cinematic representation of Frankenstein's creation of his creature has since 1931 been indelibly linked in the audience's mind with James Whale's tour de force of thunder and lightning and the crackling, sparking and arcing mechanical apparatus of Kenneth Strickfaden, and yet it's worth remembering that the brief description given in the novel contains nothing of elevating gurneys or kites or lightning rods - "It was on a dreary night of November that i beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, i collected the instruments of life around me, that i might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet" - and indeed reads as much as the work of a magician or an alchemist than a physicist: more sorcery than science.
So Phillips' Frankenstein doesn't go about his act of asexual reproduction (and , let's face it, which student hasn't spent long sweaty hours in his room doing the same?) by sewing together the pieces of cadavers, but pours a sequence of elixirs into a cauldron before closing the fomenting mixture behind iron doors with a handy peep-hole with which to spy on his neon-genesis (evangelion not supplied). The 'CREATION' sequence really is a tour de force, in which we see his hubbling-bubbling homunculus slowly forming from the frothing elements - apparently achieved via the simple method of burning a waxen figurine and running the film in reverse, we seem to see the flesh congealing and coalescing upon the very bones of the Creature, it's skeletal arm flapping wildly like an errant Muppet as the muscles and flesh begin to form upon it to create the Creature played by Charles Ogle (another veteran of the silent screen, including not only co-starring with Mary Fuller in What Happened to Mary, but also starring opposite her erstwhile rival Mary Pickford in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm [Marshall Neilan, 1917]*): Ogle's creature bears the elevated brow later made famous by Karloff. but also a stooped hunched walk more akin to Quasimodo and a wild shock wig and talon-like fingernails.
After the standard sequences of Frankenstein rejecting his creation, and the Creature stalking his creator and his bride like some flailing human striving to search for Yahweh and Shekhina (but in sepia-tinted black and white and in under a quarter of an hour, so we probably don't have time for philosophy all that much), the Creature finally meets his end when, rejected by his 'father', he catches sight of his reflection and - in rather a good trick shot - at first vanishes to leave nothing in the room itself but only his reflection in the mirror, and then the reflection changes to show only Frankenstein himself. The nightmare vanishes, to leave only the waking dreamer - the father left to deal with the consequences of his misbegotten, forgotten son.
(*The book The Rivals of Frankenstein by Michel Parry [Corgi, 1977] lists a film entitled Franenstein [sic] of Sunnybrook Farm as a "nudie rip-off" directed by William Rotsler in 1971. To the best of my knowledge, this is a product of M. Parry's inagination, but answers on a postcard please if anyone knows any better.)
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