The Many Lives of Frankenstein on Screen

Mary Shelley, the English author best known for her 1818 novel that spawned a million nightmares, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, died long before the dawn of cinema. 

But if Shelley were resurrected in the 21st century—like her infamous monster—she’d have plenty to catch up on. Since 1910, representations of Dr. Frankenstein’s freakish creation have appeared in hundreds of films, cementing its place as cinema’s ultimate monster. Each generation has reshaped the story to reflect its own fears—about technology, scientific hubris and the perils of humans playing God. 

That’s one reason why Frankenstein, the tale of a frightful beast reanimated from the corpses of other men, remains so enduring: The monster stands as a powerful warning about the price of “progress.” As a fictionalized Shelley explains in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), “My purpose was to write a moral lesson: the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God.” 

Another explanation? Frankenstein is the rare horror movie that elicits sympathy for its monster. “I think the secret is that the monster’s a misfit, and he’s lost,” says Gregory William Mank, film historian and author of It's Alive! The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein. “Everybody feels like that sometimes. The monster is a profoundly sad being in the films—particularly when [Boris] Karloff was playing him. This incredible sadness, it sounds a chord with people.”

Widely regarded as the quintessential monster movie, 1931’s Frankenstein—along with Dracula, also released by Universal Studios that year—alerted industry executives to a winning strategy: Horror sells. What followed was the unleashing of a string of classic movies centered around so-called “Universal Monsters,” including the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Invisible Man and the Black Cat.  

The films followed a studio playbook, established by those two early successes: Set a gothic atmosphere. Render the figures tragic by their “otherness” and isolation. Give them a memorable look—achieved, in most cases, by Universal’s pioneering horror makeup man Jack Pierce. And plumb the theme of good versus evil, of man struggling to control his powerful, and inevitable, inner demons. 

The timeline below, by no means exhaustive, charts some of Frankenstein’s most memorable cinematic representations. 

Produced by Thomas Edison, this silent film runs just 16 minutes long and has been all but forgotten to history. Long believed to be a lost film until 1980, when a collector realized he had owned a print for decades, it bears the distinction of being the first screen adaptation of Shelley’s Frankenstein. The monster, portrayed by Charles Stanton Ogle, is brought to life in a kind of satanic burbling cauldron, and his costuming—as a hobbit-footed, big-haired ghoul—differs dramatically from Boris Karloff’s iconic look. 

“As entertainment now, it’s just a curiosity piece,” says film critic Michael Mayo, author of the VideoHound's Horror Show and the Jimmy Quinn suspense novels. “But the lab scene, for the time, is kind of nutty. It had special effects that people weren't used to seeing.” To create the eerie illusion of the creature taking shape from a cauldron of smoke, for example, the filmmakers shot a dummy dissolving in fire—with crew members manipulating its arms and head to simulate movement—then played the footage backward.

James Whale directed this chilling masterpiece, inspired by the 1927 play, “Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre.” The film introduced Boris Karloff in the role that would define his career, a monster both terrifying and terrified, shunned by the villagers and forsaken by his creator. Its unforgettable images and sounds (the bolts of lightning, the monster’s crude vocalizations) became part of the foundation of modern horror. Karloff’s pale visage, lurching walk and anguished grunts have shaped Frankenstein’s popular image for nearly a century, but Colin Clive was just as compelling as the monster’s feverish, power-mad creator, Dr. Henry Frankenstein (his first name changed from Shelley’s Victor.) Clive’s hysterical cries of “It’s alive! It’s aliiiive!” as his ungodly creation flickers to life remain the quintessential cinematic depiction of a mad scientist. 

Frankenstein shocked and delighted audiences at a time when sound motion pictures were still new. Released in an era before enforcement of the Hays Code, which imposed strict rules on what films could show or say, the film was sliced and diced by a slew of state censor boards—Kansas made more than 30 different cuts—with most removing a disturbing scene of the monster drowning a young girl in a lake. “Horror movies have always pushed the limits of what can be shown and what kind of stories can be told,” says Mayo. “They had to censor one line—‘now I know how it feels like to be God’—because that was something that you just couldn’t say in a more religious society.”

This sneakily complex sequel, which reunited director Whale with stars Clive and Karloff, delved into the profound loneliness at the heart of Shelley’s novel. Bride of Frankenstein offers a richer, more tragic portrait of its monster who, in his primitive verbalizations and interactions with a blind hermit, comes to seem less like a murderous beast than a misunderstood creature yearning for companionship. And companionship he nearly gets when Dr. Frankenstein, at the urging of a devilish former mentor, reanimates a macabre “mate” for the monster (played memorably, if briefly, by Elsa Lanchester). Hollywood’s first real horror sequel (talk about creating a monster!), Bride of Frankenstein still fascinates film audiences and scholars alike with its striking, expressionistic visuals and the ongoing debate over whether Whale, who was openly gay, wove elements of queer subtext into the film.

By 1939, Universal had more or less invented the modern horror franchise. The third entry in the studio’s original Frankenstein series, Son of Frankenstein, stars Basil Rathbone as Dr. Frankenstein’s offspring, who returns to his late father’s castle and (you guessed it) unleashes more carnage by resurrecting the monster. The star-studded cast and the jagged, high-contrast visuals—reminiscent of the German expressionist masterpieces of the 1920s—made the end result distinctive.

Though less well-regarded than Bride of Frankenstein, Son is remembered for two reasons: It was the last film in which Karloff portrayed the monster. And its plot was an obvious influence on Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. “It's also got Bela Lugosi in one of his last really good roles,” says Mayo, who considers Son of Frankenstein an underappreciated entry in the original franchise. 

In the 1950s and early ’60s, as color technology transformed the look and feel of movies, studios saw an opportunity to remake countless films that had been popular during the black-and-white era. Perhaps no studio embraced this strategy as savvily as Hammer Film Productions, the British studio known for its melodramatic and lushly filmed horror classics, which included color remakes of Dracula, The Mummy and of course Frankenstein. 

The Curse of Frankenstein, the first of these—and Hammer's first color horror flick—starred Christopher Lee (cast largely on the basis of his height) as the towering and gruesomely scarred creature, vastly different in appearance from Karloff. The film was tremendously successful and spawned a whole new franchise of sequels. With Curse of Frankenstein, “Hammer set the standard for itself as a purveyor of shocking, colorful, gothic horror," writes film critic Daniel Dockery. 

Could Frankenstein’s monster be a normal family man? “The Munsters” answered yes, reimagining the creature’s struggles as lighthearted TV sitcom fare. Fred Gwynne rose to fame as Herman Munster, a suburban patriarch who, despite his monstrous appearance, lives an ordinary middle-class life with his vampiric wife and their strange-looking kids. The show satirized family-oriented sitcoms and became a hit for CBS during a period of changing social mores. “There is not the slightest question that Mr. Gwynne, superbly made up as Frankenstein, is the whole show,” a New York Times critic raved at the time. 

Hollywood doesn’t hold the only patent on monster movies. By the 1960s, Universal’s iconic creatures were influencing cinema around the world. Japan, in particular, became known for a wildly inventive strain of monster flicks, known as kaiju movies, which often pit one giant monster against another. 

The prolific Japanese director Ishirō Honda, who pioneered the genre with his Godzilla movies, put a kaiju spin on Frankenstein with this 1965 classic, a Japanese American co-production. It was followed by a 1966 sequel, The War of the Gargantuas, in which two giant Frankenstein monsters do battle. The latter film proved influential to American filmmakers like Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino and John Carpenter, who called it “the ultimate Japanese monster movie”—illustrating how Frankenstein’s influence flitted back and forth between continents in a fruitful cross-cultural exchange.

In the early 1970s, the Blaxploitation genre burst onto American screens, bringing an irreverent, Black-oriented sensibility to movie houses in an era shaped, in part, by revolutionary Black Power activism. These films—low-budget, swaggering blends of action, style and social commentary—featured Black heroes and antiheroes navigating crime, corruption and systemic oppression, often for the first time as the focus of mainstream entertainment. The movement yielded its own franchises—most notably Shaft—but also lampooned existing horror franchises with the campy excess and boundary-pushing humor of a more permissive age. Among these were 1972’s Blacula and 1973’s Blackenstein (aka Black Frankenstein), released a year apart. The former was a surprise hit. The latter—a tale about a maimed Vietnam war veteran transformed into a Frankenstein-like freak—fared less well, earning dismissive reviews and a cooler reception. Plans for a sequel by writer-producer Frank R. Saletri were cut short when he was mysteriously murdered in 1982.

Leave it to Mel Brooks to spot the comic potential of the Frankenstein story. In this madcap parody—which, along with the same year’s Blazing Saddles, established Brooks as the master of genre spoofs—nothing is off limits, from goofy sound gags and risqué jokes to over-the-top song-and-dance sequences. Shot in black and white, and featuring period-accurate opening credits, Young Frankenstein lovingly lampoons not just James Whale’s 1931 film but a grab bag of classic monster-movie tropes. The film’s heart, though, lies in Peter Boyle’s deadpan performance as a monster trapped in a castle of wackos. His encounter with a blind hermit—a send-up of the scene from Bride of Frankenstein—remains a master class of physical comedy. Brooks later declared Young Frankenstein “by far the best movie I ever made,” even if, he admitted, “not the funniest.”

The auteur who brought gothic whimsy to a generation of lonely Gen Xers, Tim Burton has long been drawn to macabre tales that blur the line between life and death (Beetlejuice, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride). So, it’s fitting that he launched his career with a quirky nod to Frankenstein. His 1984 short film follows a precocious boy who uses a makeshift attic laboratory to bring his beloved dog back to life—though the freaky yet lovable pooch quickly steals the show. Decades later, Burton remade the short as a stop-motion feature, Frankenweenie (2012), complete with a star-studded voice cast—Martin Landau shines as the eccentric science teacher—but some of the original’s offbeat charm was lost in the polish. By then, Burton was no longer an underdog, and Frankenstein spoofs no longer felt so novel. 

The original Frankenstein movies were never in good taste, exactly. But exploitation filmmaker Frank Henenlotter took the tastelessness to a new level with this sordid, low-budget gem. Frankenhooker is about, well, exactly what it sounds like: a would-be doctor who reanimates his deceased fiancée using the body parts of murdered prostitutes. “Much of what happens defies description in its sheer grisliness,” observed Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, “but never for a second do Henenlotter and co-writer Robert Martin lose their all-crucial sense of humor."

In the 1990s, as Hollywood studios rediscovered the box-office power of familiar stories, classic horror properties looked ripe for reboot. That’s what inspired lavish new takes on Dracula and Frankenstein within a span of two years. Directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, the 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was an unmistakable bid to recreate the gothic grandeur of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s stylish 1992 hit. 

The result was an ambitious entry in the decade’s brief “prestige” monster movie era, which later peaked with The Mummy (1999). Despite an impressive cast—Robert De Niro portrays an unusually eloquent, self-aware creature—and sumptuous visuals, the film buckled under its own weight, critics said, focusing a disproportionate amount of time telling the scientist’s childhood backstory.