Hammer executives initially asked Fisher to view the previous Frankenstein movies but the director declined. Unfamiliar even with Mary Shelley’s novel, Fisher preferred instead a twist inspired by a script by future long-term collaborator Jimmy Sangster. Fisher’s chosen leads were Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, actors whose names would subsequently be synonymous with Hammer horror. Cushing in particular would be most associated with the type he established here as the demented aristocrat Baron Frankenstein initiated a series of obsessive, hypocritical figures. Indeed, much more so than in the Universal original, the Baron is the central figure and Lee’s creature decidedly secondary as the characterization of Baron Frankenstein introduced director Fisher’s theme of self-control. With much wealth and privilege behind him, the Baron is an aloof, arrogant and selfish man. He is so obsessed with his sacrilegious scientific aspirations that he fails to recognize that in the process he has become a morally duplicitous and homicidal monster who is sexually excited by his ghastly experiments. That is the nature of his bizarre curse and his creation, a surgical nightmare, is for Fisher a reflection of the Baron’s own warped monstrousness – the desire to transcend death.
Knowledge may be power but the end result of this amoral scientific rationalism is the creation of an irrational monstrosity. God, far from obsolete, is found in irrationality. The Baron treats his creation with contempt and brutal sadism: as a patriarch, he is the real monster. The creature so loosed by ambition and perverse desire is thus almost an inevitable force to be courted, denied and finally repressed. Whilst these were intriguing themes, Fisher’s visual style predominated. Throughout the film, vivid interiors complement a gradual buildup of colour as a means of charting the Baron’s peculiar symbiosis of scientific and sexual excitement. This buildup is remarkably sensual and would be a recurrent feature in Fisher’s subsequent work, reaching almost dizzyingly Expressionist use in The Horror of Dracula and The Mummy. In later years it would be termed the foundation of the English Gothic in cinema. Indeed, the use of colour finds its full glory in an autumnal forest sequence wherein Fisher reportedly insisted that leaves be painted (red) in order to heighten the scene’s emotional content. This potent balance of lush visuals and insightful characterization would lead to many sequels to Fisher’s works wherein were cemented the horror careers of Cushing and Lee. read more