I

n 1931, Universal Pictures released a risky horror film star-

ring a virtually unknown Hungarian-American actor

named Bela Lugosi. The studio’s expectations were low,

but Dracula—based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic hor-

ror novel—became a critical favorite and one of the most

successful films of the year. In Hollywood, this sort of

hit usually leads to a spate of imitations, but horror was

an unproven genre at the time. “Producers are not cer-

tain whether nightmare pictures have a box office pull or

whether Dracula is just a freak,” Variety reported.

That’s why Universal Pictures was worried about its

planned adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dracula

had, after all, been based on a book that was then only 34

years old, whereas Frankenstein had been first published

in 1818, used a complicated structure, and was filled with

archaic language. (The creature spoke in thees and thous.)

In addition, almost no one read the book anymore, though

the monster had become a cultural reference point quite

apart from its original context.

The first cinematic Frankenstein—a 16-minute silent

short now considered the first horror film—had been

JAMES WHALE’S FRANKENSTEIN

(1931) had little in common with

Thomas Edison’s first film version

of the story, opposite. Instead,

Whale looked for inspiration

to such German Expressionist

films as 1920’s The Cabinet

of Dr. Caligari, pictured here.

The shocking first appearance

of Whale’s monster has been

compared to Lon Chaney’s similar

reveal in 1925’s The Phantom of

the Opera, below.

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