film would prove to be Fisher’s swan
song. As such, it was “an epitaph for
Hammer horror itself,” as one critic
noted. Hammer’s final film was its ill-
advised 1979 remake of Hitchcock’s The
Lady Vanishes.
That studio aside, Mary Shelley’s
novel continues, 200 years after pub-
lication, to inspire remakes, sequels,
riffs, and parodies. It has been
reflected in books, stage plays, and
even breakfast cereal (Franken Berry
was launched in the early 1970s).
But Frankenstein’s legacy remains
largely cinematic. Most of the films
that Shelley’s novel has inspired are
forgettable at best (there have been
blaxploitation Frankensteins, sexploi-
tation Frankensteins, action-adven-
ture Frankensteins, and sci-fi/horror
hybrid Frankensteins), but a handfulbrought provocative new perspectives
to the tale.
A visually poetic critique of Spain
under dictator Francisco Franco,
1973’s Spirit of the Beehive focuses on
a lonely girl’s obsession with Whale’s
Frankenstein, which the Spanish fas-
cists promoted as propaganda, equat-
ing the monster with the evils of
“atheistic” socialism. Seeing the film
in a far more humanistic and personal
light, the girl becomes obsessed with
the scene in which the monster throws
the child into the lake. “Why did he kill
the girl,” she asks, “and why did they
kill him after that?”
Starring Robert De Niro as the
monster, Kenneth Branagh’s Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) suppos-
edly returned to the novel for inspi-
ration, though it wasn’t as faithful“I HAVE THIS IDEA THAT THERE
could be another Frankenstein,”
actor Gene Wilder told his friend
Mel Brooks. “Not another!” the
director replied. “We’ve had
the son of, the cousin of, the
brother-in-law. We don’t need
another Frankenstein.” And yet
we got it in Young Frankenstein
(opposite), a 1974 comedy
directed by Brooks, above at
left, shown lunching with (left to
right) Peter Boyle (the Monster),
Teri Garr (Inga), Wilder (Dr.
Frederick Frankenstein), and
Cloris Leachman (Frau Blücher).77MA
RC^
WA
NA
MA
KE
R/B
ISO
N^ A
RC
HIV
ES