A Film Canon

 

 

Despite its iconic status, Frankenstein is a much less impressive contribution to the Universal Horror cycle than Dracula. Whereas Browning isolates and condenses his taste for camp to a mere rupture in an otherwise naturalistic fabric, Whale fuses the two in a fairly indiscriminate, self-defeating fashion, producing a theatrical aesthetic that precludes any lasting sense of uncanniness; or, alternatively, reduces his mise-en-scene to a single stage, with the result that the supernatural is normalised, rather than naturalised. To this end, Whale favours conspicuously artificial sets - albeit refusing to commit to the cerebral extremities of his German Expressionist forbears - and stagy dialogue, as if his real ambition were to direct a Wildean comedy of manners, rather than a horror film. Hence the monster functions more as an impediment to its creator's impending marriage than as a sophisticated interrogation of the human - a simplification of source material that is, admittedly, in keeping with the greatest Universal Horror films, but only when offset by an exploitation of that material's tone, or even its reputation, that remains unachieved here. For this reason, the most memorable scenes are those in which theatricality is explicitly thematised, as occurs whenever the action centres on Frankenstein's pyrotechnic laboratory, or the monster himself performs some atrocity for the benefit of an incredulous crowd - a welcome reprieve from Boris Karloff's supreme deadpan, which might be profound in another context, but is here reduced to just another piece of stage equipment.