Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) - film review

Baron Frankenstein believes he has perfected a means of extracting the soul of a human being from a corpse and transferring it into another body.  He gets the opportunity to test his theories when his young assistant, Hans, is executed, after having been tried for the murder of a local innkeeper.  The recipient of Hans’ soul is the innkeeper’s disfigured daughter, Christiana, who drowned herself after seeing Hans, her lover, guillotined.  Not only does Frankenstein succeed in reviving Christina with Hans’ soul, but he also manages to remove her disfigurements, making her a beautiful young woman that no man can resist.  Guided by Hans’ soul, Christina attracts the three odious young dandies who killed her father and lures them to a grisly end...

The fourth entry in the series of Frankenstein films made by Hammer Film Productions in the 1950s and 1960s is generally considered the best of the bunch, and sees the inimitable Peter Cushing once again exuding cold charm and sinister evil as the brilliant but misguided Baron Frankenstein.  The film was to have been made several years earlier, which explains its quirky title, a rather silly take on the French film And God Created Woman, released in 1956, the film that made a star of Brigitte Bardot and helped launch the sexual revolution on an unsuspecting world.

By the mid-1960s, Hammer’s Gothic horror films were becoming increasingly formulaic and were starting to lose their appeal.  Spoofs such as Carry on Screaming (1966) were beginning to sound the death knell for the genre and unless things changed it would take far more than a few pints of blood to bring Dracula back from the dead.  Frankenstein Created Woman was the first film to break ranks, promising an original storyline, greater overt sexuality and more graphic violence.  This is probably the first of the Hammer horror films that can be rightly classified as a slasher film, although it is pretty mild by today’s standards.

Another thing that makes this film stand out from the other Hammer Gothic horror offerings is its unsettling dreamlike feel, a darkly poetic aura that somehow the other films lack.  The location setting, interior sets and photography all have an unreal, other-worldly quality that evokes something of romantic literature of the early 19th century (which is where, after all, the genre had its origins).   The tragic love story involving the characters Hans and Christina has a distinct touch of Goethe or Emily Brontë about it and the film’s portrayal of Frankenstein, with its metaphysical slant, is much closer to Mary Shelley’s creation than what we find in most other horror films.  

Of all the horror films made by Hammer, Frankenstein Created Woman is probably the most subversive.   Whilst it has all the trappings of the classic Gothic horror film, it is clearly doing its utmost to push the genre in new and more interesting directions, exploiting recent relaxations in the censorship rules to cater for a grower audience sophistication.  Since Universal Pictures began making its horror films in 1930s, the genre was pretty well set in stone until the mid-1960s and no one seemed ready to depart from the familiar iconography created by Universal.  There was only one way of realising Frankenstein, Dracula or the Mummy on screen, and audiences would accept nothing else.  Frankenstein Created Woman was one of the first films to try something new.  Out went the lumbering monster; Dr Frankenstein is now interested in transferring souls between bodies instead of reviving cobbled together cadavers.  The film’s success encouraged Hammer to take even bigger gambles in some of its subsequent films, the result being some increasingly bizarre reinterpretations of the classic Gothic horror film in the 1970s.

© James Travers 2009

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