As The Monster in 1931’s Frankenstein, Boris Karloff brought dignity not only to the iconic character, drawn from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, but to the entire horror genre. With sad eyes and limp limbs, he movingly evokes a lost soul struggling to move the lifeless body it’s trapped within. He enacts an entire tragedy in a single lurch. Surrounding his towering performance is set and production design that’s no less iconic. The lab of rogue scientist Henry Frankenstein (a possessed Colin Clive) is crammed with contraptions and cylinders and circles and spheres, simultaneously antique and futuristic. It’s not only the interiors, but the exteriors as well that evoke an eerily magical realm, including the opening scene in a graveyard, pockmarked with black crosses and set against a cloud-flecked, matte-painted sky. This is where Frankenstein and his ghoulishly gleeful assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) steal their first body and begin to lay the film’s rich theological framework. (“He’s just resting,” Frankenstein says of the corpse, “waiting for new life to come!”) Directed by James Whale, who would go on to top himself with 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein.
