Pushing Peter Cushing: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Welcome to Pushing Peter Cushing, a new column taking a non-chronological stroll through the filmography of one of Britain’s most prolific horror stars—an actor who is somehow both beloved and underrated, iconic yet overlooked. Along the way, we will inevitably tell the story of the rise and fall of the house of Hammer, as well as documenting a friendship that will forever be synonymous with Gothic horror.
At the outset of the pandemic, people sought out their comfort films and shows. I turned to Hammer Horror.
There’s something about Hammer that has always felt immensely cozy to me. Part of it no doubt stems from growing up in the UK, where I was exposed to imagery from these homegrown horrors long before I ever sat down to watch one. But the house style—defined and maintained by a stable of talented cast and crew members—also plays a key role in creating this enduring sense of comfort and familiarity. There’s a consistency to Hammer properties that makes popping one on feel like slipping into a warm bath.
I was seeking that sensation when I decided to revisit 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein in March of 2020. I expected to find brief solace from the real-life horror movie in which we were all suddenly starring. I was not anticipating that this rewatch would rekindle my old love affair with Peter Cushing, sending me down a rabbit hole of research and rediscovery that would eventually lead to this column, named after my tendency to nudge unsuspecting friends into watching Cushing’s films with me.
Since it was both the prototype for Hammer’s horror empire and the film that would launch Peter Cushing to genre stardom, Curse seemed the natural place to start this series. So, put on your surgical gloves and join me in the laboratory as we dissect The Curse of Frankenstein.
Laying the Foundations for the house of Hammer
Hammer had existed before The Curse of Frankenstein, but it was this gruesome Gothic tale that would put the studio on the map.
Established in the 1930s, Hammer Film Productions was always characterized by a certain savviness and scrappiness. In the aftermath of World War II, the studio was known primarily for churning out “quota quickies,” low-budget films designed to satisfy the requirement that British cinemas show at least some material of British or Commonwealth origin. From there, Hammer saw the potential to draw crowds with adaptations of popular radio shows and, later, television series. The resulting output was a real mixed bag in terms of genre, from comedies to crime stories and, crucially, science fiction films.
It was in 1955 with an adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s BBC Television sci-fi serial The Quatermass Experiment that Hammer first caught a glimpse of its future horror success. The film, released as The Creeping Unknown in the US, got another name in its home country: The Quatermass Xperiment, capitalizing on the British Board of Film Classification’s relatively new “X” Certificate. The film was indeed rated “X,” and for good reason. The Quatermass Xperiment features some truly horrific imagery for the day, including grotesque mutations of the human body, shriveled corpses, and a revolting final monster constructed from rubber and tripe.
Audiences lapped it up. And Hammer was paying attention.
Richard Wordsworth as the unfortunate Victor Carroon in The Quatermass Xperiment.
The success of the horror-tinged Quatermass Xperiment was by no means a guarantee. At the time of the film’s release, the horror landscape was fairly barren. The Universal Monsters that had terrified a generation had long since been foiled by Abbott and Costello, and the public’s burgeoning interest in and anxiety around topics like space exploration and nuclear warfare meant that the once-popular genre had largely been usurped by science fiction. But the eager reception of The Quatermass Xperiment proved to Hammer that horror could still hold and horrify an audience. And, more importantly, it could sell tickets.
Perhaps the best way to test the waters was to adapt the story that arguably both birthed science fiction and pumped fresh blood into the horror genre: Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.
Resurrecting or rebirthing?
The idea to adapt Frankenstein came to Hammer courtesy of Milton Subotsky, a name that you’ll see repeatedly if you follow this column. Subotsky would later co-found Amicus, a production company best known for its smart horror anthologies and even smarter tendency to cast Hammer stars, Cushing among them, to boost box office appeal.
An enthusiastic writer and producer, Subotsky had a knack for finding great stories to adapt, but his writing abilities left something to be desired. Hammer reviewed his script, tossed it out, and decided to adapt Frankenstein without him.
Initially, the studio toyed with the idea of bringing in the man who had become the face of all things Frankenstein: Boris Karloff. There was just one problem with this plan: while Shelley’s novel was in the public domain, the 1931 film was still very much the property of Universal Pictures. Wary of being sued, Hammer set about making a movie that bore no resemblance to the James Whale classic, other than the basic premise and names lifted from the book.
Hammer co-founders James Carreras (left) and Will “Hammer” Hinds (right) have a little fun with Peter Cushing at The Curse of Frankenstein’s premiere. (Image courtesy of the Peter Cushing Appreciation Society UK.)
With Subotsky out of the picture, scripting duties were handed over to Jimmy Sangster, who had been part of the Hammer family for years. After joining the company as a second assistant director, Sangster worked his way up to associate producer before being encouraged to try his hand at screenwriting by Michael Carreras, son of Hammer co-founder and chairman James Carreras.
Beyond creativity, Sangster possessed a quality that made him perfect for the job. He knew Hammer inside out and could produce a script that played to the studio’s strengths while skirting around its constraints, especially when it came to the budget.
While Michael Carreras found the film’s screenwriter, it was his father who would secure The Curse of Frankenstein’s leading man. James Carreras had for some time had his eye on a certain star of the small screen—a star who would go on to appear in almost two dozen films for the studio and many more across the genre. That star was, of course, Peter Cushing.
Banking on the baron Of British TV
Peter Cushing’s acting career began not in the UK but in Hollywood. When the English actor arrived in LA, he had little more than $16 and a wristwatch to offer by way of security at the YMCA. Interestingly, his first film—1939’s The Man in the Iron Mask—was directed by none other than James Whale, the man whose version of Frankenstein Hammer would try desperately not to copy.
Cushing’s star was on the rise when homesickness and a desire to contribute to the war effort brought him back to England at the height of World War II. An old injury kept him away from active duty, unlike his future friend and co-star Christopher Lee, who was at that time serving as a pilot officer with the RAF. Instead, Cushing enlisted in the Entertainment National Services Association (ENSA), putting on plays to boost the troops’ morale.
Through ENSA, he met his beloved wife, Helen, and the pair married in 1943. Cushing later joked that he married Helen for her money, saying “she had thirty pounds and I had about twenty-three.”
Yvonne Mitchell as Julia Dixon opposite Peter Cushing as Winston Smith in BBC Sunday-Night Theatre’s celebrated live TV adaptation of 1984.
Money was certainly a concern. After the war, Cushing’s career took some time to really get going again, leading his father to accuse him of being “nearly forty and a failure.” It was Helen who set him on the path that would eventually lead him to Hammer’s door when she wrote to every TV producer in London telling them that her husband was available.
Miraculously, the letters worked. Parts started rolling in, and by the mid-1950s, Cushing was a bonafide TV star, winning numerous awards for his challenging work on live television.
Even amidst this acclaim, his return to the big screen was an unlikely one. With the rise of television, cinema attendance had started to dwindle. This meant that television stars weren’t particularly popular with film executives—with one notable exception.
In his autobiography, Cushing recalls that James Carreras “reasoned sagaciously that if someone well known and popular on the rival medium was starred in a film, that name could lure people back to those empty seats.” Carreras began writing to Cushing’s agent as early as 1953, but the actor’s television fame was keeping him busy. Then Cushing caught wind that Hammer was adapting Frankenstein.
A fan of Whale’s 1931 adaptation, which he found “splendid,” Cushing asked his agent to put him up for the role of the Baron. He was cast, along with a then-unknown British actor of impressive height…
Forming a friendship through layers of latex
Standing at six-foot-four, Christopher Lee was cast as Frankenstein’s creature for two reasons: he was tall and had experience with mime. Having been told repeatedly that his height made him impossible to cast as a leading man, Lee had struggled to break into acting after leaving the armed forces, often landing only a single line or an uncredited role. When The Curse of Frankenstein went into production in late 1956, he decided he might as well play a part that involved heavy make-up because no one would recognize him, anyway. He was dismayed, however, to learn he didn’t have any lines in this film at all.
“I told him, well, consider yourself lucky,” Cushing teased. “I’ve read the script.”
During this period, Hammer was operating out of Bray Studios (formerly Down Place), a large rural estate near the village of Bray in England’s Berkshire county. Being the thrifty company that it was, Hammer made the most of this space, using its rooms for sets, offices, and everything in between. It was in a bathroom at Bray that makeup artist Phil Leakey fashioned the unforgettable look of Lee’s creature, experimenting directly on the actor’s face to save time. It would take three tries to get it right, with Lee noting that “One made me look like a combination between a wolf and a pig. And the other was actually surprisingly close to the elephant man.”
Christopher Lee’s uniquely horrific make-up was a “mad rush” job according to artist Phil Leakey.
The final result, famously compared to a victim of a traffic accident, is as shocking today as it must have been to audiences in 1957. Lee was wearing it when he first met his co-star, but it didn’t stop the pair from becoming fast friends. Lee would sing opera in Cushing’s dressing room between takes, his deep, rich voice resounding through the hallways of Bray. Over the years, the duo would make over 20 films together, eight of which were for Hammer, and would remain close friends until Cushing’s death from cancer in 1994.
Moving in perfect harmony
The crew give Cushing and Lee a touch-up between takes.
Watching The Curse of Frankenstein today is like watching the pieces of an intricate puzzle fall perfectly into place. From the lush production design of Bernard Robinson to the leitmotif-driven score by James Bernard, the film brings together much of what would come to define Hammer’s distinct look and feel over the next few decades.
This includes the director, Terence Fisher, who would helm a total of eighteen films for Hammer, including his very last, 1974’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. Fisher’s reasoning for taking on Curse is unremarkable: he was under contract with Hammer at the time and owed them one more film. But without him at the wheel, The Curse of Frankenstein might have turned out very differently. Fisher’s patient direction, characterized by long takes and a willingness to let characters dictate the camera’s movements, allows the performances to shine and makes his few highly kinetic moments—like the reveal of the creature’s face—all the more jarring and disturbing in comparison.
Despite never getting the chance to use his dulcet voice in the film, Christopher Lee is marvelous as the creature. The actor had huge admiration for Karloff’s portrayal and became great friends with the man, but his performance is entirely his own. Reflecting on his approach to embodying the stitched-together entity, Lee once noted that “The legs are independent of the arms. The hands sort of don’t coordinate with the feet or the rest of the body. So I tried to play the character like an ill-coordinated, childish creature.”
Lee gets an eyeful of Hammer’s sometimes slapdash approach to health and safety.
This approach, combined with Lee’s ability to silently express tortured bewilderment even through a thick layer of mortician’s wax, makes his monster uniquely wretched and pitiful. It likely helps that some of Lee’s pained expressions are entirely genuine. During the scene in which Robert Urquhart’s Paul Krempe shoots the creature in the head, Lee almost blinded himself smacking a handful of the old “Kensington Gore” (fake blood) into his eye. “I felt someone had put a red hot poker into my eye,” the actor would later recall.
Lee’s commitment to giving blood, sweat, and tears for a mute, unrecognizable role is certainly commendable, but this is Cushing’s movie through and through. If Karloff is the definitive monster, then Cushing is the definitive Frankenstein.
Cushing plays Baron Victor Frankenstein with a coldness and amorality that makes Colin Clive’s mad scientist in the Universal picture seem practically cuddly. This is best evidenced in a scene where Frankenstein’s fiancé, Elizabeth (Hazel Court), expresses a desire to help him with his secretive work. Examining her head like a specimen, Frankenstein replies, “Well, who knows my dear. Perhaps you will, one day.” Whether he’s pushing peers over railings for their brains or treating a woman who loves him like stock to be shelved, Cushing’s Baron is unrelentingly cruel.
Fittingly, Cushing’s performance was inspired by the infamous Scottish anatomist Robert Knox. Between 1827 and 1828, Knox gladly accepted more than a dozen bodies from the murderers William Burke and William Hare for use in public dissections, keeping bothersome questions (like, “How come all these people were clearly smothered?”) to himself.
“It seemed to me that Knox and Frankenstein had a lot in common,” Cushing wrote in Past Forgetting: Memoirs of the Hammer Years. “The minds of these exceptional men were driven by a single desire: to enquire into the unknown. Ahead of their time, their work and motives were misunderstood… This view of the characters I played helped me a great deal in getting to grips with Mary Shelley’s creation. In order to give some sort of credibility to Victor Frankenstein’s nefarious deeds… I needed to hold on to his basic motivation.”
Dr. Knox was never punished for his involvement in the Burke and Hare murders. Baron Frankenstein’s peers are less forgiving.
Cushing also looked for help closer to home when preparing for the role. Knowing he would be handling replicas of old surgical equipment, Cushing phoned his doctor for advice about how to do it properly. “Each time I rang him, he sighed with relief, saying ‘So glad it’s you—you’re not ill—you just want to know how to remove a brain or a heart or something, is that it?” the actor recalled. It was this level of thoughtfulness and preparation that would earn Cushing his on-set nickname, “Props Peter.”
Stitching horror history
The Curse of Frankenstein might end with Cushing’s Baron getting the chop (at least until the sequel), but it would spell no such doom for Hammer. Reviled by contemporary critics, as the best horror films often are, Curse drew huge crowds both domestically and in the United States, rapidly making back seven times its production costs.
The film’s success taught Hammer a very important lesson: audiences were ready for more horror that took itself seriously (but not too seriously). With Curse, the studio had created a template that it could follow for years to come—one that balanced scrappiness with style and that offset darkness with moments of levity and light. Moreover, it had secured stars that would make Hammer’s films a shining beacon of Britain’s soon-to-be horror legacy. As Cushing once succinctly put it, “Frankenstein created Hammer.”
It also helped create the image of Cushing that we know and love today—that of a kind, gentle actor who was remarkably good at being bad. Cushing would reprise the role of Baron Frankenstein in five sequels for Hammer and would even play the man who inspired his portrayal, Dr. Robert Knox, in The Flesh and the Fiends just a few years later.
But those are all stories for another day. For now, let’s leave the Baron alone in his laboratory, dabbling in the obscene, lest we linger too long and find him eyeing us for parts…
Sources:
Bell, Alan J. W. Peter Cushing: A One Way Ticket to Hollywood. Tyburn Film Productions Limited, 1989.
Cushing, Peter. Peter Cushing: The Complete Memoirs. Signum Books, 2013.
Fryer, Ian. The British Horror Film: From the Silent to the Multiplex. Fonthill Media, 2017.
Miller, Mark A. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Horror Cinema: A Filmography of Their 22 Collaborations. McFarland, 1995.
Newsom, Ted. Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror. Bosustow Media Group, Hammer Film Productions, Heidelberg Films, 1994.
