A CONVERSATION WITH SCREENWRITER-DIRECTOR DON MANCINI, FATHER OF CHUCKY (Part 1)

Writer-director Don Mancini, creator of the Chucky horror franchise and director of Seed of Chucky, after accepting his Eyegore Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Horror Genre at Universal Studios on October 5. Flanking the director are, clockwise from right to left, screenwriter Mike Werb (Face/Off, The Mask), producer Corey Sienega (Seed of Chucky and the upcoming Martian Child), Brian Roskum, actress Debbie Carrington, and yours truly, DC. (Photo by Damian Siegel.)

It was a dark and stormy night. No, actually, it was a typically bright, somewhat overly warm Southern California afternoon in 2006, several months after I’d written a lukewarm review of Seed of Chucky. I had raved in the review about the movie’s sensibility, especially as embodied by its stylized, ready-for-anything star Jennifer Tilly, and, in a classic case of almost entirely missing the point, gave the movie excessively short shrift for not being particularly scary even as I recognized it was funny and not just a little daft. So I’m looking through my e-mail that sunny afternoon and up pops this notice from Earthlink telling me there’s been a request to deliver an e-mail from Don Mancini, and should it be allowed? Hmm, thought I, that name sounds really familiar. I clicked on it and was treated to a very nice note from the writer-director of Seed of Chucky himself thanking me for my kind words, and even for some of the backhanded compliments and criticisms I leveled at the movie. Don also thanked me for consistently writing about horror films without the usual condescending tone or fanboy gushing with which the subject is typically greeted in a lot of film writing.

Not long after that Don and I met up for coffee and killed almost four hours of a workday afternoon talking movies, film criticism, families and a whole lot of other fun subjects and subsequently became good friends. We’ve seen a lot of movies together since that first meeting—I credit him with dragging me and my wife and daughters to Hairspray, which fast became one of our favorites of the year, and we also surprised ourselves by liking Hostel Part II—and I can honestly say that I’ve never met anyone in the movie business who has seemed as genuine, good-natured and smart as he, with fewer pretensions and an ego the size of which suggests he’s in any business except show business.

Recently Don was the recipient of the Eyegore Award for outstanding achievement in the horror genre, and this Tuesday night he, along with star Jennifer Tilly, will be hosting a screening of Seed of Chucky, followed by a Q& A at the Egyptian Theater, the Halloween offering from OutFest, the gay-themed film series sponsored by the American Cinematheque and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). To celebrate the most horror-ful time of the year, and to celebrate Don’s award and the upcoming screening (tickets are still available but are selling more briskly than expected, so get yours now), Don and I recently sat down at Dupar’s in Studio City for another one of those long workday chats. However, this time I brought a digital recording device. There’s a whole lot more conversation than just this first segment, so I’ll be posting the interview in segments over the next week or so. We touched on everything from the movies of the year, to the state of the horror genre (as evinced by this past weekend’s Saw IV grosses, it’s apparently still alive and kicking), to critics and criticism, and finally what’s coming up next for the writer-director. But in the first segment we talk about Seed of Chucky-- how the movie was received, the philosophy behind the direction of the Chucky series, and what it’s like to be an award-winning director.

*************************************************************************************************

DC: So how did the Seed of Chucky screening at the Egyptian come about?

DM: It was actually proposed by my friend, screenwriter Mike Werb (Face/Off, The Mask). He has connections to OutFest. Every year at the festival proper he teaches seminars, and he had suggested Seed of Chucky to them, which is probably, along with Nightmare on Elm Street 2, the gayest mainstream horror movie ever made. He thought it would be appropriate for them to show in their OutFest Wednesdays series. Only they changed it because Wednesday is Halloween night and I said, “You’re having a specifically gay screening of this movie, and all of the gay guys are gonna be down on Santa Monica Boulevard that night. I know I am! I’m not going to the screening!” So they moved it to Tuesday, October 30. But that’s really how it came about—it was Mike who proposed it.

DC: It’s interesting to me that the movie has had this extended life—it was a hit on DVD and groups like GLAAD are sponsoring screenings of it. Yet the movie didn’t do well theatrically. What’s it like to have the movie carry on like this?

DM: It’s really nice, particularly since the theatrical release was not very successful. That was disappointing, to say the least. But it’s nice to see that there are people who appreciate it. But I think Chucky has always been a fairly cultish phenomenon. It is, obviously, a mainstream movie, and the series has been successful in that regard, but it’s never been as successful as Freddy (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Michael Meyers (Halloween). But I also think that—I like to think, anyway, that it’s a little off the beaten path from those movies too. It’s not as formulaic as those movies.

DC: Horror is a malleable genre—you can fit a lot of stuff into the form. But what you demonstrated with the last two movies certainly is that it is a series that lends itself to experimentation with themes and even form.

DM: Particularly because the characters are dolls. Dolls naturally lend themselves to satire and parody. We weren’t doing that in the first couple of movies, but certainly with the last two-- Bride of Chucky and Seed-- we really delved into that. Last night I went to the Ahmanson and saw Avenue Q-- hilarious, by the way. It’s basically a parody of Sesame Street. You’ve got these Bert & Ernie and Cookie Monster-type characters, but as if they’re living not courtesy of the Children’s Television Workshop, but in the actual streets of New York City. These characters fall in love, have sex—so you see puppets-- Muppets, basically—having sex. Bert of Bert & Ernie, we always knew he was a fag, and it turns out he is! (Laughing) I mean, it sounds obvious, but because puppets are distortions of human beings anyway means you can plug them into different kinds of situations that are ripe for satire and parody.

DC: I imagine you can get away with a lot more because you’re already dealing with something that is exaggerated beyond belief.

DM: Yes. The subtext of Seed of Chucky is domestic abuse. If you extrapolate what’s really going on in that story, it’s a very sad story. It’s about family discord-- a child who doesn’t fit in, who starts out fairly innocent and is completely warped by two crazy parents who are pulling him in different directions. You could tell that story in so many different ways. You could do it on the Lifetime network as a tragedy. But because they’re puppets, you can laugh at it.

DC: I remember reading someone who referred to it as The Great Santini done as a horror comedy.

DM: Yeah, it is, kind of.

DC: There are not too many movie series where you can mess around with the themes and the style like that, especially after having been so well-established.

DM: I just didn’t want to keep making the same movie over and over again. And we could have. Look at the various installments of other horror franchises. Sometimes some of the latter ones are good, but they all tend to be generally the same kind of movie and faithfully follow the formula. I just wanted to shake that up a bit.

DC: Given the way the movie was received, do you think you took extra heat because of that?

DM: Well, I think that probably Bride of Chucky-- And I think you prefer Seed to Bride.

DC: Yes.

DM: I think most people, certainly among the fans, prefer Bride to Seed. It might be for them Bride represented the best balance of the comedy and horror elements. In one of the many essays you’ve written about Bride and Seed-- and bless you for that (Laughing) —you had said that for you Bride still felt a little chained to that formula, which I think is basically true. I mean, you’ve got the teens on the run and stuff like that. I think that Seed is so bizarre and silly, I guess—And I love silly. For a lot of people “silly” and “camp” are pejorative terms, and I don’t necessarily see it that way. I think there are a lot of great movies that could be described that way. But I think that tendency turns off the core audience of early 20-something males, who I think really come, for the most part, to these movies with the attitude, “I dare you to scare me.” And they want the movie to take on that dare successfully and fulfill those expectations. Consequently, I think they were pretty bewildered by Seed of Chucky because it’s not a scary movie. But to me Seed of Chucky is no less “scary” than Evil Dead 2 or Dead Alive. Those movies were openly silly, parodistic, satirical, meta-minded horror movies, and I wanted to make a movie in that mold.

DC: It’s interesting to think about why a fan base would have no trouble with Evil Dead 2 yet resist accepting Seed of Chucky.

DM: Interestingly, none of the Evil Dead movies did well at the box office. I don’t know how the grosses compare to Seed of Chucky, but movies like this tend not to do well at the box office. James Gunn’s movie Slither is another good example. And that movie got really, really good reviews, which mine, for the most part, did not. And it was silly, and I didn’t find it particularly scary, but I definitely liked it. That’s a movie which was much more embraced by the horror community and the critics. However, at the box office, it didn’t even do as well as Seed of Chucky. Horror comedy is a tricky thing.

DC: The genre itself tends to be pretty conservative. You set up a situation with characters, they’re threatened, some of them are killed, but eventually the order is usually restored at some point. I don’t know if “transgressive” is the right word, but movies that are doing away with conventions like that are asking you to accept that certain elements of the genre are not the stable, reliable signposts that you think they are. Maybe horror fans are less comfortable facing that.

DM: Also, Seed of Chucky is really gay. It’s got this gender-confused character at its center, and we’ve got Jennifer Tilly and John Waters—it’s just a very explicit gay sensibility. I think that’s also something that maybe turns off that young, straight, male— (Laughing)

DC: Well, regardless of what anyone says, now we get to refer to you as “award-winning writer-director” Don Mancini.

DM: The EyeGore! (Laughs).

DC: What do you think about that?


Onstage at the Eyegore Awards: the Eyegore Award equivalent of the Golden Globe Girl presides over (from left) Michael Berryman, Don Mancini, Shawnee Smith, Corey Feldman, David Arquette and Sherri Moon Zombie

DM: It was really fun! I have a feeling that, of everyone who was up there, it meant the most to me! (Laughs) Well, except maybe for Corey Feldman! I’ve been nominated for a couple of Saturns, which is kinda cool. But always a bridesmaid—never won. I’ve been nominated for a couple of Fangoria magazine Chainsaw Awards, a couple of MTV awards, but I never won. So even with the knowledge that this is just this semi-bogus thing that was created by Universal as a marketing tool to help promote their Halloween Horror Nights, I’ll take it! (Laughs) Where do I show up?

DC: It was fun to see everyone on that stage.

DM: It really was. I had such a good time. It was really fun to meet Shawnee (Smith, who also received an Eyegore that night for her work in the Saw series). You told me a lot about her. She was really nice. David Arquette (accepting on behalf of his sister, Patricia) actually came up to me and introduced himself, because I had worked with (his brother) Alexis on Bride. Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes) was really nice!

DC: My best friend used to work in a bookstore in Santa Monica when he first moved to Los Angeles in the early ‘80s, and he said Michael Berryman used to come in twice a week and talk to him all the time.

DM: It’s really interesting—I find this to be true among, for lack of a better term, the horror community—people who make the movies, act in the movies and are fans of the movies and cover the movies, it is a genre that inspires such devotion. The point that you have magazines—I mean, you don’t see Romantic Comedy magazine, that genre’s version of Fangoria, although the idea of that is quite funny to imagine. This genre inspires such cultish devotion, and I find that the people who are into that, who get sucked up into that vortex, tend to be really nice. I’ve worked in the movie business for 20 years now and I’ve met a lot of people, and some of them are not very nice. But the people who are involved in horror—it’s kind of remarkable. People who make horror movies, who like horror movies, there’s kind of like a brotherhood. You met my friend Stacy Wilson the other night. Stacy is a journalist who specializes in the horror world. She writes reviews—Another critic, by the way, who didn’t love Seed of Chucky. But it’s like our whole enjoyment of all of this kind of transcends any one person’s opinion about any one movie. It’s fun to be a part of that world, and I really felt that the other night. Even if I hadn’t been one of the honored, I would have had a great time just to be there and see all of those people. I had not met Shawnee Smith before, or David Arquette, or Michael Berryman, or Sherri Zombie. (Pauses) That sounds so strange. “Hi, I’m Sherri Zombie.” (Laughs) “But you’re so pretty!”

Next: Don Mancini talks about critics, film criticism and the movies of 2007.

*************************************************************************************

ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR

For those of you who may be Withnail and I cultists awaiting the return of the two down-and-out antiheroes of Bruce Robinson’s brilliant 1988 comedy, the wait is over. Sort of. Actors Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann have finally found occasion to share the screen again, but it’s not a Withnail sequel. Instead, it’s a short film directed by Duncan Wellaway entitled Always Crashing in the Same Car. The film, as well as the accompanying London Times article from which the movie can be downloaded, was produced in conjunction with the British Film Institute and leads of with the familiar Handmade Films logo, the company founded by George Harrison which provided funds for many of the best British movies of the past 25 years, including The Long Good Friday, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Mona Lisa, Time Bandits and, yes, Withnail & I. The movie can also be accessed via the McGann Brothers web site. Wherever you see it, see it. It’s a stunner, and the boys are as good together as they ever were, albeit in a completely different context.

(Thanks to David Hudson and GreenCine Daily for another invaluable heads-up.)

THE SLIFR 100 (HALLOWEEN SPECIAL EDITION): #7 THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

(Another in the ongoing series looking at the individual movies that make up The SLIFR 100.)

James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein is just about everything that the endless parade of sequels to the iconic Universal horror films of the ‘30s and ‘40s were inevitably not. It remains true to the moorings of old dark houses and Promethean unease provided by Mary Shelley herself, seen in an opening cameo played by Elsa Lanchester, who will reappear rather famously later on in the film. In fact, those old dark houses, and moss-covered crypts, and shadowy laboratories, have a primal visual weight and power provided by director Whale, whose ability to imbue that imagery with the elements of his own sardonic personality masterfully balanced heightened black comedy with an overall tone of moral transgression that conveys with utter conviction the insistent chill of the dead. Where subsequent Universal sequels like House of Dracula and Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman were often just simple, satisfying retreads or smorgasbords of creatures jammed to the creaking rafters of the old castle, monster mashes with little rationale beyond Saturday matinee spectacle, The Bride of Frankenstein dares to invest real emotional power in the continuation of its story of a scientist flirting with supplanting God (and the inevitable madness that comes packaged with such arrogance) and the creature he unleashes, who turns out to be far more articulate in his needs and wants, and his desire to understand the precarious landscape of existence which he occupies.

The Monster, in the previous 1931 film, was certainly a figure of sympathy, but had to be ultimately understood as one ruled by the murderous impulses that coursed through his stitched-together frame at the command of a brain which offers him no comfort or coherent way to process the humanity that surrounds him, that runs in fear from him. (And the one who doesn’t run in fear, the little girl at the well, is dealt a most horrendous fate.) But in Bride, the rage inside the Monster’s brain abates long enough to establish tentative relationships with people he encounters while loose from Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments—mostly tenderly with the blind man in the woods (an encounter leavened by Whale’s sardonic pranksterism at the expense of the old man’s religiosity), and most treacherously with Dr. Praetorius (the eager and funny Ernest Thesiger), who manipulates the creature by promising to give him a bride, and uses the creature’s newly inspired visions of companionship to strong-arm Frankenstein (Colin Clive) into helping Praetorius deliver on his promise.

When Lanchester finally reappears in the laboratory as the Bride, bolts of white lightning streaking through her molded woolen hive of hair, eyes ablaze with unfathomable anger, delivering a hiss that could shatter laboratory glass, and will shatter at least one heart, the movie adds to the already powerful reserve of empathy for the Creature, who cannot fathom why he may not have someone like himself to spend his new life with. For this is, unfortunately, too much to ask. Holding his arms out to his potential mate, muttering his plea for understanding (“Woman… friend?”), the Creature becomes a crushing spectacle of rejection, one undoubtedly understood by the thousands of fumbling young boys of my generation who grew up absorbing every frame of this masterpiece under the guidance of Forrest J. Ackerman and Famous Monsters of Filmland. The pain of the Creature, which causes him to literally bring down the house on this ghastly parody of the marriage ceremony, is never, in all of the Universal monster cycle, more instantly, justifiably accessible than at this moment. The Bride of Frankenstein ends on a note of both triumph and despair—the Creature accepts his fate of loneliness, but forces Praetorius and the Bride to experience it with him. “We belong dead!” he growls as he pulls the switch that brings the laboratory to crumbled ruin. The movie, of course, insists on giving Frankenstein and his bride the final shot—embracing, saved from death, superficially triumphant over their circumstances, but also primed for a lifetime of anguish and, in later films, generations of descendants who will insist on retracing the blasphemous steps of their ancestor. Frankenstein would go on to create new life in subsequent Universal sequels, but director Whale, in congress with Karloff’s brilliant portrayal, would assure that their achievement in The Bride of Frankenstein, a masterful blend of supreme emotional resonance and mordant wit, truly bringing life to the dead, would never be equaled.

ONE FOR THE ACHIEVERS: THE BIG LEBOWSKI CULT

“To some, The Big Lebowski is just a movie. To others it is the movie. When we decided to get some friends together at a tiny bowling alley in Kentucky to drink White Russians and celebrate our favorite movie, Lebowski fest was born. We discovered we were not alone, and fellow fans from around the world, also known as ‘Achievers,’ started coming out of the woodwork.

We, the Bums who started Lebowski Fest, have been given the modest task of assembling a fan book for what we feel is the greatest movie of all time (condolences, Citizen Kane). At times, we felt we were out of our element, but we went out and achieved anyway.”

-- The Bums, from the front inside jacket flap of I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski


Most everyone who has come to hold the Coen Brothers’ comedy The Big Lebowski dear has a story about their first encounter with the movie. No matter who’s telling it, it’s basically the same story, a fable of initial reluctance or confusion, topped off by a dawning realization of the movie’s brilliance. And this story gets told many times in the new fan book I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski, written—nah, compiled by the Bums, a.k.a. Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt, the originators of Lebowski Fest. This is a book that proudly contains everything you need to know about the movie, as well as much you didn’t need to know about how to incorporate dialogue from the film into just about 50% of your everyday utterances. (The book's own Dialogue Incorporation Percentage hovers at about 78%.) The story of my first Lebowski experience, which is echoed often in the chapter devoted to some of the movie’s most rabid fans (comedian/actor Patton Oswalt, animator Craig McCracken, skateboarder Tony Hawk among many others), goes something like this.

The wife and I, looking for a hearty laugh back on the weekend of the movie’s initial theatrical release (March 6, 1998), decided to check the movie out based on some pretty good reviews we had read (though reports out of Sundance a couple of months earlier were decidedly mixed). We enjoyed it, and one of the things we most enjoyed was the apparent perversity of Joel and Ethan Coen following up the chilly, Oscar-winning black comedy of Fargo, what everyone supposed would be their ticket to big-time Hollywood respectability, with a comedy that seemed almost tossed-off in its casualness, a movie as underachieving, scrappy and shaggy as its antihero, Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski. As for the movie itself, the operative word seemed to be “odd,” not in any grossly self-conscious way, but in a way that seemed perplexing, almost in-jokey.

Over the course of the next year we kept running into people who kept insisting (in a non-aggressive way, man) on the undeniable hilarity of The Big Lebowski, and I kept repeating that, though I liked it, it seemed like kind of a minor effort. Then, sometime in 1999, the wife and I rented it just to see if we’d missed something in the theater. Apparently we had. We both watched the movie through tears of laughter, appreciating the subtlety within the over-the-top comic histrionics of John Goodman as Walter, the abiding core of humor within Jeff Bridges’ infinitely empathetic and put-upon Dude, the far-reaching excellence of the supporting cast, the deliberately confusing plot that parodies Raymond Chandler through a prism of deadbeat philosophizing and generational ideals left dangling like the strands of plot that lead nowhere, even the playfully mocking vision of Los Angeles as a city where a lone tumbleweed can survive, much like the Dude survives, just by taking a tour wherever the winds take it/him, an oddly comforting thought on a night when many of the places the movie shows us are literally on fire. Suddenly The Big Lebowski made sense, and it wasn’t long before we began urging friends and coworkers to join the club. Since then I’ve made lots of friends, mostly in traffic, and most memorably at a Dutch Bros. coffee shop drive-thru in Salem, Oregon last summer, when fellow Achievers working inside noticed the bumper sticker on my minivan, which says simply “Mark it 8, Dude,” and responded with near-Pentecostal enthusiasm.

A book like I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski, one that attempts to capture the essence, and offer explanations for the cult phenomenon surrounding a film, can often be one of the first signs that the cult, or at least its freshness, has jumped the shark, and this book doesn't entirely avoid that pitfall. Naturally, it’s not a book of criticism—it’s a fan book, with sections on How to Dude-ify your Office Space or Living Space that are pretty amusing, more so the more familiar you are with the film. And the large section of the book devoted to interviews with the actors—everyone from Jeff Bridges down to Jim Hoosier (Liam, the Jesus’ bowling partner), Asia Carrera (premier porn star who has a cameo in the Jackie Treehorn production Logjammin’) and Jack Kehler (Marty, the Dude’s artistically aspiring landlord)—is great fun, hampered only by the Bums’ lack of interviewing finesse. They are obviously operating off of the same set of index cards for every interviewee, so at some point everyone gets asked some variation on “How do you explain this movie’s success or its devoted fan base?” or “How did you get involved with the movie?” or “What is it about the movie that resonates with people?” These are not uninteresting questions, just questions that needed to be mixed up a bit more with something more derived from left field.


The best stuff comes when the Bums get out of the way of the likes of John Turturro, who earnestly describes his idea for a sequel based on his character, the sex offender and bowler extraordinaire Jesus Quintana, or Goodman, who leads the book into a hilarious description of how some of the movie’s famously profane dialogue ended up sounding on basic cable (“So you see what happens, Larry, when you find a stranger in the Alps?!”) For their part, the Coens, no strangers to refusing to participate in the interpretation, analysis or exegesis of their own work, sidestepped any participation in the book. “They have neither our blessing nor our curse” is the one quote in the book attributed to them, as much as an out-and-out endorsement as the fan authors could have ever hoped for.

There is an excellent short section in the book devoted to the story of the development of the movie from box-office disappointment to grass-roots phenomenon (“Are We Alone, or How The Big Lebowski Became a Cult Classic”) as well as a look at the origins of the Lebowski Fest itself (“If You Will It, Dude, It Is No Dream”). (This year’s L.A. Lebowski Fest was held on October 12 & 13. Here’s a look at last year’s, which I attended.) And for the obsessive completist, there is a glossary of Lebowski terminology ("In the Parlance of Our Times"), a guide to the various Los Angeles-area locations seen in the film, and even a handy reference section (“Your side guide to watching The Big Lebowski”) with significant moments, oddities and trivial bits linked to the hour, minute and second where the event appears on the original Polygram DVD release. (“For those of you on the Universal DVD, please add 20 seconds,” offer our very thurra* hosts.)

But, as an unabashed fan of the movie, the nagging feeling I was left with after finishing I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski was one of possible overexposure. It is undeniably amusing to read about other people whose fanatical devotion to the movie far outstrips my own. Yet I closed the back cover wanting either more in terms of actual writing and thought about what’s happening in the movie, or to have been left alone with my own perceptions, about the movie and the cult. In this way, the Coens reticence to offer DVD audio commentary or any kind of ascension to the various theories floating around about their work, this film included, can be seen as the ultimate respect for fans of their movies—they are willing to let us do all the heavy lifting when it comes to assessing what those movies mean to us. And certainly Mssrs. Green, Peskoe, Russell and Shuffitt have come up with an answer to what The Big Lebowski means to them, an answer that will likely be shared by hordes of White Russian-drinking, robe-wearing, carpet-obsessed cultists who will eat up their book even faster than I did.

In the end, however, I cannot help but sympathize with freelance journalist and uber-fan Oliver Benjamin, whose greatest Achievement is the founding of a faith based on the tenets of Dude-ism, “the world’s slowest-growing religion.” Benjamin, currently takin’ ‘er easy for all us sinners in Chiang Mai, Thailand, is a self-described male version of Maude Lebowski, the pretentious, marginal artist played by Julianne Moore in the film (* whose affected accent has her pronouncing words like “thorough” in the exacting and extremely precious manner referenced above). And though Benjamin is an unapologetic fan of the movie (he’s seen it about 15 times), he admits, “I try not to watch it too often, as I’m terrified one day I’ll finally get sick of it.” I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski is a lot of fun, but afterward you may feel like taking a sabbatical from the film in the name of preserving the freshness of your own experience with it. It made me remind myself of the greatness at the other end of the Coen Brothers spectrum, their rather more straightforward, though even more complicated, shot at noir, the Dashiell Hammett-inflected Miller’s Crossing, and want to go running straight into its trenchcoated arms. Am I wrong?

THE SLIFR 100 (HALLOWEEN SPECIAL EDITION): #51 FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED

Another in the ongoing series looking at the individual movies that make up the SLIFR Top 100.

Director Terence Fisher began his 21-year run at Hammer Films in 1952 with a film noir entitled The Last Page*. But in 1957 he kicked off a fruitful 17-year stretch by doing nothing less than fleshing out the template for the studio’s greatest financial and artistic successes, which would send them all on an impressive run of lurid yet stately horror films whose budgets were rarely betrayed by their production values. Hammer began life in the mid-30’s, the inspiration of two father-son pairs, James and Enrique Carreras and Will and Anthony Hinds. They specialized in under-the-radar low-budget fare that touched on all tones and subject matter, but found their greatest success since the studio’s inception when they released 1955’s science fiction thriller The Quatermass X-periment (known in the U.S. as The Creeping Unknown). In the wake of a successful sequel, Quatermass II (aka Enemy from Space), Hammer wisely decided to focus more or less solely on horror and science fiction output. They embarked upon what would ultimately turn out to be a reinvention of the Universal horror film stable, and their first four efforts, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Horror of Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and The Mummy (1959) were directed by Fisher (and all four starred the venerable team of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee). Fisher would turn out to be the director whose style and career would become the most closely synonymous with Hammer horror.

By the time he made Frankenstein Created Woman in 1967, Fisher had revisited the well of the vampire twice (1960’s highly-regarded The Brides of Dracula, with Cushing’s Van Helsing battling David Peel’s incarnation of the blood-sucker, and 1966’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness which brought Lee’s sophistication back to Bram Stoker’s vampire, this time sans Cushing) and seemed ready to do something different with the Frankenstein formula. He and screenwriter Anthony Hinds delivered a brilliant genre-twisting and gender-bending idea: Frankenstein, still up to his usual existentially inspired hi-jinks, has a body—that of a beautiful young woman—whose skull ends up housing the brain of a wrongly executed man. But the brain is loath to cede its identity, and soon the woman begins a campaign of vengeful murder on those who caused the young man’s fate. There’s some rather neat (for its time) consideration of crossed-gender behavior thrown in the mix as well, and the absence of an actual monster provided exactly the right downbeat note to keep the level of inspiration in Hammer’s now four-film-old series running high.

(The previous entry, The Evil of Frankenstein, was director Freddie Francis' first contribution to the Hammer monster cycle-- he had previously directed Paranoiac (1963) starring Oliver Reed and Nightmare (1964) for the studio. Unfortunately, Evil was largely content to rehash the motif of the monster lumbering through the countryside which, aided not at all by the series’ worst make-up effects, assured that Evil would be generally considered to occupy a spot near the bottom of Hammer’s Frankenstein well.)

Fisher returned for the fourth time to the continuing saga of Dr. Frankenstein in 1969. But something about staging the battle of the sexes within a body at war with itself seemed to have rather unhinged the good doctor. In fact, whereas in previous episodes it was fairly well understood that Cushing’s Frankenstein, as misguided as his methods were, as blind as his God complex may have made him, had intentions that were almost always good, regardless of how much death and destruction were their result. In Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969), Fisher and scenarists Bert Batt and Anthony Nelson Keys waste absolutely no time putting whatever remains of Frankenstein’s altruistic tendencies to their final rest. If it was to be understood that Colin Clive’s obsessions to bring Karloff’s monster to life were put into perspective by the monster’s inability to control the impulses his damaged brain was sending to his stitched-together body, then Clive’s characterization of Frankenstein, even through the first two sequels, at least retains some measure of sympathy due in large part to his own empathy for his creation. This was true of Cushing’s Frankenstein too, despite the more graphic stylization of the violence perpetuated by the monster, reflected in the violence with which Cushing's Frankenstein had pieced together his creation’s visage. But Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed opens with a memorable sequence that makes audience identification with the titular surgeon unlikely right from the start—Frankenstein, wearing a frightening rubber mask that looks like a Captain Company version of Dustin Hoffman’s old-man makeup in Little Big Man, stalks and decapitates a colleague with a spray of the brightest Technicolor red, then threatens to do the same to a wino who stumbles upon his storefront laboratory. Luckily, the wino ends up only with the victim’s head in his lap—he gets to keep his own—and it’s not long before Dr. Frankenstein has to dump his current project and find other, more shadowy digs.

Cushing occupies Frankenstein here with an actor’s supreme confidence in his own ability to hold an audience. He knows the direction the character is headed is in one of irredeemable megalomania and condescension for those less intelligent than he, but he never winks or otherwise elicits anything resembling a plea for understanding. Instead, Cushing grabs the character by the throat and steers the ride to hell through some truly harrowing territory. His icy stare and vaguely regal air of superiority, mixed with a cunningly choreographed charm that morphs out of his sharp, angular features whenever the need arises, have rarely been put to better use than they were here. And few were better, in either timing or timbre, with the kind of florid speeches, here laced with seething anger and potential violence that were hallmarks of Hammer film dialogue, than was Cushing.


Frankenstein eventually checks in and lays low, under an assumed name, at a boarding house run by Anna Spengler (Hammer stock siren Veronica Carlson), where he berates other medical professionals for their dismissive attitude toward his own experiments conducted in concert with another like-minded surgical maverick, a Dr. George Brandt. He soon discovers that Anna’s boyfriend Karl (Simon Ward) is a doctor at the mental asylum where Brandt, gone crazy before he could reveal to Frankenstein the secret of successful brain transplantation, is being caged. Karl is also involved in procuring illegal drugs for Anna’s ailing mother, and Frankenstein uses that information to blackmail the couple into facilitating, and taking part in, the continuation of his shrouded surgical experimentation. It’s soon clear that Frankenstein’s motives go far beyond simple advances of science for the benefit of mankind. This mad doctor truly is drunk on the idea of pursuing succes