ABCs of Horror 3: “F” Is for Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

The Hammer Film Productions series of Frankenstein movies began with 1957’s classic The Curse of Frankenstein and proceeded to sprawl out over the next 17 years, in a constantly morphing saga notable for just how disjointed and paradoxical it typically manages to be at any given moment. Where The Curse of Frankenstein had given new life to the studio, which followed quickly with the similarly Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee-starring Horror of Dracula and many others, the theoretical “golden era” of the studio’s horror run lasted only until the mid-to-late 1960s. By the time the 1970s rolled around, the studio’s horror series was running on fumes, desperately trying to up the titillation and shock factor to match a worldwide horror movement that had taken its inspiration and then proceeded to run far beyond the previously established bounds of decency. What disturbed people in 1958 simply didn’t hold a candle to the increasingly transgressive nature of the genre by the 1970s.

And then you have something like the oddball Frankenstein Created Woman in 1967, the fourth film in Hammer’s series, which catches it in the middle of its metamorphosis, leaving the reinvention of classic gothic horror tropes behind to instead embrace a considerably more cerebral, metaphysical version of the same old Frankenstein story. Even as the middle entry of a sequence that featured constantly broken continuity, glaring shifts in characterization and a few remakes within the series of previous films in said series, this one still stands out as perhaps the most imaginatively strange moment in the Hammer Frankenstein canon. Its defenders famously include none other than Martin Scorsese himself, who once described the film as “close to something sublime” in a film series he was programming. Pretty high praise, for the fourth film in a low-budget horror series.

Frankenstein Created Woman at first hardly seems like a Frankenstein entry at all–it’s maybe the only film in the series where the titular doctor, played as always by the deliciously aristocratic Peter Cushing, never truly seems to be the main character. Those would instead be Hans, a young man who as a child watched his criminal father put to death by guillotine, and Christina, the disfigured daughter of a tavern keeper who is Hans’ only friend and secret romantic companion. Hans works as a laboratory assistant to Baron Victor Frankenstein–always an enviable role for any bright up-and-comer–but is sidetracked by both his explosive temper and romantic life when a group of snobbish local ruffians begin harassing Christina for her (decidedly mild) deformity. When the tavern keeper turns up dead after an altercation, a sham trial ultimately sends Hans to the same guillotine that killed his father, which then leads poor Christina to commit suicide by drowning. What’s the good Baron Frankenstein to do, other than start reviving some corpses?