ABCs of Horror 2: “G” Is for The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 2 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?
You’ll often see it cited as common knowledge among film buffs that Universal’s 1935 sequel Bride of Frankenstein is “even better than the original”—an idle observation repeated so many times that it’s been canonized over the decades, some 90 years after Boris Karloff first donned the iconic monster makeup. True horror geeks, on the other hand, are likely to extend that same sort of praise and recognition to the second sequel of the series, 1939’s Son of Frankenstein. I am among these monster aficionados—Son of Frankenstein was the “S” of last year’s ABCs of Horror for a reason, because it is in many ways the peak of the entire Frankenstein series in terms of the grandiosity of its production, which is unmatched in the Universal monster canon. Its opulent setpieces and dramatic performances reach operatic heights that clearly illustrate just how much the American film industry had matured from the beginning to the end of the 1930s.
Where cultural reevaluation has steadily molded the reputation of Son of Frankenstein into a classic alongside the first two entries in the series, however, 1942’s The Ghost of Frankenstein has not been so lucky, standing out as the beginning of a pretty clear descent into what would become genuine mediocrity. Fans of the series will still find ample macabre pleasures in a film that is rarely invoked by even the most dedicated of horror buffs today, but Ghost proves to be emblematic of Universal’s changing outlook on the horror genre in the 1940s—lower budgets, limited vision, and a potboiler attitude. In truth, The Ghost of Frankenstein functions more like a fun “last hurrah” for the original era of the Universal Monsters, a final quality outing before they began to fall increasingly into ignominious self parody. It has “end of an era” written all over it.