Everybody's favorite monster, along with actor Colin Clive
Ah, October is here, that month when everybody starts thinking of horror because Halloween is at the end of the month. TCM is starting tonight, with the classic 1931 Frankenstein at 8:00 PM. It's the jumping off point for a dozen Frankenstein movies, airing every Sunday in prime time in October on TCM.
The 1931 version is the one everybody remembers, but of course it's not original in that it's based on the novel by Mary Shelley. That having been said, it's not even the original movie version. Much like there was a two-reel version of Ben-Hur in the first decade of the last century, there was also a two-reel version of Frankenstein about that early. (At least the Frankenstein story was already in the public domain.) That 1910 version of Frankenstein survives and can be seen on Youtube:
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2 comments:
Thanks for sharing this. I had no idea this even existed, but had fun watching it. It was definitely a different take on the story than anything I've encountered before. Most notably, I found it odd that Frankenstein spent the majority of the film trying to pretend nothing ever happened, just kept trying to go on with a normal life even though there was this horrible creature out there that he created and kept stalking him. In the end, it felt more like Jekyll & Hyde than Frankenstein, though.
I didn't know until yesterday that it existed, either. I was going to refer to the 1931 version as the "original", well, at least the original cinematic version since Karloff's monster is the one we all recognize. But I looked it up on IMDb and sure enough there were silent versions. It's just that there doesn't seem to be one of those shortish feature-length silent versions the way we have the mid-1920s Wizard of Oz. (If memory serves, there's also a two-reel version of The Wizard of Oz from around 1910.)
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