Frankenstein
“A Liberal Adaptation of Mrs. Shelley's Famous Story.”
About Frankenstein
Frankenstein, a medical student, tries to make a perfect human and instead raises a misshapen creature out of a burning vat. The work leaves him ill. His fiancée nurses him, and on their wedding night the monster walks in. It is played as his own evil given a body. Seeing itself in a mirror, the creature fades away.
Cast & crew
More about Frankenstein
J. Searle Dawley wrote and directed the one-reeler for Edison, working from Mary Shelley's novel without following it closely. Augustus Phillips plays Frankenstein, Charles Ogle the monster, and Mary Fuller the fiancée. None of them is credited on the surviving print. Ogle built the makeup himself.
Themes
In film history
It is the earliest Frankenstein film. The monster is not a sympathetic outcast. He is the doctor's evil, and he disappears when he faces a mirror.
Making
Dawley staged the creation as a reverse-motion shot: the creature assembles itself out of the fire in the vat, then the film is turned around so it seems to grow.
Technique
The birth of the monster is a reverse-motion trick shot inside a smoking vat.
Preservation
It was treated as lost until collector Alois F. Dettlaff found a 35mm print in Wisconsin in the 1970s. The film is in the public domain.
Notes
- Film historians treat it as the first screen version of Shelley's novel.
- The monster is formed in a cauldron of chemicals, not on an electrical table.
- Ogle's makeup is wild hair and a hunched body, not the flat skull later used for Boris Karloff.
- The print does not credit the cast.
Scenes
- The monster rises out of the flaming vat by reverse motion.
- On the wedding night the creature sees itself in a mirror and fades.
Influenced by
- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Also available
- Internet Archive (FrankensteinfullMovie)
- Wikimedia Commons (Frankenstein - Edison Mfg. Co., 1910.webm)
