The Curse of Frankenstein

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Timing: 1:23 (83 min)

6.745/10
282

6.656/10
1017

7/10
15000

All about film

Video 3

Photo 19

Actors and characters

Release date

1957-05-20

Country

United Kingdom

Production

Hammer Film Productions

Genre

Horror, Science Fiction

Budget

$270 000

Revenue

$7 000 000

Website

Director

Terence Fisher

Actors

Peter Cushing, Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Christopher Lee, Melvyn Hayes, Valerie Gaunt, Paul Hardtmuth, Noel Hood, Fred Johnson, Claude Kingston
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Producer

Anthony Hinds, Max Rosenberg, Michael Carreras

Operator

Jack Asher

Composer

James Bernard

Artist

Audition

Dorothy Holloway

Editing

James Needs
All team (18)

• A scene showing severed heads lying in acid was cut from the film.
• The friendship between Christopher Lee (1922-2015) and Peter Cushing (1913-1994) began when Lee burst into Cushing’s dressing room and complained that he hadn’t been given a sheet with his character’s lines, to which Cushing phlegmatically remarked that Lee was lucky because he, Cushing, had read the script.
• Christopher Lee’s monster makeup was applied literally at the last moment. All previous attempts had been unsuccessful, and makeup artist Philip Leakey (1908-1992) created the monster’s image the day before filming began directly on the actor’s face, using cotton and other materials that were at hand. He used no latex or plaster casts, so the makeup had to be recreated from scratch each morning before filming began.
• In some shots of outdoor scenes (such as the scene with the child on the river), the leaves in the background were painted red and yellow. This was done to match the shots of autumn leaves at the very beginning in the forest scene, shown when the Creature escapes from Frankenstein’s laboratory.
• According to actress Hazel Court (1926-2008), her dresses were part of a preserved collection of Victorian-era clothing (1837-1901 – the period of Queen Victoria's reign over Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India).
• Robert Erkhart (1921-1995), who played Krempe, disliked the film so much that he stormed out of the cinema during the premiere. Moreover, he vowed never to appear in a horror film again and never worked with Hammer Film Productions again.
• Many years after filming this movie, Christopher Lee recounted that during the scene in the forest when the Creature is hit by a bullet, he genuinely cried out in pain because prop blood got into his eye during a take.