YMMV / The Curse of Frankenstein

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Did Victor's tale about creating the monster really not happen as the ending seems to imply, or was the whole thing true and Paul is just pretending it's all an insane delusion of Victor's and therefore is condemning his former friend to death to ensure that something like it never happens again?
  • Was Justine really pregnant with Victor's child? She doesn't appear to be showing very much and in the days before pregnancy tests, it would take a couple of months to really be sure. Did she make that up in the hopes it would persuade Victor to marry her? She never mentions the pregnancy again once Victor makes it clear he won't marry her - and changes to threatening to expose his secrets.
  • Was the Creature smarter than Victor and Paul gave it credit for? It notably waits until Victor has left the lab before trying to free itself from the wall. Was it in fact feigning stupidity to lure Victor into a false sense of security? Or was it getting brief bursts of knowledge the longer it lived?
  • Was the Creature inherently evil or violent or was it simply the damage the brain sustained as Victor claims?
• Complete Monster: Victor Frankenstein is a heinous individual who gradually loses every redeeming quality he had by the end of the film. A Mad Scientist obsessed with life beyond death, he plunders graves to get the parts to make his monster, and has no compunction committing murder to cover his tracks. Defined by his utter separation from human morality after a point, Frankenstein murders a kindly old scientist in order to harvest his brain. In response to his mistress's anger towards him for refusing to marry her, he murders her and her unborn child by locking them in a room to be killed by his monster. Frankenstein threatens to murder his wife when Paul attempts to expose his misdeeds, and shows no remorse upon accidentally shooting her. Utterly callous and ruthless in his mad quest to become a scientific god, Frankenstein is even more terrifying than the creature he creates.
• Fair for Its Day: Elizabeth expresses an interest in helping with Victor's experiments, and she's said to manage the house's accounts - showing that she at least has desires to be more than a decorative wife.
• Genre Turning Point: For British horror. This is the film that put Hammer Horror on the map.
• Ho Yay: There's an oddly framed scene during the montage of Victor and Paul's work, where Victor interrupts Paul while he's shaving and sporting an Intimate Open Shirt - and there's something that looks like a Held Gaze between them.
• Jerkass Woobie: The creature who is violent but probably only because his brain was damaged and later because he is thoroughly degraded by Baron Frankenstein.
• Moral Event Horizon: At first, Victor Frankenstein seems to be an obsessed genius, even after actually killing a man to get his brain but when he uses the monster to kill the maid he's banging to keep her quiet, he's now irredeemably evil. While he gets some sympathetic moments afterwards, most notably in The Evil of Frankenstein, he seals the deal in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed with his rape of Anna. Most notably, Peter Cushing was disgusted that the writers dared to add the scene because of how it cheapened his character and apologized to his co-star Veronica Carlson for having to do the scene against his wishes.
• Narm: Justine is literally distracted from gathering evidence against Victor because she spots some cute animals in his lab, and is too busy Squeeing over them to notice the Creature behind her.
• Once Original, Now Common: In 1957 this film was shocking for its gore, especially in Technicolor. Audiences had not seen such red blood on the screen before. The Creature's make-up was horrifying too, as the image of Frankenstein's monster was associated with the Boris Karloff look, and audiences weren't expecting to see such a grotesquely scarred figure.
• Retroactive Recognition: Young Victor is played by Melvyn Hayes, who would later be best known for playing Bombardier Beaumont in It Ain't Half Hot, Mum.
• The Scrappy: Oh Elizabeth. Victor can give life to the dead, but even he can't give you a personality.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Paul. He doesn't go to the authorities over Victor's illegal activities even when they culminate in literal murder. He doesn't tell Elizabeth the truth despite claiming he wants to protect her, even seeming to imply she couldn't intellectually comprehend the truth or is too emotionally fragile to handle it, coming off as somewhat sexist. In fact, his actions lead to the death of more people by the hands of both Victor and the Creature, the latter of whom might not have even turned out violent if he had not damaged the brain Victor intended to use. If he was played as morally ambiguous this might have worked but the movie seems to treat him as the white to Victor's black, which just makes him come across as a weak-willed and self-righteous hypocrite who talks about morality but never truly acts on it. Even at the very end it's Victor who stops the Creature—even if it was unwillingly—so Paul's protests and threats all amount to nothing except ineffective blustering.
• Vindicated by History: Critics initially hated the film. Nowadays it's hailed as a classic.

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