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Overview
If you're going to talk about original horror movies, why not use one of the original horror stories? Frankenstein was not only one of the first horror, it was one of Edison's and considered too shocking for most people.
It is a black and white silent and and is only 12 minutes long. So it kinda follows the story in a condensed fashion. But you can see even back then, filmmakers took the liberty of changing books to make them movies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_(1910_film)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0001223
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https://archive.org/details/Frankenstein1910
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Transcript
Stephen: Frankenstein, right? it however you like Stein, Frankenstein-stein, drinking beer steins. Okay. Yeah, we're just kinda, eh. Okay. Side Dish whatever number this is, I'm not even sure.
Rhys: Wow. Yeah, I don't keep track of that
Stephen: yeah I get confused 'cause we usually have one live, and then there's one or two we've recorded, and then there's one, on the list that we're watching.
So it's... I get confused as to where we're at exactly. But this is considered one of the first Frankenstein, if not the first recording based on the book an early horror movie, about as early as you can get
Rhys: Yeah. In fact, everything I've come across says it's the first.
Stephen: Yeah
Rhys: And it was such a shocker that the production studio apologized for it. And then they got bad reviews because it was... I'll read them once, w- we get a little later in the review here. But it w- it's just really funny. It was like, wow, their-- public's reaction to filmed horror has never been great, but this seems a little extreme
Stephen: What was the one German Caligari was it, where people were, like, protesting and throwing up, leaving the theater and stuff? Or some, may- maybe some of the other ones. We get a lot that early ones where their just reaction is outrageous. And now, they would probably have heart attacks watching some of the stuff that goes out considered horror nowadays.
Rhys: For sure. This, so yeah, we'll just-- This is Edison Studios in 1910. They're the ones who did this, and when they released it, this is the disclaimer that they sent with it. "In making the film, the Edison Company has carefully tried to eliminate all actual repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and f- psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale.
Wherever, therefore, the film differs from the original story, it is purely with the idea of elimination of what would be repulsive to a moving picture audience."
Stephen: Wow
Rhys: And I think in here they're referring specifically to the fact that the monster doesn't actually kill anybody in their film. Nobody has to kill the monster.
It just disappears once it realizes what a hideous abomination it is.
Stephen: Yeah, and it's only 15 minutes, which actually is pretty long for this time period.
Rhys: For sure
Stephen: I was pretty impressed with that. But there's, let's just say, a few liberties taken with the story if you've actually read Mary Shelley's story
Rhys: And so they went and they attempted to, alleviate some of this by changing the story slightly, and this is the negative review that they received, like one of them: "I have the sincerest admiration for the Edison and Vitagraph Studios, but it must be said with all due deference to these distinguished producers that such films such as 'Frankenstein' and 'The Mystery of Temple Court,' while delightful literature to coroners, undertakers, gravediggers, and morgue keepers, failed to please the general public.
'Failed to please' is putting it mildly. Death scenes and executions are interesting historical reading when well-described, but portrayal of these things on the living screen may well be dispensed with."
Stephen: Wow. So even the trolls back then were pretty polite and a little bit, little more mature than we get nowadays. "This movie sucks so bad, you deserve to die." That's where we've devolved to
Rhys: Yeah. And it's so goofy 'cause it's just at the time you still had public educa- public executions.
Stephen: Yeah,
Rhys: were being hung in the streets. What are you talking about watching something on film being too much?
Stephen: But, this could be a whole discussion. It's what becomes used to and normalized. We've mentioned it before. Kiss, oh my God, they're satanic. They're going to, change our children. We're going to devolve into, just lawlessness and death everywhere. And okay, so they were a couple guys with some makeup and long hair, which the '80s was rife with that, so it became normal and whatever.
And really, have you listened to Kiss music nowadays? It sounds so tame and so poppy. It's almost bubblegum pop at times
Rhys: and it's so funny because we just did censor and we talked about the same thing there, where the line is. And yes, there will always be a line for society, but that line just keeps moving backwards the further back you get in time.
Stephen: A- and it, it not just backwards, but changes too. Different countries, different people and times, some things are offensive, other things are not, and that changes too. So that line, like you say, keeps getting redrawn based on somebody deciding somewhere
Rhys: I was reading an article I don't re- even remember where, but there... It was a historical article, and they were talking about horse- horses and how important they used to be. And the term horse thief was thrown around as such a pejorative, it's... it would be the same as accusing someone of being a pedophile today.
That's
Stephen: Which doesn't seem to have too much bother nowadays, it seems.
Rhys: I'm just saying so yeah, the line of what is important and what isn't constantly changes over time
Stephen: Yeah, look up Victorian swear words. None of them are recognizable, and they're hilarious sometimes. Arf and arf is, a, like an extreme ju- drunkard or something
Rhys: Bite your tongue, sir
Stephen: Wait, le- let's start doing entomology.
Rhys: This was directed by J. Searle Dawley, and he was born in Colorado. This is a really nice thing about this as a side dish, is that these are actual American... from our point of view, everyone else we've been doing has all been, French or,
Stephen: Pretty much, yeah
Rhys: Yeah. He's Colorado born. He did 182 films, and the first was in 1907, and his last was in 1926
Stephen: Wow. Yeah, when you do 15-minute films, you can get a few more in
Rhys: Yeah. But this is the amazing part to me. So we have J. Searle Dawley, we have August Phillips who played Frank- who played Dr. Frankenstein. This was his first movie. He was born in Indiana in 1874, and he died in 1952. He did 160 movies, his last being in 1921
Stephen: Oh, wow.
Rhys: Okay.
Stephen: Yeah
Rhys: Charles Ogle, The Monster, born in Steubenville, Ohio in 1865.
Yes.
Stephen: Right down the road
Rhys: He died in 1940. He was a stage actor. He made the jump to films in 1908. He did 331 films,
Stephen: Wow
Rhys: ending his career in 1926 So those three guys, the director and two actors, they both quit right about the time sound was being introduced
Stephen: And we've talked about that. That's very interesting that it's a different thing. And y- you can see it in this film a lot because they have very long scenes that are filmed, unlike some of the others like Nosferatu and stuff, where it's a, a sm- a short scene and then there's the interstitial words and then part-- more of that scene or something like that.
They put in a lot of dialogue, a lot of words and stuff. This, I even made the comment, there's like nothing. It's like a, a chapter heading and that's what you get
Rhys: Yeah, and I kinda liked that the way they did that. But like the he went to school and learned s- learned things, right? The education section. I was watching that and I was just like, "Man, they're really sticking on this. There's not much going on. He's looking at a book, he's making some notes." This is only like a 13-minute film.
They spent probably four of it just with him sitting in a chair flipping through books
Stephen: But very expressively. All the stuff they do on the silent films
Rhys: Still, I've seen ones that are far more over the top than this performance-wise
Stephen: Yeah, that's true. That's true. A- and you wanna talk about time, the, the creation of the monster. That was almost half the movie it seemed like. It was just,
Rhys: that was brilliant
Stephen: It was, and I made a note that the-- that's s- it's special effects. We have the first Frankenstein, and we get special effects that are great,
Rhys: yeah. They built a model, lit it on fire, and recorded it while it burned. They had some wires on it to move the arms and things around, and then played it backwards,
Stephen: Yeah
Rhys: That's just... That was just... I was like, "Holy cow, that's pretty amazing."
Stephen: For, for never having someone do it before you to, build off of, this is just them doing it. And y- that I'm sure they wanted to show the whole thing 'cause that was probably the most expensive part of the budget for this film, I'm sure
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah, maybe. The film itself was expensive back then being all laced with silver nitrate and everything. But yeah, you're probably right. They... It only took three days to shoot, and they shot it in the Bronx. I keep thinking, so they make the model of the monster, and then they light it on fire and record it. I don't know. I don't know how... I don't know if they did multiple takes or if they only had one of them, it might not have been that pricey really
Stephen: Yeah, it might not have been, but it's a long sequence and it, and this is one of the biggest areas that differs from the book,
Rhys: Yes. Yes, it comes about from chemical and an all chemical c- concoction in a pot, and it rises up out of it as opposed to being pieces, parts that are sewn together
Stephen: Yeah, I'm sure they would, at the time they would not have cared for Igor carrying in hands and other stuff and flopping them on the table. Unlike nowadays where they complain that if it's not realistic enough
Rhys: Yeah. The, the film had a cast of three, and we've mentioned two of them, and the last one is Mary Fuller. She played Elizabeth. And she was born in DC in 1888. She was, again, a stage actor. And I think she and Charles Ogle were both stage actors who made the leap to movies, and I think maybe that's why the acting didn't seem necessarily over the top because they were actually trained actors before.
Stephen: Right
Rhys: But she did 229 films. S- Their first one was in 1908. She was in the first serialized film project, which was called What Happened to Mary? She did 229 films. She stopped in 1917 and moved back in with her mother. People asked her why she stopped, and she's "I got tired of it. It was too much work, and I invested my money well, and I'm living comfortably."
And no one heard anything about her for the longest time. She died, shoot, I think 1973. I didn't write that down. But she-- The last 25 years of her life, she was institutionalized because she had a nervous breakdown due to a broken heart.
Stephen: Wow
Rhys: And I just thought, "Holy cow," "How dramatic." She quits working in 1917, spends the next 40 years, 50 years just living quietly, not paying attention to anybody. Somebody breaks her heart, she has a nervous breakdown, and ends up in an insane asylum for the last 25 years of her life until she dies
Stephen: That sounds like it should have been a movie
Rhys: It absolutely should have, yeah
Stephen: Yeah, may- maybe it should be a Hallmark Christmas special. Make it a happy ending instead of she just died.
Rhys: Then somebody's gonna complain that you're not being true to the story.
Stephen: true. And interesting 'cause we're in the middle of season six with women directors, and while this wasn't directed by a woman, it's written by a woman and arguably one of the, an early example of horror, and it's a, a woman writer, so it fits in very nicely
Rhys: That's a really good point that, it w- considering when we're recording this and the fact that, it was written by a woman during the woman season, so
Stephen: Yeah. So the o- the other comment I have besides what we've already talked about, is I did like the ending where Dr. Frankenstein walks in and sees the monster in the mirror, and it's the reflection of himself. I thought that was, pretty deep for the time for a movie
Rhys: Yeah, and then it just fades and disappears.
Stephen: Yeah
Rhys: Yeah, it was a, I don't know, kind of esoteric, mystical kind of ending to the whole thing
Stephen: Yeah. They, a lot of the-- what people have gotten out of Frankenstein, which I'm not even sure she really was intending to bring out when she wrote it, but it's, who's really the monster, and the monster is the reflection of our society. All those things in the story which I've seen arguments of that's really not what she was trying to do, and we were pulling-- But that's what all art does, right?
You pull out of things that, you know. And I know my own writing sometimes I get done with it, I'm like, "Oh, hey, that's a good message. Maybe I'll strengthen that a little bit now that I see it." You don't always think about it,
Rhys: The benefits to rereading things
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah, when you edit, sometimes you're rereading 300, 400 times.
It's no wonder authors don't wanna touch a book after they've gotten done with it and it's published. It's like, "Dear God, I'm so done with that book."
Rhys: Ja
Stephen: But then it's weird how they all forget. "Yeah, I have no idea what that character did. I don't remember." Yeah, it was last year.
Okay. So there's early Frankenstein.
And it's from the Library of Congress, the copy we were watching.
Rhys: Yeah, I was gonna say that's the first time ever we've had a film that came direct from the Library of Congress
Stephen: Yeah. And it's nice that they have those things 'cause, a lot of these, especially the old ones we watch, if you don't, have them preserved, they're gone. There have been a couple we've run into that are gone or
Rhys: this was supposed to be lost. They found a copy of it in Wisconsin.
Stephen: Where all good movies go to die
Rhys: some guy's mother-in-law had collected films and, he got a bunch from her and had no idea that, this was
Stephen: So
Rhys: such a rare thing. Yeah, so
Stephen: Yeah, we've run into that, with "Doctor Who" with the missing episode seasons of "Doctor Who" they've been recreating. But then there was that lady, that librarian who recorded like every TV show from the '70s through the 2000s or something recently that came to light.
Rhys: Wow.
Stephen: yeah.
Yeah, she wanted to preserve it for all the things missing. And, if you think about, think of some shows that you remember, go look for some of them. Some of them just don't exist. They never put them on DVD, they don't have them on streaming, they're really hard to get. Y- and if you do find some, dark corner that, somebody put them up for people, it's like always a bad VHS recording of it, so yeah.
Rhys: yeah
Stephen: Okay, so next time I've got down "Peeping Tom," I'll have to look for that one. That's next. But then we got the possibility of "House on Haunted Hill," and so we've got still some good ones coming up
Rhys: I own that one on DVD
Stephen: Yeah, so do I. It's a good classic. But, we already did a Vincent Price earlier and "House on Haunted Hill" I was questioning.
Eh, it's pretty well-known, but maybe we'll
Rhys: It was remade, it's like Thirteen Ghosts, people know the remake, they have no idea about the original kind of thing
Stephen: true. It, like it, it's good, like we were joking with Slumber Party last night, it's good to get that mix. Not everything has to be nobody's ever heard of it. Y- some stuff. 'Cause even for us, I enjoy watching things over. I enjoy watching things other people have liked sometimes.
Rhys: Sure
Stephen: that's coming up and we've got season six we're still in the middle of.
Rhys: Yep, rolling along
Stephen: all right, man, I'll talk to you later.
Rhys: All right. See ya
