Inside Thomas Edison’s FRANKENSTEIN Adaptation

It was on a dreary night in March, 1910, that the Thomas Edison–produced Frankenstein played for an audience for the first time. Boris Karloff, though he might be the actor who made the role famous in 1931, was far from the first man to play Mary Shelley’s classic creature on-screen. That honor goes to Charles Ogle, who acted as the monster in the 1910 adaptation directed by J. Searle Dawley.

First, to dispel some oft-cited misinformation, the 1910 Frankenstein is indeed a horror movie, though it is not the first one ever made. Genre, as pliant and subjective as it is, was a wholly different beast back in the 1910s. Movies, mind you, had been in existence for 22 years by that point — people had moved on from short films about workers leaving factories and three-second sneeze cams. Film was growing up as a medium, and by the time Frankenstein premiered, cinema was at the age where it had gotten its first tattoo, its fourth heartbreak, and taken up smoking even though it knew it’s unhealthy.

Many early films were comedies because if you don’t have more than a minute with your audience, you’d might as well make them laugh. They were often under one minute in length because Edison was a sleazy asshole who patented the hell out of the motion picture industry and charged exorbitant amounts of money for each foot of film stock. France, however, got rowdy and experimental, with the wily director Georges Méliès not only pioneering science-fiction filmmaking, but horror as well. The genres do get a bit complicated, though, especially when you try to parse out which film did it first.

Most of the work produced between 1888 and 1910 is lost to time, but most modern scholars consider Méliès’ The House of the Devil from 1896 to be the first horror film. It’s got ghosts, the Devil, and a vampire bat turning into a vampire, the first cinematic depiction of such. (This isn’t particularly relevant to the 1910 Frankenstein adaptation, but old movies are fun!) Other contenders for the “first horror film” include 1895’s The Execution of Mary Stuart, 1886’s The Vanishing Lady, and 1896’s A Nightmare — see what I mean when I say it’s complicated?

Walter R. Booth’s 1901 short, Artistic Creation, can be counted among those early black-and-white films that had horror elements in them, but maybe weren’t de facto horrors. The film sees a male artist paint a woman’s head on canvas, which then comes to life. He adds a torso, arms, and legs, piece by piece constructing a real, live woman. Though Booth’s tone is comedic, Artistic Creation recalls many of Frankenstein’s themes, namely the act of creating a live human from spare inanimate parts. Artistic Creation would also go on to inspire shitty student films for centuries to come.

The Creation Sequence

“I had desired it with an ardor that far exceed moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The creation element of the Frankenstein tale always gets more traction than it deserves. The adaptations time and again indulge in the specifics of how the monster is made, often to the extent that the murdering and grave-robbing angle leaves little of the film for the best parts of the story — namely, the doctor’s struggles with mania and his dogged pursuit of the creature after he’s lost everything. In the Edison Frankenstein, the creation sequence occupies two minutes and 50 seconds of the 13-minute film, about 20 percent. In the 166-page novel, Shelley brushes past it in a single paragraph. Any further attempts to explain the science or the process behind such a feat of necromancy are similarly brushed aside.

The 1910 film does boast a killer creation sequence. “Instead of a perfect human being, the evil in Frankenstein’s mind creates a monster,” the intertitle card reads. The press notes provided in the Edison Kinetogram at the time were right on the money when they emphasized that this is a “liberal adaptation” of Shelley’s story. It’s no more loyal to its source material than Billy the Kid Versus Dracula is to the real Billy the Kid, or to Dracula. I wouldn’t be surprised if neither Dawley nor Edison even read Frankenstein and instead had an intern tell them the basic plot of the thing over lunch.

To be clear, in Shelley’s novel, there’s no “evil brain,” no unique maniacal elixir the doctor pours into the blood — exploring what turned Frankenstein’s monster into a savage killer is the cornerstone of the book. It might have just been loneliness, or was it the horror of his creator, or was it a combination of both? The work uses the crude horror premise as a springboard to discuss ideas that are far more interesting than “what if man reanimated a cadaver but accidentally made it evil?!” The book’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, offers a glimpse at a rich world of philosophy and mythology that Shelley happily dives into and swims around in, yet that Dawley and Edison never touch.

Adapting the Frankenstein story to fit neatly within a 13-minute short is a bit like sawing off all the arms on a coat rack so you can fit it through a keyhole — so much of the original story is altered, removed, or blatantly ignored that besides the character names and reanimation conceit, it’s a completely different story, one whose telling is of questionable import. After all, what is Frankenstein with the moral and philosophical dilemmas removed? Just a ghost story with a sad ending.

Likely, Edison saw in Frankenstein a world of technical possibilities rather than a narrative. The creation sequence is the most inspired in the film, and it’s indeed one of the eeriest scenes I’ve ever watched in a horror movie, period. When approached as pure spectacle and entertainment, it delivers.

The sequence begins with Victor Frankenstein, played by Augustus Phillips, who goes uncredited like the rest of the cast. He prepares a large vat to create the monster, closes the enormous iron door, and watches through a tiny window as his sordid work begins. Inside, we watch as particles seem to attach themselves to bones to slowly build a man. The most eerie bit is when he’s still a trash lump–looking guy with one arm and the arm starts bouncing up and down, as though this yet-unformed man is greeting us.

To accomplish the effect, the crew constructed a model of the creature, rolled the camera, and then melted the model. The entire scene was shot in reverse, either by back-cranking the camera or by feeding in the film stock backward — we have little information concerning the specifics of Frankenstein’s production — so that in the final cut, the form appears to be composing itself from the chemicals and air within the vat. Much better than that lightning bolt nonsense.

Colorization

“I saw no more ruined castles and fertile fields. Immense glaciers approach the road; I heard the rumbling thunder of the falling avalanche and marked the smoke of its passage. Mont Blanc, supreme and magnificent Mont Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles, and its tremendous dôme overlooked the valley.” —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Some scenes in Frankenstein are tinted. This is no accident, nor is it a byproduct of the aging process. Edison started having films tinted in 1894, so technically there was very little time we didn’t have color film available.

The process originated to prevent film piracy — Edison was a stingy businessman, after all — but soon was adopted for the purposes of art. In films such as Frankenstein, when the entire frame appears to be colored, the film stock was soaked in dye and stained. Some films, including the Edison-produced Annabelle Serpentine Dance, some later Méliès pictures, and the early work of Russian filmmakers, used hand-tinting. This process, not unlike hand-drawn animation, required colorists to work frame by frame.

In Frankenstein, there are three colors: blue for the night scene, red for the creation scene and subsequent encounters with the doctor’s monster, and supposedly, there was a yellowish tint applied to the indoor scenes that has since mulled into sepia. One can’t help but wonder if the yellow glow of interiors was influenced by Edison’s electricity enterprise. Perhaps this was subliminal endorsement of Edison’s products.

The blue night scenes are commonplace in most silent films. Older cameras, due to the amount of light needed to properly capture images, could not shoot at night. So blue tinting allowed filmmakers to shoot day for night and then lacquer over it in post.

The most thematically inventive tinting is the red, employed for the length of the creation sequence — Frankenstein’s own Faustian moment, when the doctor raises a demon across the border between life and death. The tinting returns for Frankenstein’s wedding to Elizabeth (Mary Fuller) and then for Frankenstein’s final, baffling confrontation with the creature.

In the original novel, the monster seeks out Frankenstein and makes a promise to him: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” Frankenstein’s wedding then occurs in the shadow of this threat by the creature — by this point in the story, he’s killed at least one person, and Frankenstein fears that the creature will murder him on the day of his ceremony. All that context, of course, never appears in the 1910 film, but the effect of the devilish red lighting remains as a reminder of the creature’s surviving menace.

And though I’m doubtful any of the filmmakers actually read the novel, the colorization oddly doubles as tribute to Shelley’s novel. In her book, Frankenstein’s harried spirits are often calmed by his exposure to nature. Much of the novel takes place outside, with Frankenstein traversing lakes, forests, mountains, and seas to cool his frayed nerves. Due to the limitations of the medium, Dawley and Edison could not capture those moments from the novel. The colorization is at least a suggestion of vibrancy to Frankenstein’s otherwise tormented life.

Delusions

“A being whom I myself had formed, and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain. I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable. I knew well that if any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it as the ravings of insanity.”  —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

For a time, Shelley teases that Frankenstein may be delusional, that the creature he invented was a fabrication not of flesh and electricity, but of the mind. A significant sect of academics has argued that the creature does not exist and is rather an extension of Frankenstein’s own being and that the doctor himself is a murderous schizoid. Personally, I think it’s bullshit — the arguments crumble when one considers the accounts Frankenstein contains from Captain Walton, a man who claims to see the creature twice (granted, once is at a distance, and the second time, it’s possible he’s dying of starvation and/or is insane due to being marooned on an ice patch for days on end).

Nevertheless, having the monster be a delusion of Frankenstein’s makes for a far less interesting story, and I’m prepared to give Shelley as much praise as I can. She clearly intended to expound on human creation and mythology with her Modern Prometheus subtitle, and those thematic mountains in her writing collapse if the monster is just a figment of Frankenstein’s imagination. No, the monster has to be literal.

Yet two people, we know, loved the “schizoid” interpretation of Shelley’s novel: Dawley and Edison. The short film flabbergastingly concludes thusly: “The creation of an evil mind is overcome by love and disappears,” the intertitle tells us before cutting to Frankenstein’s parlour, coated in the blood-red tint. We watch the creature escape into the room, his creator close behind. The creature sees in the mirror his ghastly form (designed by the actor, Ogle, himself — I like to think the creature’s long, knifelike fingers inspired the look of Edward Scissorhands), and after shrieking in terror, the creature vanishes. The reflection in the mirror, however, remains. Frankenstein rushes in, seeking his creation, and when he spots the mirror-monster, he points at the macabre form, only for the creature to disappear. In its place, a reflection of Frankenstein himself. We hold on this image, then the movie ends. The monster’s gone, and the implication is that there never was one in the first place. Man is the true monster!

Which is a colossally stupid twist.

Film is a more literal medium than writing. We’re given zero indication for the preceding 13 minutes that we should question the film’s reality. Perhaps the problem lies with Dawley’s direction — framing each scene as though it’s a play isn’t the most conducive to implying an unreliable perspective, or indeed, any perspective at all.

Additionally, the creature appears in the flesh to accost Frankenstein’s wife, who runs away from the monster before fainting while Frankenstein watches the creature emerge from the bedroom. Maybe we would be more willing to believe the monster’s entirely in Frankenstein’s head if we didn’t spend nearly three minutes watching scientific gases in the vat create him!

The argument at least suits Shelley’s novel better, as she cares very little about the specifics of the monster’s birth. But here? Dawley explicitly depicts the creation and makes us watch every second of it. If the creature doesn’t exist, then what were we watching form in the vat? Did Dawley waste our time?

The Wretched Daemon Of Censorship

“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.” —Mary Shelley in her introduction to Frankenstein

Much has been made of the interpretation of Shelley’s original work in Edison’s adaptation. Very little of the grotesque and gruesome remains, lending the production a tame, almost anxious edge, the final minutes working to quickly conjure a climax only to dispel it forthwith.

Apparently movie houses at the time deemed the film “far too weird and frightening” to show unedited, according to one Film Threat article. In some theaters, it was flat-out rejected to be screened. Yet Frederick C. Wiebel, Jr., author of Edison’s Frankenstein, said in an interview that the film was a hit.

“I never found anything that would state the film was not appreciated by the audience,” he said.

He added that sometimes the film would be shown at a higher speed than intended — projectors operated by hand-cranking in those days — and that by showing the movie faster, the exhibitor could turn over audiences quicker.

This, I believe, is the root of the supposed “censorship” of Frankenstein, as the film has little that would offend an audience. Instead, Edison likely saw profits from each of these screenings, as his company also dealt in projection technology. Never much of an artist, he would likely have been in favor of any way to expedite screenings of the abnormally long film.

Ultimately, it isn’t difficult to understand why Edison should have chosen to adapt Frankenstein. The story’s protagonist is a scientist and inventor, like himself, defined by his ambitions. He’s dogged by “chimeras of boundless grandeur,” and he gives life to the monster, hoping to finally be recognized for his genius. Just like Edison, he always sought out new technologies, always thought he could rival any man intellectually, always thought his creations would change the world.

Edison, in adapting Frankenstein, also reenacts his own contributions to the then-nubile medium of film. For the United States, Edison developed this world of moving pictures into an industry. And in his own vat of Promethean ambition, one can see all of film history unspooling in front of his eyes — Harold Lloyd dangling from the clock, the house falling on Buster Keaton, and Colin Clive in his lab coat shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

And as the creature does to its creator in Shelley’s novel, American film would wrest its own life from Edison’s grasp and travel westward, escaping his reach and his means. Film outlived Edison, its celluloid trail unwinding into the faraway mountains, but Frankenstein exists for us today as a flawed but living work of art summative of a then-22-year-strong medium birthed by not just Edison, but the Lumíeres, Méliès, and countless others lost in textbook obscurity.

The 1910 film, which was restored last year by the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, can be found here. Though you’re welcome to listen to the music recorded for the restoration, I advise playing the soundtrack to A Ghost Story, which pairs brilliantly with any and all silent films.

What’s your favorite adaptation of Frankenstein? Let me know in the comments.