silver nitrate notes

Whale's Frankenstein and Arthur Edeson's First Monster

14 feb 2012

James Whale (1889-1957) had directed four films before Frankenstein (1931) and would direct another ten after it. None of them except possibly Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is as interesting as this one. What Whale and his cinematographer Arthur Edeson (whom we have met before on The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca) did in Frankenstein is invent, for all practical purposes, the visual grammar of the American horror film.

The film was Universal's follow-up to Dracula (1931). The studio had bought the rights to Peggy Webling's stage adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel and handed them to Whale, an English theatre director Universal had recently signed. Whale cast Boris Karloff as the Monster over the studio's preference for Bela Lugosi. Karloff's makeup, designed by Jack Pierce, took four hours to apply each day; Karloff spent seventy-three days in it across the production.

What Edeson does with the Monster is a technical achievement that every horror cinematographer since has borrowed from. The Monster is almost never fully lit. His introduction, reversing into the laboratory in silhouette and turning to face the camera, is a single tracking shot in which Edeson begins with the face in shadow and ends with a single key light raking across the eyes. The scar on Karloff's forehead is picked out. The rest of the face is a shadow shape. The camera holds on the face for eight seconds. The audience in 1931 did not know what to do with those eight seconds. Reports from the Universal premiere describe members of the audience walking out.

The windmill sequence at the end is Edeson working at the opposite extreme. The mob, armed with torches, advances on the Monster through dark countryside. The light is entirely motivated by the torches, which Edeson placed close to the actors' faces and supplemented with off-camera sources painted to match. The final fire in the windmill, where the Monster is (not) destroyed, is photographed with multiple cameras and long lenses so that the flames in the foreground are out of focus and the Monster's hand in the middle distance reaches out of the flames, in focus. The composition is a still life of horror that Stanley Cortez would echo, less intentionally, in The Night of the Hunter twenty-four years later.

Whale made Bride of Frankenstein four years later with a different cinematographer (John J. Mescall) and most of the same cast. Bride is, on balance, the better film. Frankenstein is the film that made Bride possible.

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sources
[1] Curtis, James. James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters. Faber, 1998.
[2] Mank, Gregory William. It's Alive!: The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein. Barnes, 1981.
[3] Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. Norton, 1993.
[4] Edeson, Arthur. Interview in American Cinematographer, December 1931.