Frankenstein (1968) ★★★★☆ Watched 18 Oct 2025

At last! An adaptation of… the actual book Frankenstein in a Frankenstein adaptation?! Absurd, I know. And yet, somehow, this 1968 television production from ITV’s Mystery and Imagination series manages to do just that. It captures most of the novel’s essential beats, themes, and moral weight in under ninety minutes.

The budget is clearly modest, but the production makes every pound count. Like many later TV versions, it condenses locations and trims the supporting cast for practicality. The Arctic wraparound is gone, and instead of Victor and the Creature returning to Geneva, the surviving characters visit Victor. (This latter approach actually goes all the way back to the 1931 Universal film and the play that inspired it.) These concessions make sense for the format and never feel like compromises so much as smart adaptations to the medium’s monetary limitations.

What’s most striking are the deliberate, conceptual changes. Chief among them: casting Ian Holm as both Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. It’s a brilliant choice that literalizes the theme of creator and creation as reflections of one another, given their utter inability to let anything go. Holm’s dual performance is remarkable. His Victor is a feverish intellectual blinded by ambition, while his Creature is fragile, childlike, and devastatingly human. Few screen Frankensteins, before or since, have conveyed so much raw empathy for the Creature without sentimentalizing him. Holm gives both roles depth, dignity, and distinct emotional rhythms, and the doubling adds a chilling psychological undercurrent: Victor is quite literally facing himself.

Another bold departure is the ending, which trades Shelley’s poetic Arctic coda for something more intimate and fatalistic. The Creature shoots his creator, then deliberately walks into a crowd to die. It’s not faithful, but it’s conceptually sound, distilling Shelley’s themes of guilt, consequence, and mutual destruction into a single haunting image.

There are some unexpected touches too, like the inclusion of Fritz, the hunchback assistant lifted straight from the 1931 Universal version. It’s a curious graft onto an otherwise text-faithful production, but it serves as a subtle nod to the film legacy that shaped the popular idea of Frankenstein.

Perhaps most impressive is how much the production leans into the story’s religious dimension. Victor explicitly compares himself to God; the Creature sees Victor as his creator in the literal, divine sense. Furthermore, the blind man who briefly befriends the Creature later rejects him for blasphemy. This gives the narrative a moral clarity and tragic tension that many larger-budget versions avoid. It’s not just about ambition or scientific inquiry gone too far. Faith, pride, and revenge are also core themes.

For a one-hour-and-thirteen-minute teleplay, it’s astonishingly complete. It does what Hammer and Del Toro’s lavish reimaginings could not: it tells Mary Shelley’s story, simply, economically, and with emotional power.

The production was helmed by George Markstein, known for his work on The Prisoner as a producer, script editor, and writer. You can feel his hand here. The pacing, dialogue, and emphasis on moral and psychological conflict all bear the mark of someone who understands speculative fiction as a vehicle for ideas.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

1969

★½

Watched 13 Oct 2025

If any of the Hammer Frankenstein films must be destroyed, it’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969).

By this point, the series has nothing to do with Mary Shelley’s novel, not that the other films really did. But this time, it's REALLY apparent. There’s no creature, no attempt to raise the dead. This is just a series about a doctor who swaps brains. The whole “brain” angle technically started back in Frankenstein (1931) and became central with Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), when Ygor wanted his mind in the creature’s body. Even that film at least pretended to care about realism. They mention mismatched blood types and blindness. But here? Brains are traded around like spare light bulbs.

It’s also baffling from a character standpoint. After Frankenstein Created Woman painted the Baron as a sort of tragic antihero, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed resets him to full-on sadist with zero explanation. Then there’s the infamous rape scene—forced on the film by the studio, hated by everyone involved—made even worse by Frankenstein’s order to make him boiled eggs for breakfast right after. It’s one of the most tonally offensive moments in any Hammer film.

At an hour and forty minutes, this is also one of the slowest entries. The “creation” doesn’t even show up until the final twenty minutes. Even then, he's just a guy with a scar on his head; probably easier to do on Hammer's budget than the Universal films.

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