The Curse of Frankenstein (Devil's Advocates) 

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book The Curse of Frankenstein. It is an entry in Auteur’s Devil’s Advocates series and explores the landmark 1957 Hammer horror of the same name.

 

From the Columbia University Press website:

 

Critics abhorred it, audiences loved it, and Hammer executives were thrilled with the box office returns: The Curse of Frankenstein was big business. The 1957 film is the first to bring together in a horror movie the 'unholy two', Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, together with the Hammer company, and director Terence Fisher, combinations now legendary among horror fans. In his Devil's Advocate, Marcus Harmes goes back to where the Hammer horror production started, looking at the film from a variety of perspectives: as a loose literary adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel; as a film that had, for legal reasons, to avoid adapting from James Whale's 1931 film for Universal Pictures; and as one which found immediate sources of inspiration in the Gainsborough bodice rippers of the 1940s and the poverty row horrors of the 1950s. Later Hammer horrors may have consolidated the reputation of the company and the stars, but these works had their starting point in the creative and commercial choices made by the team behind The Curse of Frankenstein. In the film sparks fly, new life is created and horrors unleashed but the film itself was a jolt to 1950s cinema going that has never been entirely surpassed.

 

http://auteur.co.uk/?product=the-curse-of-frankenstein-marcus-k-harmes

 

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-curse-of-frankenstein/9781906733858

 

Introduction 
1. The Film and its Critics
2. Adapting and Transgressing 
3. The Book: Adapting Shelley
4. Cinema Part 1: Horror before Hammer
5. Cinema Part 2: Heritage and Horror
Conclusion
Bibliography

 

ISBN 1906733856

 

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