#gothic-horror

#gothic-horror

I'm quite a fan of Gothic horror movies. As a young teenager, I experienced the gloriously Technicolour-saturated world of the Hammer movies late on Saturday night TV when no one was keeping an eye on me. A star of several of those films, Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell' (with Peter Cushing) and Taste the Blood of Dracula' (with Christopher Lee), was the iconic British actress Madeline Smith.

Guillermo del Toro is just about to release his epic new Frankenstein adaptation, swathed in self-conscious artistry and mythic self-importance. But this rereleased 1957 Hammer shocker from the screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and the veteran director Terence Fisher, shows the way it should be done with unpretentious energy and sly macabre gusto. In vivid Eastmancolor, it's a film electrified with its own melodramatic crassness, unencumbered with good taste and certainly uninterested in making either Frankenstein or his creature in any way tragically sympathetic.