Dr Henry Frankenstein is obsessed with assembling a living being from parts of several exhumed corpses.

Storyline 

The 1931 horror movie “Frankenstein“, tells the tale of when Henry Frankenstein who is a doctor, trying to discover a way to make a living human using human body parts from the recently deceased. He succeeds, but his creation is looked upon as a monster by the local inhabitants, who wish to destroy it.

Our Thoughts on Frankenstein (1931)

This movie comes off as silly at times and brilliant at others, but it is probably considered to be one of the greatest monster movies of all time. The greatest thing to come out of this movie was the performance of Boris Karloff as the monster, it is just incredible how much emotion and feeling he was able to convey while under all that makeup. The direction of James Whale is spot on with a great use of sets and outdoor locations, in fact, the only real flaw in the film lies in the script, which has a few situations that make very little sense and because of which interrupts the films flow. But other than that, Frankenstein is a classic and very important movie, and it launched Karloff on to a great career, plus the sequel Bride Of Frankenstein is even better.

8 out of 10 Stars 

Trivia

The Monster’s make-up design by Jack P. Pierce is under copyright to Universal Pictures until January 1, 2026, and licensed by Universal Studios Licensing.

The Monster in this film does not physically resemble the character in Mary Shelley‘s novel. It was make-up artist Jack P. Pierce who came up with innovations such as the Monster’s flat head, the bolts through the neck, the droopy eyelids, and the poorly-fitted suit. Any future Frankenstein film (or parodies, such as ‘The Munsters’) that features any of these physical abnormalities takes its inspiration from Pierce’s make-up work.

A 20-minute test reel, starring Bela Lugosi as The Monster and directed by Robert Florey, was filmed on the Dracula (1931) sets. This footage has not been seen since 1931 and is considered lost. Only a poster, featuring the vague likeness of Lugosi as a 30-foot colossus, remains.

The thick-soled boots The Monster wears are known as “hot asphalt boots.” They were used by men who had to work with hot asphalt on roads. The soles are specially designed to resist heat.

After bringing The Monster to life, Dr. Frankenstein uttered the famous line, “Now I know what it’s like to BE God!” The movie was originally released with this line of dialogue, but when it was re-released in the late 1930s, censors demanded it be removed on the grounds that it was blasphemy. A loud clap of thunder was substituted on the soundtrack. The dialogue was partially restored on the video release, but since no decent recording of the dialogue could be found, it still appears garbled and indistinct. The censored dialog was partially returned to the soundtrack in the initial “restored version” releases. Further restoration has now completely brought back this line of missing dialog. A clean recording of the missing dialog was reportedly found on a Vitaphone disc (similar to a large phonograph record). Modern audio technology was used to reinsert the dialog in the film without any detectable change in the audio quality. With the restoration, it is now known that he says, “Now I know what it feels like to be gods.”

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