🎃 31 Days of Halloween – Day 20 🎃
Frankenstein: The True Story (1973)
★★ Watched 20 Oct 2025
Despite its audacious title, Frankenstein: The True Story might be one of the least faithful adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel ever made.
The irony of the title becomes clear almost immediately. This is less Frankenstein and more an unacknowledged precursor to The Incredible Melting Man (1977), as it follows a creature who starts off perfect and then slowly deteriorates throughout the film. If there are any Frankenstein aspects at all, they come from The Bride of Frankenstein. Many of the key story beats, such as the mentor figure, the female creation, even the blind hermit subplot, are here not because they’re in Shelley’s novel, but because they were in Bride. The creators clearly loved Whale’s films, but since they didn’t have the rights, they had to file the serial numbers off. Hence we get James Mason as Polidori, a thinly veiled Dr. Pretorius stand-in, named after The Vampyre author John Polidori, who, fittingly, was present at the Villa Diodati where Shelley conceived her story.
One of its most significant contributions to Frankenstein’s cinematic lineage is the Bride, presented here as a fully developed character for the first time. She’s created with the head of Agatha, the blind man’s daughter, and becomes Polidori’s ward. A poised, elegant woman he intends to use to infiltrate high society. She’s not the ghastly, iconic Bride we know, but a “femme fatale” figure (played by Jane Seymour, no less). Her storyline is undercut by melodrama, but her death scene, where the Creature pulls her head from her body, at least offers an echo of the story’s tragic heart.
Victor Frankenstein is barely the ambitious scientist Shelley envisioned. In this version, the idea of creating life doesn’t even come from him. It’s Polidori who plants the seed, and it’s Henry Clerval, reimagined here as an unhinged proto–mad scientist, who actually builds the first creature with Victor acting as his assistant. When Clerval dies, Victor harvests his brain for the Creature, who later flickers between his own identity and Clerval’s memories. Essentially, Victor becomes Igor in his own story.
Wherever redeeming aspects Frankenstein: The True Story possesses are is in its supporting cast, stacked with British character actors and familiar faces from across pop culture. You’ve got Sapphire and Steel’s David McCallum, Doctor Who’s Tom Baker, and a small army of Orson Welles veterans including Agnes Moorehead, John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson. Their presence adds some theatrical flair to what is otherwise overwrought pulp.
The film also earns a bit of historical credit: it’s the first adaptation to include the Arctic material, though stripped of its framing device. The finale, where the Creature (now half-Clerval) reunites with Victor, and the two joyfully embrace as an avalanche buries them alive, forgets the novel's themes.
Frankenstein: The True Story is ridiculous, talky, boring, and has nothing to do with the novel except by osmosis through Bride. But if Hammer gave us lurid pulp and Universal gave us a few entertaining monster flicks and one genuine masterpiece in Bride, I’ll damn this version with faint praise by at least conceding that it gives us something different.
