Resurrecting the franchise from Hollywood—which had finally put its popular monster to sleep for a while—Britain’s Hammer Films took a stab at their version of Frankenstein in lurid color and hit the mark. The film launched the careers of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and director Terence Fisher while making Hammer Films synonymous with gothic horror. In a role he would repeat several times, Cushing portrays a meticulous, erudite Dr. Frankenstein, whose icy sociopathy eclipses Lee’s silent, morose monster. In this version, the young baron takes on a tutor who becomes his colleague and eventually—as the only one privy to Frankenstein’s increasingly gruesome experiments—his greatest adversary. The restraint and understatement of Victorian England are optically matched by a palette of muted hues, so the strikingly vibrant Eastmancolor red is all the more shocking when the blood spills in quantities never before seen on screen.