In the 1930s the great James Whale directed the two most indelible and influential film adaptations of Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic cautionary tale of science and its discontents, effectively defining the course of the cinema’s rich fascination with the Frankenstein myth and monster. His masterfully crafted Frankenstein and deliciously irreverent The Bride of Frankenstein immediately established the twin poles against which all subsequent Frankenstein films would be measured—with the first film offering a fervent, although at times quite feverish, adaptation that grappled with the ethics of reanimation and the scientific pursuit of knowledge, and the sequel instead embracing a subversive and proto-camp iconoclasm that treated Shelly’s novel as an open text available for bold revision. The legend of Frankenstein continues to inspire and haunt the cinema, itself a medium that essentially gives poignant life to the shadowy dead. A miracle of science, the cinema has been thoroughly steeped throughout its history in the Gothic imagination of storytelling and science as means to communicate with powerful and often dark forces, be they generated by science or powerful human emotions. While including a wide range of Frankenstein films, from Victor Erice’s meditative and politically astute The Spirit of the Beehive to the lesser known horror classic Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, this series gathers a group of films that together revitalize Shelley’s now-legendary tale, with each offering new ways to contemplate and celebrate the cinema’s unique power to bring uncanny and lasting narrative life to still images.

In conjunction with a major symposium hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center and organized by Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature in Harvard’s Department of English and the Houghton Library, the HFA is pleased to present a concise survey of the most innovative and irreverent adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein, including a late-night Halloween screening of Mel Brooks’ cult classic Young Frankenstein following a marathon reading of the novel in Houghton Library.