Made the same year as the Lugosi-Dracula, this is the other star-making (for Boris Karloff, this time), hugely influential (or archetypal, you might wanna say) Universal horror vehicle. Both films have in common a rather stunning, german expressionism-influenced gothic visual style and a plot that seems rather simplistic for today’s standards, kinda like the writing and editing is still stuck in the silent era and has yet to catch up to the storytelling possibilities of sound film. Dramaturgically though, this one is much better paced than Dracula.

I can’t help but notice how rooted in catholicism both of these films are, so it’s easy to understand why they were percieved as shocking and blasphemous at their time. Both revolve around a particular sin - in Dracula it’s the sin of promiscuity (after all, Count Dracula is coming for your daughters…), while in Frankenstein the sin is hubris, playing god if you will at a time when medicine and particularly surgery was making rapid progress - to the layman, it probably wouldn’t have seemed too unlikely that humans would soon create life out of dead body parts. The religious aspects become all the more obvious to me considering that the Jehova’s Witnesses still forbid blood transfusions - and thus, most kinds of surgery - to this day.