Following the events of Son of Frankenstein, the village is gripped with fear that Frankenstein’s monster will return, and so they implore the mayor to destroy Castle Frankenstein. Ygor (Bela Lugosi), having miraculously survived the end of the last film, discovers that so too has the Monster (Lon Chaney Jr.), and the pair escape the castle in search of Henry Frankenstein’s other son, Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). With the Monster weakened, Ygor hopes Ludwig will restore his strength and threatens to expose the doctor’s lineage if he does not obey.
I’ve compared the recursive nature of Ghost of Frankenstein to the classic line from Peter Pan, but there’s also something to be said for the infomercial quality of the film, which seems to shout to its audience, “But wait, there’s more!” Both Ygor and the Monster met pretty definitive ends in Son of Frankenstein, but Ghost handwaves both of those in order to get the plot going. I’ll grant you that there’s a tolerable level of suspended disbelief in accepting that the Monster outlived his bath in molten sulfur, but even the characters in the film can’t believe that Ygor survived being shot multiple times. Ditto the existence of a secret, second son of Frankenstein; it’s the same gimmick as Son of Frankenstein, just flavored a little differently.
All of which is to say that within ten minutes of Ghost of Frankenstein, I was overcome with a wave of déjà vu – and not in a good, “this is how the genre gets invented” way. Where it’s been fun over the course of Monster March to watch filmmakers figure out the nascent genre (and indeed, talkie motion pictures more generally), it’s becoming increasingly clear that the formula wasn’t invented so much as ossified over the course of the 1940s. Every creative decision in Ghost of Frankenstein seems to be borne out of expectation rather than invention, and the result is something that feels overly familiar.
Consequently (or perhaps as a contributing factor), much of Ghost of Frankenstein is rather low-energy – which may come as a bit of a surprise because the film is arguably the loudest monster movie so far. From the opening frames, the score is banging and crashing, while the film is never a few seconds away from an all-out riot erupting. But all the performances lack the verve that had set the Franken-films apart; even Bela Lugosi seems restrained by the material, though he’s trying as hard as he can to make Ygor as weird as he was in Son of Frankenstein. (Still, no one lurks in a window like Lugosi.) As Ludwig Frankenstein, Sir Cedric Hardwicke is appropriately subdued if a bit too reliant on the stiff upper lip, the kind of performance that might best be described today as “slumming it.”
The big headline in Ghost of Frankenstein is that it’s the first Franken-film without Boris Karloff as The Monster, and Lon Chaney Jr. struggles to fill his oversized shoes. While Chaney was captivating as The Wolf Man, his Monster lacks Karloff’s surprising humanity, and his stumbling around the film suggests that his Monster is blind long before the third-act turn in which that affliction actually manifests. (I would have thrown up a spoiler warning, but it’s not even a plot detail that matters, and I would venture to say you’d be as surprised as I was to discover that wasn’t always already the case.) There’s only one moment when Chaney’s Monster is transcendently creepy, though it’s more the fault of the script than the performance. Amid so much kerfuffle about how to restore the Monster’s strength, the monster kidnaps a young girl (shades of the original Frankenstein) and pantomimes to Ludwig that he wants the girl’s brain put inside his head. It’s a moment of genuine horror and an astonishingly dark intimation, especially by 1942’s standards.
Of course, it never comes to pass, and the second act concludes with a bizarre half-chase in which the Monster shambles after Ludwig’s daughter as she shelters the youngling from his grasp. The third act then transforms into a shell game in which brains are shuffled about until one lands in the operating room with the anesthetized Monster. To say which brain ends up in the Monster would be a spoiler, so I’ll refrain – but even that moment plays less like the next evolution of the character and more like a sad reduction of the whole affair into a B-movie plot. I shouldn’t be questioning why a 1942 movie misunderstands how blood transfusions work if that movie is sufficiently engaging. I should instead be captivated, enthralled, perhaps even briefly horrified – but sadly The Ghost of Frankenstein lives up to its name, a sad and pale specter of greatness long dead, a mere apparition haunting the franchise.
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