#Baron Victor Frankenstein

[chernobog13]

THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN (1964) Hammer Films.

Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein, Kiwi Kingston as The Creature, and Peter Woodthorpe as Zoltan.

[popironrye]

Get you a man who can do both!

My attraction to old men sometime confound me. But not this time! This one just seems obvious.

[professorambrius]

Happy Birthday, Peter Cushing

A Happy Birthday in Heaven to one of the finest gentlemen of Horror, Peter Cushing!

Today would have been his 111th Birthday.

[groovy-lady]

I just finished watching The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and I greatly enjoyed it! Peter Cushing was a delight as Baron Victor Frankenstein! The rest of the cast were very good as well! The one part that I didn’t understand fully (and dislike) is at the end, Paul Kempe doesn’t tell the priest nor the police that he did see the Creature, he shot the Creature and helped Victor bury him, and had even tried to stop Victor for a while by no longer helping him and so he lets everyone think it was solely Victor who was at fault for everything (I mean he was for the most part, but Paul did help him initially with creating life in something dead with the earlier scene of the dog they resurrected)!!! Why did Paul do that?! Victor was begging Paul to tell them what he saw and Paul didn’t!

Also, damn Peter Cushing looks so fine as Baron Frankenstein!😍

[linenandlavendercushing]

Welcome!

I’m Sage, the mod of this Peter Cushing appreciation/love blog! I’ve loved Peter Cushing since seeing him as Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin in Star Wars: Episode 4: A New Hope! I took the URL of this blog from a quote in which Carrie Fisher described Peter Cushing as smelling of linen and lavender! :)

[seking-922]

Peter Cushing would be 110 years old today!

Happy Birthday, Peter!

He was a true gentleman all his life. He is an extremely talented and charming actor. Gentleman of Horror.

He has played an extremely high number of valuable characters in his films.

Let's remember it today!

[mourningmaybells]

stop. hammer time

[popironrye]

There's more?!

It's that scene and oh boy is it a treasure trove of gifs.

[papsiguesss]

Some Victor sketches using references/designs from various films of the Hammer Frankenstein series.

[patart-illustrations-stuff]

 Had man not been given to invention and experiment, then tonight, sir, you would have eaten your dinner in a cave. You would've strewn the bones about the floor then wiped your fingers on a coat of animal skin. In fact, your lapels do look a bit greasy. Good night. - Baron Frankenstein

[piedalchemist]

[petercushings]

I'm afraid that stupidity always brings out the worst in me.

PETER CUSHING as BARON VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN in FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969) dir. Terence Fisher

[gurumog]

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) Hammer Film Productions Dir. Terence Fisher

Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein

[weirdlookindog]

Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

[livefromcastledracula]

Gothic literature fanons I wish would die a death and disappear from pop culture, here we go...incoming ramble.

DracuMina and tragic, romantic Dracula is a big one. It's just not who he is. There are plenty of other vampires who live these tropes. It's not Dracula. It's Barnabas Collins and Louis de Pointe du Lac and Angel from Buffy and Edward Cullen. It's not Count Dracula. Count Dracula is a bastard and his bastardy is what makes him scary and charismatic and compelling as a villain in the same way, say, the Joker or (pre-Angelina) Maleficent is. He doesn't need to be suave or soft or secretly a woobie out for love to be interesting. He is a smug, smiling monster to the bone and we love him for it.

If there's any tragedy at all to Dracula the character it's the vague hints Van Helsing gives that he was once a great man and that man's soul might still be trapped somewhere in this hollow, monstrous husk of a creature, yearning for the release of true death.

But that man is long gone. What Dracula is now doesn't feel any guilt or remorse or compassion or grief. He is, he schemes, he hungers, he preys. He is Vampire.

Okay, Carmilla...well the big one is that she is in any way not a lesbian. Adaptations that make her an equal opportunity seductress. Ha ha ha no. Book Carmilla shows absolutely zero interest in men. They might as well not exist to her. She is ALL about young women her own (apparent) age. There is that vague anecdote about the Baron's male ancestor in her backstory, but at the time 'lover' was also used in a more one-sided context of romantic admirers, of which a beautiful young noblewoman would have many, so it could as easily imply she'd never even spoken to him. Vampire Carmilla, the one we meet and interact with, is all about the girls and especially about specific girls; like Laura.

Frankenstein... oh there's a bunch, pop culture Frankenstein is probably the farthest away from the book. Let's not even go into "Frankenstein is the monster's name" or "Doctor Frankenstein" or "Igor" or "the monster is a mute lumbering zombie" or even the animated with lightning thing...

...the one that actually irks me is the pervasive idea that Frankenstein is resurrecting dead people, or that the Monster is / has the brain of a specific person who just doesn't remember who he is. Even Penny Dreadful did this one! Even the musical did this one!

Nooo, the Creature isn't a frigging zombie. He's not a revived human. Frankenstein specifically says that he can't revive the dead but that someday if his "creations" are successful he might also discover that secret:

'I thought that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.'

Also very worth noting that despite the frequent fanon that Victor used a random hanged man for the Creature and Justine or even Elizabeth's body to build the Bride, this absolutely does not happen in the book, at no point does Frankenstein consider 'reviving' his dead loved ones. It doesn't even cross his mind. He's not Herbert West 😆

Back to Creech, Frankenstein specifically says he made him eight feet tall because human parts were too small and detailed for him to work on quickly.

'Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour.'

"...As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large...."

You can't do that just by chopping up a few dead people. You can't get an eight foot giant by stitching together a bunch of smaller dudes. You can't make a bigger heart and bigger bones and bigger organs just by stitching together smaller ones. So what the heck IS Frankenstein doing?

I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.

Okay so we know he IS collecting flesh to use as raw materials, but slaughter houses interests me. This suggests that the Creature isn't necessarily being built of human flesh.

And that makes more sense, doesn't it? How do you build a humanlike body with bigger-than-human bones, muscles, veins and organs? What if you got them from a bull, a horse, an ox?

But here's another point of interest:

...After having formed this determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began... ...The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit...

Months. It's taken him months at least to build Creech.

This book is set in the late 1700s. There is no refrigeration and Victor is working out of a loft apartment at a university.

How. The HECK. Is his glorious Creation not a pile of rotting meat falling apart on his table? How is he preserving it?

Does his magical mad science also extend to preservation? That's never mentioned, but I could imagine that it might involve a fair bit of, well, pickling. He does compare him to a 'mummy' at least once.

So...

Book canon Creech is an eight foot tall giant with flowing black hair, nice teeth, shrivelled yellow skin stretched over his muscle and veins, and watery yellow eyes in 'dun white' sockets. He is probably a bit 'pickled' and potentially a chimera built partially out of animal bones, muscles and organs, though don't think Dr Moreau, Victor was TRYING to make him look human and nobody ever comments on any visibly animal parts.

I wish the 'serious' movie adaptations would go harder on his makeup and effects. As OTT and steampunk Karloff inspired as the Van Helsing movie was, that's actually the level of "oh shit that's not a human" I expect from a canonical Creech, just ditch the steampunk cyborg bits and give the man some hair. Penny Dreadful did good with his alabaster skin and yellow eyes, and Rory Kinnear's still my favorite performance of this character, though they could've stood to use some LOTR-style forced perspective to make him Huge. If Creech could pass for a tall homeless war vet with a lot of scars, he's not 'creature' enough for me. There's probably something poignant to be said there about him thinking that his mistreatment at humanity's hands is because he's an inhuman monster, But Actually people he meets think he's human, they just treat him like they'd treat any other large, disfigured, confused, potentially mentally-ill homeless person they'd meet.

But that's not Mary Shelley's intent, I don't think. He's not a revived, amnesiac human. He's something much more terrifying, poignant, and mysterious. He's an entire new creature, a newborn, earthbound alien species, and that's what makes it interesting to me, because ... what even IS he? Creature is born as a total blank slate, he doesn't know what he is. Victor doesn't understand him, doesn't really comprehend what he's created, so he can't tell him.

So there's no-one alive that can, and there never will be, it's not an answerable question.

There's a deep, abiding existential horror in Creech's existence that is dumbed down to 'came back wrong' if he is a resurrected human. If he isn't, what the hell IS he? Frankenstein is grounded in science fiction rather than the supernatural, but if there's such a thing in its universe as a soul, does he have a soul? Where did it come from? Is he an amalgam of all the people/animals he's built out of, potentially hundreds of them? Is he something that came from somewhere else to inhabit this meat-husk? Is he something else entirely? He doesn't know and never will, Victor never will, no one ever will.

That's haunting, tragic, and terrifying.

[night-market-if]

Just imagine an omniscient narrator voice.

Not like, spoiling the plot, but every now and again, just unnecessary narration. But it has some opinions and what they thought of the character, but not nessecarily right.

Milo: *humming*

Narrator: As Milo hummed as he strolled through the darkness of the...

Milo: What the fuck?

Pen: *Doing pen stuff*

Narrator: The work Pen did was invaluable as ever, but only mundane to pen. Unbeknownst to Pen, it was time to see the night market again, who is strolling around the corner...

Belladonna: *Swirls wine*

Narrator: Belladona Malady swirls her wine, her pale fingers, paler than usual. It hasn't been long since the night market came back, and...

Talisin: *doing some searching*

Narrator: Fuck you.

Talisin: ???

Narrator: no, you heard me. Look at this Baron, who crawled into a dying person's chest. Be richless, filth.

Talisin: *just really confused* ?????

Victor Frankenstein: *Doing Victor Frankenstein things*

Narrator: And we are back with the insightful doctor Victor Frankenstein! A true monument of intellectual integrity. Tonight- or rather, right now, we find ourselves...

Victor: *Does the voice admire my skills for some reason?*

The narrator from Arrested Development is actually the one telling the story. This is actually all secretly a documentary.