In 1931, Universal Pictures was teetering on the edge of insolvency, until they accidentally made an unholy amount of money by releasing Dracula. With the equation “Monster plus Movie equals Being Able To Afford Bourbon” dancing in their noggins, the studio heads made a few calls and ordered a buffet platter of horror adaptations.
And that’s how we got Boris Karloff’s performance in Frankenstein just a few months later. Arguably the most iconic acting work in the history of creature features, Karloff’s take on Frankenstein’s monster became the template for almost every other interpretation of the character for nearly a century. Despite his becoming synonymous with the Monster, his unbeatable work, and the studio system’s habit of rolling out as many movies as possible, Karloff actually only donned the scars and neck bolts for three motion pictures.
Frankenstein (1931)
Boris Karloff began the most successful leg of his career with Frankenstein in 1931. It’s the classic story of a lunatic stitching dead people together, hitting the resulting mass of flesh with lightning until it wakes up, and then eventually getting married while the townsfolk wash monster ash out of their clothes.
The process of becoming the monster was an arduous one. Karloff, still a struggling working actor at this point and probably just grateful for the work, strapped on a pair of four-inch platform boots, weighing around 11 pounds apiece. He’d have high-alcohol liquid plastic painted over his face for between three and six hours every morning. Putty – occasionally reported to be the same kind that morticians use to fill in a cadaver’s problem areas – was attached to his eyelids to create that iconic, just-woke-up-from-being-dead look. Another couple of hours a day were spent carving the makeup off of Karloff’s face. It’s all part of what inspired Karloff to help start the Screen Actors Guild – He knew that 3:30 AM call times were the real monsters, and he didn’t want anyone else to fall prey.
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Given the success of the first movie, as well as Karloff’s rising star in the world of monsters following 1932’s The Mummy, it’s a little bit wild that the sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, took four years to make. The studio commissioned half a dozen different potential scripts for the follow up. Appropriately, the version that wound up committed to film was a stitched-together combination of pieces of all of them.
Karloff reportedly didn’t love the decision to make the monster verbal in Bride of Frankenstein. Still, the money spent the same, and it would have been hard to say “no” to the acclaim. Boris Karloff got top billing this time around, credited simply as “KARLOFF” in big, bold letters across dozens of posters and advertisements. In what was becoming a habit, his monster died in this film’s final moments as well, self-destructing in a laboratory explosion.
Son of Frankenstein (1939)
By 1939, Universal was in trouble again. A few box office bombs led them to put a moratorium on monster movies until a rerelease of Dracula started making them money again. Time being a flat circle, they decided to make a movie about Frankenstein, and the Universal Movie Monsters were back in business.
By this point, Karloff was just about done wearing electrodes on his neck for a living. “The makeup did all the work,” he would later point out, and despite near-universal acclaim for the threequel, he decided to hang up his Doc Martens.
Piles of loose sequels would follow, with legendary names attached to the role of the monster. Lon Chaney, Jr. took over the part for 1942’s Ghost of Frankenstein. Bela Lugosi glued on the forehead extenders for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man the following year. The iconography lived on, but the part of Frankenstein’s monster never reclaimed the gravitas that it carried during the Karloff era.
Honorable mentions
While Karloff seemed happy to stop working part-time job hours having makeup applied to and then removed from his face, he never entirely left the monster behind him.
In 1940, Karloff played baseball in his full Frankenstein getup as a publicity stunt for charity. After that, the only other time that he would don the square forehead came some 30 years after the premiere of Frankenstein, on a 1962 episode of the TV series Route 66. There, the performer teamed up with Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, Jr. in a story where they all played themselves, looking back on their careers as movie monsters and wondering if they could still scare people if they put on the old costumes. It was zany.
In 1967, Karloff made his final Frankenstein-adjacent performance, voicing Baron Boris von Frankenstein in the ugly stepchild of the Rankin/Bass animated catalog, Mad Monster Party? He died not long after that, on February 2, 1969, at age 81, probably just glad that Universal didn’t make him wear the makeup to do it.
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