Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

This time Baron Frankenstein is after a brain transplant. He needs what a former colleague held in an asylum knows, so he abducts the man and moves his brain into another body. The scene in which the victim wakes in that new body and goes to his own wife to explain is the film's cruellest passage. The subject is not the creature but Frankenstein himself. Here he blackmails, threatens and treats everyone around him as an instrument; the monstrousness is in the maker, not the made. The form is the familiar Hammer arrangement: period sets, saturated colour, a short running time and a steady tempo. This is the harshest film Terence Fisher made in the series. One scene entered production history. The studio demanded a rape scene; Fisher, Peter Cushing and Veronica Carlson all objected, and it was shot anyway. Because it cannot be squared with the character's cold calculation in the earlier films, it is still counted as the most contested decision in the series. Peter Cushing plays the Baron again, with Veronica Carlson and Freddie Jones in support; Jones' work as the transplant victim is among the best supporting performances in the whole run. Who it is for: viewers who like Hammer horror and Cushing's severity in this role. Who it is not for: anyone the added scene will sour on the film; it does not fit the narrative either, and is genuinely unnecessary.