The Curse of Frankenstein

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) is a landmark British horror film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Terence Fisher for Hammer Film Productions. Baron Victor Frankenstein sits in a prison cell awaiting execution. He agrees to tell a priest the whole story — the years of secret experiments, the obsession with reversing death, and the thing he eventually assembled from stolen corpses.

Peter Cushing plays the Baron not as a raving lunatic but as a man of complete, terrifying conviction. He believes in what he's doing right to the end. The creature is Christopher Lee — made up with a deliberately original design to avoid any resemblance to the Universal version — and the two actors launched one of horror cinema's most productive pairings across a long run of Hammer films.

This was the first Frankenstein film ever shot in colour, and Fisher's handling of that was pointed: the reds are vivid, the laboratory is clinical and cold, and the violence was explicit enough to get the film censored in several countries on release. For a 1957 production, it holds up better than most — tightly constructed, atmospherically shot, and still unsettling when Cushing is at his most coldly rational. Stream The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) online on iFILM.