Young Frankenstein
A comic take on the Universal classic.
First off, a note before we start. I know this post is two days late, and I apologize for that to all 24 of you who read this. However, on the day this post was supposed to go out I was writing a script for a movie, making an apple crisp, breaking a blender, cleaning up said blender, and then filming a movie. And the day after I was getting my Halloween costume. So I have pretty good excuses. The rest of the Spooky Season Spooktacular posts *should* stay on schedule, which means that the first The Mummy post will be out tomorrow. (Two posts in two days! Get hype!) Now, onto Young Frankenstein.
Young Frankenstein is not a horror movie. And to this, I know you are all yelling ‘Then why are you writing about it?’. Well it’s not a horror movie, but it is based off of one, and it is brilliant, so that’s why.
If you Google Young Frankenstein it is listed as a comedy/horror. There are a lot of movies with this listing, enough that horror comedy is a well-known subgenre. Movies like Shaun of the Dead, Cabin in the Woods, Jennifer’s Body, Beetlejuice, The Lost Boys, and many other greats of the horror genre as a whole fit into this category. Now, this should raise some questions. Namely, horror is meant to be scary. Why does it lend itself so well to comedy?
The answer to this question is surprisingly simple. As it turns out, most horror, especially good horror, is pretty damn funny if you think about it. For example, the main plot of one of the most successful horror franchises of all time is that a serial killer possesses a child’s doll to murder people. And that’s only the first Child’s Play movie. Countless other classics like Jaws, Scream, The Ring, and The Exorcist, to name a few, can also very quickly fall into this trap. Which isn’t to say that they aren’t good horror movies. They are quite the opposite. They are absolutely genius. In fact, this phenomenon is part of what makes horror so hard to pull off. If it isn’t done well, horror is laughably absurd. Because of this, it can’t really afford to take itself to seriously. It has to acknowledge the absurdity in itself, let the audience laugh at it, then scare them witless. This is where you get movies like Young Frankenstein.
Horror and comedy are, I think, the two hardest genres to do wel, either in film or literature. This is why it is so brilliant to take a good horror story and make it a comedy.
Frankenstein is one of the best horror stories ever written. So it lent itself beautifully to comedy.
Universal Studio’s Frankenstein came out in 1931. 20th Century Studio’s Young Frankenstein came out in 1974. From a cinematography perspective, they look almost exactly the same. Young Frankenstein is shot in black and white, with Peter Boyle made up very close to how Boris Karloff was in the original. There are the same scenes as the original throughout, like the little girl by the well, the old blind man, and the mob coming to kill the Monster. It also has about the same message as the original story, of the danger of releasing a creature out into a world that can’t understand it. It just decides that this is a funny story instead of a scary or tragic one.
It is impossible to do Young Frankenstein justice when describing it, but I’m going to try for a moment. The movie follows Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder), who has spent almost his whole life running from his family’s reputation. Then, when he inherits his family estate in Transylvania, he must face his lineage, and create his own monster, with the help of Igor (the legendary Marty Feldman). Also there’s a musical number where Dr. Frankenstein and the Monster do a tap routine to the song Puttin’ on the Ritz. It’s a glorious spoof of a movie, that is the perfect comic tribute to the original.
Just like horror, comedy deserves to be taken seriously, but isn’t normally. From original stories to spoofs on originals, horror comedies are genius pieces of storytelling that take an insane amount of talent and work to pull off. While they may be maligned by critics and awards shows, they are every bit as deserving of praise as big, dramatic blockbusters. And Young Frankenstein is one of the best out there.