It is difficult to count the number of times Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein has been adapted in some form or another to motion pictures, but the count is in the scores. Some have attempted to hew closely to the novel as in Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’ Frankensteinwhile other are so disregarding of the text that creature is made into a kaiju fighting other oversized monsters in the Japanese wilderness.

What nearly all these adaptations have in common is a visually dynamic creation process where the creature is brought to life. The method varies wildly, in the first film adaptation from Edison’s company the creature is born in fire and in the aforementioned 1994 film the processed is wet and liquid much like a fetus growing in a womb. However, the most famous and most used process is lightning during a fantastic storm as inspired by the pre-code 1931 James Whale film Frankenstein. (Ironically it is not electricity that provides life the creature in this film but the undiscovered ‘Great Ray’ beyond ultraviolet that is the source of life, but the movie fixed in the popular imagination the idea of electrification into life.) This production also created another recurring fixture in future adaptations, the twisted assistant, here named Fritz, who later and indelibly became Igor.

What makes these phantom fidelities is that the novel spends an amazingly little amount of time or text on the creation itself. One paragraph, 98 words out 75,000 depict the creature creation.

” It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.“

And yet I think it would be very difficult to persuade a production company to fund a new adaptation of Frankenstein without a climatic creation scene present. And Igor has become so accepted as cannon that in the 2004 film Van Helsing when asked why he tortures the creature Igor responds, “It’s what I do.” His existence not only as assistant but as tormentor is so fixed it no longer needs any form of explanation. The mad scientist, the sadistic assistant, and the grand act of creation seem foundational to the story and none of it existed in the original text. Perhaps the person who casts the longest shadow in the universal myth, second only to Shelley herself, is James Whale.

When I was about 12 or 13 on the local late-night horror show I saw a movie that left a deep and lasting impression Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires.

PoV is a science-fiction horror that may have very well influenced Dan O’Bannon when he conceived of his classic scrip Alien. Adapted from a short story “A night of 21 Hours” (in Italy with the more apt title Terror in Space) the movie is an Italian/Spanish co-production with an international cast fronted by American actor Barry Sullivan. Two space craft, the Galliot and the Argos arrive at an unexplored world following a signal that may be of intelligent origin. Attempting to land the Argos nearly crashes and after a brief fugue state where the crew try to murder each other bare-handed they begin a search for the missing Galliot. Strange occurrences and lights plague the Argos’ crew, and they find that the perpetually fog shrouded planet harbors a lethal secret.

Planet of the Vampires lacked a decent budget and quite ironically vampires. The lethal secret of the planet has nothing at all to do with undead corpses feeding upon the blood of the living which is why the Italian title is so much more fitting. However even with a limited budget Bava, who was a master of in-camera special effects, produced a colorful, visually striking, and engaging piece of cinema. Sullivan is reported to have said that while on set everything looked sparse and cheap, and he was later stunned by how it appeared on screen. The film has only a couple of optical effects with everything else, including the ship’s telescreen communications before performed live in set and captured in camera. The cast deals with the multilingual nature of the international production well enough with only a few scenes where it was clear that the various cast did not under the lines being spoken by each other. (This sort of production was common in Italy at the time where English, French, Spanish, and Italian speakers would deliver their lines in their own languages with dubbing for various markets smoothing over the final product.)

Two elements of the story fixed in my mind over the decades. One, the ending which when seen becomes very obvious as to why it sticks and the other a very prosaic scene where Sullivan’s commander comments that their last-minute landing turned from a crash into an Academy perfect one. An observation that isn’t special but lodged deep into my memory.

Planet of the Vampires is not great cinema but it is fun and quite stylish.