You may have heard about this but I'm betting most have not seen it--the Thomas Edison backed 1910 version of FRANKENSTEIN starring one Charles Ogle as the Monster. For nearly a century it was believed that only a couple of stills had survived and the main one, although intriguing to horror buffs, was also used for gag shots in places like LAUGH IN MAGAZINE in the sixties. The story as told to me by a major trafficker in rare films was that a collector had been hoarding a single surviving copy for decades and finally decided to cash in by selling it to the highest bidder. Unfortunately, he was never satisfied with the bids and so decided to release it himself, thus raking in expected millions! The problem, of course, was that once the cat was out of the bag it had long since fallen into the public domain and anyone and everyone began to duplicate this historically important film perfectly legally! Complete with original tinting here's all twelve minutes plus of..FRANKENSTEIN!
UPDATE-If you just want an idea of it, this works but it seems that it was actually on a wider screen than I can apparenrtly capture here so go here to erooster to visually catch the whole thing:
http://erooster.tv/video.php?cat_id=43&video_id=750&act=detail
Wow, thanks for posting the video. I had never seen this before even though I had seen pictures in various monster magazines over the years. The creation process scene was pretty gruesome.
ReplyDeleteFascinating! How shocking and nightmare-inducing the image of the monster must have been to the viewers of this cutting edge technology (of the time)!
ReplyDeleteWho knew that you could just jiffy-pop up a monster in your kitchen, or closet! Thanks for posting this!