It's Hammer time, Everyone! There's no other place to start than Hammer Studio's first color horror movie The Curse of Frankenstein. For anyone unfamiliar to Hammer Studios, it's a film production studio in England that may or may not be still active. It was hard to tell if it was after the early 70s. This is the film that got Hammer onto every horror fan's radar in the late 50s. There is so much about this movie and it's sequels that separates it from the Universal Frankenstein series. For one thing, this series focuses on Victor Frankenstein and has him create a new monster in each sequel. It's because of this that I mostly just care about the first film. Another thing that makes this classic film different is the design of the monster, it's smaller but a more grotesque monster. This time Frankenstein's creation is called "the creature." The reason all these changes were made is, according to some, that Hammer was afraid that Universal was going to file a lawsuit. One thing Hammer is known for is taking a classic story and adapting it very loosely. They would do this a couple more times with their adaptations of Stoker's Dracula and Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris. 

The choices of actors are legendary in the history of horror cinema. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee would be paired together in a few more Hammer classics after this. A Frankenstein film in color was something nobody could come up with at the time it seems. However, director Terence Fisher needed a way to make it work and he did. The design of Frankenstein's lab looks so crude and yet attractive to the viewers. All those bottles of red fluids and glass containers of bubbling water feels so genuine when watching Cushing's Frankenstein at work.