Hammer Studios made a name for themselves in the 1960s and 1970s by remaking and updating the classic Universal Horror Monster Movies. They were stylish and full of wonderful sets. They were more violent and sexy than those classic films, though they come out looking fairly tame by today’s standards.

They made numerous Dracula, Frankenstein, and Mummy films (I don’t believe they ever made an Invisible Man or Creature from the Black Lagoon film), most of which starred Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing. I’ve talked about a few of them in these pages. I have a great fondness for them all.

Frankenstein Created Woman was the fourth film in Hammer’s Frankenstein series (there would be seven in total.) It is a bit of a strange one in that it doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to the other films other than Peter Cushing playing Victor Frankenstein, and him continuing to be a mad scientist.

Here he isn’t so much reanimating freshly dead corpses, but capturing the souls of the recently deceased and placing them in fresh bodies. It is also strangely, almost accidentally progressive.

It opens with Frankenstein lying dead in a sort of deep-freeze coffin. He’s been dead for exactly one hour and at that precise moment, his assistant Dr. Hertz (Thorley Walters) resuscitates (or resurrects?) him. This proves to Frankenstein that a person’s soul does not immediately leave the body at death. Something he surely must experiment with.

Meanwhile, his other assistant, Hans (Robert Morris) is having a love affair with Christina Kleve (Susan Denberg) a woman who is disfigured and whose body is partially paralyzed.

Soon enough he’ll find himself being guillotined for a crime he didn’t commit and she’ll commit suicide shortly thereafter.

Naturally, Frankenstein takes this as an opportunity to capture the soul of Hans and put it into Christina’s body. This is where the film gets accidentally progressive. It apparently doesn’t occur to our friend Baron Victor Frankenstein that putting a male soul inside a female body might be considered strange (I mean stranger than reuniting a dead person). He doesn’t seem to consider it at all. For a brief moment, Hertz raises the question but it shuts down with a singular word from Frankenstein.

The film doesn’t really do anything with the concept after that either. There aren’t any moments where Hans’ soul is questioned about what it is like inhabiting a woman’s body or anything of the sort. No one ever mentions the fact that he could have simply resurrected Christina without Hans’ soul and his experiment would have still been a success.

Frankenstein also fixes all of Christina’s ailments (well, technically Hertz does the actual surgeries as Frankenstein’s hands no longer work – something I think that happened when he was frozen). She can now walk properly and her face is beautiful. No one questions why he didn’t do this while she was properly alive. That would have actually been something the entire community could get behind.

Anyway…

The two souls seem to exist simultaneously. Christina is more or less in control, but she hears Hans talking to her – he mostly screams at her to kill the people who committed the crime that got him executed.

It is a strange entry into the Frankenstein universe. There isn’t really a monster, just a nice girl who gets her dead lover’s soul implanted inside her body. Even after she (or they) start a murder spree the film is on their side. It seems to justify their crimes since the people getting killed were jerks in the first place.

So she’s not really a monster. There aren’t any townspeople with pitchforks, and Frankenstein isn’t all that involved in his own movie. We spend more time with others, developing relationships than with Frankenstein in his lab.

But it kind of worked for me. I am a great fan of these Hammer Horror films. They are often rather slow and meandering, but there is something I just love about them. This is no exception.

You can stream the film for free on the Internet Archive.