Halloween Film Of The Day: FRANKENSTEIN (1910)

We’ve talked about Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein before here at FilmBuffOnLine. But there is no better film to kick off a week of films celebrating Halloween than this fifeteen minute feature from 1910, the first horror film ever made.

As outlined in our feature story on the making of the film, like many early silent films, this version of Frankenstein was long thought lost for decades until Wisconsin film collector Alois Dettlaff announced that he had a print in his collection. Fully aware of the value of what he had, Dettlaff was, to be polite about it, guarded about letting the print out of his possession for screenings. He did finally release it on DVD in 2003. As the film was long out of copyright, Dettlaff’s fears about losing control of the film came true and it almost immediately spread across the internet. WIth Dettlaff’s passing in 2005, it is unclear as to what has happened to the original print.

YouTube has several versions of Frankenstein posted, but I chose this one, split into two parts, as the soundtrack was especially composed for it by an amatuer composer and I think that it works really well. Enjoy, and come back to morrow for a film that might not be all that scary, but certainly scared some of its audience when it was first screened in 1934…

Frankenstein, Part 1-

Frankenstein, Part 2