De l’origine à l’originalité : Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) ou l’insularité de l’œuvre intermédiale

Abstract

When Terence Fisher’s Curse of Frankenstein was released in 1957 and initiated Hammer’s cycle of horror films, it fitted into a series of well-known hypotexts. Between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and this new opus, the blossoming of various Universal productions in the thirties and forties had helped crystallize, among Anglo-Saxon viewers, the conventions of Shelley’s narrative thus turning it into a myth. Yet, despite the intrinsic rooting of Curse of Frankenstein in a network of references (as advertised in the title itself), Terence Fisher found multiple innovative ways of creating a new cartography designed to reinvent such overly delineated territory. The present analysis of Terence Fisher’s film through the prism of intermediality aims at revealing the paradoxical insularity and singularity of a film whose narrative keeps mirroring its metafilmic essence.