Within the decadent walls of the Frankenstein mansion, the Baron (Udo Kier) and his depraved assistant Otto have discovered the means of creating new life. As the Baron’s laboratory begins to fill up with stitched body parts, the Baroness dallies with the randy new manservant (Joe Dallesandro) and soon the decadent, permissive household is consumed by an outrageous, bizarre and hilarious combination of death and dismemberment.
EN
“To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life – in the gall bladder!”
Baron Frankenstein
“What I always believed in was the truthfulness of artificiality.”
Paul Morrissey1
“When you see people like Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes screaming and hyperventilating, you’re seeing the phoniest kind of bad acting. You may as well have a ‘men at work’ sign.”
Paul Morrissey2
“He makes a marvelous kind of world, and a marvelous kind of mischief, holding nothing back and just watching it happen. ‘Personal expression’ is a much-abused expression, but these films are real expression... Nobody has done anything like it. The selection of people, the casting, is absolutely brilliant and impertinent. The life they see, the gutter they see, or the world they see is so funny and agonizing, and they see it so vividly, with such original humor.”
George Cukor3
“We're injecting our style into a formula film. I don't think it really matters whether a film is photographed to look fantastic or whether it looks really awful. If you come away from the film and you have had a somewhat amusing time, you've seen something that approaches a good film."
Paul Morrissey4
“I think the secretary [Pat Hackett, who typed up the daily plot addition] made up most of the dialogue. Each night I'd think of what further absurdity might logically follow from where I began.”
Paul Morrissey5
“In everything to do with film, Warhol always did whatever I asked him to do. His ideas never went beyond ‘Why don't you use this person?’ In ninety percent of the cases I didn't think they were right and I didn't use them and he didn't mind. I was completely free. He paid the bills and I did what I wanted to.”
Paul Morrissey6
- 1Ryan Gilbey, “So what exactly did Andy do?,” The Independent, 11 September 1996.
- 2Ryan Gilbey, “So what exactly did Andy do?,” The Independent, 11 September 1996.
- 3Gavin Lambert, On Cukor (New York: Putnam, 1972), 153-154.
- 4Melton S. Dawes, “Morrissey – From Flesh and Trash to Blood for Dracula,” New York Times, 15 July 1973.
- 5Paul Morrissey, “Dialogue on Film,” American Film Institute 4, nr. 2 (1974): 21.
- 6Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 73.
NL
“In Frankenstein is alles zichtbaar gebleven. Je ziet de acteurs in een rol, maar je ziet ze die ook spelen. […] Zelfs toegepast op een strikt genre als de horrorfilm heeft de Warhol-Morrissey-touch een bevrijdende werking: gedaan met de dictatuur van de waarschijnlijkheid, weg met de tirannie van de emotionele eenheid, overboord de angst voor de revelerende breuk – integendeel zelfs, betrap de knapste trucages op hun zwak moment!”
Dirk Lauwaert1
- 1Dirk Lauwaert, “The Exorcist versus Frankenstein,” Kunst en Cultuur, 31 oktober 1974, 21.
