My dad was a monster! Sara Karloff on reviving Frankenstein, 95 years on
NEWS | 25 September 2026
Once seen, never forgotten – the 1931 Frankenstein is 95 years old, but still one of the most instantly recognisable of classic horrors. Whether it’s the sight of lanky Boris Karloff lumbering into the frame with his squared-off head, neck bolts and oversized leaden shoes, or the sound of a thunderclap and Colin Clive exclaiming “It’s alive!” as the monster comes to life one stormy night in the laboratory – the film still raises hairs on the back of the neck. However, this classic has arguably long been missing one element: a continuous musical soundtrack – the original movie had dialogue but no music. In 2001, the American composer Michael Shapiro wrote a full-length score, which he will be conducting alongside the film for the first time in London next month, at Cadogan Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. “It becomes one artistic expression, one artistic experience,” he says. “The film and the music, together, and the audience forgets that I am there.” Shapiro says his music emphasises what is already up on the screen. “Suddenly the film jumps out in a way it never did before.” Karloff’s daughter will also be in London to talk about her memories of her famous father. Sara Karloff, who was born in 1938, did not see Frankenstein herself until she was 19, because her strict girls’ school didn’t approve of scary movies. Eventually, she watched it alone, on TV. “It was a rather strange way for my father’s daughter to see his famous film for the first time. By that time I’d heard so much about it,” she says. “I watched it rather studiously and understood why it was so popular and so important a film. But I was not scared by it – I enjoyed it immensely.” View image in fullscreen Michael Shapiro conducting Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s novel became the basis for James Whale’s film, in which ambitious scientist Henry Frankenstein and his hunchbacked assistant go grave-robbing to find the parts for a homemade human. But the creature is accidentally given the brain of a deviant criminal and when he escapes from the lab, he cannot control his impulses. Beautifully designed and photographed, the film is exciting and unexpectedly moving, if not quite as terrifying as it was in 1931. In one famous scene, the monster meets a little girl by a lake, and although at first they seem to become friends, tragedy ensues. It’s a bold and still shocking moment. According to Karloff, her father always felt that children got on better with the film than adults, intuiting that the monster is an innocent victim himself. “Adults were kind of horrified by the film and horrified by that scene, but children seemed to understand it,” she says. She adds that seven-year-old Marilyn Harris, who played Little Maria, “really liked my father and wanted to go everywhere with him. She wanted to ride in the car with him, and she always wanted to hold hands with him. She was not the least bit frightened.” View image in fullscreen Jacob Elordi, Guillermo del Toro and Sara Karloff at the premiere of Netflix’s Frankenstein last year. Photograph: Roger Kisby/Getty Images for Netflix Shapiro was one of the children who got it. Aged nine, he wrote the star a fan letter (“Dear Mr Karloff. … I think you’re a thriller”) and was delighted to get a response, along with an autograph and a picture of him as Frankenstein’s monster. “I’m crazy about the film,” says Shapiro, “mostly because of Boris Karloff’s acting.” Now he gets to pay tribute in another way. Karloff, he says, “gives the creature a soul”. And as a composer, he says, “You can put that into the music – as the film progresses, as he shows that, the music changes with him.” Frankenstein is a foundational text in Hollywood horror, the second film in Universal’s long-running series of scary movies, following Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931). But it is a film made largely by British talent, not least Shelley herself. Karloff was born William Henry Pratt in Dulwich in 1887 and lived in London until he was a young man, starting his acting career in Canada in 1911. That was when he picked up his pseudonym. He combined manual labour gigs with stage work until he got a foothold in the film business in Los Angeles at the end of the decade, working in silents. Frankenstein finally made him a star at the age of 44. “My father said Frankenstein was his 81st film, and hardly anybody saw the first 80,” recalls Karloff. Karloff eventually made 167 films, including many more monster pictures, but also one-offs such as the 1968 sniper thriller Targets directed by Peter Bogdanovich, which is his daughter’s favourite, because “it really reflects my father’s feelings that the real horror is on the street, not up on the screen”. He also made countless TV and stage appearances. When he finally returned to the UK in the 1950s, he lived in a flat just a stone’s throw from Cadogan Hall in Chelsea, and a cottage in Hampshire, and England became his home once more while he commuted to the US to act. “He was mad about cricket,” says Karloff. “He thought he’d died and gone to heaven when he got to go to a cricket match and have cucumber sandwiches and a pint of beer.” Now, the Boris Karloff Foundation supports young people in the performing arts in the UK, and cricket too. View image in fullscreen ‘It’s a masterpiece of humanity’ … Michael Shapiro. The film’s director, James Whale, was also British, hailing from Dudley. He transferred to Broadway, then Hollywood after his success directing Journey’s End in London in 1928. At Universal he quickly developed a reputation for artistically ambitious pictures, which, like Frankenstein, used the chiaroscuro lighting associated with German expressionism. Clive, who plays Doctor Frankenstein, was born to aristocratic English parents in France but educated in the UK: after making his name on the London stage, he came to Hollywood to star in Whale’s 1930 film of Journey’s End. Frederick Kerr, who plays Henry’s father, and Lionel Belmore, the Burgomaster, were also Britons. Even the film’s editor, Maurice Pivar, was originally from Manchester. Whale sent Clive a note before the shooting began: “Although it is largely an English cast, I do not want too much English accent about it … it is well to talk to as many Americans as you can to get that looseness, instead of what Americans think of as English tightness, in speech.” The British critics were largely horrified by the film – and not in a good way. There were reports of faints and walkouts during screenings. But at the New York premiere, critic Mordaunt Hall believed people were laughing “to cover their true feelings”. However, he liked the film, acknowledging it was “a morbid, gruesome affair, but it is something to keep the spectator awake, for during its most spine-chilling periods it exacts attention”. Sara Karloff says her father never considered it a horror movie at all. “He felt that the films he did were more terrifying than horrific – that horror films, as they came along, dumped blood and guts right in the lap of the viewer, and terror films made the viewer use his own imagination to finish the scene.” She describes it as “a thoughtful film”, which “asks many questions. Who really is the perpetrator, and who really is the victim? Who instigates the brutality first?” In 2026, as arguments rage about the limits of the use of technology, and whether we can ever control it, Frankenstein remains unsettlingly timely. “It’s a masterpiece of humanity,” agrees Shapiro. “That’s why it’s lasted. That’s why it inspired me to write the music.”
Author: Pamela Hutchinson.
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