Young Frankenstein1974

The Review

Every Young Frankenstein 1974 review has to begin with the same astonishment: this is a parody that loves its subject too much to mug at it. Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder — who dreamed the film up and wrote the first draft while the two of them were making Blazing Saddles, in the same miraculous year — did not set out to make fun of Frankenstein. They set out to make the Frankenstein film Universal would have made next, if Universal had employed geniuses with a wicked streak. So it is shot in black and white, against studio insistence. It is built, in part, on Kenneth Strickfaden’s original 1931 laboratory equipment, hauled out of storage and crackling again forty years on. Its Transylvania is fog, stone and torchlight, photographed with total sincerity. And into that sincerity it places Gene Wilder, sweating through his collar, insisting his name is pronounced Fronkensteen — and the collision of the straight face and the crooked world produces the funniest horror film ever made. Not the funniest parody. The funniest horror film, full stop, because for long stretches it simply is one.

Wilder’s Frederick is the great comic performance of the seventies, and it works because he never once plays it as a joke. He is a brilliant, brittle man at war with his own blood — stabbing a scalpel into his own leg to prove a point about reflexes, denying his heritage with the desperation of a man who can hear the castle calling. Around him Brooks assembles a company no horror film has ever deserved: Marty Feldman’s Igor, whose hump migrates from shoulder to shoulder across the film because Feldman kept moving it as a private gag and nobody caught him; Cloris Leachman’s Frau Blücher, a name that stampedes horses and a performance of such porcelain menace that her late confession — “He vas my boyfriend!” — lands like a thunderclap; Teri Garr’s Inga, all innocence and hay-cart innuendo; Kenneth Mars as Inspector Kemp, whose wooden arm gets its own sound effects; and Madeline Kahn, arriving late as Elizabeth and detonating every scene she touches. And then there is Peter Boyle’s Monster — hulking, tender, murderous, heartbroken — a performance that has to carry the film’s soul in a body built for slapstick. It does. Watch his face during “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” top hat on, cane in hand, terror and pride fighting for the same expression. That is not a gag performance. That is acting.

The construction is a marvel of respect disguised as theft. Scene after scene restages the sacred texts — James Whale‘s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein — with the reverence of a restoration and the timing of a vaudeville team: the brain theft, the hermit’s cottage (with Gene Hackman, uncredited, wringing pathos and agony out of hot soup and a lit thumb — “I was going to make espresso” may be the most perfectly delivered exit line in comedy), the little girl at the well, replayed beat for beat from 1931 and resolved, this time, on a seesaw instead of in the water. Brooks understood what so many parodists miss: you cannot send up what you do not understand, and he understands these films down to the dissolve. Even the famous set pieces that belong wholly to this film — “Walk this way,” the Abby Normal brain, “Sedagive?!” — grow out of the genre’s own soil. The laboratory crackles because Strickfaden built it to crackle in 1931. The jokes detonate because the horror underneath them is genuine.

And it is a horror film, in the ways that count. Strip the laughter and the bones are pure Gothic: a grandson cursed by a name, a creature assembled from the dead, a village with torches, a creator locked in a room with his creation, playing charades while it throttles him. The film’s one truly frightening passage — the Monster loose among the townsfolk, the theatre demonstration collapsing into panic and chains — works because Boyle has made us love the creature before the world turns on him, which is, of course, exactly Shelley’s point, and Whale’s. Young Frankenstein smuggles the whole tragic argument of Frankenstein inside a comedy without dropping either. That it also earned Academy Award nominations — for its screenplay and its sound — and became one of the biggest hits of its year, made for under three million dollars, is almost beside the point. The point is durability. Half a century on, there is not a wasted frame in it.

If the film has a flaw, it is only that it ends — and even that it manages gracefully, closing the circle with a wedding, a transfer of endowments played as the last great sight gag, and Kahn’s hair streaked white in tribute to the Bride. Brooks never appears on screen, a condition Wilder set and the film honours; the director’s restraint is everywhere, in a picture that could have been a sketch revue and is instead a seamless, affectionate, beautifully built machine. On a horror shelf it sits a little apart — the one that makes you laugh until the lightning flashes — but it earns its place the honest way: by knowing exactly what Frankenstein is, and loving it too much to lie about it.

Spoiler Section

Stop here if you have never seen it. The Monster keeps his secrets for first-timers.

Frederick inherits his grandfather Victor’s castle and, despite himself, repeats the experiment, stealing a body and fitting it — thanks to Igor’s mix-up — with the brain of “Abby Normal.” The creature escapes, re-enacts the hermit and the little-girl encounters in kinder form, and is captured after the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” demonstration collapses when a stage light explodes and the frightened Monster panics. Frederick risks his life locked in with the Monster and finally accepts both his name — shouting “My name is Frankenstein!” — and his creation, performing a risky procedure that transfers some of his own intellect and refinement to the creature. The Monster, now articulate, forgives the villagers, sacrifices his freedom to save Frederick from Kemp’s mob, and marries Elizabeth; Frederick, who has received something of the Monster in exchange, marries Inga. Everybody, improbably, lives happily ever after — the only Frankenstein film brave enough to let them.

Trivia

• It really is the 1931 laboratory. Kenneth Strickfaden’s original Frankenstein equipment — the coils, arcs and crackling towers built for James Whale — was tracked down and used again, four decades later.
• Wilder made black-and-white a non-negotiable condition, and Brooks held the line against the studio, which wanted colour.
• The hump moves. Feldman shifted Igor’s hump between shoulders from scene to scene as his own private joke; it stayed in the finished film.
• “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was Wilder’s. Brooks resisted the musical number in early arguments, then conceded — it became the film’s signature sequence.
• Gene Hackman took the blind hermit’s cameo uncredited — at the height of his fame, the funniest five minutes in the film, played completely straight.
• Two Oscar nominations. The film was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound — rare air for a parody, and rarer for a horror comedy.
• Blazing Saddles is its twin. Brooks released both films in 1974; they made him, in a single year, the defining comedy director of the decade.

Where to Watch

Checked November 9, 2026. Streaming with a subscription on fuboTV.

The Verdict

Young Frankenstein is the perfect horror-comedy — the one every later entry in the genre is measured against and found charming, or wanting, but never equal. Brooks and Wilder built it out of love, Strickfaden’s lightning and the finest comic company ever assembled in a castle, and it has not dated a frame in fifty years: it is beautiful, it is tragic underneath, and it is funny in a way that seems to have been struck by the same bolt as the Monster — alive, against all the laws of nature, forever.

The seven-fifteen to Transylvania leaves shortly, horror lover. Walk this way. No — this way.

Rating: 4.5 ravens out of 5.