Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

Is there anyone who doesn’t recall their first love? For that matter, is there anyone who doesn’t remember precisely what the world looked like on the day they realized they’d never felt this way before and something deep inside them would forever be different?

Horror fans are similar when it comes to their first movie loves. Almost all of us have a film we can point to and say, “And it was then that I gave my heart.” Paradoxically, horror inspires love more than it does fear. Love itself is scary. Anyone can leave us any time they desire. No matter how well we think things might be going. Death can take them from us. We may love someone such that it changes how we view everyone else, and life without them becomes an impossible struggle in contrasts. Love requires us to be vulnerable. Love doesn’t just happen. Feelings do, but love requires our every aspect, including our will, our effort, our setting aside of ego. Love isn’t for the fainthearted. 

Charles Barton’s 1948 horror-comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is a film that’s easy to fall for and has probably served in equal measure as a first love and a familiar face to rekindle the flame of romance. The story is straight hokum, which matters nary a jot. The famed comedy duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello play a couple of regular, wisecracking baggage porters who receive an urgent phone call from Lon Chaney Jr.’s still-tormented Larry Talbot, warning the pair to be careful with some crates that happen to hold Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (who’s officially Dracula for the second and final time of his movie career) and the Frankenstein Monster (Glenn Strange). Obviously there’s going to be bungling, and Drac gets up to his latest round of no-good, which means restoring the Monster to life and unleashing mayhem.

But the comedy isn’t why the people who see this film tend to love it and will until the bitter end—and maybe beyond, for all we know. At the time, parents would let their kids attend something like this without worrying that they wouldn’t sleep that night. How menacing could anything be with Abbott and Costello’s names right there in the title? Sure, Sally and Jimmy, have a gay time, and Jimmy, you keep an eye on your sister, you hear. But the bogeys are in character. The Count may prefer to feed on Victorian ladies, but a bloodsucker’s gotta do what a bloodsucker’s gotta do. It’s called being a professional. If you have to suck the neck of post-WWII Lou Costello, then so be it.

Hunkering down with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is akin to rolling out of bed on a bygone Saturday morning and watching a cartoon like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! or Super Friends and hoping your favorite baddie gets quality screen time. You check the clock, worried that they’ve yet to appear and you may have to wait to next weekend (or longer!), but we breathe easy on that score with this movie. We know our pals will strut their stuff as only they can.

Life changes—that is, it goes on, as we all learn eventually—around Larry Talbot’s Wolf Man, but his pain remains despite the surrounding, almost mocking, mirth. That’s grief, though, isn’t it? Talbot doesn’t become a song-and-dance man any more than we would. We respect that about the movie. Jokes, yes, but inauthenticity, no.

Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein looks sharp. There are some nifty effects, with flourishes from the medium of animation. Our heroes—the monsters, not the “boys”—feel like they’ve adapted well to the more modern world than the one in which we’re used to seeing them. It’s a perfect picture to share with a 6-year-old and get them started early. The jump from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to Night of the Living Dead isn’t as broad as one might suppose.

There’s real pleasure, too, in returning to this film after having watched hundreds, or thousands, of other horror movies, and not for nostalgia’s sake either. These monsters look how we love them to look. They sound how we love them to sound. We know them by their indelible tread, their sutures, the gleam of teeth, the way a mother can spot her child in a big, messy photo faster than anyone else, save here the photos are in delightfully spooky motion.

In his book-length 1822 treatise, On Love, Stendhal wrote about what he called “crystallization,” in which all aspects of a person are composited, and love is understood through this composite as it hadn’t been previously. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein offers a leg up on that process for horror enthusiasts. The comedy team themselves didn’t care for the script when they saw it but liked how the final product went over with people. There’s a witty Invisible Man cameo when you least expect it, too, and in the nick of time. And after all, to be sagely besotted is to be positioned to love best, whether that’s with the person to whom we’ve given ourselves, or a horror film that has our heart. 🩸