Frankenstein

Frankenstein (1931) is James Whale's horror landmark, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Driven scientist Henry Frankenstein stitches a body from stolen corpses and jolts it alive with a bolt of lightning.

The experiment works too well. The creature wakes — but the brain sewn into its skull belonged to a murderer. Colin Clive plays Henry as a man blinded by his own triumph, with fiancee Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) and his old mentor Dr. Waldman, who senses ruin from the start. Then there is the Monster. Boris Karloff, buried under heavy makeup and given no lines, makes him something closer to a wounded child than a beast. He reaches for light. He cannot grasp why the world recoils.

Universal built this picture from Mary Shelley's novel and set the template the genre followed for decades: the flat skull, the neck bolts, the lurching walk that became shorthand for horror itself. Seventy minutes of black-and-white that still land. Stream Frankenstein (1931) online on iFILM.