Weird Wednesdays: Flesh for Frankenstein 3D

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

On October 28, 2024, American filmmaker Paul Morrissey passed away at the age of 86, two days before I would get to see one of his most well-known movies in its intended format: 3D. 

Morrissey was a strange figure. He initially worked with Andy Warhol at the Factory, leading to continuous confusion about how much he contributed to their joint film projects; he was a self-identified deeply conservative Catholic who portrayed drug users and trans people with perhaps surprising tenderness. In 2024, he is still, largely, not well known, despite having had a fairly successful and lengthy directing career. 

His most well-known movies (at least, in the United States) are described by his biographer Maurice Yacowar as his “costume films”: Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974). In the United States they released as “Andy Warhol’s” Frankenstein/Dracula, though Warhol himself was not involved in their creation at all. Flesh for Frankenstein was shot in 3D (Roman Polanski’s idea, apparently), and I had the pleasure of seeing the 3D version as part of Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series.

The atmosphere was unusually heavy as Weird Wednesday programmer Morgan Hyde introduced the film. I certainly didn’t expect when I signed up for this review that I would be signing up for a eulogy. But then it started rolling, and, well, like Morrisey said, horror movies are absurd, but 3D movies are totally absurd.

Flesh for Frankenstein stars Udo Kier as the titular Dr. Frankenstein, on an obsessive quest to create two perfect specimens of humanity (or, well, specifically, specimens of the Serbian race) that will then be able to breed a new race of perfect humans, all under his command. He’s joined by Arno Juerging as his sniveling, weasley assistant Otto; they hide the nature of Dr. Frankenstein’s work from his wife-slash-sister, the Baroness Katrin Frankenstein, played excellently by Monique van Vooren.

As in nearly all of Morrissey’s films, the center of Flesh for Frankenstein is Joe Dallesandro, who’s role in a Morrisey flick is always invariably “a pretty normal guy surrounded by freaks.” Here Dallesandro is Nicholas, a stableboy for the Frankensteins, who finds himself an unwilling participant in their debauched bourgeois drama. His friend Sacha gets beheaded by Dr. Frankenstein for his perfect nasum; Nicholas himself ends up a kind of sexual servant for the Baroness, you know how these things go. 

In 3D, oh does this movie sing. Morrissey has a deft hand for camerawork; even in his earlier, more Warhol-y films, where the camera stays mostly static, he sure knows how to aim. His Frankenstein takes full advantage of incorporating the use of 3D into each shot. Not just the grossout gore, though I love watching a big nasty organ flop at me as much as the next guy, but also: Dallesandro’s perfect ass as he thrusts into the Baroness; the oddly beautiful laboratory crammed with bits and bobs that push Dr. Frankenstein back into the 3D space, separated from the viewer (and his own humanity, perhaps?); the scenic vista where the Baroness takes her children to picnic, only to find Nicholas having sex on her property.

Morrissey’s Frankenstein is by all measures an incredibly goofy film. It’s fair to call it camp, even. At one point, as Udo’s Frankestein thrusts into an open wound on the stomach of his female corpse, he shouts at Otto in his beautifully some-kind-of-European accent, “To know death, you must fuck life in the gallbladder!” 

At the same time, as with all of Morrissey’s films, it’s hard to resist reading any kind of politics into it. Morrissey was insistent that his films weren’t political, but they were clearly about some kind of morality. In Frankenstein, there’s certainly some obvious clues: His Frankenstein is incestuously married to his sister, whose sex drive he tolerates so he can focus on his work, which is, you know, the whole perfect race thing (also kind of a logical conclusion to the idea of Frankenstein’s monster). Frankenstein wants his perfect creations to breed, and he attempts to find a perfect head for his male creature by lurking outside a brothel, a place he describes to Otto as disgusting. The joke of the movie is that the man they behead is actually seemingly celibate, having told Nicholas he wants to be a monk.

Though Morrissey considered sexual liberation to be one of U.S. society's great moral failings (along with, and I’m not kidding, drugs and rock ’n’ roll*), he never shied away from depicting sex explicitly on screen. His deployment of sex here takes on a particular effect because it is 3D. This makes it, frankly, incredibly silly, which may be the point. His camera treats fucking the same way it treats gore, with both serving schlocky horror movie fare. 

Of the pair, Blood for Dracula is my personal favorite, but it’s hard to overstate how effective the silly 3D is in Flesh for Frankenstein. The movie is, to its core, a 3D Frankenstein picture, an absurd thing. And as is typical for Morrissey, despite his personal moral code shaping his approach to the story, there is no didactic conclusion to be drawn. He lets you watch these events unfold and decide for yourself what they might mean, whether that’s a tale of sexual corruption, a story of bourgeois cannibalism, or just a goofy take on B-horror. He brings to his films a surprising grace underneath the layers of filth and grime: through the organs and dirt, at the core of his oeuvre, the humanity of his actors shine. 

*For example, in interview with Yacowar (The Films of Paul Morrisey, 1993):  “All the sensible values of a solid education and a moral foundation have been flushed down the liberal toilet in order to sell sex, drugs, and rock and roll” (13) 

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