Over twenty years before Universal brought the monster to the big screen in the classic Frankenstein, Thomas Edison produced an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel that was written and directed by J. Searle Dawley, released in 1910. A 12-minute short, Frankenstein was the very first adaptation of Shelly’s book, making it an important piece of horror history.
Back in 2015, the sole surviving nitrate print of Dawley’s 1910 film made its way into the Library of Congress’s collection, and they’ve just restored it and uploaded it online!
The team explained in a blog post, “It didn’t take us long to get the reel into our film preservation lab for a 2K scan in advance of photochemical preservation. From that 2K scan we worked on a digital restoration. The film’s head credits and the first intertitle were missing, but fortunately the Edison Historic Site in East Orange, New Jersey, had a copy of the head credit we could drop into place; the intertitle was recreated using the style of the other titles. We asked Donald Sosin, a highly regarded silent film composer and accompanist, to provide a score.”
They add, “The newly restored version of the 1910 Frankenstein is also available on the Library’s YouTube channel and in the National Screening Room, our recently launched digital collection of films. And, like most films on the NSR, it’s freely downloadable in both ProRes LT and MPEG-4 formats, complete with the Sosin score.”
You can watch Frankenstein 1910, newly restored, below!