"..looks today like a wonderful and witty fairy story which is exactly what it always was; yet at the time outraged critics fell over each other to condemn it. One suggested a new certificate 'SO' For Sadists Only, another reviled Hammer ' a sickening and nauseating way to make a living and CA Lejeune in the Observer, put it 'among the half dozen most repulsive films I have ever encountered'…
Fisher..transformed the Baron into a magnificently arrogant aristocratic rebel, in the direct Byronic tradition, who never relinquishes his explorations for one moment…Frankenstein as he would have been seen through the eyes of Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde…
For Cushing conforms exactly to Baudelaire's complex definition of the 'Dandy': 'Above all else it is burning need to create an originality for oneself, a need contained within the exterior limit of convention…it is the pleasure of astonishing and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished..they all participate in the same characteristics of opposition and revolt; they are all representative of what is best in human pride, in that need which is too rare in the men of today, of opposing and demolishing triviality' "

[David Pirie ' A Heritage of Horror' the English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972']