Mary Shelley's Frankenstein might be the most faithful movie adaptation of the novel... yet it's far from the best.

There has never been a fully faithful adaptation of the book Frankenstein. While that seminal 1818 novel is often credited with being the birth of science fiction, as well as one of the greatest works of Gothic literature ever penned, generally cinema's popularization of the story has more to do with Universal Pictures and Boris Karloff under mountains of makeup than it does Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley). Conversely, the post-Enlightenment anxieties which she first dreamed up as a teenager on the shores of Lake Geneva have remained, as ever, on the page.

Yet one cinematic offering, at least, made a serious attempt at doing the book justice. And to be sure, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a raging Kenneth Branagh spectacle when it came out 30 years ago today. Filled with literary pomp and theatrical bombast, it was also a movie rushed into production in order to capitalize on the success of Bram Stoker's Dracula from two years earlier (a film that more rightly could have been titled Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula). The 1994 Frankenstein retained Coppola as a hands-on, if frustrated, producer and was released by Sony Pictures' TriStar Pictures acquisition, just as Sony's Columbia had handled the distribution of Dracula and many other of the early 1990s' splashy retellings of iconic 19th and early 20th century novels. Think The Age of Innocence (1993) and Little Women (1994).

In theory, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was meant to fit snugly beside those efforts and other trendy lunges toward literary prestige in the industry. In fact, after Coppola elected to not direct Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, he still got the new Shakespeare wunderkind Kenneth Branagh to helm, fresh off Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and convinced the younger filmmaker to cast Coppola's first choice for Frankenstein's Monster, Robert De Niro. The expectations were then raised further when Helena Bonham Carter, the unofficial face of Merchant Ivory films like A Room with a View (1985) and Howards End (1992), signed on to co-star as Elizabeth Frankenstein, the cousin of main character Victor, and his eventual doomed wife.

All of these ingredients, plus the largely untapped appeal of Mary Shelley's novel, should have produced a film at least as alluring and unforgettable as Coppola's Dracula, which love it or hate it has stood the test of time 32 years on. And in principle, Branagh's Frankenstein hews closer to its source material than Coppola's vampire bacchanal ever did.