1957’s “The Curse of Frankenstein” would cement Hammer Films’ reputation as a purveyor of classic horror films, and it’s due in no small part to Cushing. Here is where Cushing defined the Platonic ideal of The Magnificent Bastard. His Baron von Frankenstein was proud, arrogant and secure in his intelligence to be absolutely ruthless. When his lover becomes troublesome, he has no qualms siccing his creature (a silent, eye-catching role for Christopher Lee) on her. He feels that morality and ethics are the concerns of those without the wherewithal and brains to build secret laboratories to practice reanimating life in. In the loosely connected sequels, he would put interesting spins on the character.

In the third film, “The Evil of Frankenstein” he’s not quite as merciless, which makes his rounding up and managing of a family of outcasts all the more unsettling because the threat of its dissolution is balanced on when Frankenstein no longer needs them. Frankenstein's cruelty become outright sociopathic in the fifth film, “Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed.” It’s easily Cushing’s most terrifying performance, coolly tasking the woman he just sexually assaulted to put on some coffee as if she doesn't matter; nothing matters in his relentless pursuit of creating life in his image. After an ill-fated attempt to relaunch the series with a younger actor, the ever sodden Ralph Bates, Cushing returned for the final film in the series, “Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell,” which is an uneven effort but worth seeing for Cushing. In this entry, it would appear the jig is up for Frankenstein; he’s been sent to an asylum. When the younger protagonist succeeds in finding out where he’s being held, he gets there to discover, what else, that Frankenstein is secretly running the place.

A year after “The Curse of Frankenstein” Cushing displayed his versatility as the heroic, morally upright Abraham Van Helsing in “The Horror of Dracula.” Observant, considerate and brave, he was everything a filmgoer would want in a vampire hunter. It’s a thrilling moment when he flashes the silver crucifix at Dracula (Christopher Lee, beginning his tempestuous relationship with the role.) The music crescendos as the vampire writhes in agony. Cushing would return in the Lee-less first sequel “The Brides of Dracula,” which is one of the most beautiful and sensuous films Hammer ever made. Cushing’s warmth as Van Helsing, the very opposite of Frankenstein’s frost, comes through in what has to be one of the gentlest vampire stakings in film. He approaches the terrified woman, unwillingly turned by her own son, and assures her he means only to release her from her torment. She realizes he has come to help her find the death she wants and submits willingly. Cushing would play a grandson of Van Helsing in “Dracula A.D. 1972,” which is terrible, albeit delightfully so. And he is about the only thing to recommend in the utterly exhausted “The Satanic Rites of Dracula." He heads up a paranormal bureau in the British government, intriguingly like a proto B.P.R.D. from the Hellboy comics, and looks after his staff with a paternal eye. The business with the actual office work of vampire fighting makes me wish we’d gotten a TV series of Cushing solving various paranormal mysteries.