Igor (character)

Igor, or sometimes Ygor, is a assistant to many types of Gothic villains, such as Count Dracula or Dr. Victor Frankenstein, familiar from many horror movies and horror movie parodies. Although Dr. Frankenstein had a hunchbacked assistant in the 1931 film Frankenstein, his name was Fritz; in the original Mary Shelley novel, Dr. Frankenstein has no lab assistant nor does a character named Igor appear.

Dwight Frye's hunchbacked lab assistant in the first film of the Frankenstein series (1931) is the main source for the "Igor" of public imagination, though this character was actually named Fritz. The sequels Son of Frankenstein (1939) and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) featured a character named Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi. This character, however, is neither a hunchback nor a lab assistant, but a blacksmith with a broken neck and twisted back. He reanimates the monster as an instrument of vengeance against the townspeople who attempted to hang him for grave-robbing. He survives a near-fatal gunshot and appears in the next film, in which his brain is placed in the monster's body.

Universal Pictures would actively cement the idea of the hunchbacked assistant to the "mad scientist" in the Frankenstein film series House of Frankenstein (1944) with J. Carrol Naish playing a hunchbacked lab assistant named Daniel.

In the 1933 horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum, Ivan Igor is the name of the mad wax-museum curator. The film was remade as House of Wax in 1953, but the name Igor was given to the curator's henchman (played by a young Charles Bronson) rather than the curator himself. This character is deaf and mute, rather than a hunchback.

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