Great film acting results from an empathic collaboration between actor and director. However much a director guides theater actors, the performers are ultimately alone onstage. In a film, we are permitted to see a performance as a montage pieced together by director and editor. Movie technicians can undermine a good actor as decisively as they can redeem a bad one.

In “The Strange Door” (1951), one of five twisted, mediocre films collected in “The Boris Karloff Collection,” Karloff makes a belated entrance as servant to maniacal sybarite Charles Laughton, who upstages him mercilessly with eye-rolling theatrics. Yet director Joseph Pevney gives the parting close-up to Karloff, who uses every muscle in his face to milk his lines. For a moment, you think, this may be fun after all — two incorrigible hams warring over the camera. But the director, more intent on following a dreary script than the actors, allows them to go to hell in separate hand baskets, dragging the film behind them.

For an inspired communion between director and actor, one can ask for no better example than “Frankenstein” (1931), which Universal is releasing in its third DVD incarnation — this time as a two-disc “Anniversary 75th Edition” (their word order) with an excellent print, spoken and written commentaries, and three documentaries. The monster’s first appearance, anticipated by off-camera footfalls, exemplifies the unity of purpose. The creature emerges from a dark doorway, back first, then turns its face to the light as director James Whale, beginning with a middle-distance shot, abruptly thrusts us into its face with two jump-cuts, each from a marginally different angle. Damn!

What a pleasure it is to find that after so many years and viewings, sequels, documentaries, and parodies (one of the first, a witless but prophetic 1933 Universal short, “Boo,” is included on the DVD), the scene retains its power. Threats of camp, cliché, derision, and giggles are momentarily allayed. What do we see in Whale’s scrupulously lighted and edited frames? As in the unmasking of Lon Chaney in “Phantom of the Opera,” we confront a radical makeup (by Jack Pierce), at once absurd and credible, and an actor powerful enough to make it real. The producers thought the film would be about Dr. Frankenstein’s attempt to pre-empt God. They figured the creature was little more than a stunt part.

Karloff, with the complicity of the director, turned the film on its head. His monster is the most human being in the piece. A purely reactive figure, created from body parts and (hilariously) an unwrinkled brain, abandoned, beaten, feared, and pursued, the monster commits atrocious acts, including one of the most appalling of classic Hollywood murders — the drowning of an adorable child — and yet simultaneously commands our sympathy and fear.

The odds against his performance were formidable; other actors who played the role in cheapjack sequels barely registered underneath the increasingly rote square-head makeup. “Frankenstein” sustains its allure as a movie that almost everyone comes to in childhood. Yet it doesn’t stay buried in childhood. We read the 1818 novel because we know the film.

Minus Karloff and Whale’s efficient staging, the film isn’t much. The script is conventional and abbreviated, the dialogue uninteresting. Most of the performances are dated (Colin Clive’s hysterical Frankenstein), dull (John Boles’s stolid other man), or indifferent (Mae Clarke’s confused fiancée). Dwight Frye’s hunchback is amusing, but only as a commedia dell’arte genre staple — albeit one largely of his own invention.Edward van Sloan plays two roles: Frankenstein’s professor and, more interestingly, the unidentified codger in the prelude who warns the audience that it may find the film horrifying. “Frankenstein” horrifies because Whale and Karloff love the monster and are amused by the havoc it wrecks.

Karloff was a 44-year-old veteran of bit and supporting roles (in movies since 1916) when he got his break. He parlayed it into nearly four decades of grotesques, specializing in outsiders, fanatics, and idealistic victims of greed and ignorance. Most of his films weren’t any good, but it is amazing how many of them he salvages. Even without makeup he was an odd-looking duck, with his gaunt face, bowlegs, and ramrod if slightly angular posture. Yet he cut a handsome, charming figure. “Take away the neck bolts and big shoes and he was a helluva good-looking guy,” Rosemary Clooney, recalling her early days in Hollywood, once said.

Karloff’s speech patterns, despite a pronounced lisp, employed a rare musicality — long phrases that rose in chromatic increments, his shrewd timing dispatching ridiculous lines and savoring the plums.

Of his early starring vehicles, two of the best, “House of Rothschild” (1934) and the mock fairy tale “The Black Room” (1935), have not been issued on DVD, but his irresistible turn in “The Mask of Fu Manchu” (1932) has been slated for release in October as part of an MGM horror collection. Meanwhile, there is his second-fiddle work in Universal’s “The Boris Karloff Collection.”

The little-known “Night Key” (1937) is one of the first in Karloff’s series of wronged-inventor movies and probably the only one in which he is still breathing in the last reel, having survived an evil capitalist and an evil gangster (the underrated Alan Baxter with a Ralph Meeker sneer). In “Tower of London” (1939), Karloff is the bald, beetlebrowed, clubfooted Mord, who does his torture duties with the dispassion of a hotel maid. Basil Rathbone plays Crookback Richard with a secret cabinet of dolls representing his future victims — most memorably Vincent Price’s splendidly bipolar Clarence.

“The Climax” (1944) is a silly but underrated prize, shot in Technicolor on the sets dressed for Universal’s 1943 remake of “Phantom of the Opera.” Director George Waggner composed the egregious music for the opera scenes, which include Munchkin-like chorales, but minimized the comedy relief. Karloff, carrying the film on his malevolent, impeccably tailored shoulders, plays an ears, nose, and throat man who occasionally hypnotizes and strangles sopranos so that no one else will be able to enjoy them. Curt Siodmak’s adaptation incorporates aspects of “The Black Cat” while portending elements of “Vertigo.” The theme has to do with music as a liberating sexual force, which turns morbid and mad when suppressed.

Karloff’s career and the horror genre plummeted in the early 1950s, soon to be resurrected by late-night television and Hammer films. In 1951 and 1952,Universal tried to revive grotesquerie with costume dramas in the style produced at RKO by Val Lewton, whose “The Body Snatchers” inspired Karloff’s greatest performance.Where Lewton had a taste for subtlety and art, however, Universal’s B-picture unit preferred secret passages, alligator pits, torture chambers, stabbings, and frothing tyrants. Turning to Robert Louis Stevenson, they adapted “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door” as “The Strange Door,” removing most of the talk that is the story’s heart. Then they reunited Paula Corday (from “The Body Snatcher”) with Karloff in the incomprehensible “The Black Castle,” which has a ripping performance by cowboy villain Stephen McNally as a one-eyed Austrian degenerate.

The more spiritual qualities of Karloff abided, inspiring, among many lesser works, a sublimely static reverie of childhood, Victor Erice’s “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973). Set in Franco’s arid, shell-shocked Spain, in 1940, the beautifully shot and acted film begins with the excited arrival of a new movie to be screened in the meeting house. The film is Karloff’s “Frankenstein,” and the unrehearsed reaction shots of children actually seeing if for the first time capture the magic of cinema as a modern locus for campfire storytelling. The youngest child in a disconnected family, unforgettably played by 6-year-old Ana Torrent, becomes obsessed with the motiveless, liberating violence of Karloff’s monster. Pursuing it in the surrounding fields and in her imagination, she makes her way out of an isolated childhood and into the budding recognition of identity.

Those of us who came of age with Boris Karloff understand her compulsion very well.

Mr. Giddins’s latest book, “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books,” is available from Oxford University Press.