It's Alive in Hollywood: Frankenstein in the Movies

      Young Mary Shelley, married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the grand poets of England's Romantic movement, saw the publication of her immortal novel Frankenstein in 1818. She was only 19 years old.

      The Romantics were not romantic in the "mushy" sense of traditional love poetry. Instead the Romantics were a youthful group of nonconformists who wrote lovingly of the past and the beauty to be found in purer, ancient times. The modern Industrial Revolution was progressing full-tilt in England and the Romantics saw such progress as a threat to the world's natural beauty and sanity. In a sense, they were the "hippies" of the late 18th century, who tried to get back into harmony with Mother Nature. They exhorted loving, respecting, and preserving the natural environment, all the while dabbling in sex and drugs.

      The novel Frankenstein shows just how much can go wrong when the frightening new science disrupts the harmony of nature and God's great plan. The Romantics horror was the horror of an uncomprehending industrial/scientific-charged society. They created a modern monster that ultimately turns against its creators, itself and everything in its wake.

      But in the movies, the Frankenstein Monster became something radically different from Mary Shelley's vision of an intelligent and almost handsome creature, becoming something ugly, inhuman, grotesque, and quite simply monstrous. Yet at the same time, Frankenstein's Monster aroused sympathy in the heart of the terrified viewer when directed by artists such as James Whale, and Terence Fisher.

      This book stands as a testament to the durability of Mary Shelley's original novel. The fact that today the name Frankenstein still elicits an immediate emotional response speaks of the universality of the Frankenstein mythos.

      To a generation of baby boomers, we recall with fondness turning our TV antennas toward the dark heavens trying to pull in distant television channels to catch snowy glimpses of the classic Universal Frankenstein films of the 1930s on Shock Theatre or other late-night horror hosted festivities. The thrill of being able to stay up late, to sometimes watch all alone while all the other inhabitants of the household were sleeping, became something very special to me.

      Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, we saw the recreation of the Frankenstein myth rewritten first by England's Hammer Film Productions and later recast in science fiction terms, where even The Thing and It! The Terror from Beyond Space became variations on a theme: Frankenstein Monsters from outer space.

We watched during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s as filmmakers rediscovered Frankenstein and tried to retell the story, this time, truer to the original concept of Mary Shelley, adaptations that reconstructed our Universal visions of how a Frankenstein Monster should look, speak, and act. Most of us still prefer the Universal and Hammer versions, but once again Frankenstein became redefined for yet another generation.

Frankenstein's Monster, over the course of the 20th century, became all things to all people. He was the social outcast who still had redeeming qualities. He was the loner, the tortured outsider to whom most of us could relate. He was the symbol of fear and of death, the creature better off dead who still stalked the laboratories of egocentric science. He became the metaphor for science gone bad... he was the Dark Side before Star Wars . He became a symbol that life, no matter how pathetic, was always better than death. The Monster represented a creature who sometimes wanted to die but could not. The Monster became the mirror in which the movie viewer could view the cruelty of an insensitive society that both created and later abandoned its own abominations.

And within these pages, all the pieces of the jigsaw are repeatedly reassembled, each time recreating a different, finished puzzle, a puzzle that needs to be examined and explained. For each generation has the task of redefining its own Frankenstein Monster, recasting it as a reflection of all the horrors that each age lets loose upon an unsuspecting public.

      Whether we look at Frankenstein's Monster as the bogeyman, as metaphor, as kindred spirit, or as society's mirror, the fact remains that Mary Shelley knew not what she wrought during that haunted summer of 1816, and this volume is the latest effort in a relatively short line that tries to explain, looking at both cinema past and present, the meaning of Boris Karloff's immortal words from 1935's Bride of Frankenstein --"We belong dead!"