Here is my recommended song for this post.

So, to finish off this chain of posts around horror we are going to go all the way back to one of the very first horror stories. We all know it as the large green guy with stitches all over it and screws coming out of its head. That’s right, Frankenstein’s Monster.

As a class we all, individually, read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have to say it wasn’t all that bad as a book to read. Some of the language was a little rough and it was a generally slow paced story but all in all it kept me somewhat entertained, which is slightly rare for me when it comes to school reading.

The original story of Frankenstein is actually quite different than what I grew up knowing. It was a lot more to do with what makes us human (as talked about in the last 2 posts). Now the real question is who is the monster? Is it actually the creature or was it the creator? That’s a serious question that I had to constantly ask myself (for educational purposes of course). To me it’s a topic that is still up for debate and everyone can have completely different opinions of who the monster actually is. What I think is that Shelley reflects the monster as the monster within the story of the book. She makes him grotesque, murderous and vengeful beyond what some would consider human. She also doesn’t reflect it as a monster either, having him learn language, social structure and norms and survival skills. All most humans have, minus survival skills for some, which contradicts your basic instinct that the crazy looking murder, not born from a womb, is the monster.

Another thing I lot of people tend to see is parallels between Frankenstein and his monster, people think that the monster is just a reflection of Frankenstein and that they are both the monster. I would have to sway towards this in the sense of the book. Both have demonstrated human and slightly non-human tendencies. The real question though is at what point are we not human and how far can one go? The monster, in my mind, goes the furthest into the non-human side. He commits murder multiple times and acts in a very aggressive nature for a fair portion of the book, while Frankenstein works as a human when dealing with grief and when chasing the monster. Both are written as being consumed with revenge, which humans naturally can be consumed with revenge, for various reasons but that doesn’t make us inhuman” the interesting thing to note is that Frankenstein died in his pursuit for revenge and the monster after witnessing that loses his sense of revenge and instead feels sorrow and grief, a very human nature and one that killers are seen as not feeling.

Both Frankenstein and the creature can be seen as a monster, it just depends on what sways your opinion. I personally, still flip flop back and forth. Both (like I said) exhibit inhuman and human symptoms but in the very end the monster is the one left alive and I think more human than Frankenstein. Frankenstein died from being so consumed with revenge while the monster came to terms with it and decided to rid himself of those feelings. That to me is more human than being so hell-bent on exacting revenge you kill yourself in the process.

We also watched the 1931 Frankenstein and Gods and Monsters. Watching Frankenstein was really interesting because it added some different elements to the story. There was some large differences in the overall storyline but the perception of the monster was the same. There were a lot less of evidence that the monster could be perceived as human. To me, there was only one key moment where that happened.

He shares a moment with a little girl in which he is just exploring the world. He, without true knowledge of his actions, drowns the girl by throwing her in. After that moment he is perceived as a monster even by me watching it. What I failed to notice is that he really didn’t know she would die, how could he know he had never seen a lake before and didn’t know that she would drown.

Another aspect of that is that he is shown to be given an abnormal brain, a criminal brain. This immediately turns you into thinking he is most definitely the monster.

During our class discussion a lot of people expressed that the creature was the monster in the movie. I disagree, the village was the monster. The final major scene of the movie had the entire village form into a mob, chase down the monster across the countryside. They eventually find him cornered in an old mill. They get the captured Frankenstein out of the monsters grasp and proceed to burn the entire mill to the ground with the monster inside. In history if we look back, any group that burns people at the stake or in gas chambers are called monsters and inhuman. Wouldn’t that make the village, who burned a living, functioning creature in a building from which he could not escape, the monster?

If you were to then watch Gods and Monsters there would yet another monster. On a basic movie level I was not a huge fan of it. It was slowly paced and I gained no connection to the story (I was told that I would cry at the end, that did not happen). I found the movie to be a good different viewpoint though on who the monster is. The director of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale, is the main character and he develops a relationship with his gardener. Whale is an openly gay man, which at the time of the 50’s was a slightly controversial matter. I don’t want to say that Whale is portrayed as the monster, but I feel that they try to do that in some ways. In PTSD flashbacks, Whale, is pictured as the monsters silhouette which does suggest he sees himself as such. What is really interesting is the gardener is later seen as the monster in Whale’s flashbacks. When Whale dies a flashback style scene comes across the screen, the gardener in the form of the monster is escorting Whale to lie next to his first love who lies in a trench amid World War I. So, you see a bit of a progression from Whale seeing himself as the monster to him shifting the blame onto someone else, who is homophobic.

The director of Gods and Monsters is also openly gay. Which made me wonder if he was crafting the story to portray homophobic people as the monster. With the gardener being the monster it could also mean that anyone can be a monster, but it is what we do that defines us as such. We as humans can choose if we are inhuman or human but you can only truely define yourself.