This is probably the most confusing title that I have ever written but it is exactly about what I learned about. A piece of our horror unit was about Frankenstein, we read the book and watched the movie, then we moved onto a movie about the producer of the movie.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was the first created and the one that we started with. I personally was not a huge fan of the book as it left me reading pages more than once out of confusion some times. The plot was interesting but I found it hard to follow along with what was going most of the time, I don’t enjoy having to seek clarifications for a book that I am reading. The book was a lot more philosophical than I thought it would be. I originally just thought the story was about a monster named Frankenstein. In reality it’s about a man named Frankenstein who accidentally creates a monster. It then moves into what being a human truly means. When you really think about who is truly the monster between Frankenstein and his creature, you are forced to way the differences between the two. There is no easy answer to that question, the creature has the physical and stereotypical features of a monster but the original actions of Frankenstein that put the creature in that position were almost worse than anything creature did. Frankenstein created something with no knowledge of what was going on, all that the creature started to learn was how it did not fit in because of its physical appearance, this angered the creature as it could do nothing to find happiness and Frankenstein was the only one to blame.
To me the most interesting story fo the three artifacts we studied was the Gods and Monsters movie. This movie was about the man who directed the Frankenstein movie and The Bride of Frankenstein. This movie takes place in the 50’s and there are no creatures just relatively normal people. James Whale is an openly gay man and he starts to bond with his Gardner who does not think much of this at the time. The true underlying theme of this movie is harder to understand but it almost seems as if James Whale is the monster in this situation as he experiences PTSD and you see in his flash backs himself represented as the creature. Later in the story, the Gardner is seen as the monster in the flash backs. It shows progression of James Whales’s thinking through the movie. It seems as if he does not blame himself anymore and has pushed it off on to the Gardner now. This movie was very hard to understand, but it was extremely interesting, I think that if I were to intently watch it again I would gain a much greater understanding for the underlying theme.
The entire underlying message of Frankenstein in general has to do with what being human means. It breaks down into several parts, but none can be properly explained so it makes explaining what it means to be human very difficult. Everybody would have different definition.