When I started my first film studies course, we were assigned to watch one day the James Whale adaptation of Frankenstein (1931). The teacher chose to structure the class by showing us a “classic” and “modern” version of a genre in order to show how conventions have grown and changed. While I am still not entirely sure how Frankenstein became Evil Dead II (1987), I can’t complain about this particular decision because in some ways it opened up a new side of me.
This wasn’t the first time that I watched an old movie, but there was something about Frankenstein especially that resonated with me, a young college kid who was still trying to figure out what his future held. Ever since that day, I became obsessed with a specific kind of horror. It wasn’t defined by grotesque imagery and jump scares that kept you from sleeping at night. It was evident that the genre clearly had more in its DNA than just that. The horrors of yesterday aren’t any safer than they are right now, just the way that they’re presented.
What will always be exciting and vital about Universal Horror for me is that while you can read all of these stories about how the audiences were horrified by Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, you will miss the more complicated substance underneath. These were dramas redesigned to be about the outsiders, themselves freaks to the normal world. For Whale, that meant turning Dr. Frankenstein into a coded queer character who used The Monster to express himself. The Monster was misunderstood, a town of pitchforks coming after him as he growled in a childlike frustration. He had no way of expressing himself, and that alone expressed something deep down in our human condition that is scary because of how real it is, for fear that the world will turn on us.
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| Frankenstein (1931) |
Of course, there was something even greater that I admired about Frankenstein coming from a writer’s perspective. My whole profession is built on creating worlds and characters out of nothing, forcing myself to be judged by a public who maybe doesn’t care that I have anything of value to say.
To me, Frankenstein is more specifically timeless because of how it serves as an allegory of a man playing God. You got Dr. Frankenstein eager to create life without ever thinking of the ramifications. To him, it’s just another experiment. This one just happens to involve rotting flesh being reanimated back to life in order to try and resurrect. You feel like a big shot when it’s first done, watching lightning strike those neck bolts that cause the eyes to open. It makes the impossible possible, though it brings with it a whole host of ethical questions, such as what it means to be the father of life like you’ve usurped your own God. As you stare into the imperfection, what do you see in its life? Suddenly it’s personal, where every fault makes you realize why God sent Noah the flood. Mistakes will be made if you don’t know what you’re doing.
That is why I see it as much a cautionary tale as it is something deeper inside. To go through all of the different reasons that Frankenstein continues to resonate would be a bit difficult, but I wanted to bring in the substance of the film because that epitomizes what keeps this story relevant. Large portions of the novel may differ from that film adaptation, but the soul of both exist with similar intentions. Sure, Mary Shelley may have been less obsessed with queer subtext, but the rest informs how horror has evolved and changed between the 19th century when she published the first horror novel and 1931.
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| Elsa Lanchester (center) as Shelley in Bride of Frankenstein (1933) |
It’s a bit strange to admit, but I am more in love with Shelley the person than Shelley the author. In fact, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is my preferred classic horror novel of choice even if I like the film adaptations less. While I am sure that a reread may help me form a deeper appreciation for the novel, I am not as immediately captivated by what appears on the page as I initially expected. Maybe I’m expected it to be too much like Whale’s vision, or that I was in the wrong mood when I read it. Still, I love reading essays dissecting the prose, doing everything to understand the brilliance of this reanimation story. Considering that we’re celebrating two centuries, it’s a great time to look back and understand what makes it particularly timeless.
To me, the backstory to “Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus” is one of the greatest stories in the world. Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had passed away when she was young and Shelley spent a lot of time at her gravesite. She was also heavily involved with two of the more popular writers of her time in Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Their time together has pretty much become mythology, as if your lazy afternoons with your friends getting high reinvented the idea of a novel.
I still am unsure as to how “Frankenstein” came to be, but the story I find most endearing involves them gathering together for a writing session. Only, this wasn’t just trying to see who wrote the better story. They were high on opium, scribbling down every idea that came to them. Considering that Shelley had a few miscarriages in her life, she had a personal understanding of what it meant to create life. She also knew what it was like to mourn the death of her mother, bringing so much sadness into this particular story. You begin to see the threads clearer when you know how much of Shelley’s life was surrounded by death. However, nobody really expected her to get anywhere with the story (which, as a female author, was true upon initial publishing).
It is considered to be the first horror novel ever written and few tortured souls could’ve been better assigned to it. After all, this is the same woman who was said to have kept her husband’s heart wrapped in her desk after he died in a sailing accident. Her life is worthy of so much more attention than it gets (and unfortunately the biopic Mary Shelley (2017) wasn’t great at this). I would read a whole biography of hers if it was expertly written, with an attention to detail on par with Doris Kearns Goodwin.
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| Elle Fanning as Shelley in Mary Shelley (2017) |
She’ll never not be fascinating to me because writing seemed to be only one part of her story. Considering that Byron burned the draft of his memoir because it was too lewd for public consumption, there is plenty to wonder what those three got up to that history doesn’t know. That is why I’ll always click on an article that’s about Shelley or her writing. For someone who is known explicitly for one novel, she inspires me endlessly. And the craziest part?
She was 18 when she wrote “Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus.”
I want you to stop and think about something for a moment. Don’t bring anyone else into this, just yourself. Okay, now that we’re focused on you, I want to ask you a serious question: what did you achieve by the time you were 18? I’m sure that most of your answers are something conventional that we’ve all done, like graduate high school, get a driver’s license, or get your first job. These are all admirable goals worthy of hanging on a wall of accomplishments. These are evidence of a life well-lived, moving towards successful life as an adult.
But seriously, did you do anything worth even a modicum of comparison to “Frankenstein”? I’m aware that there are those prodigies who have created art from a teenage perspective and made it timeless. Billie Eilish and Lorde are doing that right this moment. I’m sure you had your own personal form of expression, but I think that most of us will be lucky if we become local legends by that age. I was on the yearbook, creative arts, and newspaper staff at 18, but that was more of a collaborative effort that I owe more to the group than myself.
For me personally, my writing career has been modest at best and one that hasn’t really become what it could be until the past five years. I began self-publishing short stories at 25, a novel at 30. Comparing myself to Shelley is undeniable because deep down I want to be a writer who has something timeless in them.
However, I am way too critical of my 18-year-old self to have seen me getting there before I turned 20. I don’t know that many of us do. I think of many of our greatest authors and they are even older than I by the time they wrote a masterpiece. Every story comes in its own time, but I want to know what made Shelley so lucky, that she had a moment where the ideas poured out of her and changed how we see literature. You begin to envy her because of how well it taps into our youthful understanding of life and death as if she was the first Goth.
Then again, that is exactly the issue that I have with Shelley’s prose. Whereas I look at Stoker and see this person in control of his craft, “Frankenstein” feels basic in prose. It doesn’t make her bad. I was a worse writer at 18, lacking a self-awareness that makes hers work so much better. Even then, I compare it to other authors of the time like Louisa May Alcott and I see people who have a way of drawing me in better. Maybe I’m the issue, thinking that I’m reading a teenager’s novel, but it’s still very good for what it is. Maybe I’m jealous.
At the end of the day, I am thankful that this story exists and that it’s there to inspire so much conversation about what it means to be alive and play God. These are themes that continue to make me curious, questioning our existence within a palatable prism. The best of horror was never about what was scary, but confronting tough subject matter in a way that may open up something inside of you that is unexpected, making you reconsider the very fabric of your existence. For Shelley to have such a grasp of that at 18 is something that will never stop being impressive, especially since the novel remains just as essential today as it did then.
I’m thinking about Shelley because this week marks a special occasion for live theater fans. National Theater Live has been putting their shows on YouTube for free every week, doing numbers like Treasure Island and Jane Eyre. This week they’re doing Frankenstein, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating roles of Dr. Frankenstein and The Monster depending on what day you watch. I wanted to see it when it played in cinemas a few years back but was busy. Now that I have nothing else to do, I’m finally crossing it off my bucket list. If you want to see the latest adaptation of this great novel, then I encourage you to do the same.
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