Why Frankenstein is Still Scary

It is a good time for the Modern Prometheus. Though I sadly wasn’t able to get in to see it while there, one of the biggest hits at this year’s Toronto Film Festival was the long-awaited Guillermo del Toro adaptation of Frankenstein. For the man whose made the theme of monsters his bread and butter and whose debut feature Cronos was very Frankenstein-esque it seems a perfect pairing of filmmaker and subject. But he’s not the only one at the moment drawn to the classic literary creature. Maggie Gyllenhaal has her own revisionist take on the story called The Bride coming out early next year, which itself in its apparent feminist themes seems to be taking up the baton of another recent film that heavily owes a debt to the work, Poor Things. More than two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote her cautionary tale about playing god, her creation -much like Victor Frankenstein’s- is still so much more powerful than she could have imagined. We are still obsessed with it today.

Frankenstein doesn’t endure for no reason of course. Shelley’s novel -which it’s easy to forget was one of the first of that medium as we know it- was easily the most unique and provocative work of that age of gothic romance. That she came up with it at a party of her husband’s friends and easily put all of their horror stories to shame is just the cherry on top of the impressive brilliance of her insights and creative mind. It was chilling in the way of many of the best horror stories in that it was drawn as a theoretic extension of practices and attitudes of its time -indeed many in her time felt it was an entirely accurate prediction, that one day man would devise the power to reanimate corpses. And it also confronted humanity directly with their sins -it originated the idea in fiction at least of we being the architects of our own monsters. And that is perhaps the aspect of the story that is most consistently resonating as the centuries have gone by. It is not God or the natural elements or anything so peripheral that will be our doom, it will be the things that we ourselves have done. Shelley gleaned on to that and we have been captivated by that not untrue notion ever since.

There is that theological component to the story in the framed audacity of Victor Frankenstein to assume a role of creation that meant a lot to the horror of the time it was written in. In addition to everything else, he was a blasphemer -destined for Hell. The fear of eternal damnation was a common theme of gothic horror of that time, such as in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s 1796 book The Monk, where so much tension derives from the moral and sexual corruption of its titular character -the reader knowing exactly what to expect lies in wait for him on the other side. Sure enough, his ultimate fate comes at the hands of Lucifer himself and is quite graphic and horrible. No such Christian demon makes an appearance in Frankenstein, but the doctor’s work was understood by the readers of that time to be a perversion against God and nature. And that was a horrifying thing to grapple with. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect as the novel was received in its original time by its original audience.

Though deeper than that was another fear, a fear of the unknown -particularly in the science that Frankenstein exploits to create his creature. As major scientific discoveries and breakthroughs were happening in the nineteenth century, there had to have been something disconcerting in their mysteries to average people. Perhaps of note is that Shelley wrote the book in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, which was rapidly changing the landscape of the world, nowhere more bluntly than in Britain. Divorced even from religious connotations, what might innovation wreak on the world, or on the minds of those like Frankenstein in control of them?

But Frankenstein of course had no control, and that is another thing that haunted folks right from the start. His creature defies him, resents him for the bitterness of his existence -and perhaps some were even savvy enough to read in this monster a reflection of the faults of man himself, Frankenstein standing in for our species writ large. In Frankenstein’s creation there is any and every foul character of humanity, but there is also great pity and empathy for the pain and existential sadness he embodies -traits just as taboo as more violent or licentious ones. A creature that didn’t ask to be born but was forced into existence by a creator not thinking through the consequences of his actions -just as we are prone with our great vices. In both Frankenstein and his monster there are endless metaphors that fascinated the morbid curiosities of Shelley’s readers then through now. But the horror of ourselves seems a particularly pointed one, whether in the sense of who we really are, what are our actions constitute, or even where we are directing our future -and these have always been a critical part of the story’s terror that only reached new heights when it was allowed to be translated into other mediums.

Cinema of course was not the first, but it is what I know, so I won’t dwell on the various musical, stage, and operatic variations of Shelley’s novel that predated its first adaptations to film. But I’m sure they represented its horror in unique ways that still connected with the source, and the societal fears that were pressing at the times they were made. The first cinematic version of Frankenstein was a one-reel silent film made in 1910 for Edison Studios, with an honestly pretty interesting looking monster. But of course it was the one that came twenty-one years later that really brought the story back into the public limelight. One of the first films to really utilize the horror capabilities of the emergent sound era and that was so successful it kickstarted arguably the first big American movie franchise as we would recognize them today at Universal Studios.

1931’s Frankenstein is very quaint to modern audiences -there is hardly anything to it that would be considered scary to anybody living in the twenty-first century. And not just because the make-up and primitive special-effects of the film -it’s biggest technical novelties at the time- have been far outpaced since, but its dramatic style is so different from anything that would be made today. The silent era was still very recent at the time and thus there is a broadness to the performances that doesn’t entice anymore. It’s kind of funny actually to watch the film’s opening scene, in which actor Edward Van Sloan comes out from behind a curtain to warn audiences about the shocking spectacle they are about to see. And yet in the details of that introduction there is an invocation of the story’s classical horrors and their potential effect on the audiences of the Great Depression. "A man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God", Van Slaon says. "It deals with the two great mysteries of creation: life and death." A conscious appeal to those old horrors, still with some power in the 1930s, but director James Whale saw the story of Frankenstein and his creation as something else entirely, with a new lens for its horror.

It is not an uncommon theme, indeed it was one of the first things that came up in my university film theory class when we discussed Frankenstein at the start of semester that the film is intentionally or not (though likely intentionally) a metaphor for homosexuality. Whale was gay, and in both Frankenstein and his monster -each outcast and stigmatized in their own way- he saw analogues to himself and his predominantly closeted brethren. Frankenstein's monster is the easier symbol for this -he is a figure to be sympathized with in the misery of his existence. He is an innocent whom a child does not fear, and the terror of his actions is not in any way rooted in malice. It is stronger in the sequel, Bride of Frankenstein -the better movie which skews thematically closer to the book- in which his loneliness and seeking out acceptance is much more prominent. The sequence with the blind man is especially pertinent, providing him a brief sense of belonging and love. He is unequivocally a misunderstood victim of a society conditioned to fear him, and forcing Frankenstein to make him a Bride is an attempt at social heterosexual conformity. But it goes badly as even the Bride cannot bear him -it is futile to try to fit himself into so false a role.

The metaphor is perhaps more interesting in Dr. Frankenstein though (Henry Frankenstein for whatever reason in these movies), who himself also clearly doesn’t fit into traditional society. Actor Colin Clive was also gay, and that factors into the forced heterosexuality with his own love interest. In a sense, his creation of the monster is the ultimate expression of his identity; his subsequent shunning of it a tragedy of self-preservation. And yet he cannot escape the monster, who keeps coming back to him. In Bride of Frankenstein once again there is even more palpable sexual tension in the relationship he develops with Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) who essentially seduces him into working together to create the Bride -the taboo nature of this act together symbolic of gay sexual activity. The horror of these early Frankenstein movies that derived from the special effects, the make-up and the music -these don’t hold water anymore. Even the gothic atmosphere is relatively tame. But through this very potent queer lens, a more pervasive fear reveals itself -and it does not emanate from the monster or even Dr. Frankenstein, but the society and standards in which they are pressured to conform to, and to which they never can. It is the horror of an eternal struggle of gay liberation. “We belong dead” is the scariest line.

This was not the subject of fear by the late 1950s and the next major new film adaptation -this time in the U.K. under the brand new Hammer Horror banner. The Curse of Frankenstein as the 1957 movie was called was no closer to the source material than Universal’s film had been, taking the very interesting approach of making the Creature -played by Christopher Lee- almost incidental. He is even more of the mute lumbering brute than Boris Karloff had been -though with more gory effects in his make-up- and simply the tool of another’s violence. It is Victor Frankenstein himself, played by Peter Cushing, who is the subject of terror here.  The horror of the creation is removed from the equation almost entirely by writer Jimmy Sangster. The creator, his madness and ambition, is the only fearful thing. This is not a Frankenstein forced to seriously reckon with any consequences of his playing god -he doesn’t have the moral compass for it to matter -this being perhaps the starkest difference from Shelley’s novel. There’s always an idea that Frankenstein and not his creature is the real monster -this is indisputably true of Cushing’s iteration where Frankenstein is downright evil in his machinations. And indeed though it is the Creature who is often more ubiquitous with the story, he never appears in any of the sequels that Hammer produced with Cushing, the doctor himself made into the demented villain terrorizing people through his reanimated creations. But in this initial film the horror derives from the reaches of human nature -it is a very Cold War era Frankenstein movie. If the Creature is an avatar of the nuclear age (his appearance of flayed skin brings to mind those harrowing images of Hiroshima), he is a neutral figure -but it is the mankind that brought him about that is the true danger (Cushing’s Frankenstein does bear a passing resemblance to J. Robert Oppenheimer). One mad scientist might destroy the world -it is an idea present in some form in Shelley’s novel, the central theme of Hammer’s production.

Nearly forty years passed before another attempt at a Frankenstein adaptation was made, and that came courtesy of Kenneth Branagh, whose 1994 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was meant to be an equivalent to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992. By evoking the author in the title a certain fidelity was stressed, and indeed this was the first major Frankenstein movie to hew generally quite closely to the book, including for the first time the arctic expedition framing device and the creature evolving into a figure of intelligence and existential pathos. Branagh's movie is very stylized and psychological -he himself playing Frankenstein against Robert De Niro as the Creature- and in typical Branagh fashion he approaches the material like one of his Shakespeare adaptations, poetic and bombastic. The horror comes across primarily in the updated graphic visual effects -the film features the gnarliest-looking Creature of any Frankenstein movie. Yet efforts to evoke the story's classical fearful themes alongside this don't come to much, because Branagh's interpretations of those themes are very broad and abstract. The film is notably chaotic and bizarre in many of its artistic choices -which in spite of a general source loyalty feel more like a penny dreadful reinterpretation (and yet not so much so as the show Penny Dreadful) that lingers a lot in the operatic gruesome macabre, burying much of its symbolic meaning. There is a curious and weird sexual component to the fear this telling represents, but it overall fails to meet the moment and is thus a version of Frankenstein that doesn't inspire or comment on much fear.

Which is a marked failing of any adaptation -Frankenstein is always capable of being scary so long as the adapter knows how to harness it. It is not the literal story of a man creating a creature from the corpses of other men, it is the meaning behind it that matters. The anxieties that created the ideas in Shelley's mind have long been present in the world in different forms. And more than thirty years after the last cinematic translation of Frankenstein failed to address them, in walks Guillermo del Toro, who both understands the text deeply and how it relates to our own Promethean modern world.

Part of what makes del Toro's latest iteration, his Frankenstein, the most interesting at least since the 1930s movies is that he identifies simultaneously with the humanity of both protagonists as well as with the inherent horror and dread at the heart of the story's themes. He knows too well the varied Frankensteins in our own world whose creations have escaped their control -it is no coincidence his press tour for the film has featured several moments of his denouncing one such monster -A.I. I discussed already in my review how del Toro comments on the age of artificial intelligence through this film's metaphor, how he connects the two forms of thoughtless creation and the destructive power of the 'monster' if not treated responsibly. As expansion, such a comparison for a modern Frankenstein would be extraordinarily obvious to make. As something with the potential to alter our world (at least as the companies behind it want to make clear), A.I. is our latest monster to reckon with, created for audacity's sake -what good it has the potential to do dwarfed by the bad it has been in actuality put to. Rather than a new tool for scientific development or necessary menial labour, it has become most often a weapon of plagiarism, laziness, and dangerous misinformation, offering no value in the areas it is most often associated, and yet facilitating a real harm to humanity through gormless moneyed institutions. There is no pathos in A.I. as there is in Shelley's Creature, but there is the clarity it is shaped and corrupted by the toxic world it has been born into.

Del Toro's Frankenstein, as played by Oscar Isaac, is at times palpably similar to the CEOs of OpenAI, Meta, NVIDIA, and Google -his adult introduction, demonstrating his work to a panel of scientists reminiscent of those commercial presentations to stockholders touting the latest development in some app designed to stifle the human drive for ingenuity. His inability to understand the humanism of Elizabeth (Mia Goth), or to connect with her beyond some shallow notions of their intellectual compatibility speaks to these figures and their acolytes quite well too. And of course his impulse to destroy his creation once it evolves beyond the narrow limits of his control over it -how often has Elon Musk attempted to burn Grok over fact-checks that are unfavourable to him?

But it isn't just timely commentary. The implications of A.I. echo through the narrative of the story; and becomes more foreboding as a result. For however sympathetic as the Creature may be, he is intrinsically unnatural -so too is A.I. And though both may be ethically neutral, their environments and contexts feed into their worst impulses. There is something to the terror that Frankenstein expresses about the notion of making his Creature a mate, what the grander ramifications of that could be. Perhaps he has a modern analogue in Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘Godfather of A.I.’, instrumental in developing the technology who now warns of its existential risks. And both of course have a kindred spirit in the aforementioned Oppenheimer, who demonstrated a similar trajectory in his relationship to nuclear technology, which he originally imposed upon the world. The Creature is not A.I. -one cannot imagine A.I. being capable of such feeling and poetry, intelligence and originality. A.I. has not demonstrated any redemptive quality; but the danger it poses, and the human arrogance that brought it about is perfectly in sync with Frankenstein, both as del Toro chooses to present it, and as Mary Shelley always envisioned. And the starkness of that is becoming a scarier thing by the year.

Though it is a narrative set in the nineteenth century, Frankenstein has always been about the horrors of today -about whatever new precipice we are on in probing too deeply past our limits. We are still addicted to playing God and are not in any way as concerned as we should be about the result of that. We keep creating these monsters that then come after us, overturning the world in the process. And it is we not them that are at fault. The horror of Frankenstein is universal. The monster may not be the terror it once was but the act and audacity of his creation remains a frightful thing to grapple with. In our real life counterparts we are woefully ill-prepared to. The next Frankenstein will be just as relevant as this last, casting a light on some new example of our persistent hubris. Maybe it will be A.I., maybe it will be something else. Maybe it will be a judgement we have not the courage to rectify. Whatever it is, it will remain linked to those conversations Shelley was shrewd enough to have centuries ago, and which will continue to haunt the human soul for centuries to come. As scary as it ever was.

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