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FRANKENSTEIN AS MORE THAN A HORROR STORY; OR, THE MONTY IN US ALL
Modern society views “horror” stories as involving ghosts, monsters, or horrific deaths. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, on the other hand, is a horror story that explores the dangers and fragility of the human psyche; it is “intellectual fiction” – that is, the work isn’t written simply for the storyline, but for the intellectual exploration of humanity and man’s surroundings. A contemporary work of intellectual fiction in the genre of Frankenstein is M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, which tells of an alien invasion of Earth. Just as Shelley uses the ubiquitous monster story to examine man and nature, Shyamalan uses the common alien invasion pretext to explore the faith of man. If Shyamalan wrote a book instead of a screenplay, and Karloffian movie was made from the book, the movie would focus on the horror of the alien invasion more than Shyamalan’s intended themes of the mutability of human faith and emotions. This superficial “interpretation” of Shyamalan’s work would be a parallel of how Karloff’s film focused on the monster, and threw Shelley’s themes out of the window. Miller is correct in suggesting that the horror films adapted from Shelley’s work do not resemble the novel Frankenstein, and that such debasing interpretations of the story have lead to cultural misconception about Shelley’s true horror.
Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a horror story derived from her own nightmares, but her version of horror deviates from perceptions of popular culture. The true horrors are that of Victor and man himself rather than the horrible monster. Victor’s unruly knowledge lead him to lose perception of his own limitations, as the ambition of “[his] sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body” (Shelley, 43) lead to “the beauty of [his] dream [vanishing], and breathless horror and disgust [filling his] heart” (43). The inhumanity of man also comes into play, as the reader sees the cruelty of the people the creature faces, making him think he is “a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned” (103). These thematic elements are not even cursorily discussed in many of the film adaptations because that is not what the films are intended to do. Shelley wrote a horror novel which she intended to scare people by showing them their own flaws and imperfections. The films, on the other hand, are supposed to draw large crowds of people to the theaters mainly in the interests of profit. In order to attract the most people, the producers of these films tend to condense Frankenstein’s storyline into its simplest form – man makes monster, monster becomes violent and kills many men.
Another main theme is handled very differently by the films: the condensation of this storyline shifts all the blame to the creature’s actions, and somewhat to “Henry,” “Victor,” or whatever its creator is named. Shelley’s novel, however, avails the possibility of humanity sharing the blame for the creation and its actions. This treatment of a creature who was harmless at the time may have incited an otherwise benign creature. The villagers made the creature feel “[his] heart sank within [him] as with bitter sickness” (117), and the man who shot the creature after he saved the girl’s life caused “the feelings of kindness and gentleness which [the creature] had entertained” (123) to be replaced by “hellish rage and gnashing of teeth” (123). These actions show that the creature wasn’t born as a killer, but was rather made that way – the creature is still very impressionable due to his age and lack of normal human contact.
One of Miller’s most important points is that Frankenstein is not a typical horror novel, it explores complex issues about the nature of man. Due to film adaptations of Shelley’s work that are intended to be more sensational that intellectual, popular culture has lost the true issues raised by Frankenstein, and instead identify it as a story of a mad scientist and his rampant, homicidal monster. In horror, many people tend to take the easy way out – they would rather be frightened by monsters than by themselves. Because of this, many times works such as Frankenstein are not construed as they should be. If people choose to forget the films and read Shelley’s work for what it is, they will realize Shelley’s true horror: they can be as monstrous as Victor’s creation. WORKS CITED
"Frankenstein" Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. 21 Jan. 2005. University of Virginia. <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-new?id=SheFran&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public>
