Hello everybody and welcome back to our horror unit here in PLP 12. For this post we will be looking back at one of the most known horror stories out there. This being Frankenstein.

The first thing we did in this unit was read the original Frankenstein written back in the early 1800s by Mary Shelley. The book however being old, wasn’t too difficult of a book to read. It wasn’t one of my favourites to read as it was just a little bit slow paced. I never had the feeling of not being able to put the book down. All in all the book was alright. Moving away from my personal opinion on the book, the story really was not what I expected. We all know the story of some green monster with bolts in his head that goes around killing people. Before reading the story the only real image of Frankenstein I could think of was the monster being created from a lightning strike in the attic of some random house. Sure enough that really isn’t what the story is about. Frankenstein more than anything is about the question of what makes a human. Is the monster a human? He’s made out of them, he can walk and talk, and he has the same emotions as one.

While that question is a very interesting one to think about, that’s not what this post is about. The topic of this post is answering the question, who is the monster in Frankenstein? Sounds like an easy question to answer, because of course the creature often called “the monster” would be the monster. However, is he really? If you truly think about the question after reading the book and watching the original movie, there are a lot of points that say the monster isn’t actually the monster. Also to help stop confusion for the rest of this post I will be referring to Frankenstein’s creature as Bob. I don’t want to be calling something the monster while talking about who is the monster.

When reading Frankenstein lots of people seem to see that there are lots of parallels between both Frankenstein and Bob. They see Bob as a reflection of Frankenstein and that they are either both the monster or neither are the monster. I agree with this, Bob showed throughout the book that he generally acts very humanely. The main thing he does that classify him as the monster to many people, is the fact that he does go on a bit of a killing spree, trying to get revenge on anyone close to Frankenstein. However Frankenstein himself has done some very inhumane things, first of all creating a creature out of dead bodies. Frankenstein is generally ruled with grief and sadness throughout the book from all the people around him being killed. However, after a while he decided it was time for revenge. When Frankenstein unfortunately died during his pursuit of Bob, Bob was heartbroken. He truly showed that he was a human and had feelings for people. This is what makes it really hard to consider him a monster.

So who is the monster then? Well in my opinion, the book didn’t have a monster. Both Bob and Frankenstein were trying to get revenge on each other, and when one died the other was terribly sad. Therefore showing they were both human. Anyways, the 1931 movie of Frankenstein is a different story. First of all the movie changes the actual story a substantial amount, but I believe there is a monster in this adaptation. The monster isn’t Bob, nor is it Frankenstein, it’s the local village. My reasoning behind this is as follows, if a group of people form a mob, trap a creature in a building with no exit, and burn it down, that’s a monster. Simple as that. Other reasons that Bob isn’t the monster is because his actions in the movie are the only way he knows. Something that’s different from the book and the movie is that in the movie Bob gets given the brain of a criminal. This action is trying to make the story about Bob being the monster. However in my opinion the fact he had an abnormal brain gives me more empathy to Bob.

The last movie we watched in class was Gods and Monsters. I was sick during the watching of this movie and therefore missed most of it, but that doesn’t stop me from having opinions on it. This movie wasn’t actually about Frankenstein or Bob, rather it was about the director of both the original Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein James Whale. James was openly gay, which was not something many people came out as at the time. The movie is about his relationship with his gardener who very much wasn’t gay, and was in fact homophobic. Throughout the movie we saw many flashbacks from the mind of James. Many of them portraying him as our before mentioned Bob. However later in the movie when James passes away, it happens in a sort of flashback where Bob is carrying him to his grave, however it’s actually the gardener carrying him out. Which makes it seem as though the movie is trying to push that homophobic people are monsters.

Overall these were all generally interesting stories to read and watch. They’ve taught me a lot about horror and the director of a horror film. This information will be very useful over the upcoming weeks as we move into the production of our class wide horror film. Check back for a post on that in the near future.