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monster could no longer lurk in the psyche or within linguistic gaps.
She goes on to compare the original Universal features with the later
TriStar Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where she echoes Derrida’s language
in describing the monstrous, calling the creature “child-like,” but adds
that this humanizes the creature (26). Picart notes, however, that this
humanization is quickly eschewed by filmmakers when they transform
the monster into a horror icon:
[T]he Universal series ends up transforming the creature
into a mindless automaton—a standard horror prop that is
momentarily resurrected, only to enact a ritualistic chase and
destruction by an angry mob. By the end of the Universal series,
the Frankenstein monster simply becomes one of a coterie of
horrors, inclusive of Count Dracula and the Wolfman; worse,
it becomes a sick and inferior monster not only physically but
mentally. (26-27)
This depiction of the monster is an obvious contrast to Shelley’s depiction
in the novel. The easy answer is that the movie is much more interested in
presenting a physical terror than a psychological one.
Picart’s is a fascinating juxtaposition. The very thing that allows us to
sympathize with the monster is the very thing that causes us to recoil in
horror. These binaries are so tightly related, they seem conjoined. While
the clumsy awkwardness of Whale’s monster—its childlike behavior—
can be endearing, it can also be frighteningly unpredictable, resembling
an out-of-control toddler. However, in this case, the infant cannot be
overpowered or put under our control: very like a wild beast. Therefore,
our fear of the monster is a fear that not only stems from the unknowable
but also encompasses a fear of what we cannot control—and in language,
this is a truism: we cannot be precise with our meaning, and the more
words we use to articulate a particularity, the more we lose control of the
growing number of referents.
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The fear of an out of control monster run-amok is just one of the fears
lurking within the empty referent. However, the abundance of horror
apparent in the myth is rife with opportunities for co-opting. As Paul
O’Flinn argues, the twentieth century adaptations of “Frankenstein” were
the product of a complex collision of political values: those of its capitalist
backers, the intellectual concerns of the artists involved, and, of course,
the broad audience whose “populist” interests the film could not avoid
addressing (34). The novel’s own empty referent is co-opted to become a
political narrative; the absent body of the monster is substituted with the
body politic of twentieth century America. O’Flinn notes that “there are
no immutable fears in human nature to which horror stories always speak
in the same terms … rather those images need to be repeatedly broken up
and reconstituted if they are to continue to touch people” (34). Broken up
are many of the images of the novel, a good deal of which are the depiction
of the monster. The silent lumbering beast replaces the articulate creature
of the novel, who, in the Whale film, instead of being given a voice is
accidentally given the “abnormal” brain of a criminal. Zakharieva argues
that the “anthropological features—large, flat-domed skull, sinking black
water eyes, long clumsy hands, and large stumbling legs—define it in
terms of ‘savageness’ or debility conceived by those racial theories” (420).
This post-colonial articulation, an instance of the film’s co-opting of the
previously undisplayed body of the monster, is quite a common use of the
monster-gap problem, which becomes a representation of the political.
The historical-political implications for O’Flinn are that the horror
of the inhuman(e) monster’s murderous tendency reflects the insecurities
of a Depression-era United States on the verge of entering an enormous
war in Europe, what he calls an “intervention in its world rather than just
a picture of it or a retreat from it, a practice whose extent is marked out by
a reconstruction of the text” (38). This engagement is little more than a
usurpation of the monster’s body, a forceful repurposing that glosses over
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