This is a rant I wrote in 2019 when I was writing a diary style blog. I kind of lost interest in the blog after a few family tragedies and I found it hard to write something positive. But this rant was one of my favourite things I wrote for it. So I thought that I would start the reviews and memory awaking through cinema with this piece about James Whale’s two Frankenstein films. Enjoy. 

While I was working today, I watched two classic Universal horror films, Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, both directed by James Whale. Hey, I work from home, it’s one of the perks. Anyway, these two films are much treasured favourites. Like old friends, no matter how long since you’ve seen them, you instantly fall into a comfortable repour.

I always felt for the monster in these glorious black and white films. Stitched together from the parts of murders and thieves, born in great pain, outwardly deformed, immensely strong, and unnaturally big. The very image of a monster. Yet inside he was a kind and gentle soul looking for his place in the world that didn’t understand him and a world he didn’t understand. And as the old adage goes, the villagers feared what they didn’t understand. That fear made him the monster they saw him to be.

I have always loved the character ever since the first time I saw these films when I was in high school. Back then it was before the lost footage was edited back in and the films were re-released. The way James Whale and Boris Karloff (with a little help from Jack Pierce the make up man) presented the monster spoke to me as a teenager filled with teenage angst and hormones. I am sure others felt the same way when they first watched Frankenstein. These films gave me a love of the odd, the different, the discarded, the weird, the lost and the freaks. They became my people. Still are.

Close to the end of the second film, The Bride of Frankenstein, I found myself pausing my work and staring intently at the screen. It was the part where the monster and the bride first see each other. The monster, desperate to love and be love, to find someone like himself, reaches out with a hopeful smile, full of wonder at what his creator had made and compassion for the creation. She looks at him blankly at first, then she screams in horror. The monster had finally found that one other freak like himself and she didn’t want him either.

Doctors’ Frankenstein and Pretorius sit the bride down next to the monster. The monster gently strokes her hand smiling like a child at Christmas. She recoils from him into the arms of Dr. Frankenstein. This also brought up memories of old sitcoms where the female lead’s mother wants her daughter to marry a doctor, instead of becoming one herself. And if there is a sitcom out there revolving around a Dr Frankenstein, his creations, and there on going adventures, I so need to watch it.

All the emotions that I have felt over my lifetime concerning loss, longing, heartache, rejection, depression and the tragedy of life being the oddball round peg in a square world came rushing in at me like a hurricane. I felt all of it. Fear, rage, loneliness and hopelessness.

By the time the monster proclaims, “We belong dead” and pulls that one leaver that destroys the laboratory and the castle (weird how that was there), I was in tears. Ugly, blubbering tears that hurt my stomach muscles and robbed the air from my lungs. It has been I very long time since something has affected me like that and allowed me to release that kind of emotion. In that moment, if consumed me. When I came out the other side, I felt a thousand times better than I had in ages. For this, I thank James Whale and Boris Karloff for giving me these films.

Its one of the reasons I love horror films.