Monsters: The narrative of Frankenstein has undergone constant transformations. It trembles, fluctuates and makes metamorphoses, just as does its creature in the midst. Frankenstein has grown to be more than just a book; it originated from the candlelit dream that Mary Shelley envisioned in 1816 and evolved into the shadows on the silver screen, which transformed the monster into a global legend. Now, it represents a living ethical mystery that will never die. And perhaps the most troubling thing related to it is the fact that the monster is never a mere monster. It is a mirror. And it stares back.
And what makes Shelley’s novel chilling is not because it talks of lightning or laboratories, but because it daringly suggests: What do we get when ambition precedes responsibility? When reason is not united to pity?
Her Victor Frankenstein is not the mad cluck of the early movie but a troubled young man, weak, scared, and brilliant enough to crack. The monster is not the mute, humpbacked, wandering brute seen on the movie posters; he is eloquent, pained, and desires to be just like us. Violence is no source of tragedy; denial is. Is an author prepared to jeopardise both his own reputation and his artistic endeavours? Lovesick and learns the language of hate too early.
But when this story was transferred to the screen, the most mythical version of the story, being that of James Whale in 1931, something really great happened. The monster lost his philosophical monologues and received another kind of horror. Bolt-necked and heavy-footed, he had now become the figure of the century to haunt Halloween. Cinema gave him a new body and stole away his voice. The visual triumphed over moral terror. The appearance of the monster, rather than his abandonment, stunned the audience. Even behind that mythic make-up, though, the question that Shelley had brought up was still smouldering: Who is the monster we fear — the being or the civilisation that created him?
The page-to-screen conversion is not taking hold due to the differences, but due to the tension brought by them. The novel babbles, the movies wail. Shelley and Hollywood creatures are seeking an end. In between the two, the audience are exposed to the allure of what lies below; something is wrong, but we are not quite sure what.
Frankenstein is not a novel of a body that has been stitched together and brought to life. It is worrying about all the inventions that we unleash before we are aware of them. Whatever the ambitions that are surpassed by their morality. Whenever we drive out what we cannot bear to face of our personalities.
The films have been insane, all decades long — the trembling hands of Victor, the raving eye, the craziness that overtakes him. Yet it is not his madness only. We witness him transverse boundaries of nature when we understand that we are equally inhabiting the world where the creation has become so far beyond our perception: artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and weapons that can be produced within the heartbeat. Frankenstein has become an oracle disguised as a horror.
And the monster? He endures. On page, he is a foundling son of an irresponsible soul. He is the misunderstood giant trapped in a world that does not want to be like everybody on the screen. In both of them he is a tutor. That monstrosity is not frequently born; it is created. Worked up by apathy, polished by cruelty, emancipated by vanity.
Frankenstein asks us to take a second glance, to look higher, and, saddest of all, to look inside oneself 200 years after the horror that initially roused Shelley into alertness. The sewn skin, or the scream of the animal, is not so terrifying. What is left behind is a moot question:
And what have we made — and what can it do for us?