ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author aims to consider what is probably the most famous horror story, Frankenstein. She begins with Mary Shelley's 1818 masterpiece, then contrasts it with two prominent film versions—the James Whale Universal Studios classic and the recent major studio effort directed by Kenneth Branagh, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Most Frankenstein movies are so clear about the Creature's horrible hideousness, violence, and repulsiveness that he has become one of our defining cultural icons of monstrosity. The author explores the role of gendered concepts in Frankenstein as they are related to contemporaneous notions of art, science, nature, the unnatural, and the monstrous. Frankenstein reflects a number of developments of, and reactions to, the Scientific Revolution. The central theme in any mad-scientist story like Frankenstein concerns the proper boundaries of science and human rationality, or the scientist's relation to nature. The early 1931 Frankenstein features the best-known and iconic monster as played by Boris Karloff.