Word: karloff
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Such speculation may seem lugubrious to those who know the monster only through Boris Karloff 's film impersonations or through such burlesques as the TV sitcom The Munsters and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. As this collection of twelve essays suggests, though, Mary Shelley's novel is a surprisingly open-ended source of disturbing, even terrifying implications. Its awkwardness and philo sophical uncertainties mark Frankenstein as the first and most powerful modern myth, not a pure Jungian river flowing through the collective unconscious but a polluted industrial spillway...
...Frankenstein is not simply a woman's revenge. It is not, in fact, simply any one thing. Beneath its rhetorical, overwritten surface, the novel moves as fitfully as a dream, allowing as many interpretations as there are willing interpreters. The classic Karloff films take only part of the story and twist that as well...
...Karloff's monster is stiff-jointed and barely verbal; Mary Shelley's monster is quick on his feet and can speak like a Romantic poet on an off night: "I will glut the maw of death until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends." Similarly, most popular dramatizations of the novel have singled out the Faustian side of Frankenstein's quest: the monster is his punishment for seeking too much power...
...film's frigidity. Prophecy is sexless.) The British can usually make funnier and more stylish horror films, because they're so good about being shocked: "A vampire you say? My word..." Here are a few of the most precious moments in horror history: Ernest Thesiger plying Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster with brandy and cigars; Carrie telekinetically crucifying her Jesus freak mother; Roy Scheider spooning fish entrails into the sea, prissily calling out to Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss "Why don't you guys shovel some of this shit?" and as he hits the last word, noticing this big shark...
DEWITT: You question with the truculence of many drugged Republicans. Why don't you walk back to your car? There's more in Boris Karloff's monster in Bride of Frankenstein than in Interiors. God, what a wheeze-bag bore. I was embarrassed for Woody Allen. Oooh, were those actors acting. Oooh, spilling their guts out into the camera, "I'm so empty I'm so depressed I've got so much anger in me Watch me crack up Boo-hoo isn't life depressing Look at those waves I'm gonna walk into the surf Whoosh whoosh crash splash...