Word: shelleys
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...slathed in what appears to be Freddy Kruger's discarded latex--demands comparison to Boris Karloff"s popular 1931 interpretation of the monster. The Brattle Theatre's current series, "The Monster Within," provides an opportunity to re-examine Karloff's nifty neck bolts, and several films inspired by Mary Shelley's myth. Each presents a version of Shelley which contributes in various ways to our understanding of her classic work...
...fantasy of the Karloff film, the world surrounding her begins eerily to echo the film. It often resembles a dark version of "Cinema Paradiso," stressing the importance of the child's imagination in creating her personal world. The 1977 new wave classic Eraserhead subjects a version of Shelley's myth to the vision of its own demented genius--none other than David Lynch. The film is an hallucinatory ride through the disturbingly strange visions of the disturbingly normal Henry Spencer (James Nance). Finding himself briefly with a wife, Henry feels obligated to care for the creature which is the alleged...
...original inspiration for all these celluloid Frankensteins is James Whale's 1931 film which in fact takes only minimal plot elements from Mary Shelley's novel. Karloff's monster stands out in a production which is in many ways simply a Hollywood fluff treatment of the story. This time around, the handsome Dr. Frankenstein animates a monster who terrorizes the countryside, and Frankenstein's lovely fiancee, until he is hunted down and dies in a bizarre finale sequence at a windmill...
...incredible variety of Frankenstein films points to the richness of Shelley's text, and its uncanny ability to inspire horror. The novel is surprisingly unassuming, the first work of a 19 year-old writer who was to have few other lasting successes. But it is powerfully midwifed by the godfathers of the Romantic movement, Lord Byron and Percy Blythe Shelley, and Mary Shelley's own traumatic family experiences. The frustrations of her position--her selfimposed exile with the radical, and still-married, Shelley, her confinement in the home and her failed pregnancies--are expressed in the passion with which...
...Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein is a man obsessed with the discovery of knowledge at any price, committed to the exploration of charlatanry, if necessary, to learn all the secrets of the natural world. He is above all completely self-absorbed, unable to see beyond the experiment at hand. His monster is the product of an inevitable sequence of events: he believes reanimation is possible, and works maniacally until it is achieved. The Frankenstein films have been less successful than Shelley in defining his motive for creating inhuman life. Branagh chooses to make the death of Victor Frankenstein's mother...