Headline, November 12 2025/ ''' WORLD FRANKENSTEIN WORKS '''

''' WORLD

 FRANKENSTEIN

 WORKS '''

IN THE TWO CENTURIES SINCE THE NOVEL '' FRANKENSTEIN '' was published - film adaptation after film adaptation has morphed Mary Shelley's creature into a monster fit for a haunted house attraction - brutish and green.

Audience expectations - like scar tissue that has built up over time, are now divorced from Shelley's vision, so much so that many think of '' Frankenstein '' as purely a horror story. It is not.

A new adaptation by Guillermo del Toro, which arrives on Netflix this weekend, must contend not just with the novel but with its cultural mutation. How will Mr. del Toro reconcile the creature Shelley created and the monster it has become?

The novel is awash in the grand and tempestuous emotions you'd expect to find in Gothic works, that  Romantic impulse that has heroes swooning, overcome with fevers repeatedly exclaiming, '' How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!''

It is not exactly the prose, the pace, the vibe we now associate with horror. Yet the horrors of '' Frankenstein '' are multiple. There is the more obvious physical horror of the creature - a mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch'' -

And the violent deaths that eventually follow once it confronts its maker. Harder to grasp and to film are the horrors of parental neglect and abuse that constitutes the novel's beating heart.

The mutation of the creature began with the 1931 film directed by James Whale, which established what we typically picture as Frankenstein's creation - he has a square head and bolts at the side of the neck -and rendered the creature mostly mute.

In an early scene, Dr. Frankenstein's hunchback assistant mistakenly steals a brain labeled ' abnormal ' from a lab for use in the doctor's creation. Thus, the creature in the film is marked as tainted from the beginning.

It cannot speak properly. It cannot think properly, it cannot function properly in society. In the film's telling, it can never be anything other than a monster that must be destroyed.

But though Whale's '' Frankenstein '' takes tremendous liberties, some of the novel's awful, its ruminations on family and trauma, endure. Shelley's novel establishes the agonizing harm caused to the creature when Victor Frankenstein abandons him.

The Whale film, though inviting audiences to gasp in horror, is truly notable because the sad eyes of Boris Karloff capture the creature's wounded pathos.

In an interview Karloff said his character was a '' lumbering, helpless creature '' and trapped '' in a strange and hostile world.''

Misery the creature explains in Shelley's novel, has made him a '' friend '' ; Karloff leaned into that air of misery.

Later adaptations, however, chipped away at the remaining humanity of the creature and focused more on all the blood and guts they could get away with.

Beginning in 1957 and all through the following two decades, Hammer film Productions released a series of movies in which a brilliant scientist repeatedly assembles a creature that erupts into mindless violence.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Great Novels, Movies and the World continues. The World Students Society thanks Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

She is the author of the novel '' The Bewitching '' and many other books. She has won the Locus,  British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards.

With most respectful and loving dedication to the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world - and then Leaders, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers.

See You all prepare for the Great '' Democratic Constitutional Convention '' on !WOW! : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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