The Daemon and Me by John S. McFarland (Part II)

In Part I, John S. McFarland gave us a history of Mary Shelley's masterpiece, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. He explored what may have inspired her to write and the facts surrounding the science of resurrection via electricity.

Here, John talks about his personal feelings of her work, and how it has inspired his own. We'll be publishing John's collection, The Dark Walk Forward, on December 1, and you will certainly see Mrs. Shelley's influence in the prose and creativity of his stories.

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THE DAEMON AND ME (PART II)

My own connection to the Frankenstein story began, of course, with the movies. I was well-aware of the monster's image in popular culture as created by Jack Pierce at Universal Studios in 1931, long before I saw the classic film. As a young kid, I remember being unsure if the monster was supposed to be scary. "How did he get that flat head?" I wondered. I didn't actually see the film until I was about ten or eleven. It was one of those old hosted horror movie TV shows that used to be everywhere, like Monday Night Fright, Vampira, Zone 2, or Moona's Midnight Madness.

I was duly impressed with the original film. I loved the off-kilter old tower that Dr. Frankenstein used for his laboratory: the crooked stairways, the sloping walls, the ceiling beams, and the posts that supported them going at odd angles across the screen. Even as a kid I knew there was brilliance there, though I didn't know yet about sensitive director James Whale's debt to German Expressionist cinema. I loved Colin Clive's hysterical performance as Henry, rather than Victor, Frankenstein. It was the beginning of my impression that all characters inhabiting old monster movies no matter in what part of the world they were set, well as all characters in movies about Ancient Rome or Greece, had English accents. But most of all, I loved the monster.

1931 teaser poster for the film.

Everyone knows the story about how, after the success of Todd Browning's film Dracula, earlier in 1931, Bela Lugosi was offered the role of the monster in Frankenstein. Regarding himself as a newly-discovered matinee idol with a velvety voice, Lugosi passed on the role, not wanting to hide his assets under heavy makeup or inarticulate growls and wails. Lugosi regretted the decision for the rest of his life.

Although Boris Karloff was a bit player unknown to the movie-going public in 1931, he was well-known to fellow Brit James Whale. Karloff was 44 years old when he was "discovered" and given the role that would change his life.

If anyone could sell the portrayal of a resurrected corpse, it was the sallow, emaciated Karloff. Jack Pierce enhanced Karloff's sunken, angular features in his makeup design and added the topper of the flat head, thinking a mad scientist might form his creature that way to pop a new brain in or out, as needed. Slathered in makeup and given a script with no intelligible lines to speak, as an actor, Karloff had his work cut out for him.

Even now, his performance is amazing to me. Karloff's monster is spectral and menacing, of course. The scene where he is first introduced to Dr. Frankenstein's old mentor and fiancee, where he enters the dark room backwards and slowly turns around to three progressive closeups of his face, is a classic. That moment alone justifies hiring Whale as the film's director. It was the scene that gave my father, as a kid, and his older brother nightmares for weeks afterward.

But aside from horror and menace, Karloff conveyed so much more. He is a creature bewildered by his existence and his place in the world around him. He is a being who has just become self-aware, a stranger in a strange land needing guidance, understanding and tutelage, yet the one person responsible for his care and very existence immediately abandons him and all responsibility for his actions. With a few grunts, wails and snarls and a selection of facial expressions and bodily movements ranging from the menacing to the helpless, Karloff gave the inarticulate hulk an enduring humanity.

So, at age twelve or thirteen, it was time for me to go back to the source material and read the original novel. I found a Dell paperback edition at a local drugstore for forty-five cents. The novel proved to be a difficult read for an eighth-grader, and the narrative essentially unrecognizable as the story I had grown up with. In later years, I started to find it amusing that the early movie moguls, who were mostly poorly-educated immigrants for whom English was a second language, took classics of literature and "improved" them for movie audiences. Their goal was to make timeless stories more palatable to a wider audience. I guess one is hard-pressed to argue with the products of their storytelling instincts. The movies are iconic, after all. But I think it's valid to make that argument.

The film Frankenstein was, I found, such an incredibly simplified, paraphrased and re-imagined version of Mary Shelley's original conception, that I am not sure she would have recognized it or owned it. She may have justifiably felt that, cultural and nostalgic icon that it is, it still largely missed the point. And as I read the novel, slowly, deliberately, it occurred to me, the book had never been filmed as written. Every new iteration since 1931 seems to pretty much be an homage to the original film, not the book. I include Kenneth Branagh's 1994 version in that assessment by virtue of his depiction of the monster, even though he generally followed the original story more closely than most films that preceded it. And in my mind, the key to the efficacy of retelling this story lies in the deception of the monster: Mary Shelley's daemon.

The creature that Victor Frankenstein constructed was not just a revived corpse; it was truly an engineering marvel.

As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hinderance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of gigantic stature: that is to say, about eight feet in height and proportionally large.

So the skeleton and musculature, at least, had to be somehow made much larger than would be found in an average corpse available to the average monster-maker. "Average" bones and muscle would've been spliced together to enlarge them, or perhaps Victor Frankenstein came up with a more unsettling solution.

An illustration by Bernie Wrightson from his graphic novel, Frankenstein, depicting the creature's features and massive size.

I have never seen any treatment of the story subsequent to the original novel touch on one very salient detail:

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay...

And:

The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials.

"Tortured the living animal"? "The slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials"? The creature, Frankenstein's daemon, was partially constructed of animal parts! Cattle? Oxen? Dogs? Wolves? Apes? Mary doesn't specify. A human tibia or femur replaced by the larger bones of an ox would give a peculiarity to the look of the creature and his ability to walk that has never been hinted at in the movies. And all this piecing together would have resulted in hundreds of separate surgeries, inside and out, none of which would have begun healing until life was bestowed. The major sensation for the creature then, when he awoke, would have been pain. He would have felt searing pain from head to foot as his sutures pulled and stretched, began healing and probably became infected. A horrific welcome to the world.

A popular entertainment among the elite during the Romantic Age was the unwrapping of mummies. In her description of the creature, Mary compares him to a mummy, and says:

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whitness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contract with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

Having been hard at work piecing together his creation for months, it seems odd that Victor Frankenstein doesn't notice, until he animates his handiwork, that it is hideous. Appalled, he abandons his creature, regrets the decision his intellectual passion has taken him, and abdicates all responsibility.

This is where the story transitions from a speculative horror story to a tragedy on a level with Sophocles, Marlowe or Shakespeare. The creature is the only representative of his new species on Earth. He is completely innocent and inexperienced. Every sight and sound are a new and mysterious sensation. Seeking knowledge and guidance, protection and companionship, he is riven by the horror and disgust he inspires.

Victor's young brother William is murdered. Victor suspects his daemon has committed the act, but William's nanny, Justine Moritz, is hanged for the crime. Near Geneva, the creature encounters his creator on a mountainside. Victor is stunned to find that his horrific nemesis has become articulate and aware, learning language during his hidden observation of a peasant family. His awareness and even exceptional intelligence proves to be a more tragic state of existence than if he had been an insensate brute, because he understands and can lament, in great depth and dimension, the extent of his loneliness and isolation on Earth and the enormity of Victor's crimes against him.

My first reaction to the novel as I began to read it was dislike and dismissal. At first, I wanted it to be what I expected it to be when I started it: Carle Lammelle and James Whale's simplified synopsis of the story. Yet, I couldn't put the book down. I remember one day my family planning a picnic at a local state park. Instead of joining in that outing, I stayed in the sweltering car to read. At first, I didn't want an articulate monster, but it occurred to me that the reason I was so engrossed was because of the articulate monster.

As it turned out, Mary Shelley's new man, her daemon, her "monster" was one of the most articulate and self-aware creations of all literature in the Romantic Age. Not technically human, he was the synthesis of what it means to be human. No one suffered as he did, endured hatred or revulsion as he did, felt the pangs of loneliness as he did, nor the rage of having been wronged, as he did. No character in literature has ever been born fully formed into a mysterious and beautiful world, only to find their fate is to be driven from it... denied its joys, condolences and comforts.

These insights dawned on me as I finished the book as a kid and have stayed with me ever since. There was a complexity and dimension to the character of the creature, and the story, that I had never imagined. Film versions have never done it justice. I read an account a few years ago that celebrated brilliant horror director Guillermo del Toro was planning another remake of the novel. I have heard nothing more about this since. I would be intrigued to see if he stays true to the original tale, or decides, like many a predecessor, to "improve" it and make it more marketable to wider audiences. Wish I could say I was optimistic.

The gigantic Frankenstein sculpture in Guillermo del Toro's art exhibit, At Home With Monsters. Image by Alana de Haan.

As a writer of both mainstream and independent horror tales, there are a few characters I envy their creators for having invented. It would have been so incredible to have created Hamlet or King Lear. I would have been proud to have conceived Gabriel in James Joyce's The Dead, or Jay Gatsby, or O. E. Parker from Flannery O'Connor's Parker's Back. Even higher up on the list, though, are three brilliant creations: Huckleberry Finn, Hannibal Lecter, and, of course, Mary Shelley's Daemon.



~ John S. McFarland


Images (from top to bottom):
From Wikimedia Commons: "Style B" teaser poster for the 1931 film Frankenstein."
Boris Karloff in the makeup chair in 1931. Found online--unknown origin.
GIF of Karloff in the film Frankenstein.
Illustration by Bernie Wrightson from his graphic novel Frankenstein.

Comments

  1. I have always found Frankenstein more of a horribly sad story than a horror story. I was inspired by one of the last pages to create a blackout poem, which was published in the Visual Art section of the April 2020 issue of Sonic Boom. It can be accessed at https://sonicboomjournal.wixsite.com/sonicboom/archives , but you have to download the pdf from their archives.

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    1. Oh, yeah, this is KB Nelson commenting. Apparently I was signed in to a different account ;)

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    2. Hi KB! Thanks for sharing. I will take a look at that. I honestly have no idea what a blackout poem is, so this should be interesting!

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