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Welcome back to the introverted obelisk.
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I'm Obi Knox, and today we're heading back to 1931, for a movie that's been copied, parodied, and turned into Halloween decorations so many times that you can recognize almost anything associated with it without ever actually sitting down to watch it.
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You know the flathead, the neck electrodes, the laboratory full of sparking electrical equipment, and of course the cry of, it's alive.
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Somewhere in your memory, there's probably also a hunchback named Igor wandering around carrying a brain, although we'll straighten out that particular piece of cultural confusion a little later.
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The actual Frankenstein is considerably stranger and sadder than the collection of pop culture memories that grew around it, because beneath all the lightning and the grave robbing is the story of a man who becomes obsessed with creating life and apparently spends no time considering what he's supposed to do with it once he succeeds.
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Frankenstein was released by Universal in 1931, the same year the studio had already found enormous success with Dracula.
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James Whale directed from a screenplay credited to Garrett Ford and Francis Edwards Faro, with the film drawing not only from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, but also from the stage adaptations that came between Shelley's book and the Universal movie.
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Colin Clive stars as Henry Frankenstein, Mae Clark plays his fiancee Elizabeth, John Bowles is Victor Moritz, Edward Van Sloan plays Dr.
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Waldman, Dwight Fry is Henry's assistant Fritz, and Boris Karloff, of course, plays The Monster, and the performance that would change his entire career and give popular culture its dominant image of Frankenstein's creation.
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Now, Bella Legosi had been connected to an earlier version of the project, when Robert Flory was expected to direct, but that version never became the Freienstein we're actually watching.
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The exact story of Lagosi's departure has accumulated enough conflicting anecdotes over the decades that I'm not gonna confidently put some dramatic declaration about refusing to play a scarecrow into his mouth.
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What we do know is that Whale eventually took over, Karloff became a monster, and Universal apparently didn't realize quite how memorable he'd be because the opening cast list identifies the actor playing the monster with nothing more than a question mark.
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Karlov's name finally appears in the closing credits, but by then the mystery had pretty much solved itself.
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A huge part of the monster's instantly recognizable appearance actually came from makeup artist Jack Pierce, whose work with Karloff produced the flattened skull, heavy eyelids, and neck electrodes that became permanently associated with the character.
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Mary Shelley's creature doesn't look like this, but the image Will Pierce and Karloff created became so culturally dominant that it effectively replaced the original description in the popular imagination.
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I mean, you can draw a square head, add a couple of electrodes to the neck, and somewhere a six-year-old will immediately know who you're talking about.
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Now the remarkable thing is that Karloff's performance survives the iconography.
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The makeup is what you notice first, but watch his eyes and hands, and you'll find the character underneath it.
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Karloff doesn't have dialogue to explain what the monster is thinking, so everything has to come through movement, expression, and reaction.
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Jack Pierce gave us one of the most famous faces in horror history, while Karloff gradually makes us feel sorry for the creature who's actually wearing it.
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Now, before we meet him, however, Universal gives us one of my absolute favorite pieces of old-fashioned horror showmanship.
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Edward Van Sloan, who had played Van Helsing in Dracula, and appears here as Dr.
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Waldman, steps in front of a curtain and warns the audience that what they're about to see may shock and even horrify them.
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And I have to say I love the timing because Universal had already sold you the ticket, got you in the theater, put your butt in the seat, before ever mentioning that perhaps, you know, maybe you're not emotionally prepared for the evening.
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Well, at that point, nobody's leaving because let's face it, you just made this movie sound amazing.
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Well, once the final warning is finished, we move to a graveyard where Henry Frankenstein and his assistant Fritz are watching a funeral.
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And let me just tell you, they aren't there to pay the respects, because in reality, they're actually waiting for everybody else to leave so they can dig the body up, which establishes Henry's current relationship with, you know, medical ethics.
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So Henry and Fritz need human remains for an experiment.
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So the newly buried corpse is only one part of their evil.
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They also cut down the body of a criminal from a gallows, but come to find out that brain can't be used, thus leaving Henry in need of a replacement.
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Fortunately for them, there's a medical school nearby with brains available for demonstration, and Henry sends Fritz to steal one.
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The classroom contains two specimens, one normal and one abnormal.
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And I'd like to emphasize that they are both clearly labeled.
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Nobody has set Fritz a puzzle.
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So he reaches for the normal brain, drops it, the jar shatters, and then he finds himself facing a pretty straightforward employment decision.
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Return to Henry and admit that there's been, you know, an unfortunate brain-related accident, or quietly grab the abnormal brain and hope the difference never comes up.
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Well, Fritz chooses the second option, which means a substantial portion of Universal Horror history now depends on one employee's unwillingness to tell his supervisor that he dropped something.
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While Fritz is dealing with quality control, Henry's fiance, Elizabeth, is becoming increasingly concerned about the man she's supposed to marry.
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You see, Henry has become withdrawn from ordinary life, and is isolating himself in an old watchtower where he can work without interference, thus leaving Elizabeth with very little idea of what he's actually doing.
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Now she knows enough to realize that whatever has consumed him isn't normal.
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So she and Victor Moritz seek help from Henry's former professor, Dr.
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Walden, who knows enough about Henry's work to share their concern.
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Henry's become obsessed with creating life from dead tissue.
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And he's not trying to resuscitate someone who had just died either.
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Old Boy is trying to assemble an entirely new human body from pieces and intends to bring it to life.
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By the time Elizabeth, Victor, and Waldman reach the laboratory, Henry isn't interested in being talked out of anything.
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He's straight up ready to demonstrate that the impossible thing everyone has warned him about is in fact possible.
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And this is where Colin Clive becomes essential.
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Henry doesn't behave like a calm researcher approaching an experimental breakthrough.
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No, Colin Clive plays him with a feverish intensity.
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As though Henry has spent so long obsessing over this moment that he's barely holding himself together now that it's finally here.
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And the experiment has stopped being merely scientific, because Henry needs to prove that the limits everyone else except do not apply to him.
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Kenneth Strickfaden's electrical equipment gives that obsession the laboratory it absolutely deserves.
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The enormous coils, spinning machinery, electrodes, and electrical arcs became almost as important to the cinematic Frankenstein image as the monster himself.
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And Henry's workspace looks less like something you'd conduct a controlled experiment in, rather than a cathedral built in honor of electricity.
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Apparently no piece of scientific equipment in this building is functioning correctly, unless it's, you know, humming, spinning, or throwing sparks at something.
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Well, Henry raises the body into the storm, while the machinery erupts around him.
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And when the table descends, everyone watches until the monster's hand finally moves.
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And when doing so, Henry erupts with joy, because the impossible thing he has absolutely devoted himself to has happened in front of witnesses, and his famous declaration that the creature's alive quickly escalates into his realization that he now knows what it feels like to be God, though that part was removed from the film.
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But I gotta say that reaction tells us almost everything we need to know about Henry at this moment.
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He's thinking about what the experiment proves about him, not about the being who has just taken his first breath.
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Henry has crossed the boundary between studying life and creating it.
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But he spent so much time imagining the moment of success that he hasn't prepared himself for the responsibility that begins immediately afterward.
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Whale introduces the monster much more quietly than he introduces the experiment.
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The creature backs through a doorway before turning toward the camera, and the camera moves closer till we're staring directly into the face that audiences would spend the next ninety years imitating.
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There isn't an attack or some grand entrance, because Whale simply lets us just look at him.
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And this gives Karloff the opportunity to start separating the actual character from the monster everyone around him assumes they've created.
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And one of the most important moments comes when Henry brings the monster into a room and opens a section of the ceiling.
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Light starts pouring down and the monster looks upward before slowly raising his hands toward it.
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He does not understand what he's seeing, but he feels drawn to it.
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And when Henry closes the opening again, the monster continually reaching toward the disappearing light.
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Before we've watched him deliberately harm anyone, we've seen him discover something beautiful and then have it taken away from him.
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Now, unfortunately, Fritz remains part of the educational program.
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He discovers that the monster is frightened of fire and responds to this useful information by tormenting him with a torch.
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Somewhere between stealing the wrong brain and deliberately terrorizing the result of Henry's experiment, Fritz's animal performance review has become extremely difficult to fend.
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The monster eventually lashes out and kills him, giving Henry and Waldman the violent behavior they feared while also raising the uncomfortable question of what exactly they'd expected after chaining a newly created being in a dark room and allowing someone to repeatedly frighten him was one of the things he fears the most.
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Henry and Waldman sedate the monster, and this is where Henry's grand achievement begins turning into an inconvenience.
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The man who was willing to rob graves and defy the natural order to create life now becomes considerably less enthusiastic once that life requires care, patience, and even responsibility.
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Henry withdraws while Waldman decides that the monster should be destroyed, and basically prepares to dissect him.
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But the creature awakes before he can do it, kills Waldman, and escapes into the countryside.
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In the brief period since coming to life, the monster has restrained, tormented, drugged, nearly cut apart, and so I gotta say his first experience of freedom also happens to be his first experience without someone standing over him trying to control him or even hurt him.
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Well, that freedom leads to the movie's most famous and, let's be very honest here, tragic encounter, when the monster finds a little girl named Maria sitting beside a lake.
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Maria isn't frightened because she has no idea she's supposed to be frightening.
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She invites him to sit with her and shows him how she's tossing flowers onto the water and watching them float.
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And the monster quickly understands enough of the game to join her.
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It's a very simple scene, but it's probably the clearest demonstration of what the creature has been missing.
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Because Maria approaches him with patience instead of fear.
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She shows him something, he watches and he then learns.
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Well, when they run out of flowers, the monster tries to continue the game by picking Maria up and throwing her in the lake, expecting her to float as the flowers did.
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She doesn't.
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And his reaction makes it clear that he understands immediately that something has gone terribly wrong, even though he doesn't understand why.
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He isn't angry with Maria, and he doesn't intend to kill her.
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In fact, she's probably the first person he's genuinely enjoyed being around, but he's physically enormous, tremendously strong, and mentally new to a world no one has, you know, taking the time to bother to explain to him.
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The abnormal brain suddenly feels much less useful as an explanation for everything that happens.
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Henry has created a living being with enormous physical strength, and almost no understanding of consequences.
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And then the people responsible for him teach him very little beyond fear and violence.
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Maria shows us, although albeit briefly, that he can observe, imitate, and respond to kindness, but neither of them understands the dangers created by the difference between his intentions and his strength.
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Well, we cut to Maria's father eventually carrying her body through the village while everyone else happens to be celebrating, and this image changes the entire mood of the story.
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Whatever Henry created in his lab is no longer a private experiment that can be hidden in a tower, because let's face it, a child is dead.
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And the village wants whoever killed her.
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Henry joins the search for his own creation, which finally forces him to deal directly with consequences that, you know, aren't exactly as exhilarating as raising a table into a lightning storm.
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Henry eventually encounters the monster, and their struggle leads them to an abandoned windmill, where the creator and creation end up facing each other without the machinery, professors, or assistants that surrender the original experiment.
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The monster carries Henry upward during the fight and throws him from the structure.
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Henry thankfully survives the fall, but the villagers surround the windmill with the monster trapped inside and set it on fire.
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Turning the creature's established terror of flame into the very means of his own destruction.
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There's a very grim symmetry to that ending because one of the first things the monster learns about the world is that you know fire hurts, thanks to Fritz waving a torch at him.
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And his final experience is being trapped inside an entire burning building while the village watches from outside.
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The movie has repeatedly shown people responding to something they don't understand with fear and violence, and the windmill becomes the largest possible version of that response.
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Henry, meanwhile, again, has survived, and is in fact returned home to recover with Elizabeth while his father celebrates the continuation of the Frankenstein family line.
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There's something almost jarring about how quickly ordinary life reasserts itself around Henry.
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He gets his home, his family, and the possibility of a future, while the life he dragged into existence has apparently ended screaming instead of burning windmill.
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That's where Frankenstein becomes much more interesting, at least to me, than you know, just the simple warning about scientists who go too far.
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Henry's great sign of experiment isn't a failure because it works perfectly well in the sense that you know Henry initially cares about.
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He assembles a body from dead tissue, brings it to life, and proves that something everyone considered impossible can in fact be done, but his failure begins once the hand starts to move.
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Henry spends so much time asking whether he can create life that he never seriously considers what he will owe that life if he succeeds.
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The monster wakes without language, experience, or understanding anything of the world around him.
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Yet almost everyone immediately expects him to behave as though he already knows its rules.
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When he's confused, he's restrained.
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When he's frightened, Fritz frightens him more.
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When he becomes dangerous, Henry withdraws and Waldman decides to destroy him.
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The first person who simply sits down and tries to share something with him is in fact the little girl beside a lake.
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And for a few minutes we see a completely different possibility.
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And I don't know, if you ask me, I think that's the tragedy that Karloff finds inside the monster.
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Their creature becomes dangerous and people absolutely die because of it.
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So, you know, sympathy doesn't require pretending otherwise.
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But Whale and Karloff never let us forget how little agency he had in becoming what he is.
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I mean again, he didn't ask Henry to make him, he didn't choose the body assembled for him, he didn't choose the brain Fritz stole, and certainly didn't choose to spend his first days learning that, you know, other people are likely to chain, threaten, and hurt you.
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Karloff communicates all of this without any dialogue.
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The monster reaches toward the light, tells us something about him, as does his delight with Maria and his terror of fire.
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Jack Pierce gives Karloff one of Cinema's most frightening faces, and Karloff spends the rest of the movie finding ways to make us look through it at a creature who doesn't understand why the world keeps responding to him the way it does.
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That sympathy also separates Frankenstein from Dracula.
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Even though the two films arrived from Universal in the same year, and helped establish the studio's great horror cycle, Dracula understands what he is and knows exactly what he's doing to the people around him.
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Karloff's monster barely understands the world he's been dropped into, which means the fear comes from a completely different place.
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One monster enters the story with centuries of knowledge and purpose, while the other enters it with essentially nothing.
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So the film's influence is so enormous that nearly a century of sequels, cartoons, costumes, and parodies have created this, I'd say, a more popular version of Frankenstein that doesn't actually entirely exist in this movie.
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The most obvious example is Henry's assistant, because the man helping him rob graves and steal brains is Fritz, not Igor.
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The Universal series eventually does give us an Igor in Son of Frankenstein, where Bella Lagosi plays him, but he isn't Henry's hunchback laboratory assistant, and he certainly isn't wandering around this movie waiting for someone to ask him to pull a switch.
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The familiar Igor became a kind of cultural composite built from different characters and later adaptations.
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Then we get the eternal question of the name.
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And oh boy, this is a hot topic.
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Frankenstein is Henry Frankenstein, while Karloff is credited as the monster.
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Calling the creature Frankenstein has nevertheless been common for so long that I feel like correcting somebody at a Halloween party is now less a defense of literary accuracy, more so than a decision about how badly you want to continue the conversation.
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And let's face it, the movie itself already makes the names confusing enough because we have Mary Shelley's scientist is Victor Frankenstein, while Universal changes him to Henry and gives the name Victor to a completely different character.
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The creature's appearance changes just as dramatically because Shelley's description doesn't give us the flat skull and the neck electrodes that everybody recognizes.
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And in fact, those belong to Universal's interpretation.
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And the fact that they're now almost inseparable from the word Frankenstein tells you how completely this film took possession of the story in pop culture.
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The lab became just as influential, if you ask me.
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I mean, mention a mad scientist bringing something to life, and chances are you're picturing electrical coils, lightning, machinery, and a table being raised toward the ceiling.
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Kenneth Strickfaden's equipment helped establish a visual language for the science that filmmakers would return to for decades.
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While Wales' staging turned Henry's experiment into something closer to almost a religious ceremony than a medical procedure.
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All of that iconography can make it easy to overlook how sad the movie underneath it is.
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The monster has become a Halloween mascot, but the character Karloff actually plays spends much of Frankenstein confused, frightened, and reacting to people who decided what he was before giving him any opportunity to become something else.
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I mean, let's face it, his first instinct when exposed to light is to reach toward it.
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And when Maria offers friendship, he responds to friendship.
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Those moments don't erase what happens afterward, but they do make it impossible to dismiss him as something that emerged from Henry's laboratory already evil.
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I'd say Henry's mistake isn't simply ambition, and I don't think the movie becomes nearly as interesting if we reduce it to, you know, science went too far.
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The experiment itself is extraordinary.
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I mean, I will point that out, and I have to agree.
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Henry discovers something nobody else believes possible, and then he does it.
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The moral disaster comes from treating creation as the finish line when it's actually the beginning of his responsibility.
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He wants the movement when the hand moves, he wants the lightning, the machinery, and the satisfaction of proving everybody wrong.
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What he hasn't prepared for is the much less glamorous work of teaching the being on the table what light is, why fire hurts, why other people can be harmed, and what it means to live among them.
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Henry wants to be a creator without becoming a caretaker, and the monster pays for the difference.
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I feel that's why Maria's scene remains the heart of the movie.
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She doesn't perform some elaborate experiment or possess knowledge that science lacks.
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She simply treats the monster like someone capable of learning, and he responds.
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And the tragedy is that neither of them has enough time or understanding for that lesson to actually end safely.
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So by the time the villagers reach the windmill, I mean let's face it, there isn't an easy solution.
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Maria's dead, Waldman and Fritz are also dead, Henray's nearly been killed, and the monster has become genuinely dangerous.
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The point isn't that everyone should have simply left him wandering through the countryside, because, you know, that clearly isn't possible.
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The tragedy is that people responsible for him allowed the situation to reach that point before anyone seriously considered what creating him required.
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And to me, again, that's the part of Frankenstein that survives.
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Underneath all the familiar imagery for me.
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Flathead, the electrical equipment, the cry of It's Alive, it made the movie immortal.
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But Karloff's performance gives those images something worth returning to.
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Universal created one of the most recognizable monsters in movie history, and then allowed James Whale and Boris Karloff to make us wonder whether the monster was the person on the table or the man who brought him to life without thinking about what came next.
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Well, certainly Universal was not finished with the character either.
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A movie this successful was never going to be allowed to end with one burning windmill, and the studio would eventually look at the grave robbing, the murders, the dead child, the angry villagers, and of course the enormous flaming structure, and arrive at the most Hollywood conclusion imaginable.
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Apparently what this situation needs is a sequel.
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And hey, fortunately for us, they were 100% right.
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Alright, folks, I'm Obi Knox, and this has been the Introverted Obelisk.
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Until next time.
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If your weekend plans require grave robbing, a stolen brain, and enough electrical equipment to attract lightning, perhaps the universe is suggesting you find a different hobby.
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Also, if your assistant drops the normal brain, please don't let him improvise.
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Good night.
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And roll credits.
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Welcome back to the introverted obelisk.
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I'm Obi Knox, and today we're heading back to 1931, for a movie that's been copied, parodied, and turned into Halloween decorations so many times that you can recognize almost anything associated with it without ever actually sitting down to watch it.
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You know the flathead, the neck electrodes, the laboratory full of sparking electrical equipment, and of course the cry of, it's alive.
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Somewhere in your memory, there's probably also a hunchback named Igor wandering around carrying a brain, although we'll straighten out that particular piece of cultural confusion a little later.
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The actual Frankenstein is considerably stranger and sadder than the collection of pop culture memories that grew around it, because beneath all the lightning and the grave robbing is the story of a man who becomes obsessed with creating life and apparently spends no time considering what he's supposed to do with it once he succeeds.
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Frankenstein was released by Universal in 1931, the same year the studio had already found enormous success with Dracula.
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James Whale directed from a screenplay credited to Garrett Ford and Francis Edwards Faro, with the film drawing not only from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, but also from the stage adaptations that came between Shelley's book and the Universal movie.
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Colin Clive stars as Henry Frankenstein, Mae Clark plays his fiancee Elizabeth, John Bowles is Victor Moritz, Edward Van Sloan plays Dr.
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Waldman, Dwight Fry is Henry's assistant Fritz, and Boris Karloff, of course, plays The Monster, and the performance that would change his entire career and give popular culture its dominant image of Frankenstein's creation.
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Now, Bella Legosi had been connected to an earlier version of the project, when Robert Flory was expected to direct, but that version never became the Freienstein we're actually watching.
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The exact story of Lagosi's departure has accumulated enough conflicting anecdotes over the decades that I'm not gonna confidently put some dramatic declaration about refusing to play a scarecrow into his mouth.
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What we do know is that Whale eventually took over, Karloff became a monster, and Universal apparently didn't realize quite how memorable he'd be because the opening cast list identifies the actor playing the monster with nothing more than a question mark.
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Karlov's name finally appears in the closing credits, but by then the mystery had pretty much solved itself.
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A huge part of the monster's instantly recognizable appearance actually came from makeup artist Jack Pierce, whose work with Karloff produced the flattened skull, heavy eyelids, and neck electrodes that became permanently associated with the character.
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Mary Shelley's creature doesn't look like this, but the image Will Pierce and Karloff created became so culturally dominant that it effectively replaced the original description in the popular imagination.
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I mean, you can draw a square head, add a couple of electrodes to the neck, and somewhere a six-year-old will immediately know who you're talking about.
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Now the remarkable thing is that Karloff's performance survives the iconography.
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The makeup is what you notice first, but watch his eyes and hands, and you'll find the character underneath it.
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Karloff doesn't have dialogue to explain what the monster is thinking, so everything has to come through movement, expression, and reaction.
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Jack Pierce gave us one of the most famous faces in horror history, while Karloff gradually makes us feel sorry for the creature who's actually wearing it.
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Now, before we meet him, however, Universal gives us one of my absolute favorite pieces of old-fashioned horror showmanship.
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Edward Van Sloan, who had played Van Helsing in Dracula, and appears here as Dr.
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Waldman, steps in front of a curtain and warns the audience that what they're about to see may shock and even horrify them.
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And I have to say I love the timing because Universal had already sold you the ticket, got you in the theater, put your butt in the seat, before ever mentioning that perhaps, you know, maybe you're not emotionally prepared for the evening.
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Well, at that point, nobody's leaving because let's face it, you just made this movie sound amazing.
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Well, once the final warning is finished, we move to a graveyard where Henry Frankenstein and his assistant Fritz are watching a funeral.
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And let me just tell you, they aren't there to pay the respects, because in reality, they're actually waiting for everybody else to leave so they can dig the body up, which establishes Henry's current relationship with, you know, medical ethics.
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So Henry and Fritz need human remains for an experiment.
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So the newly buried corpse is only one part of their evil.
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They also cut down the body of a criminal from a gallows, but come to find out that brain can't be used, thus leaving Henry in need of a replacement.
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Fortunately for them, there's a medical school nearby with brains available for demonstration, and Henry sends Fritz to steal one.
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The classroom contains two specimens, one normal and one abnormal.
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And I'd like to emphasize that they are both clearly labeled.
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Nobody has set Fritz a puzzle.
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So he reaches for the normal brain, drops it, the jar shatters, and then he finds himself facing a pretty straightforward employment decision.
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Return to Henry and admit that there's been, you know, an unfortunate brain-related accident, or quietly grab the abnormal brain and hope the difference never comes up.
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Well, Fritz chooses the second option, which means a substantial portion of Universal Horror history now depends on one employee's unwillingness to tell his supervisor that he dropped something.
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While Fritz is dealing with quality control, Henry's fiance, Elizabeth, is becoming increasingly concerned about the man she's supposed to marry.
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You see, Henry has become withdrawn from ordinary life, and is isolating himself in an old watchtower where he can work without interference, thus leaving Elizabeth with very little idea of what he's actually doing.
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Now she knows enough to realize that whatever has consumed him isn't normal.
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So she and Victor Moritz seek help from Henry's former professor, Dr.
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Walden, who knows enough about Henry's work to share their concern.
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Henry's become obsessed with creating life from dead tissue.
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And he's not trying to resuscitate someone who had just died either.
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Old Boy is trying to assemble an entirely new human body from pieces and intends to bring it to life.
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By the time Elizabeth, Victor, and Waldman reach the laboratory, Henry isn't interested in being talked out of anything.
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He's straight up ready to demonstrate that the impossible thing everyone has warned him about is in fact possible.
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And this is where Colin Clive becomes essential.
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Henry doesn't behave like a calm researcher approaching an experimental breakthrough.
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No, Colin Clive plays him with a feverish intensity.
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As though Henry has spent so long obsessing over this moment that he's barely holding himself together now that it's finally here.
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And the experiment has stopped being merely scientific, because Henry needs to prove that the limits everyone else except do not apply to him.
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Kenneth Strickfaden's electrical equipment gives that obsession the laboratory it absolutely deserves.
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The enormous coils, spinning machinery, electrodes, and electrical arcs became almost as important to the cinematic Frankenstein image as the monster himself.
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And Henry's workspace looks less like something you'd conduct a controlled experiment in, rather than a cathedral built in honor of electricity.
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Apparently no piece of scientific equipment in this building is functioning correctly, unless it's, you know, humming, spinning, or throwing sparks at something.
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Well, Henry raises the body into the storm, while the machinery erupts around him.
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And when the table descends, everyone watches until the monster's hand finally moves.
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And when doing so, Henry erupts with joy, because the impossible thing he has absolutely devoted himself to has happened in front of witnesses, and his famous declaration that the creature's alive quickly escalates into his realization that he now knows what it feels like to be God, though that part was removed from the film.
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But I gotta say that reaction tells us almost everything we need to know about Henry at this moment.
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He's thinking about what the experiment proves about him, not about the being who has just taken his first breath.
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Henry has crossed the boundary between studying life and creating it.
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But he spent so much time imagining the moment of success that he hasn't prepared himself for the responsibility that begins immediately afterward.
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Whale introduces the monster much more quietly than he introduces the experiment.
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The creature backs through a doorway before turning toward the camera, and the camera moves closer till we're staring directly into the face that audiences would spend the next ninety years imitating.
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There isn't an attack or some grand entrance, because Whale simply lets us just look at him.
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And this gives Karloff the opportunity to start separating the actual character from the monster everyone around him assumes they've created.
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And one of the most important moments comes when Henry brings the monster into a room and opens a section of the ceiling.
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Light starts pouring down and the monster looks upward before slowly raising his hands toward it.
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He does not understand what he's seeing, but he feels drawn to it.
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And when Henry closes the opening again, the monster continually reaching toward the disappearing light.
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Before we've watched him deliberately harm anyone, we've seen him discover something beautiful and then have it taken away from him.
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Now, unfortunately, Fritz remains part of the educational program.
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He discovers that the monster is frightened of fire and responds to this useful information by tormenting him with a torch.
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Somewhere between stealing the wrong brain and deliberately terrorizing the result of Henry's experiment, Fritz's animal performance review has become extremely difficult to fend.
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The monster eventually lashes out and kills him, giving Henry and Waldman the violent behavior they feared while also raising the uncomfortable question of what exactly they'd expected after chaining a newly created being in a dark room and allowing someone to repeatedly frighten him was one of the things he fears the most.
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Henry and Waldman sedate the monster, and this is where Henry's grand achievement begins turning into an inconvenience.
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The man who was willing to rob graves and defy the natural order to create life now becomes considerably less enthusiastic once that life requires care, patience, and even responsibility.
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Henry withdraws while Waldman decides that the monster should be destroyed, and basically prepares to dissect him.
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But the creature awakes before he can do it, kills Waldman, and escapes into the countryside.
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In the brief period since coming to life, the monster has restrained, tormented, drugged, nearly cut apart, and so I gotta say his first experience of freedom also happens to be his first experience without someone standing over him trying to control him or even hurt him.
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Well, that freedom leads to the movie's most famous and, let's be very honest here, tragic encounter, when the monster finds a little girl named Maria sitting beside a lake.
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Maria isn't frightened because she has no idea she's supposed to be frightening.
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She invites him to sit with her and shows him how she's tossing flowers onto the water and watching them float.
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And the monster quickly understands enough of the game to join her.
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It's a very simple scene, but it's probably the clearest demonstration of what the creature has been missing.
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Because Maria approaches him with patience instead of fear.
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She shows him something, he watches and he then learns.
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Well, when they run out of flowers, the monster tries to continue the game by picking Maria up and throwing her in the lake, expecting her to float as the flowers did.
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She doesn't.
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And his reaction makes it clear that he understands immediately that something has gone terribly wrong, even though he doesn't understand why.
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He isn't angry with Maria, and he doesn't intend to kill her.
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In fact, she's probably the first person he's genuinely enjoyed being around, but he's physically enormous, tremendously strong, and mentally new to a world no one has, you know, taking the time to bother to explain to him.
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The abnormal brain suddenly feels much less useful as an explanation for everything that happens.
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Henry has created a living being with enormous physical strength, and almost no understanding of consequences.
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And then the people responsible for him teach him very little beyond fear and violence.
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Maria shows us, although albeit briefly, that he can observe, imitate, and respond to kindness, but neither of them understands the dangers created by the difference between his intentions and his strength.
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Well, we cut to Maria's father eventually carrying her body through the village while everyone else happens to be celebrating, and this image changes the entire mood of the story.
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Whatever Henry created in his lab is no longer a private experiment that can be hidden in a tower, because let's face it, a child is dead.
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And the village wants whoever killed her.
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Henry joins the search for his own creation, which finally forces him to deal directly with consequences that, you know, aren't exactly as exhilarating as raising a table into a lightning storm.
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Henry eventually encounters the monster, and their struggle leads them to an abandoned windmill, where the creator and creation end up facing each other without the machinery, professors, or assistants that surrender the original experiment.
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The monster carries Henry upward during the fight and throws him from the structure.
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Henry thankfully survives the fall, but the villagers surround the windmill with the monster trapped inside and set it on fire.
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Turning the creature's established terror of flame into the very means of his own destruction.
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There's a very grim symmetry to that ending because one of the first things the monster learns about the world is that you know fire hurts, thanks to Fritz waving a torch at him.
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And his final experience is being trapped inside an entire burning building while the village watches from outside.
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The movie has repeatedly shown people responding to something they don't understand with fear and violence, and the windmill becomes the largest possible version of that response.
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Henry, meanwhile, again, has survived, and is in fact returned home to recover with Elizabeth while his father celebrates the continuation of the Frankenstein family line.
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There's something almost jarring about how quickly ordinary life reasserts itself around Henry.
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He gets his home, his family, and the possibility of a future, while the life he dragged into existence has apparently ended screaming instead of burning windmill.
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That's where Frankenstein becomes much more interesting, at least to me, than you know, just the simple warning about scientists who go too far.
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Henry's great sign of experiment isn't a failure because it works perfectly well in the sense that you know Henry initially cares about.
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He assembles a body from dead tissue, brings it to life, and proves that something everyone considered impossible can in fact be done, but his failure begins once the hand starts to move.
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Henry spends so much time asking whether he can create life that he never seriously considers what he will owe that life if he succeeds.
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The monster wakes without language, experience, or understanding anything of the world around him.
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Yet almost everyone immediately expects him to behave as though he already knows its rules.
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When he's confused, he's restrained.
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When he's frightened, Fritz frightens him more.
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When he becomes dangerous, Henry withdraws and Waldman decides to destroy him.
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The first person who simply sits down and tries to share something with him is in fact the little girl beside a lake.
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And for a few minutes we see a completely different possibility.
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And I don't know, if you ask me, I think that's the tragedy that Karloff finds inside the monster.
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Their creature becomes dangerous and people absolutely die because of it.
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So, you know, sympathy doesn't require pretending otherwise.
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But Whale and Karloff never let us forget how little agency he had in becoming what he is.
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I mean again, he didn't ask Henry to make him, he didn't choose the body assembled for him, he didn't choose the brain Fritz stole, and certainly didn't choose to spend his first days learning that, you know, other people are likely to chain, threaten, and hurt you.
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Karloff communicates all of this without any dialogue.
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The monster reaches toward the light, tells us something about him, as does his delight with Maria and his terror of fire.
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Jack Pierce gives Karloff one of Cinema's most frightening faces, and Karloff spends the rest of the movie finding ways to make us look through it at a creature who doesn't understand why the world keeps responding to him the way it does.
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That sympathy also separates Frankenstein from Dracula.
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Even though the two films arrived from Universal in the same year, and helped establish the studio's great horror cycle, Dracula understands what he is and knows exactly what he's doing to the people around him.
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Karloff's monster barely understands the world he's been dropped into, which means the fear comes from a completely different place.
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One monster enters the story with centuries of knowledge and purpose, while the other enters it with essentially nothing.
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So the film's influence is so enormous that nearly a century of sequels, cartoons, costumes, and parodies have created this, I'd say, a more popular version of Frankenstein that doesn't actually entirely exist in this movie.
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The most obvious example is Henry's assistant, because the man helping him rob graves and steal brains is Fritz, not Igor.
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The Universal series eventually does give us an Igor in Son of Frankenstein, where Bella Lagosi plays him, but he isn't Henry's hunchback laboratory assistant, and he certainly isn't wandering around this movie waiting for someone to ask him to pull a switch.
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The familiar Igor became a kind of cultural composite built from different characters and later adaptations.
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Then we get the eternal question of the name.
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And oh boy, this is a hot topic.
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Frankenstein is Henry Frankenstein, while Karloff is credited as the monster.
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Calling the creature Frankenstein has nevertheless been common for so long that I feel like correcting somebody at a Halloween party is now less a defense of literary accuracy, more so than a decision about how badly you want to continue the conversation.
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And let's face it, the movie itself already makes the names confusing enough because we have Mary Shelley's scientist is Victor Frankenstein, while Universal changes him to Henry and gives the name Victor to a completely different character.
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The creature's appearance changes just as dramatically because Shelley's description doesn't give us the flat skull and the neck electrodes that everybody recognizes.
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And in fact, those belong to Universal's interpretation.
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And the fact that they're now almost inseparable from the word Frankenstein tells you how completely this film took possession of the story in pop culture.
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The lab became just as influential, if you ask me.
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I mean, mention a mad scientist bringing something to life, and chances are you're picturing electrical coils, lightning, machinery, and a table being raised toward the ceiling.
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Kenneth Strickfaden's equipment helped establish a visual language for the science that filmmakers would return to for decades.
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While Wales' staging turned Henry's experiment into something closer to almost a religious ceremony than a medical procedure.
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All of that iconography can make it easy to overlook how sad the movie underneath it is.
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The monster has become a Halloween mascot, but the character Karloff actually plays spends much of Frankenstein confused, frightened, and reacting to people who decided what he was before giving him any opportunity to become something else.
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I mean, let's face it, his first instinct when exposed to light is to reach toward it.
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And when Maria offers friendship, he responds to friendship.
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Those moments don't erase what happens afterward, but they do make it impossible to dismiss him as something that emerged from Henry's laboratory already evil.
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I'd say Henry's mistake isn't simply ambition, and I don't think the movie becomes nearly as interesting if we reduce it to, you know, science went too far.
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The experiment itself is extraordinary.
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I mean, I will point that out, and I have to agree.
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Henry discovers something nobody else believes possible, and then he does it.
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The moral disaster comes from treating creation as the finish line when it's actually the beginning of his responsibility.
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He wants the movement when the hand moves, he wants the lightning, the machinery, and the satisfaction of proving everybody wrong.
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What he hasn't prepared for is the much less glamorous work of teaching the being on the table what light is, why fire hurts, why other people can be harmed, and what it means to live among them.
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Henry wants to be a creator without becoming a caretaker, and the monster pays for the difference.
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I feel that's why Maria's scene remains the heart of the movie.
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She doesn't perform some elaborate experiment or possess knowledge that science lacks.
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She simply treats the monster like someone capable of learning, and he responds.
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And the tragedy is that neither of them has enough time or understanding for that lesson to actually end safely.
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So by the time the villagers reach the windmill, I mean let's face it, there isn't an easy solution.
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Maria's dead, Waldman and Fritz are also dead, Henray's nearly been killed, and the monster has become genuinely dangerous.
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The point isn't that everyone should have simply left him wandering through the countryside, because, you know, that clearly isn't possible.
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The tragedy is that people responsible for him allowed the situation to reach that point before anyone seriously considered what creating him required.
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And to me, again, that's the part of Frankenstein that survives.
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Underneath all the familiar imagery for me.
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Flathead, the electrical equipment, the cry of It's Alive, it made the movie immortal.
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But Karloff's performance gives those images something worth returning to.
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Universal created one of the most recognizable monsters in movie history, and then allowed James Whale and Boris Karloff to make us wonder whether the monster was the person on the table or the man who brought him to life without thinking about what came next.
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Well, certainly Universal was not finished with the character either.
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A movie this successful was never going to be allowed to end with one burning windmill, and the studio would eventually look at the grave robbing, the murders, the dead child, the angry villagers, and of course the enormous flaming structure, and arrive at the most Hollywood conclusion imaginable.
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Apparently what this situation needs is a sequel.
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And hey, fortunately for us, they were 100% right.
00:23:29.839 --> 00:23:34.000
Alright, folks, I'm Obi Knox, and this has been the Introverted Obelisk.
00:23:34.319 --> 00:23:35.359
Until next time.
00:23:35.599 --> 00:23:46.240
If your weekend plans require grave robbing, a stolen brain, and enough electrical equipment to attract lightning, perhaps the universe is suggesting you find a different hobby.
00:23:46.559 --> 00:23:50.559
Also, if your assistant drops the normal brain, please don't let him improvise.
00:23:52.640 --> 00:23:53.599
Good night.
00:23:54.079 --> 00:23:55.359
And roll credits.
