Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

So we begin with the movies-but what has turned Frankenstein into a movie not just once but again and again and again? One possibility is that the storyline, although constantly changed (perverted, one is tempted to say) by the filmmakers who have used (and abused) it, usually contains the wonderful dichotomy that Mary Shelley built into her story: on one hand the horror writer is an agent of the norm, he or she wants us to watch for the mutant, and we feel Victor Frankenstein's horror and disgust at the relentless, charnel creature he has made.

But on the other hand, we grasp the fact of the creature's innocence and the author's infatuation with the tabula rasa idea.

The monster strangles Henry Clerval and promises Frankenstein he will "be with him on his wedding night," but the monster is also a creature of childlike pleasure and wonder, who beholds the "radiant form" of the moon rising above the trees; he brings wood to the poor peasant family like a good spirit in the night; he seizes the hand of the old blind man, falls on his knees, and begs him: "Now is the time! Save and protect me! . . . Do not desert me in the hour of trial!" The creature who strangles snotty William is also the creature who saves a little girl from drowning . . . and is rewarded with a charge of buckshot in the ass for his pains.

Mary Shelley is-let us bite the bullet and tell the truth-not a particularly strong writer of emotional prose (which is why students who come to the book with great expectations of a fast, gory read-expectations formed by the movies-usually come away feeling puzzled and let down). She's at her best when Victor and his creation argue the pros and cons of the monster's request for a mate like Harvard debaters-that is to say, she is at her best in the realm of pure ideas. So it's perhaps ironic that the facet of the book which seems to have insured its long attractiveness to the movies is Shelley's splitting of the reader into two people of opposing minds: the reader who wants to stone the mutation and the reader who feels the stones and cries out at the injustice of it.

Even so, no moviemaker has gotten all of this idea; probably James Whale came the closest in his stylish Bride of Frankenstein, where the monster's more existential sorrows (young Werther with bolts through his neck) are boiled down to a more mundane but emotionally powerful specific: Victor Frankenstein goes ahead and makes the female . . . but she doesn't like the original monster.