Holy Monster Awareness Month!

Yes, February 2011 has been deemed Monster Awareness month by the good people at Beyond Fiction, and the monsters have their own blog.

I was lucky enough to talk about Frankenstein (1931) today:

Aside from the central conceit about a young doctor experimenting with the power to bring life to dead tissue, the film bears little resemblance to the book. There are no lengthy discussions between the creator and his creation. Karloff’s “monster” speaks no words. It is only through a series of grunts and gestures that Boris Karloff brings life to the role. Colin Clive creates the quintessential “mad doctor” as Henry (rather than Victor) Frankenstein. The scene of the unholy act isn’t an attic apartment in the city of Ingolstadt—no, it is a ruined tower, a true mad scientist’s lab loaded with electrical equipment and buzzing machinery, lost in dark and gloomy mountains of some strange England/Germany hybrid countryside. Henry employs a hunched, leering assistant (Fritz, played by Dwight Frye), the prototypical Igor. All of these deviations from the novel will serve as popular monster movie tropes for years after Frankenstein, and hint at the power of the film’s popularity today.

(click to read the rest of my essay, and be aware of monsters, dear readers)