Feature Story

This is a feature excerpt from Unwinnable Monthly #194. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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I last read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in college, and college was… a long time ago. Still, I have read about the book (and even written about it) several times in the years since, so I have at least some idea of what happens in its pages and what doesn’t, however imperfect.

In the discourse surrounding Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, I have seen several people confidently assert things about the novel that are actually drawn from one of the innumerable cinematic adaptations, instead.

I am not writing to shame those people. It is something we have all done, at one time or another, in one form or another. Rather, I want to explore this because of what I think it illustrates about memory, how we make meaning from stories and how stories become something more.

I have argued before that what makes most of the classic monster archetypes what they are is not any one iteration of them, but rather the fact that they have been adapted, sampled from, remixed and interpreted until they become something new, formed from numerous disparate parts. To our popular imagination, that new something then becomes what Frankenstein, or Dracula, or whatever is.

This is not to downplay the power or importance of the source texts. Obviously, we wouldn’t have anything without them. But within the source texts, the monsters are one thing, while through countless repetitions, remixes and reimaginings, they become something different – something new.

Writing about the Godzilla franchise, I argued that, “The best Godzilla both does and doesn’t exist. It’s not Godzilla as presented in any of the movies bearing the Big G’s name, but rather the Godzilla that exists as a gestalt entity in our cultural consciousness, even among people who … had never seen most of these movies – or who maybe haven’t ever seen any of them.”

As I was working on this piece, a new bit of discourse appeared on social media, this time about James Bond writers bemoaning the difficulty of crafting a new sequel after 007 apparently met his demise in No Time to Die. There are, of course, any number of ways to write around such a situation, should one deem it necessary to do so, but the whole idea of seeing it as an impediment points to a shift in how things such as continuity, canon and trivia have come to dominate the way we approach, interact with, understand, and discuss media.

If you watch a lot of old movies, as I do, you’ll quickly find that early movie sequels often play fast and loose with continuity. They could, after all. No one could go home and watch the previous movie on Blu-ray or their favorite streaming service. If they were told something had happened before this, they generally had to either accept that it was true, or rely on their own faulty memory.

For most people, in the age before video (and before that, occasional showings on television) once a movie was no longer playing in theaters, you just assumed that you were probably never going to see it again. You were left with your memories of it. And while some memories stayed vivid and accurate, others changed, became what they felt like they were, or merged with other movies you had seen, other stories you had read.

Even when I was a kid, though I lived in the age of the video store, our access to movies was nowhere near what it is today. You were unlikely to have seen all the movies you wanted to see, especially if you were one of the kids whose parents wouldn’t let them watch R-rated films.

So instead, there was a kind of oral tradition that existed on the playground, on the school bus, at sleepovers. Those who had seen the movies would describe them to those who hadn’t – as vividly and often every bit as inaccurately as you might imagine from excitable kids talking about monster movies and gory slashers and flicks about kickboxing or ninjas or whatever else we were into at the time.

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, and how the telling (and remembering, and misremembering) of movies shapes our idea of what those things are, often in ways that spread far beyond our individual experience of the thing. I recently posted to social media about the 1985 TV special Garfield’s Halloween Adventure (itself originally titled Garfield in Disguise) and how I wondered if its spectral pirates were what made me think for years that the ghosts in John Carpenter’s The Fog were also pirates – which led to a chorus of responses along the lines of, “Wait, they weren’t pirates?”

I think, at one time, we all thought that the ghosts in *The Fog *were pirates. In our defense, they do *look *a little like pirates, in that they are mariners, and one of them has a sword. They’re even going after treasure. But the movie makes very clear that they are not pirates, telling their story in specific detail. Our memories just lose that, replacing it with things that fit for us, whether they’re true or not. Making something new out of it.

In the commentary track for Halloween, Carpenter talks about how people came up to him for years after the movie and told him how traumatized they were by the scene when Michael Myers is unmasked – the irony being that under the mask is no monstrous makeup job or anything particularly shocking, but simply actor Tony Moran. (Poor guy, traumatizing all those people with his relatively average-looking mug.)

Sometimes, we see what we feel, rather than what is actually there. Even more often, what we feel is what we remember, and that feeling becomes real, even if it isn’t true.

So it is with Frankenstein, as with almost anything that has penetrated the culture enough to become a household name. It is undeniable that Mary Shelley created the monster, but it is equally difficult to argue that James Whale and Boris Karloff had nearly as much of an impact on how we think of it – and Whale’s Frankenstein was itself already adapted from a stage play, not directly from the original novel.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is not a particularly faithful adaptation of the source novel – it’s possible that there has never been one – and, despite its occasional pretenses to the contrary, it knows that. This *Frankenstein *has its own problems, but it is very passionately a movie about how Guillermo del Toro feels about Frankenstein. A movie that, like its central creature, is cobbled together piecemeal from elements and memories not just of the original book, but of the dozens of interpretations and adaptations that have existed since.

And how could it be anything else? After so many years, so many iterations and permutations, it could be that a truly faithful adaptation of the novel would feel wan and strange to us now. That we would react to it with the same confusion and horror with which Victor often greets his creation. The novel is still there, and it would probably be beneficial to many people – myself included – to revisit it. But the story of Frankenstein, like so many others, has become something else, something that we each build for ourselves, piece by piece.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online atorringrey.com.