2010 10 06 John Flanagan Author Interview

Unfortunately, the cadaver’s neck is broken and its brain is useless. 10 Classic Horror Films and the Literature, That Inspired Them Despite the fact that characters in the novel react with horror to the features of the monster throughout the book, Shelley’s description of Victor’s handiwork makes the creature seem not all that bad. For the film, however, Jack Pierce’s makeup for the monster, developed on the face of Boris Karloff, is the personification of horror, shocking for its time and even shocking today, for those whose visions of the monster come only from television shows, cartoons and even advertising.

 

Karloff ’s face is the perfect foundation for Pierce’s handiwork and no one who played the monster later, even employing the same makeup (including Karloff ), was ever so terrifying as Karloff in this first film. In the novel, Shelley writes that Victor Frankenstein, as a result of the difficulty with working with small body parts, decided to make his creature a being of giant stature, eight feet in height and proportionately large. Similarly, the movie monster is tall and imposing, the one aspect of the creature carried over into the film.

 

Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive), and his assistant, Fritz (Dwight Frye), look at a potential source of a brain for the creature in Frankenstein (1931).