Frankenstein: Paper 2

According to Freud, the appearance of “the uncanny” can come from several sources. It can be tied to “anything to do with death, dead bodies…” and can be found in representations of human bodies that have the appearance of being alive but which “might not be in fact animate”, examples of these “bodies” listed are wax figures, dolls and automata. (135, 148). In the 1931 film “Frankenstein”, Frankenstein’s creature fits both of these definitions of the uncanny. His body is made of human body parts, and he still maintains some of the appearance of a dead body; he appears alive, yet there is ambiguity as to whether he is more “man or machine”.

The film consciously aims to represent Frankenstien’s creature as uncanny to its audience. The uncanny draws its strangeness by taking things that are familiar to us and making them unfamiliar. The monster’s appearance is familiar to us, because his appearance is humanlike, but the familiarity is not complete. The monster’s body is a warped version of the human body.

Likewise, the creature’s behavior is a warped version of human behavior. Throughout the film, the creature’s actions mirrors those of the humans around him-- but the creature’s attempts to imitate human behavior are never perfect. To compare the creature’s behavior to human behavior, the film incorporates several scenes that feature the monster repeating the actions and behaviors of human characters earlier in the film. One such repetition is in two scenes where Dr. Frankenstein orders other characters to sit down. When Victor and Elizabeth visit Frankenstein’s lab, he orders them to sit down. A few scenes later, when his monster has emerged from its room to interact with his father, Frankenstein orders the monster to sit down. The sight of the monster sitting down is a repetition of the image of Elizabeth and Victor sitting down in the earlier scene. It shows that the monster understands Victor’s command like a human. But in the monster’s version of the scene, its reaction is delayed, and the way it sits down is jilted and machinelike. The scene draws attention to the monsters not-quite-human behavior.  

The creature again mirrors the human characters at the very end of the film. The film has three instances where characters only lines are screaming. The first two are off-screen screams—that of Fritz as the monster is hanging him, and that of Elizabeth as the monster is raping her. The third is creature’s scream as it is being burned alive. The creature’s scream is the most human-like sound it produces in the film; it was an effective way of producing empathy for the character because it reminds us that he, like any human, is afraid of death.

            The creature’s physical features are also uncanny. Different aspects of his appearance make the creature look both undead and robotic. He is a mix of human and machine; he is composed of the body parts of deceased bodies, but he has a square forehead and bolts coming out of his neck like a robot.  These features remind the viewer that the monster’s body is manmade, and lead the viewer to question whether the monster is fully alive or not.

However, the filmmakers clearly did not want the monster perceived as entirely nonliving. The script specified that “It (the creature) does not walk like a Robot. Its first off-screen sound was to be “haunting, piteous. . . like that of a lost animal” (Course Packet, 22). The combination of human and non-human features in the creature make it uncanny. The creature is an unsettling character. Although the viewer is constantly reminded that the creature is inhuman by its strange behavior and appearance, the creature is similar enough to a human that the viewer is invited to empathize with it.