Fear of Frankenstein

As a budding child insomniac, I reveled in the Late Late movies on ‘60s TV. While my parents slept upstairs, I would sneak down to the living room during the small hours before dawn to bask in the television’s flicker. That is how I discovered the moonlit night of the 1931 film Frankenstein. What kind of monster is this, I wondered, in my six-year-old’s mind. I felt sorry for him as he held out his arms for love but found none. The villagers’ furious torches electrified me. I recalled the blank stares of the children surrounding me at the bus stop once when an older girl jabbed a large stick, a dead snake draped over it for dual threat, towards me. Touch it, she’d sneered. But I think I’d rather rush into the arms of the patchwork-fleshed man my eyes follow now as he climbs to the top of the windmill, carrying the mad doctor who, after rejoicing at what he’d brought to life, acts like a disapproving daddy. When the monster hurls his creator to the ground, and the mill set afire by the angry mob, Frankenstein experiences death after resurrection. This feels confusing, out of order to what I’ve learned in Sunday school. And the scientist who’s stitched him piece by piece, ignited the shattered heart but denied it brotherhood, gazes upward in the final reel, regretting only his own broken dream, not the broken man. But I was a child then, too innocent for the horror of human ego and its tragic creation—or the dawning fear of the unlovable within me.