Beggars and Zombies: The 3 Penny Opera and its Echoes in Land of the Dead

In George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead we are introduced to a world where humanity has lost and what is left is hardly worth the saving.  One could argue, for what ought they be saved?  It is fairly clear that the point of Romero’s work in this case is to be critical of George W. Bush’s America.  There was and is much to be critical of in America due to the policies of those in power, though it is somewhat unfair to lay the blame so heavily on one man, particularly when that one man comes from a long line of men who have little real power to make America the way that it is.  In reality it is a collective effort of generations of people to engrain an ideology that ultimately is so damaging to the weakest of us.  It is interesting to look at what Romero does with his film in comparison with another set of artists 70 years before, dealing with many similar conditions.  In 1931, Georg Pabst released his adaptation of Bertold Brecht’s play The 3-Penny Opera (which was itself an adaptation of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera).  While Brecht was none to happy with the final result of the film, it does have at its core some important commonalities that can be related to Romero’s film.

In Romero’s film there is an isolated area of Pittsburg where a largish population lives.  The population is divided into haves and have-nots.  The haves live in a high-rise called Fiddler’s Green and spend their days in consumption of goods.  The main floor of the building, the foundation you might say, is a shopping mall full of high end retail and restaurants.  The have-nots live in the squalor of slums and make most of their living through black-market trading and other illegal activities (e.g. prostitution, smuggling, zombie fighting, etc.)  They have no hope of making it into the Fiddler’s Green regardless of their financial status.  Even though Cholo has saved much money and served the ruler of Fiddler’s Green, he has no hope of ever being allowed in.  There is a small group of men and women who essentially loot the abandoned towns around Pittsburgh to bring in the goods for the sustenance of the city.  Outside of the realm of the city is populated by zombies who more or less continue as they would have had the lived.  They are led by a large african american zombie in coveralls.

In Pabst’s film we see some similarities.  Set in London it represents a world in which the poor have no recourse.  There is a class of people who have all and control all.  However, they play a much smaller role that in Romero’s film.  They are represented by the coronation of the Queen, which is significant by the end of the film.  It largely focuses on the relationship between the thieves and the beggar’s.  The thieves are lead by Mack the Knife and the Beggar’s by Peachum.  One can draw a comparison between the Thieves in this film and the Looters in Romero’s film.  The beggar’s can be likened unto the zombies.  In Romero’s film it is discovered that the Zombies are making their way to the city as they have learned to solve problems (like how to cross water).  The Looters have decided that the best plan is to take advantage of the system and get out.  They see the Zombies as an inevitable tide of destruction.

The climax of both films is remarkably similar.  In Romero’s film the Zombies break their way into the city.  They are introduced to the scene shambling down the street and soon attack the poor of the city working their way to Fiddler’s Green where they rapidly and voraciously consume the citizens who so readily were engaged in consumption.  In Pabst’s film Peachum has his Beggar’s march down the street during the coronation of the Queen against the wishes of the Thieves.  Their march is very like the zombies of Romero’s film.  Shambling en masse with a dead look in the eyes, many with missing limbs.  They do not attack the upper class other that with their abominable sight and stench.  

These two moments connect to the ultimate purpose of Romero and Pabst/Brecht’s films.  According to Karl Marx, to whom these two auteurs ascribe in many ways, the rising up of the proletariat is an inevitability.  Judging from the course of history, the oppressed only stay oppressed for so long then they will rise up and destroy their oppressors establishing an new order.  The zombies/beggars coming into the city is a sign of that inevitability.  Whether they are responding to a stale monarchy that has maintained its power through financial means or a post-apocalyptic world where no crisis has gone to waste to solidify power, the oppressed will rise up.  They will find a means to exact their revenge.

Perhaps the comparison between these two films is guilty of reading against the grain, but the similarities in the shot of the beggar’s and zombies marching down the street are too striking to be ignored.  It is true that Brecht might be more of a traditional Marxist than Romero, or that Pabst might be too dissimilar from Romero to say they saw the same solutions to a world of problems.  But they did identify the same sense of inequality, and they showed that inequality through many of the same means.  In that sense I think that Brecht would agree, and maybe be a little proud.

We are the Zombies and we are Shaun

A few years ago, a friend of mine invited me over to watch a Zombie movie.  I was excited as I considered myself a zombie fan and was looking forward to what he called a zombie comedy.  We settled on his couch with the appropriate quantity of salty snacks and the movie began.  Within the first five minutes, I turned to my friend, Shaun being his name, and said, “This is the best movie that I have ever seen.” There was something about the intertwining of the lines, the cuts from scene to scene, the bricolage of images and styles and genres, that simply spoke to me.  Throughout the course of the film I was tickled, horrified, bemused, engaged, challenged, and moved to tears.  Thus was I introduced to Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead.  The film plays with so many different things that it is difficult to narrow down any one thing that the film is trying to say, so I will look at some ideas that the film touches on and discuss how that effected me.

First, is the opening credits.  After a fairly engaging opening sequence clearly establishing the main players of the film, Wright places the credits.  A clear shift in tone is made as, instead of the very human characters that we saw in the first scene, we are shown everyday humans acting like zombies.  A group of men is seen shambling toward the camera in time with the music.  THere is a group at a bus stop staring blankly ahead, who all glance at there watches simultaneously.  The in the shopping center, staring at nothing as they scan their items in tandem.  These images do a number of things.  IN one sense they are saying that the real zombies are us (we?).  Our modern life has made us into zombies blindly following a set of procedures and practices without any thought (false consciousness perhaps? or maybe Simmel’s blasé?)  This is very apparent in that the protagonist is seemingly unaware of the difference caused by the zombies.  As an audience we recognize the affect of the zombies in the film but Shaun seems unaware.  He is so zombified by the plugged-in repetition that he doesn’t notice a bloody hand-print or even that he slips on blood.  The most remarkable example is the couple necking outside of the Winchester.  Before Ed and Shaun go into the Winchester we see the couple necking outside.  When Ed and Shaun leave hours later we see the same couple ‘necking’ more furiously.  When they react and then turn from the amorous couple, the head of the man in the couple is chewed off.  Or perhaps when connected to the television story at the end of the film we see that the living zombies of the beginning are no different than the living dead of the end.  They maintain their primal instincts which consist in playing video games, pushing shopping carts, and humiliating themselves on television game shows and talk shows.  These tasks seem no different than the ones that were shown in the opening credits; mundane, repetitive, and escapist.  It seems that one of the many issues being discussed is that we are the monster, and that the monster is far more subtle and dangerous that we ever realized.

What I find most interesting in the film is its ability to take a horror sub-genre like a zombie film, and layer it with socio-political commentary (which is not entirely unexpected), and then fill it with emotionally resonant human characters.  Shaun is no hero.  He is in every sense of the word, average.  He has not the marquee good looks.  His job is no heroes duty.  He has no real skills.  He is quirky and bland at the same time.  His girlfriend is certainly average by film standards (granted that in the real world she would be quite lovely).  He has friends and family whose relationships all feel authentic.  This is where the real brilliance of the film takes place.  It is a comedy.  While tragedy, to which horror is most closely related, has heroes that are by necessity larger than life and better than ourselves (thank you, Aristotle) comedy is about the common man striving to be better than he is, and failing.  Shaun wants to be better.  He has an ideal that he strives for, but he fails.  This is comedy.  And if comedy is about us and what consistent failings we do have, then by placing comic characters in a horror context we identify more with the fear, terror, and sorrow they feel.  They are us, so we feel more poignantly the loss that they feel.  I recall the first time seeing the film, having my heart rent by death Phillip, Shaun’s step-father.  In a straight horror, the death would have been sad but not with the depth that it has in this case.  We all laughed at the imagination of Shaun’s plan to save his Mom and kill Phillip. Their matter-of-fact discussion of planning his death is hilarious.  Laughter has the power to endear us to people and comedy is about us, so when the reality of the horror of death sets in, we are caught off guard.  We feel the sorrow and loss of Shaun as we would feel it because he is us, and not as in tragedy someone better than and therefore removed from us.  Phillip’s death is the death of our own imperfect relationships.  Similar situations have been portrayed but without the same effect in more serious zombie films and it is due to not framing it as a comedy.  There is an old theatre saying, “They will only cry as hard as they have laughed.”  And this holds true in this film.

There is much more that could be discussed regarding this film, but the layering of sociopolitical commentary and poignant personal emotion into this horror film sets it above many other films of its ilk.  In many ways, it could be the zombie film that finally gets it right.  George A. Romero’s films are too serious and films like Return of the Living Dead or Zombieland are too silly.  This film marks a master of genre fusion  who understands his craft and his audience, and most importantly, the things that matter enough to make it work.  This is no piece of fluff that is to be seen and dismissed.  It is so much more.  It is us.

Uncanny Freaks

The Uncanny is that which is familiar seeming unfamiliar.  One of the powers that horror has for us is to make normal and often pleasant things terrifying.  That sense of dread that fills us, is when we recognize the thing and then we realize that that thing that we recognize is simultaneously not the thing we thought.  Many horror films have made use of this concept.  Dracula looks like a man, a dashing debonaire man, and yet he is also a ghoul.  The physical twisting of his hands and the slow methodical movement exacerbate this sense that he is not what he seems, yet he still looks human.  Boris Karloff’s reanimated mummy is little more than a shriveled old man.  Yet there is something about his voice, his movement, that is alien, uncanny.  Zombies, that have proliferated our cultural conscious are exceptionally uncanny.  They look like humans, yet they move and sound inhuman, and in fact their behavior is terribly inhuman.  In Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, this is demonstrated by the titular Shaun’s inability to clearly recognize the difference between living and dead.  This familiarity discomfits us because we want to believe that evil is easily recognizable.  We want evil to be alien to us so when it is too close to what we know and love it is threatening.  Recently a co-worker of mine was arrested for sexual abuse of a student.  As I spoke with my own students, they expressed shock and confusion.  The man was as normal as all of us and yet he was “evil”.  This threatened their sense of safety.  The familiar became unfamiliar and they were scared.

While films often use visual cues to make the familiar unfamiliar, they can make the audience believe that the unfamiliar is familiar and no longer a threat.  In Frankenstein, the monster looks very different than human, yet in various moments he behaves as a human might (more interestingly as a child who is even less threatening).  This makes the uncanny familiar and we empathize with the monster.  Then he does something horrible and monstrous and we are again discomfited.  The move from the uncanny to the familiar to the uncanny again is an extremely effective means of extracting horror from a narrative.

Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks uses this method to great effect.  When we are initially introduced to the various circus freaks we find them revolting.  They are like humans, yet different enough to be unsettling.  A man with no arms or legs or a woman who looks like a child yet an adult or a half woman half man all have a familiarity to what we expect a person to look like yet they are different and that difference disturbs us.  After showing off this freak show to frighten us with their uncanny nature, Browning invites us to see their humanity.  He shows them living normal lives, eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.  We see their very human emotions and relationships.  But most of all we see them being persecuted by ‘normal’ folk.  This makes the uncanny familiar.  It connects these people with us.  They have lives like we do, love like we do, talk and play and dream like we do.  And they suffer pain, jealousy, and heartache as we do too.  This brings them into the realm of familiarity and we are at peace with them, we feel for them.  

This is when Browning turns the screws.  Due to a betrayal the freaks band together to seek revenge on the two ‘normals’ that have been bullying them.  During a torrential downpour the wagons that carry them from site to site crash.  At the same time the betrayal of the woman is reveals and the freaks pursue her into the rain.  There are several shots of them crawling through the mud brandishing weapons.  The lightening strikes and the thunderclaps and they no longer seem human.  That which was uncanny and made familiar becomes once again uncanny.  They are freaks made human made monsters.  We are all the more terrified by this transformation.  We are betrayed and angry, yet filled with fear.  

The world of horror is the world of the uncanny.  Directors who can manipulate the uncanny are the most successful at filling audience with dread.  Tod Browning shows his mastery of that craft in his film Freaks.  Perhaps the greatest effect of his film is the conflicting feelings of guilt that this use of the uncanny produces.  We initially feel guilty for judging the freaks harshly.  Then we feel guilty for not recognizing evil when we saw it. Then we feel guilt for hating the bully and also hating the freak.  That combination of the bully and the freak in one mirrors the uncanny and the familiar in one.  And that is true terror.  I am the bully and I am the freak.

Loss in Finality: the Vanishing of the Known

I find that a fairly good test of the quality of a horror film is if I wake up the next morning thinking about it.  Even better is if it still sits with me several days later.  Perhaps more difficult is trying to uncover what it is exactly that makes the film stay.  What is it that makes me look across the table at my wife and think of the film, and sense danger.  In my experience, I have seen that the most unsettling and therefor most enduring horror experiences are those which are unknown.  Our minds are far more adept at creating fear than any film ever could.  Jean-paul Sartre in his piece Why Write indicates that there is a dialectical tension between the reader and the writer.  The writer creates and imperative (the words on the page) and the reader then uses those imperative to construct meaning, becoming a writer in their own right.  This wrestling back and forth between the reader and the writer creates a space that can be filled.  The best writing intentionally leaves space for the reader to then use creatively.  In this sense great horror leaves space for the viewer to fill with their worst fears, that which personally scares them, instead of a generic fear represented broadly.  This is why so many films fail upon the reveal of the monster.  It can never live up to the pictures in our head.

The Vanishing is a remarkable film on two counts: it leaves plenty of space for the audience to create, and it discusses the power of the unknown.  Throughout the course of the film there is ample space for us to create meaning, to fill the space.  While some of these moments do not represent any real departure from standard horror tropes (e.g. initially we do not see where she went or how she was captured) the sheer endurance of that empty space becomes the individuation of this film.  We are introduced to the murderer early on.  We see him plotting the murder going into the minutest detail of the act.  Even after we see the moment of capture, we never are shown what happened to her.  Our protagonist, Rex, agrees to take the sleeping pill and then wakes up in a coffin, being buried alive.  The empty space left by the director between the falling asleep and the waking up has to be filled by us as an audience.  We don’t just connect dots, we fill space.  This leaves us also with a more chilling vacancy.  The murder does not reveal what happened to Saskia.  He simply says that he will show what happened.  When the protagonist asks if he raped her, his response is mildly rebukive.  He is not to tell, he is to show.  When Rex awakens in the coffin it also leaves a space for us to fill regarding Saskia.  Yes, we realize that he buried her alive.  That is clear.  But what is empty for us to fill is how she responded when she awoke.  The terror she felt, the anguish, the regret, the thrashing, crying, pounding. Her last words.  Her last thoughts are all left silent.  That silence is our to fill.  And we fill it with the worst that our imagination has to offer.  The worst that can happen is not death, it is the horrific anticipation of death.  Since that is hidden, then we are free to fill that space with our own anxious anticipation.

The film also comments on the nature of the unknown.  Rex is left with nothing but the stories in his head about the final hours of Saskia’s life.  He is obsessed.  He cannot live, or go on living without knowing what happened.  His final plea is know.  He knows that getting her back alive is impossible, but he can have something of her back if he just knows what happened.  It is likely that he knows that his own life is forfeit.  He likely knows that his knowledge will result in his own death.  That is the risk that he is willing to take, he will face death for the sake of knowing.  Yet for all he comes to know, he can’t know everything.  He can’t know her last moments.  His sacrifice becomes a mockery, a simulation, which reflects an absence rather than a thing.  It shows that he really can’t know what happened because he can’t ask her, and neither can we.

That is why The Vanishing works so well.  It uses the unknown to instill in us our own greatest fears.  We know not what the day may bring.  So when I look at my wife or children and I think of this film, that fear that I sense is in knowing what I don’t know.  That fear that, more than losing them, I could lose my last moments.  The thought that those moments could be filled with horror and pain and aloneness are the grandest fears that I have.  That is why it sticks, and it always will. 

The Art of Distance in Horror

In Bertold Brecht’s seminal work Mother Courage and Her Children, in scene ten,  Ann Fierling (named Courage) and her daughter Kattrin stop their cart in front of a peasant’s hut.  From inside the hut they can hear the song of what can be assumed to be a mother singing a lullaby to her child.  They pause to listen before continuing on and the scene ends.  This scene represents the power of a moment in a work of art to draw one in and alienate one at the same time.  The song, the pause, seem to indicate a significant moment and yet it leads to nothing.  It is just another moment in a long string of them.  As an audience we believe it is significant to plot and lean in, but then it serves it not and we pull back.  A parallel can be drawn between this moment and Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter.  In it, we see a very similar scene as to what occurs with Mother Courage and her Daughter.  John and Pearl have long been fleeing Mr. Powell for some time in their skiff.  They alight near a farm house and see a light in the window.   They hear the song of a woman, likely a lullaby.  They stop and listen for a moment.  We are drawn in as an audience, believing that this is the moment perhaps of salvation for these children.  But instead, after listening, John ushers them into the barn to sleep.  We pull back to think about what just happened.

Interestingly, there exist other parallels between both the style and content of the two pieces when taken in the context of verfremdungseffekt.  Brecht believed that to make an audience think about the events on stage, the play ought to distance or alienate them from the action (I find alienation a problematic term, so I will use distancing instead).  Brecht applied various means to bring about this effect including, but not limited to: revealing the apparatus, breaking the 4th wall, music/singing, mimicry (in place of inhabiting the character), stark juxtaposition of dramatic and comic moments, and narration that reveals the end from the beginning.  When used appropriately these elements pull the audience out of their quasi-hypnotic state and allow them to think about the events and judge them.  This helps the audience not assume inevitability of events (which we can easily trace back to Greek Tragedy).  The audience then thinks that since the events are not inevitable, other choices could have been made.

Within the film there are several instances and elements that utilize this verfremdungseffekt to distance the audience from the action and allow for reflection.  One of which is the use of expressionist lighting.  While it might seem contradictory to conflate one stylistic choice with another, it is not a far cry to claim that the use of that lighting within a non-expressionist piece (structurally or theoretically) draws attention to the apparatus.  This is especially true considering the inconsistency of utilization of said apparatus.  This expressionist lighting used in specific scenes of horror, like the murder of the mother, in contrast to realistic lighting in other scenes (including night-time ones) makes the audience aware of the use of lighting.  This pulls us out and we then can reflect on what is being said about the events happening, instead of what is going to happen.

Another instance is in the representation of the mother’s corpse in the car in the water.  Rather than a dreadful image of a mutilated corpse, we are shown a peaceful, and, in fact, beautiful image of the mother, bathed in shimmering light and water as her hair and dress flit picturesquely in the current.  This juxtaposition in what is seen with the content of the moment pulls the audience out once again.  Death is portrayed almost as an idealized beauty rather than the horror that it is.  We can then reflect on the nature of death and even murder.

This moment can also bring to mind Helene Weigel’s famous silent scream.  When Mother Courage’s son is brought to her dead, she is unwilling to show her emotion, her terror, at the sight of his lifeless body.  Weigel turned her head and screamed without sound.  This was to show the emotion of the moment and was a means of revealing the apparatus, showing the artifice.  The silent peace of the dead woman in the river, is a torsion of Weigel’s silent moment of terror.  Once again, the intent is to distance the audience, in this case to think about death in another way.

Perhaps the most interesting moment of distancing is in the confrontation between Mrs. Cooper (a Mother Courage in her own right) and Mr. Powell.  There is legitimate tension as he sings outside the house and Mrs. Cooper sits with her shotgun in the house.  The children sit on the the steps and the oldest walks over to Mrs. Cooper with a candle, the light of which obscures the view of Mr. Powell.  When she moves away from the window it reveals that Mr. Powell is no longer sitting outside the house.  This moment creates intense suspense.  The audience is drawn in, asking what will happen.  The voice of Powell is heard in the house.  Chaos.  A shot is fired.  Then occurs the break, the distance.  Powell runs hootin’ and hollerin’ from the house into the barn.  Instead of a dramatic death, or violent retribution, the response is intensely comical.  The audience pulls back and laughs.  This distance incites reflection on the rightness of individually meted out justice.  

It might be a fool’s errand to seek correlation between Brecht and a horror film from the 1950’s, but perhaps there are things to be learned from the connections to be made.  Perhaps there is more of horror in Brecht and more of Brecht in than previously realized.  The film is effective in both providing thrills and causing reflection, which is precisely why this correlative relation matters.

Ghosts of Oppression: Ugetsu, The Uninvited, and Night and Fog

In the intensely shocking short Documentary Night and Fog, we are taken through the horrors of what we, as human beings, are capable of.  It is one thing to hear of or read about the atrocities of the Holocaust, and an entirely different thing to be shown them.  We are cast down into the pit of guilt and responsibility, shaken by the true terror of annihilation and desecration.  But we hear at the end of the film repeated the phrase “I was not responsible.”  That is where the horror bludgeons us.  Those whom we desperately want to blame are passing it on.  In the end, who is left to blame but a shadow, a reflection, a ghost.

When taken in conjunction with Ugetsu  and The Uninvited, this trilogy of Ghosts speaks of the terror of reality: People are, often, horrible to each other.  While obviously taking a different tone and style from each other, the three films show the grand injustice and depravity of humanity.  Night and Fog displays it as the main focal point of the film.  It is a film of degrading injustice.  In its blatant indictment of the Nazi regime there is the tacit complicity of all humans.  While not perhaps on this scale, this sort of destruction exists historically and consistently.  In Ugetsu we see this destructive nature as part of a larger hegemony and formal institution.  The Shogunate in Japan was an institutionalized oppressive structure that was destructive to the lives and livelihoods of the majority of the Japanese people.  The peasants were subject to the daimyo but received little to no benefit from that relationship.  Often the oppression would lead to death, with the inter-warring states of the various Daimyo destroying and pillaging that which stood in their way.  Additionally, the plight of women was of the depth of sorrow.  The two spouses of the two main men suffer greatly due to the hegemonic system of oppression in their state.  The wife of the would-be Samurai is raped, not by marginalized bandits or outcastes, but by the samurai.  The system places the samurai above the peasant women, and therefore, dehumanizes the women, leaving them to used and discarded.  The woman has been raised and therefore buys into the system which states that a raped woman is of no value to her husband.  She abandons hope and becomes a prostitute.  Her counterpart is murdered by ronin samurai on the road so that they can steal her provisions.  This, while horrific to us, is acceptable in the system.  

In The Uninvited we see the horror of humanity played out in contrast to the nature of system.  Though many theorist lump the family into the hegemonic systems designed to maintain our capitalist structure, I consider the family a structure that has endured various structures and systems regardless of the economic base.  The family is deemed  by many in religious circles (of which I consider myself a part) a fundamental good and a source of love and support within the horrid world.  This assumption about the family is contrasted in The Uninvited with individuals who abandon the appropriate role in the family structure for self serving means.  The two ghosts represent two versions of the mother.  The true mother is loving and kind and the false mother is vengeful and retributive.  This binary of motherhood becomes the commentary on the potential for good and evil within the family structure.  A mother who is hateful and vengeful to her child is the source of horror, while the mother who is loving and caring is the source of peace.  Murder by the evil mother is the individualized expression of the same thing that motivated the Holocaust and the oppressive Shogunate: otherness.  The false mother viewed the true mother as an other and therefore worthy of death.  In ghost form she views the daughter as an other and tries to enact that judgement as well.  

In these films, we realize that the perpetrators of these horrors are not others, they are reflections of ourselves, shadows, ghosts of the evil mother, the daimyo, the Kapo.  These are the ghosts that haunt us, more than those who suffered and died at their hands.  For in these ghosts we see that which we could do, and have done.  We make a person an other, and then they are a thing, and we claim we are not responsible, it is the institution.  But we are the institutions.   We made the ghosts.  And we need to face them. 

Frankenstein: Love of a Lifetime

As a child I was always fascinated with monsters.  I loved anything with monsters, the creepier the better.  I would, instead of playing with friends, wander about the recess play yard pretending to be a monster.  They never scared me, rather they were my friends.  I loved monsters in movies.  The best part of any movie was the monster.  I loved the trash compactor scene in Star Wars because of the monster.  I loved Mumra in Thundercats.  I loved Skeletor in Masters of the Universe.  But my favorite monsters were the Universal Horror monsters.  At our local library there were a selection of books from the classic monster movies with a truncated version of the plot and movie stills.  I would check out as many of these as I could each time I went.  I would pore over them every day until regretfully I had to return them to the library.  Our home video collection contained many of these classic monster movies and I watched them repeatedly.  As I look back, I wonder at what my family must have thought of this little toe-head who was obsessed with monsters.  I wonder a little at it myself.  Villains are so much more interesting than heroes and monsters are even more so.  Movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Invisible Man give us monsters that are uncanny and yet relatable.  Of these Frankenstein is the best.  What makes the monsters of Classic Horror so interesting and powerful is that they are empathetic.  I remember my mother complaining about the monsters of 80’s horror as lacking the pathos of the classic monster.  We need to feel that we have something in common with the monster.  The monster is a reflection of our own selves, that which we are most afraid of, our power to destroy.  This is why Frankenstein is so effective.  The film presents a monster that is destructive of life and also a victim of circumstance.  That is how we see ourselves.

There are two moments that I would like to discuss in this regard.  The first is near the end of the film.  As Victor and his bride are preparing for their wedding word arrives that the monster has infiltrated the house.  Victor locks her in the bedroom for her safety.  The monster comes in through the balcony window.  He confronts her and snarls.  It is clear that his intentions to her are violent and sexual.  While this is in itself horrifying, it also speaks to our darkest desires.  The sexual act in its perfection is a moment of unity, love, and devotion, however the mirror of this is desire for control and consumption.  We recognize in this moment our dark (Freud would say repressed) desire to consume, or use the other through sex.  We condemn the monster and simultaneously feel indicted by our reflection in him.

The second event is the most tragic and pathetic.  In the scene with Maria and the monster we see reflected our duality as lovers and destroyers.  The monster finds the child Maria playing by the lake and she invites him to play.  He obliges and they throw flowers into the lake.  The monster is jubilant in this simple moment.  When the flowers are gone, he opts for Maria and throws her into the lake.  Immediately realizing the error of his ways the monster flees and the girl drowns.  Our relationship with children is one that is uniquely trusting.  We love them and serve them and care for them.  We also lose our tempers or simply screw up out of ignorance.  Regardless of the innocence of our actions, they can have lasting destructive consequences. (e.g. Suzy is pretty, Sarah is bright).  We feel enormous guilt for our actions and simultaneously want to absolve our guilt.  We flee and leave the child to drown.  So upon seeing the monster do the same we feel empathy for him for we see ourselves reflected in his actions.

This is why the monsters of Universal worked so well.  It was a villain we could root for and still seek retribution.  We want the evil to be punished but are sorry that it has to happen to them.  This comes from our dual desire for justice and mercy.  We want the monster to stop being bad, but we want forgiveness for our similar sins of destruction.