After having never read Frankenstein, I was quite surprised as to how different the monster was compared to what I had expected. There are countless adaptations of the story portrayals of the monster but I’m not sure any of them come remotely close to it. Frankenstein’s monster is almost always a mindless, green, groaning monster with bolts sticking out his neck that wants for nothing but to kill people. In Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein the monster is actually smart and originally has no intention of killing and believe it or not, he just wants to fit in. But it doesn’t matter how smart the monster is or how he even saves a girl from drowning. He’s ugly, so he’s a monster.
I don’t know if it was Marry Shelley’s intention of making the reader feel for the monster or not but damn, I couldn’t help but feel terrible for the guy (although I’m always guilty of favoring the monster characters) Of course until he started killing people…. It was actually harder for me to relate to Dr. Frankenstein. He did things that seemed downright selfish and he never cared for his own creation. He spent most of the book complaining about his life and never really took any action to fix anything.
A funny spin on the concept of a
monster being rejected by the world is in the animated movie, A Monster in
Paris. Set in 1910 France, a harmless flea is accidentally transformed into a
monster. Emile, a shy movie projectionist who also plays the role of the gothic
heroin, finds that the creature isn’t so threatening and he actually has an
incredible singing voice!
The movie pays homage to stories
like Frankenstein and The Phantom of the Opera where the monster turns out to
be what we don’t expect. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Francœur, (the flea
monster) has no intention of harming anyone but because he is a hideous
bug-man, he is considered evil. In the end it is the greed and selfishness of
people that turn out to be the real monsters.
For my revision, Alexis Chambers
and I watched No such Thing since we were both eager to finish the film. It was
definitely not what we were expecting. Compared to Frankenstein, A Monster in
Paris, and the Gothic Horror genre, No such Thing had a lot in common but a lot
of differences too. There was that combination of horror and romance, kind of
like Beauty and the Beast and a similarity to the Bride of Frankenstein.
As with the other two stories
mentioned above, the monster turned out to be the most relatable character. The
other characters seemed to have no emotion, hardly reacting to anything around
them, where as The Monster had so much personality. Everything was affecting
him and all he wanted was to die. This film was another example as to how
people are just as terrible as the monsters they make up. As the monster roams
the city streets he is beaten up and treated like a freak. Something that stuck
out as different compared to the other films is the way the people reacted to
the Monster. Instead of freaking out about the fact that there’s a real live
monster walking around, people treated him like he was a sort of celebrity.
News reporters tried interviewing him and even making him a television fad.
Beatrice, plays the Beauty role of
Beauty and the Beast but she doesn’t necessarily fall in love with the Monster
at first. In the beginning, she sort of had the opposite role of the Monster
where she wanted to continue living after being in a plane crash. Because
Beatrice had already faced death, she was not afraid of the Monster. In the
end, she and the Monster both go through two similar procedures but to achieve
two different goals. Beatrice's surgery was to keep her alive because there was
more for her in life and The Monster's surgery was to take his life away. He seemed
to be weary of life because he had already had enough of it.
In the end it is uncertain whether
the Monster is destroyed or not. Either way the Monster and Beatrice seemed to
finally be at peace and life will go on. Overall, we weren’t expecting the outcome
of this movie but it kept itself original. I think I liked the portrayal of how
humans would react to a monster. By now, I think most of us would react more
calmly. At least I would anyway...
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