Horror Literature through History
Page 25
Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr (Terminal Reality)
2001
Clive Barker’s Undying (DreamWorks Interactive); Fatal Frame (Tecmo)
2002
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon Knights)
2005
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (Headfirst Productions); Resident Evil 4 (Capcom)
2007
Clive Barker’s Jericho (Mercury Steam Entertainment)
2010
Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment); Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games)
2013
Outlast (Red Barrels)
2014
P.T. (Kojima Productions)
Matt Cardin
Perhaps because of its relationship with imagination and investigation, the writer figure abounds in horror video games, from the author of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father (Sierra On-line, 1993) or of Silent Hill to the would-be novelist in Dark Seed (Cyberdream, 1992) or the best-selling thriller author à la Stephen King in Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment, 2010).The gamer is not only put in the shoes of such a character, but is somehow always writing her or his own story of the game itself. Perhaps in the end this makes the player of such games assume the role of the famous “wreader” (the intermingling of writer and reader) that interactive fiction authors have been talking about since the 1990s.
Bernard Perron and Jean-Charles Ray
See also: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Barker, Clive; Cthulhu Mythos; Ellison, Harlan; Herbert, James; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Monsters; Psychological Horror; The Rats; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Kirkland, Ewan. 2012. “Gothic Videogames, Survival Horror and the Silent Hill Series.” Gothic Studies 14, no. 2 (November): 106–122. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/GS.14.2.8.
Krzywinska, Tanya. 2015. “Gamification of Gothic.” In Diversity of Play, edited by Mathias Fuchs, 21–38. Lüneburg: Meson Press.
Perron, Bernard, ed. 2009. Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
THE LEGACY OF FRANKENSTEIN: FROM GOTHIC
NOVEL TO CULTURAL MYTH
Frankenstein is a Gothic novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The novel was published in 1818 when Mary was just twenty years old. Though it received little immediate recognition, theatrical adaptation raised the profile of Frankenstein, and it was issued again in 1831 in a revised form. It has never been out of print since and has become horror’s most enduring myth. The novel itself has been reimagined, reinvented, parodied, and recontextualized in countless ways, and numberless texts have been derived from its central themes. The figure of the Creature, the theme of science gone awry, and the Faustian power struggle between Creature and creator underpin a whole spectrum of modern narratives, both within the horror genre and more widely.
Brian Aldiss has described Frankenstein as the “first great myth of the industrial age” (Aldiss 1973, 23), but it could be argued that Mary Shelley’s novel is in fact the most fundamental of all modern myths. Itself a modernization of Faustian and Promethean myths—the former about a learned magician who sells his soul to the devil, the latter about an ancient Greek deity who incurs drastic punishment by stealing fire from the gods to give to humans—Frankenstein is in turn the model for all subsequent attempts to present the dangers of hubris (that is, foolish pride or arrogance) and the threat of unfettered scientific ambition.
The story of Frankenstein is among the most famous in Western literature and is well known to any student with even a passing interest in horror. In brief, it tells of Victor Frankenstein’s scientific ambitions and his ruin at the hands of the Creature he has constructed from the fragments of corpses. Victor is driven to understand the principles of life, but once he has given life to his Creature he abandons it in disgust. The Creature is cast out in solitude to face the cruelty of the world. Lonely, he asks Victor to make him a mate, and when Victor changes his mind—horrified at the prospect that “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth” (Shelley 1994, 121)—the Creature vows to destroy the man he sees as the architect of his misery. The remainder of the novel is filled with violence and death as the Creature embarks on his revenge.
The story has been adapted and altered innumerable times. Its first adaptation was in Richard Brinsley Peake’s play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823). Peake’s play was largely responsible for the growing success of Mary Shelley’s novel after it had an initial lukewarm reception. Presumption is perhaps most significant for establishing the emphasis on the Creature’s nameless status. The playbill famously represented the Creature merely as a series of dashes, foreshadowing the postmodern interest in the Creature as a representation of the unrepresentable.
There were other theatrical adaptations, but it was cinema that established Frankenstein’s place in the fabric of popular culture. The first cinematic treatment of the novel is Edison Studios’ silent film (1910), but by far the most famous early cinematic version of Frankenstein is James Whale’s 1931 adaptation for Universal Studios. Whale’s film is considered a classic of the early era of horror cinema, and almost all subsequent representations of the Creature are derived from Boris Karloff’s appearance as a rectangular-headed giant with bolts through his neck. Whale’s film, which was not based on Shelley’s novel but on a 1927 stage adaptation by the British playwright Peggy Webling, deviates significantly from the original source, and in doing so it introduces numerous motifs that have since become enshrined as part of a parallel, cinematic mythology. These include the hunchbacked henchman, Igor, the use of electricity to give life to the Creature, and the pitchfork-wielding villagers who destroy the monster.
Whale’s sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), is considered by many critics to be superior to the first film, though it now has only tangential links with the source material. Elsa Lanchester’s portrayal of the titular Bride, with her iconic, lightning-patterned beehive hair, has entered the modern horror pantheon in its own right. The Bride of Frankenstein is also noteworthy for its inclusion of a prologue depicting Mary, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron discussing Mary’s novel. The film is thus introduced by Mary’s claim that there is more story to tell. The scene highlights the way in which the biographical background of Frankenstein is often indivisible from the novel itself.
There are literally hundreds of other cinematic adaptations. Most of them adhere loosely (if at all) to the source material and frequently represent the Creature as a brutish monster, stripped of the subtlety and sympathy that was so integral to the original story. Some of the more outlandish examples include I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Frankenstein Versus Dracula (1971), and Blackenstein (1973). These, like most modern treatments, apply the name Frankenstein to the monster rather than his creator.
Frankenstein has proved ripe for parody as well. Famous examples include Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), and the stage show and subsequent film The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
As well as direct revisions of Shelley’s novel, the legacy of Frankenstein can be identified in any narrative in which scientific ambition has dangerous, uncontainable consequences. Thus, Frankenstein can be seen as the fundamental science fiction narrative, and it is widely regarded as the first example of the genre. Its influence can be seen in such prominent science fiction films as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982), both of which question the nature of life and intelligence, as well as the dangers of technology. Frankenstein has reemerged in the contemporary era as a referent for the potential pitfalls of scientific progress. In particular, anxieties about the ethics and consequences of advances in genetics have found fertile ground in the Frankenstein myth. Horro
r films such as The Fly (1986), Species (1995), and Splice (2009) each center on the horrific results of meddling with the natural order of life. In real-world terms, the prefix Franken—as in “Frankenfoods,” referring to foods that have been genetically modified or otherwise changed by human intervention; and “Frankenstorm,” a term coined for the possible “monstrous” merging of Hurricane Sandy with other violent weather in 2012—is now synonymous with the threat of unrestricted human interference. As science progresses toward artificial intelligence and human-technological interfaces, and further exerts an ostensible control over the natural world, the legacy of Frankenstein continues to be useful as an expression of anxiety.
However, alongside this particular perpetuation of the Frankenstein narrative, the novel’s genesis has itself accrued mythical overtones. There is no other novel whose composition is so famous. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1816 while holidaying on the banks of Lake Geneva. That year was famously the “year without a summer,” when meteorological anomalies meant poor weather and confinement indoors. Mary was spending the summer in Geneva with a literary gathering that included her soon-to-be husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; the iconic Lord Byron, another of the era’s most famous poets; and his physician John Polidori. Trapped in the gloomy Villa Diodati by the weather, it was suggested that they each attempt to write a ghost story. Frankenstein was Mary Shelley’s contribution.
There are many suggestions as to what inspired Mary to write Frankenstein. Critics point to the revolutionary attitude of the time, which Mary’s parents—the political philosopher William Godwin and the novelist and feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft—had helped shape. The theme of rebellion against authority is laced throughout the novel, most spectacularly in the Creature’s violence against his master. Equally, some see the death of Mary’s infant daughter in 1815 as the wishful inspiration for a story focused on overcoming the restrictions of mortality. Frankenstein is filled with symbolic resonance and is open to seemingly limitless interpretation. It is perhaps this very adaptability that has perpetuated its importance in contemporary culture, whereas other monstrous myths have been exhausted.
Frankenstein’s Monster: Adam or Satan?
The monster as originally portrayed in Mary Shelley’s novel differs dramatically from the mute, shambling version of it that was burned into public consciousness by Universal Studios’ 1931 film adaptation. Mary’s monster learns to speak and read, and it ponders the nature of its own existence with intense emotional agony. Here are its reflections as it reads John Milton’s Paradise Lost and relates that epic cosmic story of Satan, God, Adam, and Eve to its own circumstance:
But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions [than the other books I had read]. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe, that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors [a poor family whom the monster spied on to learn about human behavior], the bitter gall of envy rose within me. (Shelley 1823, 36–37)
Matt Cardin
Source: Shelley, Mary. [1818] 1823. Frankenstein. A New Edition. London: Printed for G. and W. B. Whittaker, Ave Maria Lane.
What is clear is that Mary was interested in the scientific principle of galvanism, the application of electrical current to organic tissue. It was at the time being practiced in London by Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles). In the foreword to the 1831 edition of her novel, Mary recounts a conversation between Byron and Percy Shelley that touched upon the subject of Darwin’s experiment, in which a piece of vermicelli was galvanized into “voluntary motion.” Mary goes on to wonder: “perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a Creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endured with vital warmth” (Shelley 1994, xv). Famously, Mary would then go on to dream of “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together . . . the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion” (Shelley 1994, viii). Mary had her story, and two years later it was published.
Significantly, Frankenstein was not the only horror legacy to be birthed in that friendly competition. Both Byron and Polidori wrote stories based upon the folklore of the vampire that they had heard while touring the Balkans. Byron abandoned his attempt, but Polidori went on to complete a draft of “The Vampyre” (1819) a full eighty years before Bram Stoker would create his own horror icon in Dracula (1897). And though Dracula is credited with introducing the notion of the vampire as an urbane and seductive monster, Polidori’s vampire is all this and more, being based largely on Byron himself.
As with Frankenstein itself, the most famous depictions of these events at the Villa Diodati are cinematic. As mentioned, Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein features a conversation between Shelley and her circle as an introduction to the film. The most famous fictionalization of the events at Villa Diodati is director Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986). Like the later Haunted Summer (1988), Russell’s film presents the gathering as a hedonistic, psycho-sexual degeneration. The film won several awards and has since garnered a cult following.
Both Frankenstein and the story of its creation live on in popular culture. Increasingly, postmodern meta-inclinations have led to a blurring of the lines demarcating these two distinct stories. For example, Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound (1973) features a time-traveler who visits 1816, where he encounters both the monster and a young woman named Mary Shelley. Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008) similarly conflates the world of the story and the figures involved in its creation. In Ackroyd’s novel, Victor Frankenstein meets the Shelley circle and is inspired to create his monster by their revolutionary zeal. Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes (2009) is presented as the diary of the monster who, having lived through the ages since the publication of Shelley’s novel, looks back at his own role in its inspiration.
Interestingly, all of this blurring of boundaries has been present since the publication of the 1831 edition of the novel. In her foreword Shelley clearly outlines the association between her book and the sutured Creature it contains, both of which could be referred to by her famous phrase “my hideous progeny” (ix). Frankenstein is a novel about creativity, and it is therefore unsurprising that the novel has been employed in contemporary fiction’s tendency toward self-consciousness. Shelley’s novel has endured so long and remained so central to popular culture because of its adaptability. In the current cultural moment, it is a useful metaphor for tortured literary creation and frightening scientific advancement.
Neil McRobert
See also: Eco-horror; The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Part One, Horror through History: Horror Literature in the Nineteenth Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Body Snatching; Byron, Lord; Frame Story; Gothic Hero/Villain; Koontz, Dean; Mad Scientist; Monsters; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shelley, Mary; “The Vampyre.”
Further Reading
Aldiss, Brian. 1973. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. New York: Doubleday.
Baldick, Chris. 1987 In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Friedma
n, Lester, and Allison B. Kavey. 2016. Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.
Glut, Donald F. 2002. The Frankenstein Archive: Essays on the Monster, the Myth, the Movies, and More. London: McFarland.
Graham, Elaine L. 2002. Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.
Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. 2007. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York and London: W. W. Norton.
Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. 2006. The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein. New York: Little, Brown.
Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. 1979. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mellor, Anne K. 1988. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. London: Routledge.
Shelley, Mary. [1831] 1994. Frankenstein. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Tyler Hitchcock, Susan. 2007. Frankenstein: The Cultural Legacy. New York: Norton.
OCCULT FICTION
The field of occult fiction is immensely wide and reflects the ongoing concern, spread across all ages and all cultures, with magic. A very short definition of magic would focus on the possibility of change: change of shape, change of the future, change of perception. All science has to do with change, but magic proposes to effect change through means that do not conform to rational standards, typically in the West through alchemical process and through ritual. Figures such as Simon Magus (from the first century CE), Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280), Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), Paracelsus (1493–1541), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and Eliphas Levi (1810–1875), among many others, are frequently cited as the precursors and progenitors of occult fiction, along with the apocryphal “Hermes Trismegistus.” All of these are thought to have been involved in “practical magic,” attempts to influence the world’s affairs through unorthodox means, which are often said to be secret except to the initiate.