We Belong Dead: Frankenstein on Film

The new printing of We Belong Dead has been revised and includes a new chapter by Gary J. Svehla, The Evolution of Hammer's Baron Frankenstein. This book stands as a testament to the durability of Mary Shelley’s original novel. The fact that today the name Frankenstein still elicits an immediate emotional response speaks of the universality of the Frankenstein mythos. Frankenstein’s Monster, over the course of the 20th century, became all things to all people. He was the social outcast who still had redeeming qualities. He was the loner, the tortured outsider to whom most of us could relate. He was the symbol of fear and of death, the creature better off dead who still stalked the laboratories of egocentric science. He became the metaphor for science gone bad... he was the Dark Side before Star Wars. He became a symbol that life, no matter how pathetic, was always better than death. The Monster represented a creature who sometimes wanted to die but could not. The Monster became the mirror in which the movie viewer could view the cruelty of an insensitive society that both created and later abandoned its own abominations. Whether we look at Frankenstein’s Monster as the bogeyman, as metaphor, as kindred spirit, or as society’s mirror, the fact remains that Mary Shelley knew not what she wrought during that haunted summer of 1816, and this volume is the latest effort in a relatively short line that tries to explain, looking at both cinema past and present, the meaning of Boris Karloff’s immortal words from 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein—“We belong dead!”