Frankenstein is a young medical student. Very early you’re introduced to Frankensteins interested in human life and how to create it for himself. His experiments carry him along until he becomes truly obsessed with the unholy desire to create life. But he fails to reckon with God.
From graves, the scaffold, and from the university laboratory he steals bodies and uses parts of what were once human beings to build his creation. In one of the open scenes, you meet Victor and Henry who are digging around graveyards but you also learn that Victor is desperate for one human organ in particular, the brain and then steals the brain of a criminal from a lecture room. One night, as the elements rage in an electrical storm, he puts his theories and the body he has assembled to the final test. When the creature is bought back down and Victor sees that his theory has worked, you hear the famous line;
“It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!”
The thing that never lived, the horrible monstrosity of a man, the monster of his creation, does take on a robot form of life. He has given it everything except pity, humanity, love.
From day one of the monsters life, it sets out upon a path of terror and murder. Victor, Henry and the professor try to tame and civilise the monster, to teach it, however the monster goes on killing. Frankenstein then collapses over the stress and regret of creating this monster and is taken home by his future wife, Elizabeth. Soon after the monster escapes by murdering the professor and flees into the countryside and kills a little child, the only human that had ever been kind to it. This time the monster seems to realise what it has done. What pity the monster is capable of showing, it shows here in this scene. Then, on the wedding day of Victor, the monster gets into the bridal home, attacks the bride-to-be and again escapes. This time the entire village is set to trap and kill the monster and goes looking for it. High up on the mountain they find "the thing," but not until it’s too late and has captured and is carrying away Victor after getting into a physical fight. The monster seeks safety away from the angry mob after him, and flees to the old mill where it was created. Here the mob comes and they set fire to the old mill. In its rage and fear of fire, the monster throws the body of its creator into the mob and, trapped in the flames, it burns to death.
Because Frankenstein created much of the cinematic language of horror films, it has often been copied. Consequently, and ironically, viewers coming to the film today may mistake the conventions that it created for clichés. The mad scientist and his neo-gothic lab, comma-shaped assistant, and rigidly lurching monster were all creations of director James Whale, and have become movie icons.
However, watching Frankenstein is more than simply an exercise in nostalgia. Despite moments of melodrama, the film is wonderfully economical, telling a complex and appealing tale. There are more moments of quiet power, most of them involving the striking Boris Karloff as the monster who simply wants to be loved, than you'll find in a fistful in modern day horror films. Whale knew his vision and didn't clutter the action with a lot of chatter. Instead, he filled the screen with images that would become part of our cultural vocabulary. He builds the story to its tragically inevitable climax, interchanging moments of subtle beauty and dreadful horror.
Rather than simply adopt a conventional perspective (that man should not play God), Whale emphasises the human drama that Frankenstein should not have abandoned his creation, turning a horror film into an existential tale of man's fear of abandonment.
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