To anyone born to the generation of baby-boomers, we can all recall with fondness turning our outdoor antennas toward the dark heavens to pull in distant television channels hoping to catch snowy glimpses of Shock Theatre or other late-night horror hosted festivities where classic Universal Frankenstein films of the 1930s were being shown. The thrill of being able to stay up late, so sometimes watch all alone while all the other inhabitants of the household were sleeping become something very special.
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, we saw the recreation of the Frankenstein myth rewritten first by England's Hammer Film Productions and later recast in science fiction tems where even The Thing and It! The Terror from Beyond Space became variations on a theme, Frankenstein monsters from outer space!
We watched filmmakers rediscover Frankenstein during the 1970s and 1980s as the endeavored to retell the story, this time, truer to the original concept of Mary Shelley. Most of us still prefer the Universal and Hammer versions, but once again Frankenstein became redefined for yet another generation.
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 die. The Monster became the mirror by which the movie viewer could view the cruelty of an insensitive society that both created and later abondoned its own abominations.
Join us for a loving tribute to Frankenstein's Monster and the talented movie technicians who helped create him, proving once and for all you just can't keep a good Monster down.