Adaptations, Frankenstein's Mute Monster, and the Horror of Silence
To speak or not to speak?
In my last post, we dove into the history of the adaptation of Shelley’s Frankenstein to find out exactly where the monster lost his voice. To no one’s surprise, the answer was a little complicated,
but a throughline is clear: since Shelley’s novel, the monster’s speech has rarely matched that of the original. Between the novel and today, several of the creatures are limited to trademark groaning (it’s a brand, it’s an aesthetic, and, in a world of microtrends, you’ve got to admire it). Others are completely silent. Some manage halting sentences or disjointed conversations.
There’s no question of which adaptation is shaping the narrative today. James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein is the bedrock for the pop-culture monster as he currently appears, little black bangs and all. Boris Karloff’s performance as the monster is certainly one of the most iconic of the era—though he doesn’t say a word. The reasoning behind the silence in Whale’s Frankenstein, the effects of the monstrous muteness on the audience, and the legacy of this adaptation paint a telling portrait—not only of how the monster lost his voice, but what the creature’s silence tells us about non-speaking, disability, and monstrosity in media.
The Golden Age of Horror
First of all: why has Whale’s Frankenstein been the de-facto adaptation? In part, it comes down to circumstance. Frankenstein came out at the perfect time to completely explode.
The so-called “golden age” of horror is not so much an age as what we might call a moment. During the very late 20s and early 30s, several breakout horror films amassed audiences (and revenues) of shocking size. Though only a few years, the golden age of horror established some of today’s best-known monsters in the cultural silver-screen psyche: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy. A lot was happening in film. The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talkie, was released in 1927, and talkies were becoming a global phenomenon. Developing technologies offered more realistic film effects. The Great Depression was kicking into overdrive. These were the perfect conditions for the horror genre to thrive.
And thrive it did. In 1931, Universal fronted groundbreaking horror adaptations, starting first with Tod Browning’s Dracula and then shortly afterwards Whale’s Frankenstein. In an interview with Cori Brosnahan, horror historian David Skal speaks to the success of these early horror films:
[Dracula] was a freak success. It came out in 1931, the worst year of the Great Depression, and literally saved Universal from bankruptcy, as did Frankenstein, [sic] which they brought out very quickly after they realized what a success they had on their hands with “Dracula.” [sic] So even though “Dracula” is not a polished or artistically innovative film–in fact, it really creaks—it’s still one of the most influential films Hollywood ever released because it opened up the dormant possibilities of the fantastic and the supernatural.
Another distinction of the golden age is that many of the most popular films from the era are pre-code. In the 1920s and 30s, the government realized that people were having too much of a good time at the movie theater. “That can’t be!” the Protestant moral complex cried. “There is scandal in the cinema!”
“By jove,” said William H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). “We must put a stop to this.”1
In 1934, the MPPDA did just that. The Hays Code was a series of guidelines for censorship in motion pictures in the US. The Hays Code got deep. You couldn’t make a movie that condoned breaking the law in any way; you could not make fun of “good, innocence, morality or justice”; “adultery as a subject should be avoided”; the can-can could be seen no more.2
While Whale’s Frankenstein may have been slightly altered under the Hays Code, it’s interesting to note that it actually follows most of the regulations that would be strictly enforced three years after its release. Nevertheless, Frankenstein got packaged with other more risque pre-code pictures in an era of censorship. I believe that this “pre-code” designation helped cement it even further into the romanticized canon of American cinema.
Then, of course, is the idea that Frankenstein, along with other horror classics of the time, resonated particularly with the American public at the time that it was released.
Historian David Skal says:
The 1930s, the Depression era, was a time when all of the promise of the Roaring Twenties and the faith in progress and science, and all these things that were going to make our lives better, just crashed and burned. And I don’t think it’s a mistake that we saw the rise of the mad scientist, the expert, the egghead, the people who were supposed to fix things for us, but instead had a malign influence. The image of the Frankenstein monster is a proletariat image—asphalt spreader boots and work clothes; he’s like a mute symbol of the whole working class that’s been abandoned by the people who were supposed to take care of him.
Silence as Sympathy
Since we’ve established Frankenstein (1931) as the cultural foundation of the creature, let’s take a closer look at how silence works in Whale’s film.
1931’s Frankenstein portrays the creature in a sympathetic light; I feel confident that most fans of the film would agree. In a 1963 interview with Illustrated, Boris Karloff described the monster as “a completely helpful, inarticulate, lumbering, helpless creature in a strange and hostile world, without speech, and he had to communicate to people. . .” According to a letter from Karloff to his biographer, he even received fan mail for the film that offered the monster help and friendship.3
So, the defining modern adaptation offers a speechless creature that fails to understand the world around him. More than that, his helplessness, through his silence, is the source of his connection to the audience.
But that connection is fundamentally different from identification. The audience is not truly meant to fit into the monster’s large boots. We see him as other—a sympathetic other, but other nevertheless.
Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.4
Frankenstein has been a popular work in the realm of disability studies, partly because of the othering narrative that the creature experiences. It is this unique position, as both monster and sympathetic other, that makes the creature particularly interesting as a disability narrative. I’m no expert in disability studies, so I’m going to lean on some much smarter experts in the field, a few of whom also have lived experience as disabled individuals.
In Shelley’s original narrative, the creature’s ability to speak allows him his few moments of connection with other humans, and acts in some instances to cross the othering line of disability. There are two important moments where the creature’s speech comes into play—his meeting with the blind De Lecay patriarch, and his encounter with Dr. Frankenstein, where he tells his story. Of course, these touchstone events are largely removed from most adaptations of the story. Here’s the dialogue from the creature’s meeting with De Lacey in the original novel:
De Lacey: To be friendless is indeed to be unfortunate, but the hearts of men, when unprejudiced by any obvious self-interest, are full of brotherly love and charity. Rely, therefore, on your hopes; and if these friends are good and amiable, do not despair.
Creature: They are kind—they are the most excellent creatures in the world; but, unfortunately, they are prejudiced against me. I have good dispositions; my life has been hitherto harmless and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster.
Mark Mossman, a professor of English, spoke about the significance of this exchange in “Acts of becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein, and the Postmodern Body.” Since the De Lacey patriarch cannot see the creature, the creature is able to pass as non-disabled, and therefore acceptable, to him.
We can compare the same conversation as was adapted into one of the only films with a speaking creature, the 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Robert De Niro as the creature.
De Lacey: A man shouldn’t have to hide in the shadows.
Creature: Better that way, for me.
De Lacey: Why?
Creature: People are afraid. . . except you.
De Lacey: It can’t be as bad as that.
Creature: Worse.
. . .
De Lacey: You poor man. Have you no friends?
Creature: There are some . . . people. But, they don’t know me.
De Lacey: Why do you not go to them?
Creature: Because. . . I am so very ugly. And they are so very beautiful.
Interestingly, although De Niro’s creature learns how to speak in the exact same way that Shelley’s did—by observation of the De Lacey family—he does not speak as fluidly as De Lacey does. You can watch their entire conversation here to catch the way De Niro plays the creature’s cadence:
While the De Niro adaptation seems to be by far the most faithful adaptation that I’ve studied thus far, this remnant of the creature’s current characterization lingers. This testifies to how pervasive the silent monster is, and it also tells us something about translating the disabled experience to film—and how it affects our perception of the creature as an allegory for disability.
Another significant moment for the monster’s speech is when he’s rounding up and showing the receipts to Dr. Frankenstein after hunting him down. The creature tells a moving, philosophically dense, and emotional story about his life since his creator kicked him to the curb, and begs Doc to make him a match.
Mossman comments on the importance of the creature’s narrative:
Power is in a measure re-achieved, however, in the creature’s narrative of itself. Again, self-narrative is a tool used by the creature to gain self-determinacy. . . With its story, the creature tries to resist the disabling definition of ‘monster’ and to write itself into rhetorical normalcy.
So, by telling his story, the creature attempts to break itself out of the “disabled” label, the social othering. But this story does not convince his absentee father to embrace him whole-heartedly. It does, however, switch his role in the story. Before the creature meets with Frankenstein and tells his side of the story, he is as effectually silent as Karloff’s interpretation. We’re aware of his role in the plot, in a peripheral way; the doctor expresses his horror at his creation at the beginning of his life, and we understand that he is responsible for the death of William, Frankenstein’s younger brother.
Now that the creature has told his story, he’s no longer the mindless monster we’ve believed him to be. Instead, his actions become calculating. As Mossman says, “Rather than becoming a ‘person’ or ‘human’ through an act of language and rhetoric, the creature becomes a ‘master’ through ‘monstrous’ acts of violence.”
The Innocent Mute or the Soliloquizing Psychopath
In a thesis on the silence of Frankenstein’s monster, Frida Hellryd writes, “The Creature’s only two options seem to be: monstrous because he cannot speak, or innocent because he cannot speak.”
I agree with this—most adaptations either leverage silence for sympathy or use it to further other him from the audience. However, it is interesting to note that the same dichotomy can’t be made in reverse. If he speaks, he is monstrous.
If the monster speaks as well as Shelley’s original creature, he is no longer helpless. When Whale’s 1931 monster tosses a young girl into a river, it’s because he thinks she will float like the flower petals. When Shelley’s creation kills Frankenstein’s younger brother, it’s an act of willful revenge. Whale’s creature is trapped in a windmill and lit aflame by the townspeople. Frankenstein’s monster burns himself to death.
In the case of Frankenstein’s monster, the removal of speech is most often the removal of agency and intent. This not only tells us about our understanding of agency and disability, but our perception of speech itself.
As a cultural touchstone, Frankenstein becomes an important metric for our understanding of this concepts at a social level. So far, it looks like the adaptations aren’t going to slow down. 2025 will bring two new adaptations of the creature to life—one played by Christian Bale, and the other (brace yourself) by Jacob Elordi.
I’m on the edge of my seat to see what they have to say for themselves.
Paraphrased.
I used this copy of the Hays Code for easy access.
This is originally from Boris Karloff: More than a Monster, the official biography by Stephen Jacobs. You can also find it in David Skal’s Screams of Reason.
The creature to Frankenstein in Chapter 15, non-volumed.