Spoken with shivery reverence by multitudes of children, the name had already become archetypal and uncanny. His rough clothes shrunken on him, wrists dangling from his coat sleeves to expose crude scars, the creature nevertheless emanated the misery of a lost child, and would forever connect with children and adolescents.Īs early as 1935, when the first sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, referred to 'Frankenstein, a monster created from cadavers out of rifled graves,' the title of the film, originally named after the creator, had been displaced onto the nameless monster. Forced into unnatural life, with blank eyes that regarded the world from hooded lids made of mortician's putty, the monster represented the existential horror of unwanted, ungainly life, the body as Other to the self, the identity crisis at the heart of embodiment at whatever age. I was thrilled as a kid by what now, as an adult and cinephile, I recognize as a feat of brilliant pantomime with a haunted aura of early silent cinema.

Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-1983), played off and fostered not just one resurrection but successive 'horror booms,' insuring that Boris Karloff's image, stamped on a generation of baby boomers, would remain not only Universal's but the universally recognized monster, the archetype. Shock and its descendants, along with fanzines such as Forrest J. But among the schlocky sequels were the classics. Introduced by creepily outlandish horror hosts, Shock Theater mocked and celebrated old horror movies as camp. Propelled by this resurrection, along with rock 'n roll and that unique blend of innocence and rebellion that characterized the first so-designated 'teenagers,' the second horror 'boom' became a mild protest against the complacency of the 1950s. Shock's package of pre-1948 Universal Studios horror films, released for television syndication in October 1957, gave birth to the 'midnight TV' phenomenon.

My first and truest cinematic epiphany occurred, like that of many preteens and adolescents of the boomer generation, at a Friday night sleepover watching the 1931 Frankenstein on Shock Theater with a friend who had late-night television privileges on weekends.

Frankenstein by Robert Horton