James Whale's Frankensteins: Re-animating the Great War

The destruction wrought by World War One, its decline in human welfare and the lack of
progress that became apparent as Europe began, once more, to mobilise for war were
moulded, by British director James Whale, into perhaps the most significant film adaptations
of Mary Shelleyʼs Frankenstein (1818). Moreover, Whaleʼs films—Frankenstein (1931) and
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—should be understood as narratives deriving from the two
cataclysmic social crises of the time: the Great War and the post-war years leading up to the
Great Depression. Through the prism of those events, Whaleʼs monster is rendered a
returning and mutilated soldier, in turn a Forgotten Man and the dispossessed citizen of a
depressed economy. Merging these into the now iconic figure of Boris Karloffʼs monster,
Whaleʼs films are emblematic of the inertia of those inter-war years, with hope,
reconstruction and progress foiled by the return of history. In establishing the significance of
the Great War in Whaleʼs adaptations, this essay also offers an analysis of some of the
wider implications this influence brings with it, such as the deterioration of the human
community and the individualʼs role within that community, as well as a comparison between
Frankensteinʼs materials and a trope most apparent in German art of the period, namely, the
production of destruction.