Monster Frankenstein

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There have been any number of film adaptations of Frankenstein.  Guillermo del Toro, as an auteur, has a distinctive style.  I wan’t quite sure how well the two might mix.  I’d been avoiding his 2025 Frankenstein for that reason and because it’s two-and-a-half hours long.  Even rainy weekends don’t always have that big a block of time to spare.  When I finally found the time I found it an interesting departure from Mary Shelley’s story, but, as with most del Toro films, well made.  And the Bible appears in it as well.  This, of course, is part of the whole horror mystique.  Other versions of Frankenstein have played with the idea of the creature’s superior strength but del Toro adds the distinct element that Victor Frankenstein’s creation can’t die.  When he’s killed, he recovers.  He becomes the unstoppable pursuer.

The movie also makes clear that Victor is the real monster.  It is he who kills Elizabeth and then blames it on his creation.  Likewise, when his benefactor is accidentally killed, Victor blames the creature.  The dialogue focuses on religion and death—the Bible reference isn’t gratuitous—and in an interview del Toro noted that Frankenstein is, for him, religion.  Like many del Toro horror films, it doesn’t share the feel of much of modern horror.  For example, there are no jump startles and the presentation is more like a drama or adventure movie than it is a horror one.  There is gore, however, and a monster, both of which place it into the expected category.

Another theme that runs through this rendition of the iconic horror story is that of reconciling with a problematic father.  Victor’s father is cruel and demanding.  He, in turn, becomes cruel and demanding with his creature.  Both “fathers” believe they have the right to dictate the future of their sons.  Victor, while brilliant, is emotionally poorly equipped for his role as surrogate parent.  In the end the creature reconciles with his imperfect but repentant dying father.  With large themes such as this, and the religion and death dialogue, it’s natural enough that this movie attained critical recognition.  And the acting is sincere, with characteristic del Toro sympathy for the monster.  Both monsters, in this version.  The creature and Victor both undergo a kind of redemption by the end of it all.  While not emotionally wrenching—the basic storyline is perhaps too well-known for that—this is a monster film with heart.  This is, of course, a del Toro hallmark.

Peak del Toro

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Crimson Peak is perhaps my favorite Guillermo del Toro movie.  Gothic to the hilt, the story—a bit overwrought—features plenty of ghosts and a house appropriate to them.  The many reflexes of horror on display here make it a compelling movie, despite its box office disappointment (although, honestly, how can $19 million really be a disappointment?).  There’s a gothic mansion, a murderous plot, blood-red clay, incestuous siblings, ghosts—what more’s necessary?  Thomas Sharpe is a minor aristocrat down on his luck.  All he and his sister have is the crumbling Allerdale Hall, perched atop Crimson Peak with its clay mines beneath.  In need of investors, they travel to Buffalo, New York, where Edith Cushing (surely no coincidence of names) meets and falls in love with Thomas.  Her wealthy father dies in mysterious circumstances, but she marries Thomas and they head for England along with her inheritance.

It’s clear something’s not right, so Edith, who is an aspiring writer, explores the old house and makes some unwelcome discoveries.  And she sees ghosts.  They help her unravel what’s going on but her health is declining as winter sets in.  Of course, the fact that she’s being poisoned doesn’t hurt.  Thomas and Lucille, the lover siblings, have done this before.  More than once.  There’s a kind of Bluebeard theme running through Crimson Peak.  Each time they inherit the wealth of the deceased brides but they can’t get the mines up and running to save their estate.  The twist is that this time Thomas has actually fallen in love, making it difficult for him to kill Edith.  Their house, except for that gaping hole in the roof, is one of my favorites from any movie.

The more I think about it, the haunted house in gothic films may be the decisive element for me.  I’ve always loved Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and perhaps growing up in humble domiciles attuned me to what could be.  I loved reading about Collinwood.  Maybe I even knew that such houses come with a very steep price that consequently casts them as haunted.  Indeed, in the movie itself Edith says the ghosts in her story are metaphors for the past.  Of course, she encounters literal ghosts at Crimson Peak.  This is a movie about moods and gothic settings.  The horror pretty much matches what del Toro offers up in other films like The Devil’s Backbone.  The only monsters here are the ghosts and they aren’t the bad guys.  

Ghosts and Spines

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Guillermo del Toro’s early movies are thought-provoking and somewhat depressing.  The Devil’s Backbone, like Pan’s Labyrinth, puts children in the way of adult political unrest and war.  I suspect that sensitive people watching such movies can easily imagine that they could have been put in such circumstances, were things different.  Having said that, The Devil’s Backbone works as a sad, gothic horror movie.  Set during the Spanish Civil War, the film focuses on orphans not quite out of reach of the conflict.  There’s a ghost at the orphanage that, until near the end, we think that the bully among the kids had killed.  The point of view is that of Carlos, a new kid at the orphanage who encounters the ghost and eventually decides to find out what happened to him.  The movie’s nearly a quarter century old, but there will be spoilers below.  Maybe there have already been some—sorry!

As the children, war orphans, try to navigate how to become adults, they have limited male role models—the doctor, who is good, and the groundskeeper, who is not.  Jacinto, the groundskeeper, was raised in the orphanage and although he had a professional-level family, grew up alone and wanting better.  His response was to turn cruel.  We’re not given much of the doctor’s backstory, but due to his position at the orphanage, we have to assume there’s a sadness there as well.  A number of subplots are interlaced with this, one of which involves the title of the movie.  Originally set in Mexico rather than Spain, the Devil’s Backbone was named after a mountain range.  That has to be transferred to victims of spina bifida in the local village.  This medical name has to be explained to the audience and it adds to the gothic atmosphere.

This is an example of a bright, sunny location nevertheless being a fraught place.  The boys (there are no girls at the orphanage) make their own society—not quite on a Lord of the Flies level—because the adults are at their wits’ end due to the encroaching war.  In the end all the adults end up dead.  The future of the boys is uncertain, but they show themselves able to distinguish between good and evil.  Adults, meanwhile, perpetuate a war in which, in real life, half-a-million people were killed.  There’s a lesson here for those willing and able to learn it.  Horror often has a moral, and when the boys are carrying an old crucifix to the courtyard and one remarks that he’s “pretty heavy for a dead guy,” adults should be paying attention.

Out of Season

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Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, by Alvin Schwartz, has been a fixture since the early eighties.  I was a bit too old for Scholastic at the time, but my daughter had a copy that I read recently.  I heard about the 2019 film before it came out (and I’m having trouble believing it was all the way back before the pandemic).  It’s more of a Halloween movie and since it features young actors it had translated to a “kids’ movie” in my head.  I suppose the PG-13 rating contributed to that.  Sill, it turns out that it’s a proper horror film, but not too scary.  The story is partially by Guillermo del Toro, so I had some idea of what to expect.  I’m glad I watched it, even though the right season is still months away.  Therapy is welcome any time of year.

Anthology films often don’t work well, and this one manages to avoid that by constructing an overarching narrative.  The teens, visiting a haunted house on Halloween night, find a book by a hidden family member who’d hanged herself but who was rumored to tell stories to those who ask.  The book, written in blood, writes new stories featuring each of the kids, telling their bizarre deaths.  Since there are six main kids there are six main subplots and some of them are quite effective.  Scarecrows aren’t like the kind you find in Oz.  And two of the good kids end up missing while this is played off against the Vietnam War (it’s set in 1968).  One of the characters has been drafted and is being shipped off to the war as the film ends.  Since the final girls (there are two) are committed to finding the lost kids, a sequel seems inevitable.

The setting of fictional Mill Valley is a Pennsylvania town, and it’s nice to see my home state getting some attention outside M. Night Shyamalan movies.  I’ve always felt there was more creepy potential here than has been explored.  And autumn is generally beautiful in the commonwealth.  Although I watched the movie out of season (while it was free to do so on Amazon Prime), it has landed on my list of films to watch in October.  It manages to get that feel right and I know that come the autumn I’ll have a hankering for that sensation.  It’s not really that scary, but it manages to be worth an adult’s time and attention.  And it makes me want to read the book again.  And horror can work for therapy, even when it’s starting to get hot outside.

Monster Gods

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“I would go to Catholic Church and the saints made no sense.  But Frankenstein made sense, The Wolfman made sense, The Creature from the Black Lagoon made sense.  So I chose that as my religion.”  Famed writer/director Guillermo del Toro said these words.  They’re not exactly gospel but they do demonstrate the connection between religion and horror that is only now beginning to be explored.  Del Toro and I are of the same generation, and some of us in that time frame found meaning in the monsters we saw as kids.  They were coping techniques for living in an uncertain and difficult world.  A world with hellfire on Sundays and often hell for the rest of the week.  Fears of bullies and alcoholic fathers and lack of money.  Fears of an unknown infraction sending you to eternal torment, even if you didn’t know or mean it.

Image credit: Manuel Bartual, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t choose horror as my religion.  I didn’t grow up Catholic like del Toro either.  I haven’t seen all of his movies, but he does evince a kind of religious devotion to his monsters.  Pan’s Labyrinth was distinctly disturbing.  Pacific Rim was intense.  Crimson Peak is one it’s about time I watched again.  The Shape of Water offered a lovable monster.  Many of these films don’t follow standard horror tropes.  They’re thoughtful, emotive, and often wrenching.  These are, of course, traits shared in common with religion.  I suspect my own attempts to articulate this would benefit from conversation with someone like del Toro.  There’s no doubt that monsters give me the sense of Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Religion and horror share a common ancestor.  Fear is an emotion that we apparently share with all sentient beings.  How we deal with it differs.  While a bunny will run away a rattlesnake will strike.  Horror is a way of dealing with fear.  So is religion.  We can’t avoid fear because, honestly, there’s much to be afraid of.  Many choose to believe their clergy, taught by people like me, and assume religion has all the answers.  Others, like del Toro, seek wisdom elsewhere.  When the credits roll at the end, you know it was all just a show.  When you walk out of the church, synagogue, or mosque, you know daily life awaits with its peaks and valleys.  Some may substitute one for the other, while others require the support of both.  And both, as odd as it may seem, can be addressed with conviction.  If you don’t believe me, just ask Guillermo del Toro.

Banning Banning

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Banned Book Week gets me all aflutter.  There have been years at I’m so busy that it slips by before I notice it, but each year I try to incorporate it somehow into my reading challenges.  This year my book was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, by Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell.  Yes, it’s a young readers’ book.  Most banned and challenged books are.  Why censorious adults feel the need to keep ideas out of print is pretty obvious in these Trumpian times.  (Please note, dear Republicans, many Democrats criticize Biden on a regular basis; we do not worship him.  American Marxist my donkey!)  Book censoring only serves fascist tendencies.  Ideas will find a way to be born, regardless.

Scary Stories, of course received a shot in the arm by Guillermo del Toro and his interest in making a movie based on it.  The stories themselves are drawn from folklore—they’re populist, you might say—and reflect what passes around from perhaps less insane times.  As an adult a reader tends not to find these stories frightening.  For one thing, many of them are stories we’ve heard before.  For another, life has already thrown many scary things at us.  Not only that, but we try to ban books to make adulthood even scarier.  You see, folklore doesn’t go away just because children are kept from the books.  These stories find the gaps just as water does.  They get told in the dark.  Instead of trying to censor them we should try to talk about them.

Adults’ own discomfort with ideas such as death and decay often stand behind our efforts to “protect” our children.  Then they reach maturity not prepared for the adult world of sex, exploitation, and dying.  Our modern comfort-based lifestyle tries to shut away the unpleasant aspects of existence.  Books, however, are the food of the imagination.  To ban them is to try to suppress the truths that authors have uncovered.  Growing up in a conservative household, we weren’t subjected to censorship.  I couldn’t afford many books, but my mother never said “No, you can’t read that.”  Some of my early reading faced uncomfortable facts.  I read both Jaws and The Godfather long before I ever saw the movies.  I read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark as a form of solidarity with young minds.  There are benefits to learning to deal with fear early on in life.  And Scary Stories, even if not so frightening, has an appropriate place in it.

Faithful to Monsters

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“Since childhood I’ve been faithful to monsters. I’ve been saved and absolved by them because monsters are the patron saints of our blissful imperfections.” Guillermo del Toro’s quote came to me via my colleague John W. Morehead’s wonderful Theofantastique (actually its Facebook page).  I get the sense that those of us in the field of teratology parallel play a lot.  At least I console myself that way because so few monster sites link to my blog.  Nevertheless, I have great respect for del Toro and his drive to bring monsters into the mainstream.  His quote, however, hits upon a central theme of what I try to do here and elsewhere—reflect on what monsters have to do with religion.

Notice the religious language (obviously intentional): faithful, saved, absolved, patron saints.  Monsters are indeed self-reflections, and they play on the same field as religion does.  Often at the same time.  Religion, even in the best of circumstances, entails fear.  If everything were fine all the time, what need would we have of it?  Instead, aspects of life we don’t cherish or anticipate come at us.  Winter comes far sooner than we expected.  Monsters lurk in that brief season between summer and winter, that autumn of the soul.  They know us quite well.  Our weaknesses are evident to them.  But as del Toro notes, they absolve.  And more readily than any Episcopalian.  The religion of monsters is fierce and forgiving.  When we watch them on the screen, we’re watching the drama of, in del Toro’s nomenclature, salvation.  If we didn’t require saving, again, why would we need religion (or monsters)?

Being faithful to monsters again bears comparison with the divine.  Should you become one of the lost while the 99 don’t require any assistance, your monsters will come find you.  In fact, that’s what they most specialize in.  What are dark nights of the soul without a little company?  It’s not sacrilegious to map the divine world with that of monsters, for any language regarding such high stakes beings must be metaphorical.  Our standard version of God is often a large human.  Generally he’s male, and he doesn’t always display compassion, although capable of doing so.  Monsters may be creatures of our own imaginations.  They are cast large on the screen since they too stand in for those to whom we owe some tribute for this is not a safe world in which to raise your kids.  Guillermo del Toro understands; we should listen.

Mature Monsters

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When I first began this blog, generally focused on religion, I felt the need to justify posts about monsters. Now, some seven years and several books later, I have come to assume monsters and religion are close kin. Many scholars who explore monsters are those in that amorphous field of “religious studies” who’ve come to realize that terror and the sacred are not far apart. In fact, the Bible contains many stories that could be understood as horror, if taken literally. When my wife sent me a story in The Guardian, “Guillermo del Toro: ‘I love monsters the way people worship holy images’” I once again found the connection reinforced. In the article by Jordan Riefe, del Toro comes more than once to religious themes as he describes his fascination with the macabre. Here’s a guy about my age who’s not afraid to admit that he likes the scary stuff and has, indeed, become famous for it.

Feejee_mermaidI have to admit that Guillermo del Toro has a way of pressing my buttons. I’ve watched a number of his films and they can be scary even with subtitles to read. Perhaps the reason is that del Toro understands implicitly the tie between religious thinking and the monstrous. An invisible man of infinite power whose revealed will comes in contradictions is certainly a source of fear. So is a child who wears a burlap sack painted like a mask over his head. Known for his fear-inducing creatures, del Toro was raised a Mexican Catholic. He ties this upbringing with monsters in this story. Riefe records him as saying, “I felt there was a deep cleansing allowing for imperfection through the figure of a monster. Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.” In a mythical world where perfection rests only with divinity and people are told to be perfect, monsters are certain to emerge.

Until quite recently horror was considered a lowbrow genre by academics. As such it wasn’t really worthy of exploration. Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that scholars of religion—the new lowbrow—were among the first to take their disfigured friends seriously. Science tells us there are no monsters. We live in a rational world with evolution taking logical steps—if unguided—to more efficient means of survival. That doesn’t stop us from lowering the shades as night draws on. The monsters may be in our heads, but we might also find them in our souls. When we’re informed that such souls are nothing more than imagination we have a very good reason to be afraid indeed.

Pacific Rim

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Pacific_Rim_FilmPoster

Pacific Rim is a movie that once again brings monsters and religion together in the cinema. Since I’m generally late seeing movies, I won’t worry too much about spoilers here, but in case you’re even later than me here’s the gist of it: giant monsters from outer space (properly an interplanetary portal) are emerging from the Pacific Ocean to take over the earth. These radioactive, dinosaur-like aliens are called Kaiju. Although they can be taken down with conventional weapons, the most effective fighting tool is the Jaeger, a colossal robot piloted by two humans acting as the two hemispheres of the brain. These humans must “drift”—share their brains—in order to control these massive machines in unison. Lots of action and destruction, of course, ensue. We later find out that dinosaurs were an earlier invasion of these same aliens, but that our environmental degradation has made the atmosphere much better for them, and this time they’re back for good.

The resistance is led by a mysterious marshal named Stacker Pentecost. Pentecost, of course, is the festival celebrating either the giving of the Torah (Jewish) or the giving of the Holy Spirit (Christian). In either case, it is a holiday celebrating God’s plan for humanity. As Pentecost leads his beleaguered and shrinking army of jaegers against the Kaiju, scientists Geiszler and Gottlieb disagree about how to conquer the beasts. Gottlieb swears, “Numbers are as close as we get to the handwriting of God,” while advocating the predictive elements based on the statistics of the attacks. Science and religion have come to an uneasy truce here. As Geiszler seeks a Kaiju brain to drift, he observes some of the masses in Tokyo praying to the fallen beasts. A blackmarket dealer in Kaiju remains explains that they believe the Kaiju have been sent by God. Pentecost unwittingly concurs when he declares it is time to end the apocalypse.

Pacific Rim, like most Guillermo del Toro films, is a complex movie. There is also more than a sprinkling of H. P. Lovecraft here. The worship of the Kaiju keyed me in to the fact that these were the old gods, come to earth, under the sea, from space. As the first category 5 Kaiju swims past the camera, I couldn’t help but think of Cthulhu. Although Kaiju is Japanese for “monster,” it even sounds like his sacred name. We fear that which is larger, stronger, and unknown to us. When that fear becomes reverence we are on the brink of worship, and our monsters have become our deities.

All Saints

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The movies of Guillermo del Toro, despite their success, must be watched with an astutely analytical eye. Although my movie watching runs a few years behind at best, a recent viewing of Pan’s Labyrinth left me feeling a little hollow and very reflective. The gruesome story is well told, and the fantasy world, even at the end, is hardly believable. Like most films that deal with disturbing issues, religious concepts are not far from the surface, or sometimes, the depths. In this case, the distinctly Christian trope of self-sacrifice opens a portal to a mystical world where a God-like father sits on a shining throne. But is it real? We are warned from the very first scene that this will not end well for young Ofelia, that “heaven” is but a fantasy seen through the hopeful eyes of a dying child. Even the faun (“Pan” of the English title) wears horns that suggest to modern minds the slightly diabolical, although he is in the service of the mystical king. I was so conflicted by end that I was glad the next day was a workday.

It is not difficult to notice that the heroes of the film are the female characters. Even the good men are generally ineffectual, but the strength of Ofelia and Mercedes bear the weight of showing any hope at all. Captain Vidal betrays his name of “life giver” time and again unless life is understood as unremitting pain and torture. Even the end of the film is set up as someone having to pay the price; the king demands innocent blood—will it be Ofelia or her baby brother? Of course, the girl must pay the price. In an interesting interpretation of the sacrifice of the only child, the daughter here becomes the savior.

Fantasy often has the power to heal. This is a key aspect that it shares with religion. Scientists have sought in vain a mechanism that would explain the brain’s remarkable ability to heal the body under conditions of belief. At times we’re reduced to name-calling, suggesting that somebody’s got something up their sleeve. After all, could a disreputable character like Rasputin really hold the key to physical wholesomeness (to say nothing of moral rectitude)? And yet, there are those who are made well by the most unlikely means.

The peoples of northern Europe believed that the veil between this world and the next was severely effaced at this time of year. Darkness is more prevalent than light. Pan’s Labyrinth begins and ends in darkness, and even the daylight—when it briefly occurs—is subdued. With Halloween behind us, the most veracious season of the year
lies ahead. Let us hope that this labyrinth contains fantasy.

September’s Child

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This was an appropriate weekend for a scary movie. With Guillermo del Toro in the news of late, I selected The Orphanage to fit the mood. Foreign language films can present a challenge when too much action is interspersed with dialogue, but the pacing and deliberate unfolding of The Orphanage solved that problem. As always when screening horror films, I was watching to see how religion played into the plot. The story follows the disappearance of a child adopted by a couple who wish to open a home for special needs children. Laura, the mother, is unwilling to accept her child’s disappearance while her rational, physician husband, Carlos, feels that the outcome is inevitable. In a show of support, however, Carlos lends Laura his Saint Anthony’s medal, just until their son is found.

The association of Saint Anthony—perhaps the most famous Franciscan after Francis himself—with lost items is a worldwide phenomenon. The city of San Antonio bears his name (although it is easily found). In the movie he is invoked to find the lost child. The distraught Laura religiously wears the medal until the child is found (in what state I’ll not say, for the benefit of those who’ve not seen the film). When Carlos comes to seek his wife, he finds the medal, bringing the movie to a close. The orphanage also features a very gothic chapel that sets the mood in a few scenes as well. “The Good Shepherd” is the very biblical name of the institution. Although not central to the story, religion is woven throughout, demonstrating once again that fear and religion are closely related.

Like Saint Francis before him, Anthony was born to a wealthy family in the Middle Ages. Both young men forswore their material goods to seek spiritual wealth. Both died relatively young (not uncommon in the Medieval Period) and in poverty. Choosing such a selfless character as the means of recovering that which has been lost may seem counter-intuitive, and The Orphanage exploits that idea very nicely. Over this gray weekend when many people were thinking about loss, an orphanage seems an appropriate metaphor. Although a Saint Anthony medal may inspire confidence, it can never restore what is truly gone. Even so, religion may assuage the anxiety, but in the end we still must find our own way home.