There is a moment at the end of the 1931 Frankenstein that we don’t get in the book. It’s the part where the monster screams.
Mary Shelley’s novel ends in a declaration of lonely, resentful hatred - the creature leaps with the body of his deceased creator onto a raft to sail away into the Arctic. He knows that mankind will never accept him and that the only one who he could find connection with, his father, is gone, a victim of the son’s own vicious pursuit. It’s almost triumphant in its grand condemnation of the callous human race, the monster becoming a martyr for our own inability to feel.
If the monster at the end of the book becomes far more than just a walking assemblage of corpse parts, then the monster at the end of the 1931 film is reduced to it at its most pitiable. The 1931 film, for the most part, is a careful balancing act. As countless films have shown us, simply making a Frankenstein film out of the Greatest Hits of the novel doesn’t really work. The skeleton is there, but the tissue - the angst over God, rebirth and the body - is what really makes Frankenstein special. As such, confined to just 70 minutes, this movie (directed with steady aplomb by James Whale) takes the outline of the novel and trims and adds, eventually focusing less on the trials of “Henry” Frankenstein, but instead on the horrific existence of the monster itself.
In 1931, this is a bit of a necessity but it’s also an inspired choice. Even before the mundane Hays Code attempted to regulate “riskier” elements of motion pictures and effectively wash Hollywood’s mouth out with soap, lines like Frankenstein declaring “I know what it’s like to be God!” raised the ire of executives and theater owners alike, so we can’t really explore the meaning of the good doctor’s exploration into the reversal of death and he ceases to become all that crucial of a character as soon as the monster wakes up. As far as we know, it’s just kind of a hobby, like brewing beer in your garage. He’s really into it, though!
So attention is slowly dawned on the creature, who from (re)birth experiences little more than torture. Frankenstein’s borderline feral assistant Fritz whips and burns the man until the creature lashes out and kills him. Frankenstein’s mentor then tries to exterminate him, leaving him to kill again and flee into the country side. The one tiny moment of peace that he has is spent with a little girl throwing flower petals into a lake, but that ends about at badly as you can imagine. The discovery of the drowned girl and the monster menacing Frankenstein’s bride-to-be send a mob after the monster, a sequence that culminates with the doctor facing his creation in a burning windmill. It doesn’t take long for the monster to toss him off, a final (attempted) assassination before he succumbs to, well, being in a burning windmill.
But first, he screams.
The creature of the novel is not immune to pain. Far from it - His life is defined by it from the moment that his creator/father recoils in horror from him. This moment is replayed over and over again as the creature roams the world, sometimes with physical punishment added in. But by the end, his realization is one that absolves his hideous formation - Mankind, even at its best, would never have accepted him anyway.
It’s the exact opposite in the film. The monster here is granted no moral victory. Instead, the immense, cosmic question of his revival is extinguished along with him. He panics and scrambles for an escape amidst the flames and crumbling architecture for what seems like far too long, as if to ask the audience, having come to see an escapist horror thriller in the midst of the Great Depression, if this is what they really want. Monsters, no matter what existential problems they provoke from the universe, usually die this way. It is the nature of the genre. But very rarely do they go out in such an extended writhe of agony, one that reveals them to be as ultimately human as the rest of us.
The film doesn’t really lay the blame at our feet. After all, its main lesson is “Don’t play god,” which means that the central act of villainy is from Frankenstein, even if he becomes its pseudo-hero by the end. However, that makes the death of the monster, a screeching thing trapped and being burned alive, all the more troubling. Because if he is not the villain, and if he is just a being now feeling pain like the rest of us, then he is just a man. And if he is granted no sweeping allegation about our capacity for good, then he is dying like most of us, too.
What have we done?