Why we still can’t quit ‘Frankenstein’
Gabriel Bartlett has loved horror for as long as he has cared about movies. So when he heard Frankenstein was coming to the Fredericton Playhouse with a live orchestra, he bought a ticket.
Bartlett, a fifth-year history student at St. Thomas University, has a soft spot for the Universal monster movies of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
Saturday was his first time seeing a film with live orchestration. He had hoped to catch last year’s Nosferatu in the same series but missed it.
Resonance New Music paired the 1931 film with a score by New Brunswick composer Andrew Reed Miller, performed by Symphony New Brunswick.
Bartlett said before the movie, the Playhouse’s director introduced the orchestra, and Miller explained how he came to write his own score.
Bartlett said the music is what many old films lack. Early technology left them with little scoring, which can make scenes feel drawn out or awkward. He pointed to the original Dracula with Bela Lugosi as another example.
“It just made it more lively,” he said. “It made sometimes scenes that seem to drag on forever less boring.”
One scene stood out: Dr. Frankenstein’s first resurrection of his creation. The violins sounded dissonant, Bartlett said, possibly in a minor key, though he admitted he could be wrong.
“It just made it sound eerie,” he said.
The room was full and mostly older, he said, with people from their 20s to 50s and beyond, plus some families with children. It was also a laughing crowd.
Bartlett said scenes that frightened audiences in 1931 now seem goofy by modern standards, including the monster’s encounter with a little girl by a pond.
The abrupt ending also drew laughs. Many old monster movies end with the good guys sharing a quick final laugh and little resolution, he said, which is “kind of shocking, but also quite funny.”
The pond scene is also why Bartlett thinks the story endures.
The girl is the only character who treats the monster as a person and the creature smells flowers and plays with her, he said.
The monster is created and then not cared for, Bartlett said.
Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant treats him cruelly and when he lashes out, he is cast out and hunted.
“A lot of people can resonate with Frankenstein’s monster,” Bartlett said. “In the sense of being ostracised and treated or thought of as different.”
He called the story “beautiful, but also sad.”
Many of the classic Universal monsters, he said, are either peaceful creatures who get hunted or beings who are brought to life, shown only violence and then blamed for it.
Would he go again? Yes. He paid $20 for his ticket and called the night “a great experience all around.”
“Certain eras of film should be seen, experienced, especially with live orchestration,” he said. “It just makes the experience far better.”
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