Frankly Speaking

Brief short answer test question: which classic monster has been misrepresented more than any other?

Answer: Frankenstein's Monster

Aside from the obvious nomenclature issues (Frankenstein is his creator's name, not his name), for the most part, this poor guy has been reduced to a green zombie. This is not of course a slam on zombies; they'll get theirs in due time. Let's start with the source: Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley, then 19 year old lover of Percy Bysshe Shelley, one night in 1816 after the two of them and Lord Byron had spent the evening drinking and reading ghost stories. They then resolved to see who could write the scariest story. Mary wrote Frankenstien, and Lord Byron gained the inspriation for The Vampyre, the forerunner of the gay Victorian vampire. Clearly Mary was the winner.

So the creature was designed to be frightening from the beginning, and indeed he was. Imagine a man sewn together from various exhumed bodies. Now, take all of those Hollywood images of a green skinned gargantuan with the giant flat top and bolts in the neck, and throw them out the f-ing window. Keep the height, but give him long, black hair and an eerie tranluscent yellowish skin that allows you to see his blood vessals and such underneath. Eeeeeew!

The grotesqueness is key to the scariness, but there is more at work here than pure pug fugliness. What is truly scary about the creature is that despite his outward appearance and superhuman strength and endurance, he is a man; a man with feelings, a mind, and all of the trappings of humanity. He feels loneliness, fear, anger, and vengeance, and is fundamentally weak enough to succumb to them as we all are, and though he is capable of murder, he still suffers from remorse after the act. He is as complex a character as any other, and by complex, I mean more than,

"Meeeeeh, I'm a horrible misunderstood monster who is hated by others, but you are the one person who sees beyond the mask, but you still don't know if I'll suck your blood, so let's make out."

This idea was translated in an excellent manner by Boris Karloff in the classic Universal film. You could see the pain and confusion in his eyes, you felt it as much as he did. It broke your heart when he accidentally drowned the little girl, because you knew that he was still a danger and had to be stopped. This model was only charactured in subsequent portrayals, adopting the "Herman Munster Model". I will note that for all of its problems, Van Helsing did a decent job at restoring at least some of the creature's nobility, even if it was at the loss of its scariness.

So why is he scary? It's not just that he is a hulking brute with an unnatural visage. Frankenstein's monster scares us because he was created by a mortal. He is man-made, and he is largely a failure at the attempt to create life. We fancy ourselves as the most talented beasts to walk the planet and are capable of anything, and yet we are not. The sky is not the limit, and there are some things that we simply cannot do, or should not. We possess the potential to create our own destruction, and not as a faceless disease or other abstract means, but in a grossly twisted reflectionof ourselves. We fear him because he reflects our own shortcomings as individuals, and as a species. We look in the mirror and are horrified at what looks back at us.