I watched Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Gods and Monsters last Tuesday and Wednesday, the first  to see the differences between the movie and the book, and the second because I had never heard of it and was curious.
         During the first few minutes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I thought it would take all the energy I had just to stay awake, but as the film progressed I began to enjoy it.  In the end, it scared and disgusted me more than most modern horror movies I have seen.  Throughout most of it, only subtle differences exist between the book and the movie, but the end of the film is completely different.  The monster rips out Elizabeth's still-beating heart, and Frankenstein rushes her body up to his laboratory where he chops off her head, attaches it to Justine's body, and brings her back to life.  She was grotesque, but her good eye horrified me out more than the swollen, stitched-up one.  Frankenstein begins to dance with her, compelling her to say his name.  Then the fiend walks in, and he and Frankenstein begin fighting over her.  Upset and confused, Elizabeth/Justine lights herself on fire and runs down the hall.  Then on Walton's boat, the fiend takes Frankenstein’s body away on a piece of ice and burns it.
         Gods and Monsters ranks among the strangest movies I have ever seen.  James Whale is a retired movie director who tries to seduce his young male gardener.  Surprisingly, it was a complex movie filled with symbolism.  Whale was searching for someone to be his “monster,” and he wanted a companion to be with him when he died.  Throughout the movie, flashbacks show Whale in his glory days of directing and in his painful experiences in war.  At the end, Whale drowns himself in the pool after Clayton (his gardener) refuses to kill him.  Blatant symbolism suggests that Whale is a Christ figure when his lifeless body floats with arms outstretched in the shape of a cross.