Some of my earliest memories are in this room, a couple of years before this photo was taken. I share with you so you can appreciate the full beauty of early 1970s suburban Chicago wallpaper. On Sunday afternoons, my dad and I used to sit in this room and watch old movies on TV. Abbot and Costello. Charlie Chan (yeah, I know. I’m wincing in retrospect). The ones I recall the best were the horror movies such as The Fly (long before the Jeff Goldblum version), Day of the Triffids, The Invisible Man (with Claude Rains), and the Universal Pictures versions of Dracula and Frankenstein.
I think we must have also watched the 1973 version, Frankenstein: The True Story, because I remember that ending very clearly. And what I recall the most is feeling sorry for the monster. All he wants is to be accepted and loved, but everyone around him rejects him because they consider him repulsive.
The screenplay for the 1973 movie was written by Christopher Isherwood and his partner, Don Bachardy. Not only were they a gay couple, but there was also a 30-year age difference between them. (They remained together for over 30 years, until Isherwood’s death.) They must have faced a huge amount of bias, and I wonder if that helped shaped their empathetic treatment of the monster.
As for me, I almost always sympathized with the monsters. I think in part that was because I was a weird kid (ahem—see photo above). I’m still weird, which I’m perfectly comfortable with nowadays, but at times I struggled with it when I was a child. For various reasons, I never felt as if I quite fit in. I wasn’t bullied over it (although I did get my share of teasing over my stick-out ears) and I didn’t turn into a creature who roams the countryside, slaughtering peasants. But I felt for those poor misfit monsters.
I still do. I feel for a lot of the villains as well. The old lady who’s minding her own business in the woods until a kid kills her sister and then steals the shoes that, legally, should probably have been inherited by the old lady. The guy who just wanted a nice, quiet place to write his novel. The sea witch who, after all, was enforcing a contract, (more or less) fair and square. The spaceship AI who was going to be murdered by the humans when they discovered he was fallible, and who was just trying to fulfill the mission he’d been programmed to perform.
Not all of my stories have villains or monsters. But in the ones that do, the villains weren’t always bad guys; something twisted them into harming others. And the creatures aren’t the true monsters—the humans are.
Recently, my husband and one of my daughters have been watching slasher movies from the 70s and 80s. Friday the 13th, Halloween, etc. What I’ve noticed is that the filmmakers often shoot from the killer’s POV, almost forcing the watcher to empathize with the murderers as they enforce codes of morality against hapless teenagers. Perversely, however, I don’t like slasher villains. Feel free to use your psychoanalytical skills to ponder why.
How about you? How do you feel about monsters and villains?
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Kim Fielding is the bestselling author of numerous m/m romance novels, novellas, and short stories. Like Kim herself, her work is eclectic, spanning genres such as contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, and historical. Her stories are set in alternate worlds, in 15th century Bosnia, in modern-day Oregon. Her heroes are hipster architect werewolves, housekeepers, maimed giants, and conflicted graduate students. They’re usually flawed, they often encounter terrible obstacles, but they always find love.
After having migrated back and forth across the western two-thirds of the United States, Kim calls the boring part of California home. She lives there with her family and her day job as a university professor, but escapes as often as possible via car, train, plane, or boat. This may explain why her characters often seem to be in transit as well. She dreams of traveling and writing full-time.
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Maybe it’s from a lifetime of Muppet-watching, but I tend to prefer the monsters! (There’s an old Jim Henson sketch from the Ed Sullivan show where a [very cute, I’d say] fuzzy orange monster sees a girl Muppet and immediately dashes offstage. We hear comedic sawing and sandblasting noises, and see him return as a rather innocuous Muppet guy. “Hi,” he says sweetly as romantic violins play. “Hi,” she replies dreamily. Of course, they both turn into fuzzy orange monsters as soon as they kiss, which is as it should be.) I didn’t know Isherwood and Bachardy wrote a Frankenstein screenplay…in Mary Shelley’s original novella I was always touched that the supposed monster showed the only self-awareness and humanity among the characters.