HERE BE MONSTERS REVIEW

• Published in: New York Times
• Main Authors: Rose, Lloyd, Lloyd Rose writes on theater, film and popular culture for The Atlantic
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: New York, N.Y New York Times Company 01.12.1985
• Edition: Late Edition (East Coast)
• Subjects: ROSE, LLOYD; TWITCHELL, JAMES B
• ISSN: 0362-4331

He ends up reading the Frankenstein movies as a warning to the male audience not to try to create children without the help of a woman. Since this is, outside of fantasy, clearly impossible, it is hard to see what the warning is actually against. If the social sin to be avoided is onanism, which does not in fact produce progeny, why should the legend bring in a miscreated child at all? Isn't it more likely that the neurotic and unhappy [Mary Shelley] was sending out, along with what Mr. [James B. Twitchell] identifies as her own fears about childbirth and mothering, a blackmail message to men: you need us; see what happens if you try to get along without us! The warning seems less mythic and social, born from the culture, than personal from a tormented woman. M R. TWITCHELL'S arguments keep coming up short in this way, as if he had not quite thought them through. He accounts for the surge of vampire and werewolf stories in the 16th and 17th centuries by associating them with the plague, but does not explain why the worst attack of the plague, in the mid-14th century, did not give rise to such tales. He spends a footnote arguing that when Mina Harker, the woman the heroic ''sons'' rally to protect against Dracula, half-willingly surrenders to the vampire, this indicates that ''the raped secretly encourages the rapist.'' Yet one reading of his own Freudian analysis would dictate that ''daughter'' Mina must desire ''father'' Dracula because she is acting out her Electra complex. Mr Twitchell also discloses a discarded plot line from ''The Bride of Frankenstein,'' in which the created bride would have had the transplanted heart of Baron Frankenstein's wife, in order to explain why the female creature reacts with such shock at her first glimpse of her future mate. This is going the long way round to explain why a woman, even one put together from dead bodies herself, would not want to sleep with the Frankenstein monster. (The Bride does not hiss at first sight of her intended, as Mr. Twitchell claims; she makes, quite reasonably under the circumstances, a sound something like ''Ack!'') The long way round seems to be Mr. Twitchell's chosen way, though.