Frankenstein 1931: It's a movie. IT'S A MOVIE!!

This is my class on the 1931 Frankenstein movie! Feel free to share it widely! I’ll respond to comments and questions by email, or on twitter @doctormoffett! If you’d prefer an audio-only version you can find, listen to, and download it here.


Here are the sources I used to put this video together:

Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Selected Writings Volume 1. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings.Cambridge, Mass: Belknap, 1996 .

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory : Reading Culture. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Forry, Steven Earl. Hideous Progenies : Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Picart, Caroline Joan S. “Re‐birthing the monstrous: James Whale's (Mis) reading of Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 15:4, 382-404.

Picart, Caroline Joan, and ProQuest. Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film : Between Laughter and Horror. SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

Picart, Caroline Joan. “Visualizing the Monstrous in Frankenstein Films.” Pacific Coast Philology, 35:1 (2000), pp. 17-34.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Dover, 2014.

Wolf, Leonard. Notes to The Annotated Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Clarkson N. Potter, 1977.

Wolfson, Susan J. and Ronald L. Levao. Notes to The Annotated Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Belknap, 2012.

Plus wikipedia and IMDB to double check actor and crew member names and dates.


The motion picture Der Golem is in the public domain.

The motion picture Frankenstein is protected under copyright by Universal Studios, 1931, 1959. My use of clips from "Frankenstein" in this lecture is fair use since the material is used in a educational context for analysis of the text, the clips are not presented in such as way as to diminish the market or value of the copyrighted work, I am not profiting from the use of the copyrighted material, and the total quoted material is equal to less than 8% of the audio and 10% of the video content of the copyrighted film, of which more than two minutes is simply the movie's credits.

Frankenstein 1931 is available to rent via YouTube, Amazon Prime, and iTunes, and probably elsewhere too!