What ‘Frankenstein’ Taught Me About Death, Life, And Real Monsters

H
ow did I find monsters? My father.

It was around Halloween 1956, the same week of Elvis Presley’s second appearance on Ed Sullivan.

My parents often let me stay up and watch late movies. Adventure stuff mainly: Tarzan, tiger hunters, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry. Earlier that year, the first monster I met was King Kong, when my father introduced me to him late one night.

One evening a couple of weeks later, my father said, “I have something special for you tonight.” It was James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein.

My mother wasn’t happy. She had seen the film when it was first released, as an 18-year-old woman in Salt Lake City. That particular theater, as a gimmick, parked an ambulance outside the lobby in case anybody fainted. My mother said that during the scene in which the Monster was straining against his chains, reaching upward toward a God’s light he would never receive, she fled. “I made them open up that damn ambulance and let me sit there until the movie was over and my friends came out.” After that, she vowed never to watch a movie in a theater again. Monsters in the dark, on large screens — that was enough for her. Indeed, she never went back into a film theater. She wouldn’t even take me to see Bambi. My father had to do that.

She did not want me to see Frankenstein when I was so young, but my father said, “I’ll sit next to him, with my arm around him the whole time.” My mother said, “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.” I was fine until that scene in which the Monster (though I’ve come to prefer calling him the Creation) was straining against his chains, reaching upward toward a God’s light he would never receive, then I ran to find my mother. She was standing by the window, her arms crossed sternly as she studied the moonlit industrial outskirts where we lived. “Did you get scared?” I lied: “No, it just seemed silly to me.” I was, of course, terrified.

Still, I wanted to know what would happen to this thing who never asked for creation (in her novel Frankenstein, author Mary Shelley quoted John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man? Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me?”), so I rejoined my father. I was mesmerized by the rest of Frankenstein, and I felt sorry for Boris Karloff’s character, even when the Creation unintentionally drowned a little girl because he wanted to see if she might float like the flowers she had been tossing into a lake. I understood that he had not meant to kill her; she was the only person who had shown him kindness. I never felt sorry for the Monster’s creator, the titular character played by Colin Clive. Victor Frankenstein abandoned his creation, leaving him alone and unprotected as the world pursued and sought to assign the creation back to death.

Ever since, there’s never been a Halloween season when I haven’t watched Frankenstein. I still feel my father’s arm around me. I’m not sure why he loved horror films so much. We never talked about it, of course. Maybe it was because he had been a stunt man in Hollywood; he said he’d met and liked Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi — that he’d smoked opium with the latter. But it was also because he felt, until the day he died, like an outsider, a throwaway, a man on the run; he spent much of his life one step ahead of anybody dragging him back to some place of judgment he’d eluded.

The family gospel stands to this day: There is no creepier, no more disturbing cinema experience than the 1931 Frankenstein in the big dark of a movie theater. The graveyard opening alone portends dread, obsession and fates that are already too late to be turned away from. In some ways, Colin Clive was as sinister in the film as Boris Karloff. Indeed, more so.

Frankenstein the book is its own entity — one of Western literature’s great novels, as well as one of its most imaginative (written by a teenage woman, Mary Shelley, who wove her own life experience and the uncertainty and the glory of the times through its pages). Frankenstein the novel is about many things, including the life of the mind and how the human heart divides and devastates us. The novel is a rich and endlessly revealing work. Frankenstein the film, though, is its own beast. It is about one thing: a death that cannot die. That’s how it felt and looked to me even as a child. Death across its landscape, death in the faces, death in their desires and touches. After my father died of cancer in 1962, Frankenstein and any number of other horror stories became meditations for me on what was beyond and what came back, but never should have.

The dream of undeath is as old as death. One of its most famous invocations is from the Gospel of John, in the instance of Jesus raising Lazarus from a tomb. (He raised others from death as well, but Lazarus proved a key event in Jesus’s own fate.) Though Lazarus is one of the most interesting figures in the New Testament, little is known about him other than he was a (previously unmentioned) friend of Jesus, whose death saddened him enough that, famously, “Jesus wept.” Yet Jesus knew that Lazarus was near death and did nothing to save him beforehand, as Lazarus’ sisters complained to the Lord. The story makes it plain that Jesus allowed Lazarus to die so that he could raise him from the dead, proving his claim and power as the Messiah. He tells his disciples: “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.”

This is a terrible way of preparing a miracle — letting somebody you love die so you can bring the person back to life. How would Lazarus feel about this? His friend would not save him — he had been seriously ill — but instead allowed him to die only to raise him from death after a few days. What was that like for Lazarus? According to one legend, Lazarus never smiled again for as long as he lived in the years after his resurrection. He was haunted by his memory of the unredeemed souls he had seen during the days of his stay in hell before Jesus raised him. Wait — Lazarus could remember what death had been like? He had been in hell? Why? According to Jewish teachings, hell can be compared to an intense feeling of shame. People are ashamed of their misdeeds, and this constitutes suffering, which makes up for the bad deeds. When one has so deviated from the will of God, one is said to be in Gehenna, the abode of the damned in the afterlife in Jewish and Christian eschatology — the doctrine of last things. Did Jesus truly redeem Lazarus or just forestall hell for him? Resurrection is not necessarily a blessing. Not at all.

In 2015, when I had throat cancer, one doctor told me I had at best five years. I should have felt fear — I’d been afraid of cancer more than anything since it claimed my father when I was still a child. But within minutes of my diagnosis, I made an acceptance of the knowledge that death was coming. My brother Gary Gilmore, in early 1977, in the last days of his own life, had told me that knowing the manner and time of your death was freeing and a comfort. I didn’t believe him, but then, son of a gun, there I was, in late 2015. What I was thinking wasn’t so much along the lines of what the Monster proclaims in Bride of Frankenstein: “We belong dead.” But what did he know or remember about death? Did he believe he deserved it again, or was he simply lonely? His resurrection was perhaps kinder than Lazarus’ because the Monster could never truly be outside death. It stayed in him every moment, so it was probably less fearsome. Lazarus couldn’t smile again. That’s a hell of a way to live after dying. I found a certain kindness in my own experience of dying because I was loved and valued as never before, and that love willed me to stay alive. Of course, I didn’t die, and then all bets were off. As a result, I became much more anxious. Still am. Had I simply forestalled hell? But unlike Lazarus, I can smile.

One afternoon, around a year after my father’s death, my mother had enough of my infatuation with dark tales. “I want you to stop reading all those morbid books about ghosts and horror and evil,” she told me. “I do not intend for all my sons to grow up to be monsters.” I was about 12 then. I hid my many Lovecraft, Poe, and other horror volumes — and my Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine collection — under my bed, because there was no way my mother was ever going to clean under my bed. After she went to sleep around midnight, I’d turn on my overhead reading light and enter those dark worlds that I recognized and that comforted me — and that always would. My father was prescient in one regard: He left me truths to remember him by. My mother was right as well: She left me Mormon creationist fantasies just as perdurable, just as scary.

Well, almost as perdurable. Frankenstein, my father, cancer, my brother, even Lazarus: They taught me that death has its time and place, but it should be only one time and place. The possibility of anything past that — even resurrection — was pure horror.

HOW I EXPERIENCED REAL MONSTERS in my own life was something different — though it, too, had to do with my family. Horror made its way through our house even before I met Frankenstein — and again, my father was the source.

I grew up in a home where murder was born. The killer was my brother Gary. I understood how he came to be that person. I think I’d always known that since I was a child and saw how my father scorned him, and how the law went on to reinforce my father’s will. There wasn’t going to be any mercy for that boy while he was still a boy. I once visited the Oregon boy’s prison, where my brother was incarcerated at 14, after a car-theft conviction. Despite what might have been the best intentions of some, the reform school experience of the 1950s had many brutalizing aspects about it. Boys were locked up in cold and isolated conditions, sometimes beaten at the discretion of their counselors, and subjected to an environment in which astonishing acts of violence and sexual abuse took place.

For some kids, being caged up in such a world only deepened their fears and their hatred. “It doesn’t make sense to a normal person,” one former inmate told me, “but when you’re locked up you can become a very hate-filled individual. And if you can’t externalize that hate — or if a fantasy about going into a bank with a tommy gun and blowing everybody up isn’t enough for you — then you turn that hatred on yourself. You reach a point of self-destructiveness where you’re going to have somebody really give you the ultimate. And sometimes the only way to do that is by hurting or enraging other people as much as you can.”

One of the facility’s managers wrote at the time: “Gary is still our boy in the corner. I still believe Gary will not trust anyone, staff, or boy. He tries to be one of the group but seems unable to do so. When I talk to a group he will go into a corner and not take any part in the discussion.” The manager also noted that Gary seemed to have bad dreams almost every night, and often talked in his sleep. The only way to affect change was to change my father’s repudiation of his son, and the counselors doubted that would happen. Both father and son had monstrous mutual resentments.

Years later, when the prison system finally extended my brother some leniency, the boy was no longer a boy. He was a man in his thirties, and he had a razor-sharp expression that was on the outlook for any motivation for payback. When he finally allowed himself the pretext to kill, in the summer of 1976, he murdered two young Mormon men in Provo, Utah (my mother’s hometown), on consecutive nights. Shot each in the back of the head after forcing them to kneel face down before him. Neither man had done anything to offend him. They were objects of his anger and a family’s bad history, in the wrong place on bad nights.

So, yes, I knew how wrong and anger can get jammed so badly into a person’s heart that he might want to murder the world in retaliation. That is, I understand how that hatred can be born, bred, and formed, at least on one level: psychological, compassionate, intellectual — one of those damn levels. But on a visceral level I never could. In the early 1990s, I spent several days in Utah, doing some research about my brother’s murders and my family’s history. One night, I drove out to the location of the gas station where my brother had murdered attendant Max Jensen, after Jensen knelt down and gave my brother a small smile, and then my brother fired two rounds into his head. All these years later, the service station had been torn down and replaced — now modern and gleaming. It still stood out there alone, though, in the sands, with beautiful mountains in the background. That night that I visited, I bought some gasoline to justify being there. Then I walked around. This place was a space in space, and blood had forever spoiled its ground, no matter any attempt to cover it over. The hour was around dark. I stood there, put my hands in my pockets, tried to connect with what had happened in that place, to wish rest for the spirits in the dark.

On another evening, I visited the motel lobby where my brother had murdered manager Ben Bushnell on the night after Jensen. My oldest brother Frank was in the car with me on this occasion. I asked if he’d come inside with me. He shook his head in a big “no” motion, staring straight ahead. “I just can’t, Mikal,” he said. “You have to walk this one yourself. You ask me, we have no business being here. What we have is shame.” I went inside anyway — I felt obliged. I made an excuse for walking in — I asked the night manager about their room rates. Then I froze. This was a very small, domesticated room. The night manager stood behind a counter — probably the same one Bushnell had been behind when my brother took the motel’s money box, then shot the manager in the head. He realized that the man wouldn’t die immediately, so he tried to shoot him again, but the gun misfired and wounded my brother’s thumb. Within hours he was arrested and in jail cells, which is all he’d ever see until early one morning the following January, when he walked from death row, past those beautiful mountains, to a van that took him to a cannery at Draper Prison. There, a firing squad fired bullets into his heart. He had forced the state to carry out its death sentence. America was back in the business of killing the guilty.

I thought about this in that motel lobby. The space behind the counter was narrow — a terrible place to die. I almost threw up. I turned and left abruptly, went back to the car where Frank was. I sat there for a minute, unable to turn the engine on, and I thought, as I had at the service station, “Gary, how could you?” How could he have taken these young men’s lives just to end the world around him and his part in it?

I remember these things often, even after all these years, both the killings and my visit to those sites. When a notorious shooting takes place, all I see is my brother’s face in the place of the killer’s visage. There is, of course, a difference between two murders on consecutive nights and killing, say, nearly 60 people — and injuring nearly 600 more — in a matter of minutes, as happened a few years ago in Las Vegas. But my brother and the man in Las Vegas perhaps shared some kind of unfathomable moral lacuna: They hated long enough that they found nights when they’d kill somebody — anybody. Everybody. These days, mass killings are frequent as well. Why? The easy access to efficient lethal weaponry is certainly a major means.

Are the fictional monsters I’ve studied commensurate with real-life monsters for me? No, but I understand they might be for others; horror colludes. For me the fictional ones are metaphors — they possess invented psychologies and have special rights nobody else has: The victims are merely there to receive the monster’s hurt and the monster’s fear. In real life, the only true monsters are humans. It’s much more disturbing and resonant when human monsters get to claim what they deem their special rights. One trait, though, might bond them: Both fictive and palpable monsters are hated. They are outsiders, outcasts. They have been repudiated — perhaps for fair reason. But that repudiation can also create and motivate the monster: Hurt an animal enough and it might turn on you, justifying your hatred, but also maybe sealing fates.

A couple of months back I was talking to my therapist about Frankenstein — the book, more than the film. She didn’t know the book and asked me to tell her about it, and to talk about my attachment to it. I told her the tale of how Victor Frankenstein had made his Creation then immediately abandoned him in revulsion, leaving the Creation to find a way in the world alone, with no memory of a self, with no acceptance by others, with no help except for what he could learn for himself. Vengeance and murder follow as creator and creation vow to destroy each other.

“And why are you attracted to this story so much?” my therapist asked. “Is there something familiar in it?”

And suddenly it hit me: “Yes. I never realized it before, but this is the story of my father and my brother.”

I had no way of anticipating that, of course, all those years ago when I was a child and my father first showed me the film, long before Gary’s crimes and long before both of their deaths. Besides, the story dynamic between the creator and his creation don’t quite share the same throughline in the 1931 film as in the 1818 novel, though both the novel and the film are, in a sense, stories of fathers and sons.

Though my father gave me a copy of Shelley’s book shortly before his death, I don’t know if he’d ever read it himself. But there it was, hidden in all those years of our history: Frankenstein was an unconscious prophecy in my family’s life. If my father had understood that his refusal to love his son would hurt and embitter that son to the degree that he would later kill, after so many years of rage had been stuffed inside his heart … if my father had known that, would he have treated his son differently? I doubt it, because my father had his own hurt, his own family’s denials that he was acting from.

We make our monsters, and too often we deserve them. And we will always tell ourselves we don’t know why.