Making a Monster in Junji Ito’s “Frankenstein”

#Frankenstein’s monster endures for a reason: because he incorporates many different fears & fantasies, many different theories & possibilities of monstrosity. Indeed, Junji Ito’s interpretation of the Creature embodies each of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “seven theses” about what makes a monster. 1/15

Thesis I, The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body: This means that monsters embody cultural ideas, making them manifest in monstrous flesh. Frankenstein’s monster stands for many fantasies & fears, including the fantasy of immortality & the fear of unchecked scientific experimentation. 2/15

One of the ways Ito’s adaptation visualizes the combined fear & fantasy that animates the Creature is by showing how its creation alters the body of Victor Frankenstein, whose manic, revelatory genius looks a lot like tortured guilt he experiences in the wake of his supposed scientific triumph. 3/15

Thesis II, The Monster Always Escapes: “In each vampire story, the undead returns in slightly different clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social movements… Discourse extracting a transcultural, transtemporal phenomenon… is of rather limited utility.” 4/15

IOW: monsters can signal different cultural concerns in different moments of production & reception. Junji Ito’s Creature is inspired by Mary Shelley’s Creature, and the Universal Creature, and the Hammer Film Creature, and others. But each Creature prioritizes different cultural concerns. 5/15

Thesis III, The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis: “[monsters] are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. So the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.” 6/15

Frankenstein’s monster can embody many category crises, but the most obvious being its disturbing existence at the boundary of life & death–a living being composed of dead flesh. Ito’s body horror-influenced visualization of the Creature’s rotting flesh & cracking bones underscores this crisis. 7/15

Thesis IV, The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference: “By revealing that difference is arbitrary & potentially free-floating… the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed.” 8/15

In most versions of the Frankenstein story, the Creature both physically threatens upper-class cultural elites and symbolically threatens the basis of their power by revealing its corruption. Ito visualizes this through his horrific interpretations of Victor’s laboratory. 9/15

Thesis V, The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible: “The monster prevents mobility… delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official geography is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself.” 10/15

Ito visualizes this threat of becoming monstrous by showing the steady devolution of Victor’s sense of self, safety, and sanity. Victor Frankenstein’s increasingly manic, disheveled appearance and the darkening shadows around his eyes make him resemble his monster. 11/15

Thesis VI, Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire: “The same creatures who terrify & interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies… We distrust and loathe the monster at the same time we envy its freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair.” 12/15

Our desirous fascination with monsters is visualized by Ito through the Creature’s various dramatic entrances and physical feats. Here, the reader is encouraged to share Victor’s fearful but fascinated stare as he watches the Creature effortlessly scale a sheer cliff. 13/15

Thesis VII, The Monster Stands at the Threshold… of Becoming: “Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse… but they always return… They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions… They ask us why we have created them.” 14/15

This cuts to the heart of Frankenstein’s enduring appeal, which is its literalization of the monster as a manifestation of the monstrous impulses of a seemingly great man. Ito’s visualization of the Creature’s desperate plea for recognition, juxtaposed Victor’s rejection, hammers this home. 15/15