Saw the 1910 version of Frankenstein. I approached it as a kind of homework assignment, but it's only 12 minutes long, so it wasn't that bad. The film uses the monster as a sort of metaphor for Frankenstein's evil nature. This evil nature is evidently a Faustian product of too much science which I, who consider myself a scientist of some kind, rankle at. Anyway, the monster hide around the house, popping out to terrorize Frankenstein but hiding impishly from his wife and servants. Frankenstein is also complicit in hiding the monster, reinforcing the monster's symbolic role as weakness of some nonspecific sort. Eventually the monster knocks over Frankenstein's wife and, finally sick of it, Frank turns on the monster. It disappears into a mirror and thus endeth the lesson. An interesting little twist. Frankenstein is still the monster in the end, but this time the alegory is working at a different level and Frank's monstrosity is due to some personal defect, rather than intellectual arrogance, as is usual.
There's some special effects in the "birthing" sequence and in the final mirror shot which are of interest to people who are not me.
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