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Arresting Monstrosity: Polio, Frankenstein, and the Horror Film

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Dwight Codr
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Abstract

Early Hollywood horror, and Boris Karloff's portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in particular, must be understood as cultural products of the age of polio. Polio survivors have drawn attention to kinetic similarities between their experiences and Karloff's gait, but horror and polio culture also share interests in experiments on simians, shadowy medical research, and ambiguously paralytic states. As well as locating the origins of some of horror's formal conventions, this essay draws attention to a dangerous gambit played by medical authorities in 1947, when, to energize the public in the fight against polio, they exploited those conventions for an educational horror film.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 2 , March 2014 , pp. 171 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

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