Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from Frankenstein. c and all rights reserved, 2015, Wallflower/Columbia University Press

If a cult is anything, it has rituals and ceremonies and a schedule of worship. And here is ours: Friday nights, gathered in somebody’s basement, sleeping bags staked out on the floor. There are chocolate-bar wrappers scattered around and a half-eaten bag of Fritos waiting to be finished off. This is 1970, or possibly 1971 or 1969, and as 12-year-olds our beverage of choice is something innocuous, Kool-Aid or Coke.

It’s almost 11:30, so the parents have already looked down a final time and said their goodnights, and the lights are appropriately low. If anybody managed to smuggle in an issue of Playboy it’s been put away, because we need to concentrate on television now. There’s a plaster Madonna looming in a corner, that home icon of the Catholic family, which is apt because we are gathered here for something like a religious ceremony ourselves.

The local 11 o’clock news program on KIRO-TV, Seattle’s Channel 7, is ending. As always, the broadcast signs off with an editorial comment from station manager Lloyd E. Cooney, a bespectacled square perpetually out of step with the turbulent era (Channel 7, owned by the Mormon Church, is a conservative business). Strange, then, that every Friday night Cooney’s bland homilies are immediately replaced by a dark dungeon, a fiend in a coffin, and three hours of evil.

At 11:30 sharp comes Nightmare Theatre, a double feature of horror movies. Each film is introduced by Channel 7’s resident horror-movie host, known as “The Count” (actually a station floor director named Joe Towey). His make-up is a Halloween-costume version of Dracula, with cape and fangs. He clambers out of a coffin, welcomes us, and introduces the first feature of the evening; his Bela Lugosi accent is terrible, but his maniacal laughter is accomplished.

Tonight it’s that most famous title of all, Frankenstein. The film is already legendary in my mind—I am well aware of its status in the horror pantheon. I have seen that green-faced, heavy-booted image in books and TV shows (though I am still somewhat confused about whether “Frankenstein” is the name of the monster or the name of the mad scientist), and finally I am allowed to stay up late enough to watch the film on television. Here with other like-minded fifth-graders, I await the arrival of something monumental and, with luck, terrifying.

The Count finishes his intro with a cackle. When the film begins, it too has a host, a neat little grey man who comes out from behind a curtain and delivers a message that sounds both sinister and whimsical:

Mr. Carl Laemmle feels it would be a little unkind to present this picture without just a word of friendly warning. We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God. It is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals

with the two great mysteries of creation—Life and Death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now is your chance to . . . Well . . . we’ve warned you . . . 

This is going to be good.

And here it comes: a clammy graveyard (ah, excellent start), tasty stuff about an abnormal brain, sensational lab scene in an electrical storm. Now the entrance of the monster: first a tease, then the horrible face. Can I stand to look at it? Yes. It’s weird but bearable. The Monster stomps and kills but also suffers, and the villagers go after him in a burning windmill. The End.

The movie has delivered, and those of us in the room have lived through something. In childhood, staying up late to watch horror movies is a rite of passage, a test, a communal ceremony in which fears are met, endured, analyzed. Nightmares will come, but that’s part of the ritual too (although my fears at bedtime tend more toward the Wolf Man, whose dexterity and ferocious claws are more threatening than the Frankenstein monster’s clomping brute strength). We have seen Frankenstein, and the Monster is ours—a hero, in a strange way.

I first saw

Frankenstein almost 40 years after it had been made, and by then it was firmly entrenched as a cult classic. (Can a movie that was an enormous box-office success and a permanent fixture in popular culture be called a cult film? I believe so, especially if we emphasize the religious overtones contained in the word “cult.” And Frankenstein may have many fans all over the world, but there is still something forbidden about it, something outside the main of respectable culture.)

Even though I was coming to the picture as part of a second, or perhaps third, generation of fans, even though I had already read about the Monster and seen his image refracted in everything from Mad magazine to The Munsters, it still seemed fresh—and thanks to the peculiar intimacy of late-night television, that first experience was also deeply personal. Frankenstein belongs in a dark room, late at night. The moviegoers of the 1930s and ’40s who saw the film in theaters are the people that gave the Monster its first life, without question. (Mel Brooks, who would make a detailed parody of the mythos in his 1974 comedy Young Frankenstein, amusingly recalls his boyhood fear that—against all logic—the Frankenstein monster would somehow stomp its way to Brooks’s boyhood home in Brooklyn.)

Yet it was the TV generation that turned the Monster and his ilk into icons, a generation crammed with future filmmakers weaned on late-night horror films (among them Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Sam Raimi, and Joe Dante).

What is it about Frankenstein, in particular, that seems to touch a nerve? Some of the issues are imbedded in the celebrated book that inspired the film. Even if Hollywood jettisoned many of the Romantic complexities of Mary Shelley’s novel, the book nevertheless manages to grin out from beneath the streamlining and backlot sets. At the elemental level, surely Frankenstein gets to us because it is a story of birth—and of “giving birth.” The mystery of how we got here is one childhood draw. Another early childhood anxiety surrounds the realization of death, and Frankenstein messes with the possibility of life after death; it even makes the process look scientific and achievable. How could children not be intrigued by the movie?

film@seattleweekly.com

IT’S ALIVE!: FRANKENSTEIN ON FILM Fri., Jan. 23–Sun., Jan. 25 at SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. Horton will introduce Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (7 p.m. Fri., $7–$12) and teach a class on the latter film (11 a.m. Sat., $15–$20).