The first time a transformation truly scared me was in the fourth Harry Potter movie. In it, Lord Voldemort is resurrected in a grotesque scene where he rises out of a cauldron. One of his henchmen, Wormtail, slices open his arm, lets his blood fall into the cauldron, and Voldemort grows from infant to grown man in just a few seconds. The creepy computer-generated Voldemort fetus was utterly terrifying to a six-year-old (I got started on Harry Potter at a very young age). Because of this early experience, transformation has always been one of the scariest aspects of horror to me. It can take something normal or natural and morph it into an unnatural monstrosity. Transformation in stories meant to terrify may have a broader definition than
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Both involve the reversal of what is expected to happen. For starters, the story is all about a man who creates life. He takes something that is dead (the patchwork body of the monster), that has, in fact, never had life, and gives it just that. The transformation of death to life here is startling, because normally, the exact opposite occurs. In real life, there’s no way to bring someone back from the dead or to just create something and give it life, yet Frankenstein manages to do it in the novel. In addition, later in the story, Frankenstein loses control. The monster takes over, using the famous line “You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!” (Shelley 379). This is another example of reversal being used in her novel. In a normal situation, the “parent” (in this case, Frankenstein) is in charge, but the monster, who is Frankenstein’s “child,” has risen above that and taken control. Both of these transformations leave the reader uneasy and on edge, and these uses of characterization have been used in stories after Shelley, even to this day. Shelley’s uses of transformation in Frankenstein really reinforce the ideas that make transformation a truly frightening concept. Stories aren’t the only place where transformations can be seen and where the idea of liminality is presented as a main idea; in real life, the occurrence known as sleep paralysis is a very real and frightening example of a
Both involve the reversal of what is expected to happen. For starters, the story is all about a man who creates life. He takes something that is dead (the patchwork body of the monster), that has, in fact, never had life, and gives it just that. The transformation of death to life here is startling, because normally, the exact opposite occurs. In real life, there’s no way to bring someone back from the dead or to just create something and give it life, yet Frankenstein manages to do it in the novel. In addition, later in the story, Frankenstein loses control. The monster takes over, using the famous line “You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!” (Shelley 379). This is another example of reversal being used in her novel. In a normal situation, the “parent” (in this case, Frankenstein) is in charge, but the monster, who is Frankenstein’s “child,” has risen above that and taken control. Both of these transformations leave the reader uneasy and on edge, and these uses of characterization have been used in stories after Shelley, even to this day. Shelley’s uses of transformation in Frankenstein really reinforce the ideas that make transformation a truly frightening concept. Stories aren’t the only place where transformations can be seen and where the idea of liminality is presented as a main idea; in real life, the occurrence known as sleep paralysis is a very real and frightening example of a