page_title: Monster
section_title: Pre–World War II monster films
hierarchical_section_title: Monster / Monsters in fiction / Film / Pre–World War II monster films
caption_attribution_description: Promotional photo of Boris Karloff from The Bride of Frankenstein as Frankenstein's monster.
context_page_description: A monster is often a type of grotesque creature, whose appearance frightens and whose powers of destruction threaten the human world's social or moral order.
  A monster can also be like a human, but in folklore, they are commonly portrayed as the lowest class, as mutants, deformed, supernatural, and otherworldly.
  Animal monsters are outside the moral order, but sometimes have their origin in some human violation of the moral law. Human monsters are those who by birth were never fully human or who through some supernatural or unnatural act lost their humanity, and so who can no longer, or who never could, follow the moral law of human society.
  Monsters pre-date written history, and the academic study of the particular cultural notions expressed in a society's ideas of monsters is known as monstrophy.
  Monsters have appeared in literature and in feature-length films. Well-known monsters in fiction include Count Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, werewolves, mummies, and zombies.
context_section_description: During the age of silent films, monsters tended to be human-sized, e.g. Frankenstein's monster, the Golem, werewolves and vampires. The film Siegfried featured a dragon that consisted of stop-motion animated models, as in RKO's King Kong, the first giant monster film of the sound era.
  Universal Studios specialized in monsters, with Bela Lugosi's reprisal of his stage role, Dracula, and Boris Karloff playing Frankenstein's monster. The studio also made several lesser films, such as Man-Made Monster, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. as a carnival side-show worker who is turned into an electrically charged killer, able to dispatch victims merely by touching them, causing death by electrocution.
  There was also a variant of Dr. Frankenstein, the mad surgeon Dr. Gogol (played by Peter Lorre), who transplanted hands that were reanimated with malevolent temperaments, in the film Mad Love.
  Werewolves were introduced in films during this period, and similar creatures were presented in Cat People. Mummies were cinematically depicted as fearsome monsters as well. As for giant creatures, the cliffhanger of the first episode of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial did not use a costumed actor, instead using real-life lizards to depict a pair of battling dragons via use of camera perspective. However, the cliffhanger of the ninth episode of the same serial had a man in a rubber suit play the Fire Dragon, which picks up a doll representing Flash in its claws. The cinematic monster cycle eventually wore thin, having a comedic turn in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).
caption: Hollywood's interpretation of Frankenstein's monster, played by Boris Karloff
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