Frankenstein was scary once …

Once!

The first ever reveal of his face—his being—occurs at 31:08 – 31:17, in a multi-step zoom-in that occurs as artificial today, but which was an unprecedented horror in its day:

It’s hard to realize that the long face, the sunken cheeks (removed bridge), the dead eyes (weighted with wax), and square head were once all new. Imagine being there when the Pierce-Karloff Frankie was first revealed—before it became the most iconic face of all faces in the entire world. Frankie’s famous face is revered, cool, classic, fun, familiar, and friendly. In fact,

It’s hard to get scared by the Pierce-Karloff Frankenstein today. But it’s not for a child who has only seen normal-looking people all his life. Then then idea comes across—blobs of tissue, stitched together, are walking around as if they were all parts of a single person. Frankenstein is a collection—that’s the primary horror about him.

Undead are the original super-scary. Much worse than a giant praying mantis or scorpion. The dead coming back is terrible and (the original) uncanny. It is a person in all respects except one—there is no self therein. The Living Skeleton, the greatest of the undead, is undead. Living Skeleton and zombie are the same, actually, one just has even more of its flesh missing. But Frankenstein is worse than a zombie, because he isn’t a unity even in his corpse-hood. Frankenstein is a bundle of corpse parts, pretending to be a single person. And he has a self, which is just a duller and more damaged version of the brain-part.

But now! Franky is friends with all children. He conquers Baragon. He wears a football helmet, drives a hot-rod, and pimps strawberry breakfast cereal. Gone—the evil is gone.

Check out the 1978.04.10 draft of Carpenter’s Halloween script. It has a lot of dialog that was never used. One part in particular (see above) is wildly different. Check it out: