“Jack Pierce’s makeup design for the creature furthers the film’s criticism of technology by making him look like an automaton created by an industrialized society. Karloff’s flat head and neck bolts were a throwback to the original idea of the monster as half-man, half robot inspired by earlier films like Metropolis (1923) and Karloff carried this robotic impression through in his performance of the creature’s stiff-legged gait. The robotic quality of Karloff’s creature speaks to contemporary fear that society’s ‘devotion to science and industry, reason and rationality [was] rendering [people] less human.’ The robotic, fragmented look of Karloff’s creature represents a significant shift in how the monster was adapted. Instead of ‘Mary Shelley’s well-proportioned but scary creature, her new Adam, and instead of Presumption’s dark haired brute in a blue body=stocking, the monster became a more literal thing of scars and stitches and skewers.’ The evolution of the creature from a coherent whole to a thing stitched together form different parts is a powerful metaphor for how modern advancements in technology had fragmented the self. According to Szollosy these feelings of fragmentation were the result of people projecting their unconscious fears of becoming automatons onto the creature as ‘excessive splitting and projections can leave one feeling fragmented, in pieces.’” – Jeanette Laredo, “Unmade and Remade: Trauma and Modern Adaptations of Frankenstein” in Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media
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