Frankenstein is both art and artifact. Its unexpected tone--combining horror, suspense and humor--immediately set it apart from anything that came before and much that came after. It was relentlessly copied, with singular films (including The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein by the same director) giving way to a sink of lurching monsters and screaming victims. Later, Frankenstein became a pop culture touchstone, earning paeans masked as parodies (Young Frankenstein and The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and culminating in a film about its curious creator, director James Whale (Gods and Monsters). And make no mistake: This Frankenstein is much more Whale than Shelley.

Whale invested the monster film with pathos. Karloff's ominous creature is tragic, both physically tortured and emotionally unequipped to deal with the world into which he is thrust. Henry Frankenstein, the model for countless mad scientists to come, is not so much mad as blinded by obsession--and, amazingly, he recovers. Clive deftly conveys his complex emotions. And in a role that usually amounts to monster bait, Clarke's Elizabeth has both depth and symbolism. She represents the lure of normalcy, which Frankenstein rebuffs until it's too late.

As Gods and Monsters stressed, Frankenstein was partly meant as a comedy--and there is a lot of humor, both coarse and sophisticated. There are delightful characters like Frederick Kerr's Baron Frankenstein ("Stuff and nonsense!") and even slapstick (the classic scene where Fritz drops the "normal" brain). Some of the humor is more subtle: The monster throws Maria into the river because they're tossing in flowers and he's run out, which Whale surely intended as a joke. What's often unnoticed is that the famously furious townspeople never catch on to Frankenstein. Frankenstein is often framed as illustrating God's retribution for man meddling in his domain--but only the monster acts against Frankenstein, and the monster loses. That may be the biggest joke of all.