Introduced by Andrew Griffin Whale's film, not simply the monster's face or walk, haunts audiences and filmmakers. Reviewings allow us to dominate it, to sympathize with the monster, to see another narrative emerge. Karloff's monster becomes the way "sound" Hollywood looks back at the "primitive" silent product of Expressionist studio constructivism?.But the sound track, supposedly a further filling-in of filmic reality, still evidences the hysteria-in Colin Clive's voice, in the shoel banging coldly on the grave, in the barking dogs echoing overreverberently against the rocks-that sets the teeth on edge in a way that the visual image does not. The result is to make the romantic, supposedly "natural" and "real" conventions, seem tissues, insubstantial products of a shared madness. Who does not remember the closeup of Henry turning the key to lock his bride in? His gesture is only another version of the studio concept of closing off the world in order to control it, to separate into a divided consciousness the forces that threaten the seemingly rational stability of society.-William Nestrick Andrew Griffin is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley.