MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The body-snatcher has become a ubiquitous part of the cinematic Frankenstein myth. In countless films attached to Mary Shelley’s novel, and particularly the Hammer cycle of Frankenstein films (1957-1974), viewers encounter various iterations of the disreputable, troglodytic criminal figure that supplies the mad doctor Victor Frankenstein with the dead human bodies he needs to create his monstrosities. In the Hammer films, Frankenstein occasionally becomes a proactive ghoul and snatches the bodies he needs himself, but most often he outsources this odious corpse-acquisition task to others. It is these “others” that this project is interested in interrogating. The body-snatcher in these films acts as an appropriately sinister component in the imagined cinematic storyworlds that describe Frankenstein and his monster, but if one looks to Shelley’s source text one realizes that this character occurs nowhere in the novel. This nonexistent body-snatcher is further complicated by the visibility in Shelley’s time of real body-snatchers, or “resurrection men.” Disturbing tales of such men procuring bodies for anatomists, either by grave-robbing or outright murder, abounded during Shelley’s lifetime, and culminated in the popular attention given to murderous Edinburgh resurrectionists Burke and Hare (1828) and the copycat “London Burkers” (1831). That Shelley would have known of these cases is almost certain, but, in contrast to the Hammer films, they are absolute non-presences in the novel. This project will begin from that absence and proceed to examine the possible roots of the body-snatcher’s manifestation in the Hammer Frankenstein films. Specifically examined will be Hammer’s possible sources: eighteenth and nineteenth century historical evidence concerning real and literary body-snatchers, and later materials that reflect anxieties surrounding the resurrection man as it leaked out into the Victorian era. In summation, this project will investigate why the Hammer filmmakers frequently infused their plots with resurrection men when Mary Shelley did not.