Frankenstein’s monster and Jack Thompson

Like the internet, video games, and recorded music, as film became a more popular and common form of entertainment so did the attention it received from the "moral crusaders". The voices of these early crusaders with their cult of traditional family values is being regurgitated today by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Alberto Gonzales and Jack Thompson. They evangelized that this new medium is dangerous because they believed it would transform their children into violent root-sucking sodomites. They called for strict laws governing film content and communities began to ban theaters all together. In response to this pressure Edison like the creature in Mary Shelly's story feared this mob of miscreants. Edison capitulated setting up the first Board of Censors, seething with "religious and education leaders". Frankenstein, the first horror film, ironically became the first victim of this mob. Edison stressed that the more sensational elements of the Mary Shelly’s story were sanitized .

The March 15, 1910 edition of The Edison Kinetogram, the catalog that the Edison Company would send to distributors to hype their new films, described the film as such-

“To those familiar with Mrs. Shelly’s story it will be evident that we have carefully omitted anything which might be any possibility shock any portion of the audience. In making the film the Edison Co. has carefully tried to eliminate all actual repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale. Wherever, therefore, the film differs from the original story it is purely with the idea of eliminating what would be repulsive to a moving picture audience.”

One of the major changes made to the story concerns the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. While in Shelly’s novel she did not go into specifics about the monster’s creation, the creation scene in the film certainly owes more to alchemy than science. Instead, the monster is reviled as a reflection of Frankenstein’s predisposition to depravity that leads him to molest divinity's domain.