Country Music legend Johnny Cash once opened up about how he related to another legend, Boris Karloff's Frankenstein's Monster. It seems as a young boy, Cash found himself captivated by the classic Frankenstein movie. He viewed the monster as a tragic figure, composed of defective parts yet striving to do good.
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Released in November of 1931, the James Whale-directed Frankenstein followed the highly successful Dracula for Universal Pictures. The two films ushered in a shambling chorus of horror, followed by classics like The Mummy, The Invisible Man (both 1932), and a slew of sequels.
However, one Arkansas boy caught the classic fright flick and never forgot it. Johnny Cash was a full-fledged monster kid.
Filmmaker James Mangold directed and did script revisions for the 2005 Cash biopic Walk the Line. Mangold collaborated with Cash on the project before his death in 2003. Mangold asked the music icon if there were any formative films from his youth. Cash revealed his affinity for the iconic Universal monster, explaining the depth of their connection.
"When I was working on Walk the Line, one of the last conversations I had with Johnny Cash, cause he was helping me with the script, I was asking him a bunch of questions about his life," Mangold told Italian outlet Bad Taste in 2017. "One of them I asked was 'What was your favorite film as a child?'."
Mangold said that Cash told him as a child, he saw "James Whale's original Universal Frankenstein and he had this profound emotional response to the movie."
Could Johnny Cash's signature look have been inspired by Frankenstein? (Photos by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images and Universal/Getty Images)
Why Johnny Cash Said He Related to Frankenstein's Monster
The filmmaker went on to recount how Cash claimed all of his peers had the jitters watching the film. However, the young Cash was moved by it.
"All the people around him the theater, the kids, were all frightened of the monster but he felt identity with the monster," Mangold recalled Cash saying. "He felt he identified with the creature and he said because 'here was this creature in this film that was made up of all these stolen parts from bad men', and he started to feel like he was made up of stolen parts from bad men."
Cash was born in 1932, so there's no way that he saw the horror classic upon its original release back in 1931. However, the film enjoyed a revival starting in 1935 (often paired with Dracula). It seems very likely that a tiny tyke Johnny Cash caught Frankenstein in the theater alongside some shaky peers.
One might even reason that James Whale's 1931 horror classic influenced Cash's fashion sense. After all, Karloff's monster wears black from head to toe, just as Cash famously would eventually. Many suspect that Elvis Presley's 70s-era jumpsuit look was inspired by his childhood hero Captain Marvel (aka Shazam). Maybe it's not too far-fetched that Johnny Cash may have taken his signature threads from Frankenstein.
