Creature Feature Friday: 'Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus'
As you put the finishing touches on your costume, take a few minutes to expand your literature and pop culture horror monster knowledge: the Friday before every Halloween is officially National Frankenstein Friday!
On the last Friday of October, this creepy national day recognizes the horrifying but misunderstood Frankenstein monster, the troubled Dr. Victor Frankenstein, and the author of it all, Mary Shelley. Since its publication in 1818, Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus, has become one of the most famous classic novels, and best-known horror characters, of all time.
For our (extended) Creature Feature Friday, here are 10 facts and details about the enduring horror tale of Frankenstein:
1) Mary Shelley was only 18 years old when she began penning one of the world’s most famous works of horror. The exercise began as a friendly ghost story competition between Mary Shelley and three other writers: her husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Of the four, Shelley and Byron never finished their stories, and Polidori produced a work called The Vampyre, which lost to Mary’s Frankenstein. The now classic gothic novel was published two years later in 1818, when she was 20.
2) She came up with the idea for the story by way of a terrifying waking dream she experienced. Of the dream Mary stated: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life. … He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.” Shelley began writing her famous book the next day.
3) Although she never named him specifically, there is speculation that Mary Shelley used an alchemist and occultist named Johann Conrad Dippel as inspiration for the novel’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein. Dippel was born at Castle Frankenstein (yes, a real place name) near Hesse, Germany in 1673. Throughout his career he experimented with the dissection of dead animals, and wrote a dissertation called Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh. The paper makes the great claims that Dippel had created an elixir of life, knew how to exorcize demons through potions made of dead animal parts, and believed that human souls could be transferred from one corpse to another using a funnel. In Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein experiments with human body parts and an ambiguous blend of chemistry and alchemy to bring life to his creature.
4) Mary’s own personal tragedies also played a role in the writing of Frankenstein. Her mother, writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died when she was only 11 days old. Her half-sister Fanny committed suicide in 1816, at age 22, and the first wife of her lover-turned-husband Percy Shelley drowned herself the same year, at age 21. Mary’s first child died at two weeks of age, and Mary admitted to having dreams of bringing the baby back to life, only to always wake up and find the child gone. Untimely death is a considerable plot point in her novel, as Frankenstein’s creature murders Victor’s best friend and his fiancée, and causes his father to die from grief. Mary’s tragedies continued beyond the publication of her book: only one of her five children survived into adulthood, and her husband Percy drowned in 1822, at age 29.
5) Mary’s relationship with the macabre extends even deeper. It has been well-documented that as she was growing up, Mary spent much of her time at the gravesite of the mother she never knew in St. Pancras churchyard; it became her place of refuge, where she would read (often her mother’s own publications), write, and had even learned to spell by tracing the letters on her mother’s headstone. It is also a widely accepted belief that the first time Mary and the already married Percy Shelley consummated their relationship, it was on top of Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.
6) Sometimes life imitates art: just as Dr. Frankenstein collected dead body parts, rumor has it that when Percy Shelley drowned four years after Frankenstein’s publication, Mary Shelley kept his heart in her writing desk. When he died at 29, Percy Shelley was burned on a funeral pyre at the beach were his drowned body was recovered. As the story goes, after he was cremated, a friend snatched his calcified heart from the remains., and it eventually came to belong to Mary. Though widowed at around 24 years of age, Mary never remarried. Thirty years later, her only surviving son discovered the alleged charred heart in her desk, wrapped in pages of poetry - a grim tribute to dead love from a classic purveyor of horror.
7) With the publication of Frankenstein, Shelley went on to be considered the originator of the science fiction genre. She also created the enduring trope of the “mad scientist” and inspired a common speech word in ”Frankenstein” that has been used countless times as a descriptor for things that are unnatural, patchwork, or hideous. (“Frankenfood,” for example, is the nickname for genetically modified food!)
8) Thomas Edison - yes, the inventor of the light bulb - made the very first film adaptation of Frankenstein. His production company Edison Movie Studio created a 14-minute silent Frankenstein reel in 1910, also making the film one of the first-ever horror movies. The reel was lost for four decades before being rediscovered in the 1950s.
9) Later movie versions of a green-skinned monster with a flat-top head and neck bolts greatly differ from the monster’s appearance in the classic novel. On paper, Frankenstein’s creature has nearly translucent yellow skin barely concealing the muscles underneath it, along with long black hair; a shriveled complexion; thin black lips covering big teeth; and pale watery eyes that are nearly all white.
10) Frankenstein’s monster is arguably the best-known horror character in literature and in pop culture. The monster and his story have inspired the basis of over 60 films and television shows, like the 1931 film ‘Frankenstein’ with Boris Karloff, from which was derived the most widely accepted appearance of a green Frankenstein with neck bolts and facial scars. Other popular adaptations, dramatic and comedic alike, include ‘Young Frankenstein,’ ‘Bride of Frankenstein,’ ‘The Munsters,’ ‘Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,’ ‘Frankenweenie,’ and ‘Mary’s Shelley’s Frankenstein.’ In addition to the screen, Frankenstein has been portrayed in a number of onstage plays, and still remains one of the most popular Halloween costumes!
Which Frankenstein fact shocked you the most? What’s your favorite classic horror monster? What’s your favorite classic horror novel? Discuss with us in the comments!
