Frankenstein

On the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), her future husband, Percy Shelley, and their charismatic friend Lord Byron engaged in a ghost-story contest. After seeing a vision of what she called "the hideous phantasm of a man," Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, the gothic novel that would bring her lasting fame. Even before Shelley's name was widely known, theatrical versions of her novel—the tale of Victor Frankenstein and his monster—frightened and appalled audiences all over Europe. The popularity of stage adaptations in the nineteenth century foreshad-owed the emergence of the Frankenstein monster as an icon of film, television, and other forms of popular culture in the twentieth century, including everything from comic books to Halloween costumes. Indeed, the creature's deformity and pathos have earned it such an indelible position in the popular imagination that the name "Frankenstein" has come to denote not the scientist who bears the name or even the novel which gave it life, but rather the image of a scarred and lumbering monster in angry revolt against its creator and society. On one level, the creature exists simply as a horror-movie staple, like Dracula or the Wolf Man. But it is the monster's value as a powerful symbol of our fears regarding the dangers of science, technology, and industrialization, as well as the perils of man's hubristic attempts to control nature, that has given Shelley's "hideous progeny" such an enduring and ubiquitous afterlife.

No other medium exploited, influenced, and perpetuated the Frankenstein myth like film. One of the first movies ever made, Thomas A. Edison's sixteen-minute silent film Frankenstein (1910), began the transformation of Shelley's literary creation into its numerous cinematic offspring. But it was the 1931 Universal Studio release of director James Whale's Frankenstein that exerted the greatest impact on Frankenstein mythmaking. In his career-making performance as the monster, Boris Karloff reduced Shelley's articulate, intelligent, and agile creature to a silent brute that was nevertheless endearing in its child-like innocence. Ironically, Karloff's monster—furnished with a protruding and stitched forehead, eyes devoid of intelligence, and electrodes in his neck—all but replaced Shelley's original creation in the popular imagination. As well as cementing Karloff's creature as a cinematic icon, the film also gave rise to enduring "Frankenstein movie" conventions such as the elaborate creation scene, the mad doctor's laboratory, his demented hunchback assistant, Fritz, his infamous ecstatic cry at the moment of creation ("It's alive!"), and the angry torch-carrying rabble who pushed the monster to its fiery death. For two decades, Universal profited immensely from the Frankenstein series with the much-praised Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and several lesser but popular sequels, such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). The film series also yielded several spin-off characters, including Elsa Lanchester's Bride of Frankenstein, whose teased-up hair with white "lightning streaks" made her a comparable, though lesser known, pop icon.

Embodying the postwar optimism and prosperity of the late 1940s, the Frankenstein monster shifted into the comic genre when Universal released Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948. This "horror-comedy" approach to the Frankenstein myth, complete with slapstick gags, marked a departure from Whale's more serious pictures of the 1930s. But the title's explicit focus on the Frankenstein monster—and the film's positive reception with audiences and critics—evinced the creature's ongoing mass-market appeal and presaged the onslaught of low budget films such as I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) in the following decades.

After Abbot and Costello's satire of "classic" monster movies proved that the more serious Frankenstein formula had grown tired, Frankenstein films suffered a hiatus until the British studio Hammer Films released The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957. The movie marked the beginning of a more serious and gory approach to big-screen versions of the Frankenstein story. Peter Cushing, who played Baron Frankenstein in numerous films for the Hammer series, captured the psychological struggle of the "mad" scientist so memorably that his character soon overshadowed the monster in much the same way that Karloff's creature had usurped the fame of his creator in the Whale films.

This focus on the psychology of the mad scientist, however, was short-lived. Capitalizing on the prevailing counter-cultural climate and the renewed popularity of classic horror characters in the 1960s and 1970s, the Frankenstein monster made a comeback as a popular symbol of nonconformity. Exemplary of this new trend, interpretations of Frankenstein in the 1970s subverted and even perverted more traditional representations. In 1974, cult artist Andy Warhol produced Flesh for Frankenstein (or Andy Warhol's Frankenstein), an ultra-gory retelling in which Baron Frankenstein and his "zombies" display overtly homoerotic, sensual, and necrophilic behavior. In the same year, Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein cleverly parodied theFrankenstein myth and answered the long-unspoken question about the monster's sexual girth. The cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) even featured a transvestite named Frank-n-Furter and his creation Rocky Horror.

A scene from the film Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff (standing) and Mae Clarke, 1931.

The Frankenstein monster also infiltrated America's rising TV culture in two very similar shows about eccentric nuclear families. Both The Munsters (CBS, 1964-66) and The Addams Family (ABC, 1964-66) featured a Frankenstein-like character that was essentially a nostalgic reproduction of Karloff's famous creature. In telling the weekly stories of these suburban families who were, besides their monster-movie appearance, normal in every respect, these shows satirized the quaint, white, middle-class family sitcoms of an earlier decade and capitalized on the comic implications of a "domesticated" Frankenstein's monster. (In The Addams Family, for instance, the creature named Lurch served as the terse family butler.) The popularity of such series in TV reruns and feature films suggested that the Frankenstein monster, and its attending creature culture, had become a cuddly household commodity now endlessly recycled for comic effect and commercial gain. It was not until the 1990s, in fact, that any significant attempt was made to reestablish a more serious approach to this material. Kenneth Branagh's 1994 film Mary Shelley's Frankenstein returned to Shelley's original novel and captured much of its gothic terror but also added popular movie formulas such as the creation of the monster's bride.

Despite the endless dilutions, distortions, and recyclings, the force of the Frankenstein myth remains undiminished as contemporary society continues to incorporate technological advances—in fields such as genetic engineering—into everyday life while growing increasingly apprehensive about their potential dangers. Each version of Frankenstein's monster acts not only as a potent reminder of the dark side of man's creative idealism—the dangers of trying to play God—but also as a powerful representation of the collective fears and desires of the particular era in which it was conceived. The Frankenstein legend continues to endure as a deformed mirror held up to human nature, re -formed from parts of the dead past—with our imagination providing the electrical spark.

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