THE MONSTER HIT
FOR bicentenarians that mad scientist Dr Frankenstein – and the terrifying monster he created – aren’t doing too badly. Mel Brooks’ hilarious spoof Young Frankenstein, a hit film in 1974, opens this week as a West End musical. This autumn also sees the return of The Frankenstein Chronicles to our TV screens. Overall there have been more than 50 films featuring the famous monster – and many more inspired by him.
Mary Shelley could never have imagined that her work – first published anonymously on January 1, 1818 and which she wrote when she was just 19 – would have such a long-lasting impact.
The story of Frankenstein begins appropriately enough on a dark and stormy night on the shores of Lake Geneva in June 1816.
That summer in Europe was abnormally cold and wet because of the eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies the previous year. “The year without a summer – as 1816 became known – provided the perfect backdrop to the telling of bleak and doom-laden Gothic tales,” says literary expert Greg Buzwell.
Inside the Villa Diodati the great poet and free spirit Lord Byron sat in the candlelit drawing room with his friends and suggested that they should each write a ghost story. Byron’s guests included fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his 18-year-old mistress Mary Godwin.
In 1814 Shelley had left his wife Harriet and eloped to the Continent with his young lover, who had just borne him a son. The pair married late in 1816 after Shelley’s wife committed suicide by drowning.
In the Villa Diodati Mary had initialy been unable to come up with a ghost story. Then she had a nightmare. “I saw with shut eyes – but acute mental vision – the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” she later wrote.
“I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”
ENCOURAGED by Percy – who was later drowned in 1822 – she applied herself to expanding what she had dreamed in Switzerland into a fulllength story. The resulting novel, subtitled The Modern Prometheus, begins in St Petersburg with a letter from a sea captain to his sister back in England. The captain is about to sail to the Arctic where his ship rescues one Victor Frankenstein who has an extraordinary story to tell.
Born into a wealthy Swiss family living in Naples the young student is hit hard by the death of his mother and determines to find a way of imparting life to non-living matter which he hopes will enable him to extend life too. He assembles a human frame from various grave-robbed body parts. Then at 1am on “a dreary night of November” he succeeds in his fantastic experiment.
“I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open. It breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs,” he records. But Frankenstein is appalled by the grotesque eight-foot-tall creature he has brought to life. “I had worked
hard for nearly two years for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. I had desired it with an ardour that exceeded moderation but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart,” he declares. Frankenstein abandons his creation and the consequences are catastrophic. While Shelley’s work is now quite rightly regarded as a masterpiece, some of the earliest reviews were not overly enthusiastic. Novelist Sir Walter Scott declared: “Our taste and judgment alike revolt at this kind of writing and the greater the ability with which it may be executed, the worse it is.”
However the public grew to love Mary Shelley’s creation. The Daily Express Monday September 25 2017 Encyclopaedia Of Horror records that the first known dramatisation opened in London in 1823 at the English Opera House. There was a comedy musical Frankenstein – Or The Vampire’s Victim as early as 1849, a full 125 years before The Rocky Horror Show appeared.
There was also a Victorian parody called The Model Man in which the monster was played as a bowler-hatted dandy with a carnation and monocle. In 1910 Frankenstein made his silver screen debut in a silent film made by the Thomas Edison Company. But it was the 1931 talkie version, made by Universal Studios in Hollywood and starring the mild-mannered English actor William Henry Pratt (aka Boris Karloff) which gave us the “modern” image of the monster with a large square head and bolts in his neck.
It took four hours to apply Karloff’s make-up. Despite this the actor later said: “The monster was the best friend I ever had.” The film was such a success that it spawned several sequels, including Bride Of Frankenstein, Son Of Frankenstein, Ghost Of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. Shelley’s monster even encountered comedy duo Abbott and Costello in one outing.
In the 1950s Frankenstein was unleashed on a new generation in blood and gore productions made by the British Hammer Films, starring Peter Cushing as the doctor and Christopher Lee as the Monster. Even the Carry On team got in on the act. In Carry On Screaming, in 1966, a very white-faced Kenneth Williams plays Dr Orlando Watt whose monster is called Oddbod.
ON BEING told that Oddbod’s finger has dropped off, Watt replies: “That’s the trouble with my regeneration process, it makes everything so brittle. You never know what’s going to drop off next!”
Frankenstein has clearly stayed the course while most horror characters from the 19th century have fallen by the wayside. So what’s been the secret of the series’ longevity? Shelley’s original novel is not just a cracking yarn it is also a deep philosophical work with food for thought on every page.
Far from being dated, Frankenstein is actually strikingly relevant to the world of 2017. Only two weeks ago we read in the Daily Express about the hotel in Japan where guests are greeted by a robotic dinosaur on reception.
The incredible science fiction of Mary Shelley is fast becoming today’s science fact. The moral dilemmas which faced Victor Frankenstein are ones that modern scientists working in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, computing and medicine face now.
“Despite Mary Shelley’s limited scientific expertise she anticipated many of the challenges AI faces today,” says American writer Charlotte Gordon.
Shelley also deserves credit for the nuanced way she portrays the monster and makes us feel sorry for him. “Where she showed genius was in the novel’s challenging ambiguity. Frankenstein’s creation is no mere bogey but a creature as tragic as he is ugly, so poignant a creature in fact that he has been seen as a symbol of the human condition,” was the verdict of Michel Parry in The Encyclopaedia Of Horror.
In the end Frankenstein endures because it is a story with timeless themes. The odds are we will still be enthralled in another 200 years’ time. The question is, will articles about Shelley’s masterwork then be written by humans or by Frankenstein-esque creations?