Fact, Fiction, and Frankenstein's Monster



“Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus” created what has become one of the most recognized icons of horror fiction, but behind fiction there is always a bit of fact, and Frankenstein’s monster was truly a creature of its time.

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This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

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25 thoughts on “Fact, Fiction, and Frankenstein's Monster”

  1. i looked up prometheus and found he was a titan who stole fire from the God’s giving it to humanity and was confused anout how a monster could be a prometheus when ut dawned on me that Prometheus describes Dr. Frankenstein, not the monster. Americans
    aee so accustomed to calling just the monster Frankenstein that at first i didn’t notice my mistake. 😂

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  2. After reading the book years ago, I realized that the movies were wrong, the real monster was Dr Victor Frankenstein and NOT his creation.

    I really like Dean Koontz's modern Frankenstein series.

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  3. Thanks for this, while I am a huge fan of Karloff and his many outstanding performances None of the movie versions even come close to the intelligence and tension of the original novel and that is doubly true of Dracula

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  4. For any interested in getting further into this, don't miss out on two films:
    1. GOTHIC (1986) "The film is a fictionalized retelling of the Shelleys' visit to Lord Byron in Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, shot in Gaddesden Place." — Wikipedia
    Although unstated, the actual Villa was shown here, above, for about a minute. It still stands and can be visited.
    2. Rowing With the Wind (1988) " This historical drama centers on the relationship among Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron at the time she was writing her horror masterpiece, "Frankenstein." Lizzy McInnerny, Hugh Grant, Valentine Pelka, Elizabeth Hurley, Jose Luis Gomez, Virginia Mataix.
    This English-language Spanish production is a fairly successful examination of the "haunted summer" of 1816 wherein the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her sister Claire Clairmont, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori intertwined to produce Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's classic gothic novel Frankenstein.
    This same material inspired Ken Russell's overheated horror film GOTHIC (1987). ROWING WITH THE WIND opens with a beautifully photographed sequence–accompanied by Ralph Vaughan Williams' haunting "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis"–in which Mary Shelley (McInnerny) writes on board a decrepit schooner as it drifts through massive ice floes near the North Pole, the very same setting that marks the climax of Frankenstein.
    Reminiscing about the events that have brought her to this place, McInnerny flashes back to her courtship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Pelka) and their elopement to Switzerland where they met Lord Byron (Grant) and his friend Dr. Polidori (Gomez). Accompanied by McInnery's sister Claire (Hurley)–who has had an affair with Grant–the quintet spends the summer at Grant's villa.
    From here the plot is virtually identical to that of GOTHIC, highlighting such biographical nuggets as Percy Shelley's inability to swim, Byron's callous bon mots, Polidori's suicide, and the death of the Wollstonecraft-Shelley children. The move from Switzerland to Italy is detailed, as are the events in the years following, wherein Shelley drowns and Byron dies of disease in Greece during the Greek-Turkish war.
    While in GOTHIC Russell uses the events to highlight the sexual decadence and debauchery that he imagines took place, director-writer Gonzalo Suarez takes a different, more gothic approach. He shows Mary Shelley to be haunted by the image of the monster she created in Frankenstein, which she sees lurking whenever a tragedy befalls her family and friends.
    While all the principals are excellent, Grant steals the movie as the eccentric, unconventional Lord Byron. Although Suarez's screenplay suffers from literary pretensions that occasionally result in somewhat stilted dialog, his visualization of the material is breathtaking." — TVguide.com

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