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The reshaping of Mary Shelley’s story began almost from the moment it first appeared. The 1931 Universal Studios production of Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff as the monster, capped more than a century of variant tellings of the original story.
Compared to Shelley’s sensitive, articulate creature, Universal’s was crude and unformed. But the sheer power of Hollywood image-making gave him an impact as great or greater than Shelley’s, and made him into an icon of popular culture.
Frankenstein is best known today through the many films based on the novel, although the most famous movie Frankenstein came after more than a century of popular stage adaptations. As early as 1823, Frankenstein had been adapted for the stage: Peake’s Presumption appeared on the stage only five years after Mary Shelley’s novel was published. … Read more
“I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror – my own vampire.” (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 73). Though the modern pairing of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster is primarily a partnership on screen, our favorite monsters have enjoyed a long and fascinating relationship. … Read more
From the first dramatic version of Frankenstein on the London stage in the 1820’s until Hollywood most recent attempts to exploit the myth (46 titles at last count), the general spirit of Mary Shelley’s original has significantly changed. What was once a literary classic about parental abandonment of human creations and the curse to be … Read more
In 1823 the novel’s first stage adaptation, Presumption; Or, The Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinksley Peake premiered. The creature, his face yellow and green, his limbs blue, was speechless; the novel’s complex moral explorations were reduced to a single moral: Frankenstein got punished for treading in God’s domain. Exciting scenes with the Monster alternated … Read more