Hollywood did not give birth to Frankenstein; Mary Shelley did.
More than a century before actor Boris Karloff, helped by make-up artists,
made the monster in his image, came Shelley and her creation.
In the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and
her lover, the poet Percy Shelley, visited the poet Lord Byron at his
villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Stormy weather frequently forced
them indoors, where they and Byron's other guests sometimes read from a
volume of ghost stories. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each
write one themselves. Mary's story, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley gave her monster feelings and intelligence. Fatherless and
motherless, the monster struggles to find his place in human society,
struggles with the most fundamental questions of identity and personal
history. Alone, he learns to speak, to read, and to ponder "his
accursed origins." All the while, he suffers from the loneliness of
never seeing anyone resembling himself.
The reshaping of Mary Shelley's story began almost from the moment it
first appeared. In 1823 Mary Shelley's father told her of an English Opera
House production of a play entitled Presumption; or, The Fate of
Frankenstein. Though inspired by her novel, the play departed from it
freely. Shelley's original novel, memorable for its story and ambitious in
the large questions it poses, has invariably been simplified and
distorted, sometimes almost beyond recognition.
In 1930, Universal bought film rights to Peggy Webling's Frankenstein:
An Adventure in the Macabre, which had premiered in London three years
earlier. An obscure English actor, William Henry Pratt, who went by the
stage name of Boris Karloff, played the monster in Universal's adaptation
of the Webling play. . 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.
Karloff's success in Frankenstein made him a star. The film
itself became an almost instant classic of a new genre--the horror movie.
Frankenstein earned rave reviews, was named to top-ten lists, and
made lots of money; the production cost $290,000 in Depression-era
dollars, and earned more than $12 million
Frankenstein books and movies
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