There are three classic monsters people generally think of when they think of Halloween. The first is vampires, who, despite having their image revamped in a more heroic direction in recent years, have still managed to retain their whole "creature of the night" vibe. The second is werewolves or wolfmen, who don't quite have the same pervasive evilness as vampires, but still make a good scary costume. And the third is Frankenstein—or to be more accurate, Frankenstein's monster. Now, one of these things is not like the other. Vampires and werewolves are groups, but Frankenstein's monster is an individual. Not only that, but vampires and werewolves have at least centuries of mythos supporting them. Werewolves as benevolent witch and demon hunters date back at least to the 1600s, and vampires as a catch-all blanket term for the Living Dead go back way farther than that. Frankenstein is one book from the 1800s. So how did it become so intrinsic to the modern notion of horror that its eponymous creature is paired with things as enormous and primeval as vampires and werewolves? Well for one thing, it's a really good book. "Frankenstein", written by Mary Shelley when she was just 18, is considered one of the first science fiction stories, and argued by some to be THE first due to its actual focus on science and scientific progress. Victor Frankenstein is a haunting examination of the maniacal fanaticism felt by those who thirst for knowledge, and the lengths that someone can be driven to in their pursuit of that goal, while Frankenstein's Monster is a tragic examination of the inhumane results of science taken too far without discipline or consideration for consequences. Also, it got turned into a couple of early horror movies, which probably helped. So our story begins in a way that has nothing to do with Victor Frankenstein or his monster, in a ship heading to the North Pole. The captain is one Robert Walton, and the framing sequence for the story is that Robert is writing letters to his sister back home describing the progress of his expedition. See, Robert has been seized by the thirst for discovery, and as a result has embarked on this highly dangerous expedition into uncharted territories for the betterment of knowledge as a whole. Hey look! Literary parallels to our protagonist's personal journey and subsequent downfall. Or -- no, wait, that's just Victor Frankenstein, frozen and emaciated on a nearby iceberg. So Robert brings him onboard and Victor explains that he's up here because he's been chasing someone. Now some of the ship's crew a saw dog sled in the distance earlier that day, who Victor says is almost certainly the guy he's talking about. Then, as Robert helpfully transcribes the whole novel to send to his sister, Victor proceeds to tell him his entire life story to explain how he got where he is today. So, Victor starts at the very beginning, with a long, LONG explanation of how his parents met, and how he, their eldest child, got to travel the world with them from an early age. One day, while his parents were visiting some local poor people, they spotted a little girl who was way prettier and blonder than everyone she lived with and her poor person family explained that her name was Elizabeth and she was a noble born orphan they'd taken in before they got poor. Victor's parents and Elizabeth's foster parents collectively decided that she's way too beautiful and pure to be stuck living in poverty, so Victor's parents adopt her. Yeah, just screw all those other poor kids that aren't blond-haired little cherubs... So that's how Victor acquires his childhood sweetheart/adopted sister Elizabeth. They grow up together in their impossibly idyllic Swiss mountain house, and their other house in Geneva, and finally their favorite house on Bellerive. Elizabeth has the soul of a poet, and mostly focuses on the beauty of nature and other such whatever, but Victor is a science-y curious soul, and starts absorbing the contents of the family library in pursuit of his singular goal: Victor wants to understand the nature of nature. Oh also Victor has a childhood best friend named Clerval, who's basically sunshine personified. Overall, Victor's life is about as good as it can get. Except for that one bit where his mom dies. But all that changes when Victor goes to college. That's right! That uncle you only see at Thanksgiving was right all along! College is an evil tool of The Man that changes you into some wussy bleeding-heart version of your former self. The only way to stave off the transformation is to make sure you never learn anything outside your pre-existing worldview and refuse to adjust your opinions accordingly. Well, no, Victor's college experience isn't THAT kind of disappointing. But you know how every grade has that one kid who's just way more advanced than everyone else, but as soon as that kid tests into a new school environment, they're utterly blindsided by the fact that everyone there is just as smart as they are, and they're no longer the de facto smartest kid in the room, and it sends them spiraling into a crisis of ego because they don't know who they are anymore? Well that's not Victor's problem either. Victor's problem is that as soon as he gets to college, that whole "thirst for knowledge" thing spirals out of control. With the help of a professor, Victor absorbs every physical science he can find, along with a healthy dose of mathematics, and spends two years traight making way more progress than anyone else in his classes. This is also around the time that Victor starts thinking about life. Not in a classic "I'm a third year, and what am I doing with my life?!" sort of way, but in a "What is life, and how can I create it?" sort of way. You know, normal science stuff. So Victor decides to figure out how to create and give life, which he does - in the space of five sentences. So, you know, normal science stuff... Anyway, now that Victor's figured out the trick to reanimating the dead which—side note, he never tells us how to do, meaning the movies had to make up that lightning thing on their own— Victor decides he wants to make a man. So Victor casually repurposes his room into a human assembling station, raids a truly staggering number of graveyards, and sets about assembling his creation. This ambitious project takes him through most of a year, during which time he throws himself totally into his work, neglects his own health, and wastes away to an emaciated shadow of his former self, driven only by his burning desire to progress. Which is actually fairly normal for college. Finally, November rolls around, and Victor finishes assembling his pet project: a huge beautiful man crafted from only the finest ingredients. Now, if you stumbled a little on the beautiful thing, while modern movies present Frankenstein's monster as a huge, inarticulate, patchwork monster, the book version is beautiful, intelligent (once he gets some learning in him), and his only fault is that his eyes are creepy, and he's a little viscerally disturbing to look at. In fact, his eyes are so creepy that as soon as Victor animates him, he freaks out, declares the experiment a failure, and storms off to take a nap. After some horribly symbolic nightmares, he wakes up to find the monster staring down at him, freaks out all over again, and books it out into the night, because nothing says responsible science-parent like abandoning your new creation to the elements five minutes after his creation because you didn't get his eye color right. Luckily for Victor, shortly thereafter, he's found by his childhood friend Clerval, who came to check up on him because his family was worried that they hadn't heard from him in three years. In case it wasn't already obvious, Victor is kind of a self-absorbed jerk. Anyway, together they head back to Victor's apartment, and Victor finds that, conveniently, the monster is up and vanished. Instead of pondering the obviously sinister implications of this, Victor celebrates the convenient disappearance of his greatest failure by passing out and forcing Clerval to nurse him back to health over the course of several months. So Victor gradually recovers with Clerval's help, although the distress of his apparently failed experiment has left him so traumatized that the mere thought of a Bunsen burner is enough to send him fainting into the nearest pile of cushions faster than you can say "consumption-riddled Victorian ingenue". After receiving a letter from Elizabeth asking him to return home, Victor decides he's officially had enough of college, and he and Clerval prepare to return home to Geneva. Unfortunately, they're delayed by weather problems, and it takes them a few more months before they can actually go back. But that's just more time for Victor to recover, and by the time Victor and Clerval are ready to return to Geneva, Victor's almost totally forgotten that crime against nature he committed that drove him to abandon science itself. But unfortunately for everyone involved, Victor's dad writes to inform him that his younger brother William has been murdered, and Elizabeth's losing her mind over it since she'd given William permission to wear an antique locket, and it looks like he might have been killed so someone could steal it. Victor and Clerval book it back to Geneva, but when Victor takes a break to angst in a thunderstorm, he spots the unmistakable silhouette of the monster he created hiding in the trees. This is terrible news for Victor because he immediately puts together that this means his brother was murdered by something he made, making it HIS fault. Compounding the issue, the missing locket has been discovered in the possession of Justine, the housekeeper and basically a second adopted daughter of Casa Frankenstein. (Although she's nowhere near as blonde as Elizabeth so obviously she's not REALLY considered family.) Anyway, Justine has the locket, so Justine is being accused of the murder. Now, this is the part where Victor goes from self-absorbed jerk with no real mind for consequences to irredeemable asshole. Because Victor knows Justine is innocent. Victor is very insistent that Justine is innocent. But Victor thinks that telling anyone WHY he knows she's innocent will just make him sound crazy, or worse, guilty. So instead he keeps his mouth shut through the entire trial, Justine's false confession, the guilty verdict, and the execution! All because he didn't want to own up to his own responsibility and potentially face consequences for his actions or people thinking he might be crazy. So that's two deaths on Victor's hands right now. But it's okay because he's a handsome tortured genius or something. Also, Elizabeth has a full-on existential crisis, and can no longer recognize the beauty in a world that let her basically-sister die so cruelly. Obviously this makes Victor feel really bad, which is clearly the most important part of the situation. Victor decides that the only solution is to hike his feelings away. So, he books it out to Mont Blanc for a little nature therapy. Unfortunately, his nature therapy is interrupted by his crime against nature as Frankenstein's monster appears before him and sits him down so he can tell him an exhaustively detailed description of how he spent the last two years in the hopes that it will persuade Victor to do something for him. So if you're keeping track, that's an exhaustive life story inside another exhaustive life story that poor captain Walton is transcribing in its entirety to mail to his sister. So, the monster explains that after Victor freaked out and abandoned him, he kind of wandered around for a while, barely sentient and incapable of understanding his surroundings, because he was basically a GIANT NEWBORN BABY, VICTOR. Anyway, the monster wandered into a forest and gradually learned to understand parts of his surroundings. This included the discovery of fire which, after a brief incident where he learned that fire hurt, he grew to appreciate, and carefully cultivated with wood. One interesting thing that becomes clear about the monster as he tells his story is that he's very similar to Victor in a lot of ways. For one, he's very intelligent, and, like Victor, operates by way of the scientific method: observe, hypothesize, test, repeat. This is how he figures out fire, cooking, and eventually language (although that comes later). See, the monster eventually starts running low on food, and strikes out in search of greener pastures, which leads him to find first a shed and then an entire village. Unfortunately, he observes that the average response to his presence is screaming occasionally supplemented by throwing rocks, so he learns to avoid major residential areas and instead hides in a low shelter built off of a cottage. As it turns out, this cottage belongs to a small family of three: a blind old man and his two children. The monster lives in their shack for months, in which time he learns to speak perfect English, and also gleans the family's entire soap-opera life story. Which he helpfully recounts, making this an exhaustive life story in another exhaustive life story in still yet another exhaustive life story. Suffice to say, it's exhausting. Also, someone conveniently drops a bunch of thematically appropriate books nearby, so the monster gets ahold of Paradise Lost, and, like literally everybody else, relates to the protagonist. But in this case it's meant to be, like, poignant and tragic, not edgy and dark. Anyway the most important thing that the monster learns from this experience is not good farming practice, or even the English language: it's that he's desperately lonely for the kind of family dynamic he's observing. So he decides to try something. The old man of the house is blind, meaning he won't be able to see the monster. So the monster waits for the other members of the household to leave, then knocks on the door and hangs out with the old dude for a while, until he gets too clingy, the others come back, and he gets chased out into the night again. The family moves out, and the monster burns down their house in retribution. Then, after a pleasant misadventure where he gets shot, the monster stumbles on none other than William Frankenstein, who made the mistake of revealing his family name, leading the monster to kill him. See, the motivator there is that so far the monster has basically only ever been abused, mistreated, and abandoned, so when faced with the overwhelming cruelty of a world he can't change, he finds ways to lash out at it, and comforts himself with the knowledge that he's not entirely helpless, since he does have the power to hurt the people who hurt him. So yeah, he kills William, frames Justine, and that brings us to the present, where the monster has a request. See all he really wants is to not be alone, so he asks Victor to make him a bride. Obviously Victor refuses, but the monster points out that he's only a jerk because Victor created him, abandoned him, and left him all alone in a world that only knows how to hate and fear him. If he makes him a girlfriend - someone like him who'll be able to understand him - he'll have no more reason to be evil. Also, if Victor doesn't he'll murder his friends and family and frame him for the crime. Thoroughly persuaded, Victor returns home and begins preparing for Crimes Against Nature 2: Electric Boogaloo. But not before he gets engaged to Elizabeth at the request of his aging father. So Victor heads off to England, accompanied by perpetual sunshine friend Clerval, and while Clerval goes full tourist, Victor prepares to recreate the biggest mistake of his life (but with boobs this time). So Victor leaves Clerval doing the Scotland tourist circuit and heads for the Orkneys, a suitably miserable area for him to mope and do science. But as he progresses, he realizes something that few authors seem to have internalized: that just dropping a girlfriend in front of a guy won't actually guarantee that they'll get along. This suggests the worrying possibility of two angry loner monsters rather than one. Or even worse, they might get along TOO well, and create a super race of monsters together. Now, while this is a medically solvable problem, Victor is too busy freaking out to remember his training. So he instead opts to do the much more rational thing and destroy the unfinished lady monster. Obviously, this pisses off the monster, who ominously promises Victor that he'll be with him on his wedding night. Victor, being both an egotist and sorely lacking in imagination, interprets this to mean that the monster will kill him after he's gotten married to Elizabeth, rather than the much more reasonable assumption that the monster intends to start making good on his promise to murder everyone Victor's ever loved. But Victor puts two and two together when Clerval turns up dead the next morning, with Victor as the prime suspect. Victor immediately falls into a two-month long angst-coma, seriously inconveniencing the jail, and when he wakes up he gets acquitted and his father arrives to take him home so he can finally marry Elizabeth. Which is a very good idea that definitely won't have repercussions. Victor's hopeful that marrying Elizabeth will be able to pull him out of his perpetual funk, which is obviously yet more reason not to worry at all that something bad might happen to anyone but Victor, because that would require that he think about someone other than himself for two seconds, which obviously is beyond even as great a scientific mind as his. So Victor and Elizabeth get married, and Surprise! The monster immediately breaks in and murders Elizabeth. Victor promptly freaks out and starts chasing the monster, and pursues him all the way to the North Pole. Unfortunately, it turns out it's, like, SUPER cold up there, and Victor immediately nearly dies of exposure. This is where and how Captain Walton finds him, and that brings us to the present. Speaking of the present, Walton's ship gets stuck in the ice, and the only safe choice is to abandon the expedition and turn back. Having just received an object lesson in the dangers of forging onward to discovery past the point of rational fear, Walton decides that the safe choice is the way to go, and turns the ship around. Also Victor dies of like 14 different kinds of exhaustion and exposure, at which point none other than Frankenstein's monster appears on board to pay his respects. Just like his creator, the monster spends an inordinate amount of time waxing eloquent about how all that horrible stuff he did really hurt HIM, and isn't THAT the important thing to consider right now? Anyway, the monster tells Walton that he's gonna off himself, jumps out the boat window, and vanishes into the snow. So, the moral of this story is: don't be an asshole. Or, if you have to be an asshole, at least don't play God and create more assholes. I know I can't take one more step towards you 'Cause all that's waiting is regret Don't you know I'm not your ghost anymore You lost the love I loved the most I learned to live half alive And now you want me one more time Who do you think you are? Running round leaving scars Collecting your jar of hearts And tearing love apart You're gonna catch a cold From the ice inside your soul So don't come back for me Don't come back at all Who do you think you are? Running round leaving scars Collecting your jar of hearts And tearing love apart You're gonna catch a cold From the ice inside your soul So don't come back for me Don't come back at all Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are?
Happy Halloween everyone!