What does it mean that two of the world’s most recognizable fictional figures are monsters? And with only a slight stretch, we can say that they were born on the same night in 1815 when Lord Byron, his friend Dr. Polidori and the 19-year old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley entertained each other by inventing scary stories. Byron and Polidori established the literary prototype for the aristocratic vampire that became Bram Stoker’s model for Dracula. The other creature, sprung from Shelley’s imagination, was sewn together from body parts by one Victor Frankenstein. Hers was the gothic novel that gave birth to science fiction.
Most of the world, however, knows of Frankenstein and his monster through the medium of motion pictures. As early as 1910, the Edison Studio released a short subject based on the novel, but the face cemented in the public imagination remains the flat-headed, bolted together figure played with horrific sympathy by Boris Karloff in the 1931 Frankenstein.
In Vault of Frankenstein: 200 Years of the World’s Most Famous Monster, Paul Ruditis begins with Shelley’s storytelling but devotes much of the book to the movies and television drawn from it. Frankensteins have rolled out of studios in the U.S. and U.K. with only short gaps in the 90 years since Karloff’s shambling monster first frightened moviegoers. Some of the iterations since then have played Frankenstein for laughs; others tried to get around the 1931 film by returning more faithfully to Shelley’s novel or by absorbing her idea of science amok in less recognizable ways.
Profusely illustrated, Vault of Frankenstein is a testament to the multiplicity of contradictory meanings that can fan out from an original image or idea. As Ruditis writes, most kids parading in Frankenstein masks on Halloween have never seen the Karloff film (much less read Shelley) but the face is universally recognized. Frankenstein has assumed “new and different forms completely unrelated” to Shelley’s intentions—or those of James Whale, who directed the 1931 classic.
