As Hallow’s Eve approaches and the Gothic spirit takes hold of McHenry County, well-worn tales of terror are passed down much as they were from the time when New England and the Chesapeake Bay were roughly-settled wilderness. The candlelight has been replaced by flatscreen TVs and digital projectors, and the tales themselves come as black-and-white productions of Universal Pictures, but as ghostly remnants of a bygone era, they do just as good a job of haunting and spooking their living listeners.
This October, the Woodstock Public Library will host a tribute to one of those monster tales, the oldest one to have an origin in literature instead of folklore – and in that sense, one of the oldest living “pop culture” figures in Europe and America’s history. “Frankenstein” was first published as a novel two centuries ago this year, and to commemorate it, the Library will hold five showings of Frankenstein films and a Frankenstein-themed storytime week this October.
As the library’s Katie Bradley describes, “it’s lasted for 200 years, there aren’t many [modern] stories that can say they’ve been around for that long.” The novel itself was first thought up in 1816, the “Year Without A Summer,” when the eruption of Mount Tambora plunged the world into a brief ice age. Mary Godwin, her future husband Percy Bryce Shelley, and mutual friend Lord Byron were on retreat in the Swiss lake country, passing the unnaturally cold and rainy summer with a writing contest to see who could make the most frightening “ghost story.”
Byron, drawing from old German folklore, wrote the story that would eventually take shape as Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” The future Shelley, more vexed for inspiration, eventually found herself with a grim, yet much more contemporary vision – “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” she relates. “Then, on the working of some powerful engine… stir with an uneasy, half vital motion… supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”
Shelley drew from the then-unfolding Industrial Revolution, which seemed well on its way to usurping the natural world, from the revolutionary philosophy of the day, which was doing the same with the world of God, and from her own experience as a woman, imagining “man’s” attempt to create life purely of his own will, with neither God nor his own female counterpart to assist. Throughout the 19th century, the book and stage adaptations of the story attracted both philosophers debating the nature of what is “human,” and fans of the grotesque, who began one-upping each other to see how monstrous Frankenstein’s stitched-together creature could really be.
In film, of course, the latter take on the story has prevailed. 1931’s “Frankenstein” was a perfect fit for a time which had even then fallen from the Romantic-era grace pictured by Shelley. The original creature’s Adonis-like sculpting was replaced by Karloff’s rough shamble of bolts and body parts, its sharp mind housing an inquisitive but lost soul replaced by the hastily-acquired brain of an executed criminal. With Shelley’s skepticism of technological power already vindicated by World War One, and more still to come in World War Two, the less human and more “industrialized” monster had fertile ground in the public imagination to grow in.
The 1931 Universal production will be the first film shown in the library’s October festival, on Monday the 1st at 6:00 pm, with each following film shown at the same time and day of the week. The 8th will feature the more young-kid friendly “Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein,” with 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein,” considered by many to be Universal’s best entry in the series, shown on the 15th. The 22nd will feature “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” which also stars Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman, and the 29th will close out with the raunchier “Young Frankenstein,” directed by Mel Brooks and starring Gene Wilder (whose ancestors could themselves take credit for some of the Frankenstein mythos – stories of the Golem, creatures brought to life with Hebrew letters who frequently run amok on their creators, are often cited as a forerunner to Shelley’s tale). The festival will also feature Frankenstein-themed storytimes on Wednesday the 24th at 11:00 am and Friday the 26th at 10:30 am, with a Spanish-language session on Monday the 22nd at 5:00 pm.
Brentley has said that the library is open to doing more film festivals in the future, Halloween-themed and otherwise. For now, the season of fright is the perfect time to commemorate one of the most subtly terrifying stories for an often desensitized modern audience – a tale of science turned mad by lack of wisdom, frighteningly prescient both a hundred years ago in 1918, and in our own era of genetic engineering, runaway development, and culture mutated by instant communication. Time will tell if our own bold attempt to cheat nature of its due will meet a similarly tragic end as Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.
Willcockson Wordsmithing 