Imaginary Worlds - Creature Double Feature

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

In honor of the spooky season, we present two monstrous origin stories --Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We know when these books were written in the 19th century. But what inspired the imaginations of the rebellious teenager Mary Shelley, or the beleaguered theatrical promoter Bram Stoker? I talk with biographer Charlotte Gordon and Professors Gillen D'Arcy Wood and Ron Broglio about how “The Year Without a Summer” may have sparked storms in Mary Shelley’s mind. And I talk with UC Davis professor Louis Warren about why he believes an American entertainer was the unlikely model for Count Dracula. Featuring readings by Lily Dorment and John Keating. This episode is a combination of two previous episodes that were broken apart, reassembled and brought back to life. This episode is sponsored by The Perfect Jean and Uncommon Goods To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com/imaginary To get 15% off your first order use the code IMAGINARY15 when you check out at theperfectjean.nyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new baker you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs with flexible coverage options from TV insurance you only pay for what you need TD ready for you You're listening to Imaginary Worlds a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief I'm Eric Milinski

Good afternoon my good fiends and welcome now to the creature double feature This afternoon, weird and wicked strange. When I was a kid, I used to watch the Creature Double Feature on Channel 56, a local station in Boston. Although I can't say I loved watching those movies because they often scared me, but I couldn't look away. The fact that many of them were in black and white made them feel even creepier, like they were lost worlds from long ago. Today's episode is a creature double feature of sorts. I have revised and re-edited two previous episodes about the origins of Frankenstein and Dracula, the novels, not the movies.

This is partially in honor of Halloween, which is my favorite holiday. But also in the next episode, I'll be interviewing Tamara Deverell. She is the production designer on the new Frankenstein film, directed by Guillermo del Toro. And Guillermo del Toro's adaptation draws a lot of inspiration from Mary Shelley's division. In fact, today's episode is all about inspiration, inspiration and a little bit of speculation. So let's get back to where it all began in the imagination of a teenage girl over 200 years ago. To understand Mary Shelley, we need to start with her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. She was a controversial advocate for women's rights who believed that marriage

under English law, was a type of indentured servitude. Mary Wollstonecraft died from complications giving birth to Mary Shelley, who felt haunted by the mother that she never knew. It doesn't seem to me to be a coincidence that the author of Frankenstein would be someone who was longing for her dead mother. Charlotte Gordon wrote a dual biography of both women, mother and daughter. She made her piece on some level with the idea that her mother couldn't come back, but not really.

And I think the driving motivation of her life was keeping her mother alive or keeping her mother's ideas alive. Around the age of 16, Mary fell in love with a 21-year-old, well-to-do poet named Percy Shelley. Percy was already married, so the two of them fled to France, leaving Percy's pregnant wife and two children behind. It was a big scandal. But they were not alone. They actually had a posse.

There was Mary's step-sister, Claire Claremont. Claire had heard that the very famous rock star poet, Lord Byron, was kind of between lovers. He was in London. And she decided, you know, if her sister, Mary, could have a sort of famous entanglement with Percy, a poet, she would try and do her one better and have a love affair with Byron,

who was much more famous than Percy. But... Some of the English get mad at me. when I say this, but Byron's primary interest, we think, was probably men. She says Byron was interested in Percy Shelley, Mary's lover. Meanwhile, Byron brought his personal physician, John Palladoury, who developed a crush on Mary Shelley, but the feelings weren't mutual. And at first they stayed in this posh hotel where all the English stayed on Lake Geneva, but there was so much gossip about them and it was so uncomfortable. No one would speak to them.

So Byron rented a villa called the Via Diadati, which is still standing as privately owned, just up the hill from the lake. I think that all of this also contributed to this incredible, I don't know, charged atmosphere. Yeah, this was going to be a hot and steamy summer by the lake full of drama with these young, sexy renegades. But it didn't turn out that way. it turned out to be very, very different. Gillen da R.C. Wood is the author of Tambora, the eruption that changed the world. The largest volcanic eruption of the last 10,000 years on the planet Earth

occurred six degrees south of the equator in what was then the Dutch East Indies and is now Indonesia, a small island dominated by a large volcano called Tambora. which exploded with extraordinary fury. The volcanic matter in the atmosphere formed a 100-megatone sulfate aerosol layer that then enveloped the entire planet and plunging the world into a three-year period of extreme weather,

in particular a kind of global cooling effect. Europe's experiencing frosts in June and July. Ron Brolio is the director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University. And it's having a real effect on the crops. 1816 was just absolutely devastated, so we had a lot of food shortages. In fact, in Britain, the price of bread rose almost a double. Apocalyptic cults were springing up.

The press called it the year without a summer. Although they didn't know yet, but the effects of the volcano would last for several more years. On a smaller scale, the weather was ruining the summer by the lake for Mary. Mary Shelley and her friends. It rained and rained and rained and rained. And, you know, you really can't keep people like Byron and Shelley cooped up all day long. They get impatient, restless, up to no good. And Charlotte Gordon says they plowed through every book they could.

And finally, in the middle of June. When it was really stormy and they were really bored, Byron had been reading to them from some ghost stories. And he finally said, these ghost stories, just aren't even scary. How about if we all try and write a scary story ourselves? And so everyone separated that night. Here's what happened. Byron tried to write a ghost story and got bored and went back to doing what he did best, which was basically writing about Byron. Shelley started trying to write a ghost story and same thing happened. He got bored and went back to writing

basically about Shelly, but Mary started writing a ghost story, and she did not stop. We witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Dura, and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. as I stood at the door on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about 20 yards from our house

and so soon as the dazzling light vanished the oak had disappeared and nothing remained but a blasted stump when we visited it the next morning we found the tree shattered in a singular manner it was not splintered by the shock but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.

That passage from Frankenstein described a real event in Geneva. And Gillen says you can see the motif of lightning running throughout all of Frankenstein. Which Percy described as a storm-lashed novel. A flash of lightning illuminated the object and discovered its shape plainly to me. It's gigantic stature and the deformity of its acid. more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy demon to whom I had given life. Now, besides the gloomy weather, there were probably other things that inspired Mary Shelley.

There was news at the time about experiments with electricity. And earlier that summer, she and Percy traveled through Germany near a castle called Frankenstein. But when Gillen reads the novel, he sees a reflection of the crisis that was unfolding in Europe in 1816. After that volcanic ash had blacked out the skies and destroyed crops. The numbers of peasants who abandoned their farms and took to the roads were described as armies on the march. I mean, with tens of thousands of people displaced. And seen in that light, if we think, we see it in that light, if we think, You remember the novel, and the monster is, of course, shunned and abandoned and homeless

and turned away from towns and cities and is essentially a kind of refugee that captures. He symbolizes the human crisis that was unfolding before Mary Shelley's very eyes. In Shelley's Frankenstein, the limits of hospitality are tested by the creature. And, of course, the creature first flees into Iceland. He doesn't know what's going on. And then while when he tries to extend himself to community, he shunned. The market towns and cities, which were the centres of power in various countries in Europe, they saw these armies of displaced peasantry as a threat,

in particular because they brought not only demands on food supplies, but they brought disease with them. I am malicious because I am miseries. because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph. Remember that and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me. Shall I respect man when he condemns me?

Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness and instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. but that cannot be. The human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Frankenstein wasn't the only work of literature to emerge from that cabin. Byron wrote his famous poem called Darkness. And Charlotte says the darkness and the writing of these young romantics may have also reflected their sense of political despair.

They felt that the radicalism of the previous generation was kind of being eradicated and that a terrible right-wing backlash was occurring. The novel, Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus, was published in 1818. At first, Mary kept her name off the book. It was anonymous. She finally took credit for it in 1823.

But the reason why she became a household name is because in those days in England, playwrights and, and theater people could take any novel they wanted or any story they wanted and produce it without paying the author anything. And people were enchanted. You know, this was a great story

and they put it on the stage. And that's how the story became so famous. So Mary Shelley never made any money from her novel, really. And on the other hand, became increasingly notorious because she was linked with this shocking story that was up on stage in London. Mary Shelley was able to establish herself, as a writer. She lived long enough to see Frankenstein appreciated as a work of literature,

but she could never know that future generations would credit her for creating one of the first novels in a new literary genre called Science Fiction. October is one of my favorite months. Besides Halloween, there was Comic-Con in New York and fall foliage. This is also the month where I pull out my jeans that I've been worn since the spring, and October is not a good time for bad denim. That's why when there was a fall, chill in the air, the first pair of jeans I brought out were from the perfect gene. With six different fits, from skinny to thick thick,

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Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Over time, Mary Shelley's warnings about scientific hubris continued to feel more and more relevant from atomic power to artificial intelligence. The year without a summer eventually became a footnote in history. Gillen to R.C. Wood wants to bring it back front and center. I feel like the conventional readings of Frankenstein

are somewhat stale and that this, the environmental reading, the ecological breakdown reading, is a new one. And it's really a reading for the 21st century. Now, the year without a summer was very cold, and our climate is warming up. But some scientists think the solution to climate change could be something called cloud seeding, which is to inject particles into the atmosphere, to create rain or force temperatures down in a way that would mimic the year without a summer, at least in certain places, because, you know, it's all under control. In other words, they want to Frankenstein the weather.

I mean, even if there were some kind of international authority vested with the power to make such a decision, the uneven and unpredictable impacts of artificial cooling of the planet would be grotesque and impossible to rain in. And it seems like also, too, just we all know that on a small level, if you look at sort of the atmosphere of Frankenstein and think, this could be happening in your head. You know, it makes it very personal. Absolutely. And this psychological dimension of climate change has been neglected. We haven't reckoned on, I like the phrase you use, the Frankenstein in our heads, the stress of coping. And it will create a kind of, I think, collective nervousness and anxiety that it's impossible

to predict exactly. what they'll be. Will it spur incredible creativity and innovation? And will we adapt well, or will the stresses of climate change bring us undone somehow? Mary Shelley understood adaptation. She took a gloomy summer and turned it into an opportunity to create a literary masterpiece. And after the love of her life, Percy Shelley drowned, she dedicated herself to preserving his legacy and hers. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting, right?

And it's part of her romantic self-fashioneding. What kind of self does she want to create for herself? Ron Borlio says that theme runs throughout all of her work. Other worlds are possible, not simply the world we live in. And as a fiction writer, certainly that's important. But also, interestingly, I think as an ethical person that becomes important. And if we talk about adaptation and sustainability, that's certainly the case. To be able to see or imagine or project out or to model or whatever language you want to use,

to imagine those features. And then I would extend that to say, and to imagine them not only for ourselves, but for those who are radically other than ourselves, for the monsters, for those that can't find refuge. We rest. a dream has power to poison sleep we rise but one wandering thought pollutes the day we feel conceive or reason laugh or weep embrace fond woe or cast our cares away it is the same for be it joy or sorrow the path of its departure still is free man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow nought may not may endure, but mutability. Well, that is it for part one

of our creature double feature. Let's jump ahead. Almost 80 years. We're still in England. It's now the end of the 19th century. And a new type of horror is being unleashed onto the world, or at least the literary world.

This was a Dracula indeed. What was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them? Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race, who in a later age, again and again, brought his forces over the great river into Turkey land, who, when he was beaten back, came again and again? It's a story we all know, or think we know. novelist Abraham Stoker, otherwise known as Bram Stoker, was inspired to write Dracula when he read the tale of Vlad Dracula, a 15th century Romanian warlord. Vlad defended his kingdom against the Turks so fiercely, he earned the nickname Vlad the impaler by impaling his enemies and leaving them on stakes for the world to see. But it turns out the Vlad Dracula connection is a

bit of an urban legend. It's not clear whether Stoker knew about Vlad the impaler or if he just came across the name Dracula in his research. Also, Vlad was a hero to Romanians. They were not happy that he got associated with an undead monster, although it has been good for tourism. But vampire folklore, they're like, oh yeah, that's ours. There are many vampire stories that precede Dracula. Stoker's working in what is a long-established tradition. Louis Warren teaches history at UC Davis in California. And he says what makes Dracula an unusual vampire character for that time is that he comes to London, an epicenter of modern civilization. I mean, prior to that, you see all kinds of vampire stories about women seducing men in remote parts of the countryside and

so forth, and turns out the women are vampires. Vampire mythology, after all, came from Eastern Europe, which is a mostly rural region. And so most of those stories were rural stories. It's not entirely clear what inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. Apparently, he did some research into vampire mythology, but what sparked his interest to begin with, what was driving him? Scholars have been looking for clues. And that's for things get pretty interesting. For most of his career, Bram Stoker was not known as a writer. He was a theatrical manager for a very famous Shakespearean actor named Henry Irving.

Certainly, the relationship of manager to star, that relationship we know so well, that kind of fraught relationship is something that Stoker is living in the 1880s and And it's awful for him at times. It's just terrible. But he stuck with it. Stoker came to depend completely on Irving for his employment and his well-being and his family's well-being. And remember, Stoker has his own cultural aspirations outside of his relationship with Irving. He wants to be famous as a writer of fiction.

When Stoker wrote Dracula, he wrote it intending. for it to become a play, in which Irving would star. Irving read the novel and dismissed it with one word, dreadful. It would have nothing to do with it. So was Henry Irving the real Dracula? He had the flamboyance. He could draw people into his orbit and make them do his bidding. They say you should write what you know.

And Stoker knew Irving all too well. Irving's ability to manipulate. people to come to him and to give him what he wanted always right and even i think stoker must have been marveling in some level at his own complicity in this that he continued to work for a man who was in many ways insufferable but louis warren came up with another theory and once i heard it i just couldn't stop thinking about it he thinks the real inspiration for Dracula may have been an entertainer that was even more famous than Henry Irving, William F. Cody, known to the world as Buffalo Bill. Louis came up with this theory

when he was doing research on Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and the reception that it got in England. And then he decided to read Dracula. If you read the novel Dracula, there's this curious thing where one of the major characters is from Texas, and he's kind of a cowper. boy figure. He speaks with a kind of, with at least Bram Stoker's attempt at a Western vernacular. He is a hunter and a fighter when the chase is on and they hunt down Dracula. He's the one who dispenses with Dracula's Romani bodyguards. And when Dracula dies in the novel, it's not with a wooden stake in his heart, but with a bowie knife, which is put there by this Western guy, this guy named Quincy Morris.

And that was really weird. I thought, what is a Westerner doing in this novel? Here we were interrupted in a very startling way. Outside the house came the sound of a pistol shot. The glass of the window was shattered with a bullet, which ricocheting from the top of the embrasure struck the far wall of the room. Lord Godalming flew over to the window and threw up the sash.

As he did so, we heard Mr. Morris' voice without. Sorry, I fear I've alarmed you. It was an idiotic thing of me to do, and I ask your pardon, Mrs. Harker, most sincerely. I fear I must have frightened you terribly. But the fact is that whilst the professor was talking, there came a big bat and sat on the windowsill. I've got such a horror of the damned brutes from recent. events that I cannot stand them. And I went out to have a shot, as I've been doing of late of evenings, whenever I've seen one. Did you hit it? asked Dr. Van Helsing. I don't know.

I fancy not, for it flew away into the wood. Louis discovered two other Buffalo Bill type characters in Bram Stoker's fiction before Dracula came out. So he started to wonder, was Is Bram Stoker at the Wild West Show when it played in London? Turns out his connection to Buffalo Bill goes much deeper than that. It all started in 1886. According to Louis Warren, Bram Stoker was in New York because his boss, the famous Shakespearean actor Henry Irving, was performing there. and they went to see the Wild West show, which was playing in New York. Originally, the Wild West show was just Bill Cody on stage telling stories about working as a buffalo hunter and as a scout for the army.

But it evolved to the point where Cody had this huge troop that would reenact entire battles from the frontier, like Custer's Last Stand. Native Americans signed up to be in the Wild West show because they got off the reservation, they got to see the rest of the country, and send money back home. Even though the context was humiliating. I mean, they were often reenacting their own defeat in front of white audiences. Henry Irving is totally bowled over by the Wild West show. And he proposes that they bring the whole thing to London.

Cody loves this idea. What this does for Cody is allow him to get a lot of what I would call middle class respectability. There were real concerns. at the time, that these were low-class poor people who were going to be entertaining Americans with shows of gunplay and violence. It could be a real problem to attract the middle classes, who really had the most money at the time, to attract them to your show. And Cody had learned in his theatrical career that the way to do that was to get middle-class women to come to your show.

And they'll say to each other, Queen Victoria attended it and she loved it. Yes, it was, that was a huge plus. That was probably the biggest endorsement that Cody ever got. And in many ways, it was, you might say it was the only one he ever really needed. The Wild West show was a sensation in the UK. The gossip around Cody sparked a media circus that rivaled the show itself. And as Irving's right-hand man, Bram Stoker was with them every step of the way. They take Cody around to the various gentlemen's clubs and theatrical associations.

They're at all of these fancy dinners together. And at one point, Cody goes on a coaching drive, and they drive in an open carriage with Henry Irving through Oatlands Park in London, and Bram Stoker is with them. And Stoker, many years later, would recall that coaching trip, he said, as they went through this park and a carriage, he said that that was the season that Buffalo Bills struck London like a planet. Louis says in his research he found a cartoon from that time, which made fun of Irving for being smitten with this American rube. Stoker may have felt the same way. Well, we all know Dracula's irresistible. Women cannot resist his gaze. And Cody, when he arrived in England, was hailed as an extraordinarily handsome man.

One eyewitness said that bouquets of flowers arrived at his apartment hourly, sent by English women to him. What struck some commentators in the popular media. was how unsavory this was, that he is known for his violence, and he shows up over here with a big entertainment, and suddenly English women are throwing themselves at him. I don't know if there'd be a Mrs. Buffalo Bill. If there is, she must at this moment be tearing her own or more likely her husband's lovely black hair out by the yard with jealousy.

One female professor of the blood royal, three duchesses, seven countesses in their own right, and eight six dittos with no rights accepting wrongs, have each and every de bretted one of them offered up their richly jeweled hands and highly chased hearts to beauteous Buffalo Bill. There actually was a Mrs. Buffalo Bill back home, tearing her hair out.

But that's a whole other story. Louis wondered, what made Buffalo Bill so polarizing to the British public? What made him so alluring and repulsive at the same time? While he was immersing himself in the media of Victorian England in Gilded Age America, he came to a realization. England and America in this period claimed kinship. There was a great deal of fascination with what was called the Anglo-Saxondom.

But it has a kind of counterpoint in this idea. that emigrating to a different country and encountering a different environment and conquering that environment turns you into something else. Endless warfare on a savage frontier with pagan peoples ultimately can turn

the Anglo-Saxons or whoever else into a bloodthirsty menace in their own right. Wars that don't end make for bloodthirsty people. I think that Stoker plays this out, this fantasy out, on the dark side in the novel Dracula. One of the things about Dracula himself that is often missed in the kind of in the films

that we see of Dracula is that he comes from a frontier. And it's called a frontier, the frontier of Turkey Land, where he's been fighting the Turks. and his story when he recounts it near the beginning of that novel is that he fought the Turks decade after decade and we learn in the course of the novel

that he made a pact with the devil to fight the Turks and to be able to beat the Turks he received this gift of being undead if it's not so much a gift it's a curse but it's his need to stay eternally awake on that frontier to push the Turks back and to constantly fight these battles

that makes him that kind of nightmare figure what would happen to a frontier hero if he had to keep fighting forever when would he be seduced and to go over to the dark side on the other side of the line which is what has essentially happened to Dracula he's not become the Turk He's not become Muslim. What he's become is a monster that must feed his own appetite for blood endlessly.

And when the Turk is held at bay, that monster will consume the people that it purported to defend. I saw the count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well. As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph. But on the instant came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart it was like a miracle but before our very eyes and almost in the drawing of a breath

the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment a final dissolution there was in the face a look of peace such as I never could have imagined might have rested there Mr. Morris, who had sunk to the ground, leaned on his elbow, holding his hand pressed to his side. The blood still gushed through his fingers. In the novel, it's actually Quincy Morris's death that ends the action. He struggles with Dracula and kills him, drives his bowie knife through his heart,

but in the process has killed himself, and he's the last one to die. Jonathan knelt behind him And the wounded man laid back his head on his shoulder With a sigh he took with a feeble effort My hand in that of his own which was unstained He must have seen the anguish of my heart in my face For he smiled at me and said I'm only too happy to have been of service

Oh God He cried suddenly struggling to a sitting posture and pointing to me. It was worth for this to die. Look, look! The sun was now right down upon the mountain top, and the red gleams fell upon my face, so that it was bathed in rosy light.

With one impulse the men sank on their knees, and a deep and earnest, amen, broke from all as their eyes followed the pointing of his finger. The dying man spoke. Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain. See, the snow is not more stainless than her forehead. The curse has passed away. It's a way, I think, that Stoker says, stages a meeting between the hero of the first frontier,

now become this dark, monstrous anti-hero figure of Dracula. and the hero of the last frontier, Quincy Morris, and the two collide and that energy, that war, that endless war that they carry on in that spirit that they can't let go. They can never stop fighting, right? They cancel each other out. And this leaves the Englishmen, the civilized Englishmen and the Dutch professor, and the woman Mina Harker, who is the woman they're saving from becoming a vampire, leaves them to all go back to England together and to be civilized and genteel. But these two frontier figures are gone. And it's almost as if Stoker is saying, you know, we're better off without that kind of problem. Bram Stoker's boss, Henry Irving,

died in 1905. Stoker was still working for him at the time. Then Stoker himself died seven years later. He didn't live to see Dracula become a world-famous icon, but his widow, Florence Balcom, did. She filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement against the German filmmakers who created Nospheratu, and she helped stage a successful play of Dracula not long before the Hollywood version came out. In many ways, the whole story of Dracula

and its production afterwards is the production of the novel and of the character. it comes a sort of story of a figure who's endlessly adaptable and uncontainable, even by the artist that created him. Great works of pop culture are endlessly adaptable. They have something to say to every generation, especially if there's an element of horror in them. But those wars without end, they also keep adapting to the present moment.

And if we can't find a hero to protect us, it seems like we'll always settle for a monster in the end well that's it for our creature double feature stay tuned for candlepin bowling and if you're from the Boston area let me know if you got that joke special thanks to Louis Warren Charlotte Gordon Ron Brolio Jillin Darcy Wood and John Keating and Lily Dormant who did the readings

my assistant producer is Stephanie Billman We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with the hosts of one of my favorite podcasts that aged well. The premise is simple. Each episode, The Hosts, Erica and Paul, recap an older movie and talk about what holds up and what doesn't. Sometimes the movies that really don't age well are better. They're a time capsule, and you can just take them for what, at face value, you don't get

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