The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 9: Hallowe'en Special 2025 - Frankenstein

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, have emerged from Discworld and are now exploring the worlds of speculative fiction. This week, we go classic with our Hallowe’en Special: Frankenstein.Creation! Conniptions! Metaphorical albatrosses! Find us on the internet:BlueSky: @makeyefretpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretDiscord: https://discord.gg/29wMyuDHGP Want to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on BlueSky @2hatsjo and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:The Roottrees are Dead Rethinking Inspirations for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by Paweł Kaptur Frankenstein complex - Wikipedia  Frankenstein (Universal film series) - Wikipedia The Hammer Story: Revised and Expanded Edition - Titan Books Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, by Lord Byron Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com 

Victor Frankenstein is a dumb bitch. Believe me, that rant is coming. I've been playing a game called The Root Trees are Dead. Yes, is that the one you sent me? It is, yeah. That turned out when I finished that, it unlocked a bonus game. So I've been playing that as well. It's very, very good.

It's a genealogy game, but it's set in the 90s. You get to use very early internet, and like, it's a nice mix of low tech and digital age and scandal. and dynasties and yeah yeah very puzzly I'm going to have to sacrifice my usual PlayStation time and let my partner have the telly for a bit soon so I'm eyeing up some PC games to keep me entertained while he plays Metroid Prime 4

I don't know why I say the name of any video game and it sounds like I really disapprove of it it's like you're like punk music yeah yeah punk music Horizon Zero Dawn Horizon Zero Dawn Why is it zero and Lord? What are you doing there? No, apart from that, it's been largely work still.

Yay! How about you? Yeah, my leg gave up for a bit, and I got very emotional over marzipan this week. Tell me about the marzipan, but in a spooky voice. Happy Halloween. Dark and stormy. Yeah, happy Halloween listeners. It was a dark and stormy night.

Paul Hollywood declared a bloody framboisier for the technical challenge in the bake-off semi-final. It's a fancy French cake. Yes, raspberry. Raspberry cake. And it was fine. It was fine. It was a ridiculous challenge because part of the challenge involved doing a fancy little sugar dome thing and none of the bakers managed it. I knew I wasn't going to. I knew the sugar dome wasn't going to work. I was going to try it. But I thought marzipan, I can make marzipan. Chuck a couple of ingredients in the mixer. It'll be fine. And I made it really early in the challenger. I had loads of time to fix it if it went wrong. And it went wrong. And it was too wet. And I thought, that'll be fine. That's a problem for future me. Just going to wrap it up, stick it in the fridge. I left it a problem for future me. future me did not like past me oh we could have seen this coming

it's stuck to everything except um there go creepy little dog in the in the window she's run away sorry I'd probably go deal with that I didn't know she's still open that door

well uh should we um let's make a podcast oh yeah let's make a podcast oh yeah let's make a podcast Hello and welcome to The True Shall Make You Threat, a podcast in which we were reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and now we're wandering around the corridors of speculative fiction. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. And this is our first edition of TTSMYF does the classics.

We're talking Frankenstein. And it's Halloween, so it's maybe the true shall make you fret. Because we've already got kind of a spooky name there. yeah do you remember when everyone did that with their Twitter names I don't think I ever did it because I couldn't think of a good one yeah I know me neither

I did for like Christmas one year changed two hats Joe to two hats Joe ho ho but then I realised it's that like I was calling myself a ho but yeah I don't really know how you spookify Joanna or Francine no answers on a spooky postcard please listeners so note on spoilers before we crack on

We're not going to spoil any major disc world stuff, although I will be referencing a couple of discord books and certain characters. Obviously, heavy spoilers for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Almost immediately. Yeah, and for a bunch of movies based on that book as well, because I'm going to talk about those later. But yes, if you've not read Frankenstein, go read that before you listen to this.

Or if you don't care. Yeah. You just listen to this and you'll get a basic idea. Yeah, that's true. very quick bit of follow-up if you listened to our recent episode where we reviewed The Everlasting Way Alex E. Harrow. Epistolary novel is what we were thinking of.

Epistolary. Epistolary. Yeah, I haven't tried to say that out loud before, actually. Epistolary novel. Just baking it entirely off the word epistle. Yeah, that's fair, actually. That's probably right. Anyway, that's what that was.

That's what we couldn't think of. Books made up of diary entries and letters and that sort of thing. Thank you, Sonder Vogel. Yeah, who we predicted would probably be one of the first people to answer that question in the Discord. Join our Discord, folks. It's a lot of people being nerds about language and things. It's so much smart than us. Okay, so Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, that's what we're talking about today. I have a follow-up.

Oh, I have a follow-up. It's quite a late follow-up, but you remember a very long time ago we were talking about the best food in fiction. Yes. I would like to make a late entry. the larders full of food that fantastic Mr. Fox finds having tunneled into the farmer's properties. I don't know why that popped into my head earlier. Actually, I do. It's because whenever I cook sausage and chips and beans, I get the rhyme, Boris and Bunsen Bean in my head. Right.

That makes sense. Amazing. So that's what happened there. The sider and the turkeys or the geese or whatever it was. Yeah, no, you are very right. That is one of the best food descriptions and fiction. Anyway, back into this year. back into this year not a lot of food descriptions in frankenstein i'm going to say i'll introduce

us to the history of the book yes tell us how it became to be how it came to be i think a lot of people kind of know this story already which is mary shelley wonderful woman that she was a daughter of mary waltzencraft and william godwin to philosophers um mary walsoncraft very famous feminist writer uh in her late teens was hanging out at the villa diodarty with a bunch of people there was challenged right, a scary book, and she won. And that book became Frankenstein. That's in Geneva, importantly. Yes, very importantly.

She was hanging around in Europe at the time. So in attendance at the Villa DiDiardati in 1816, we have Lord George Gordon Byron, who was escaping the scandalous rumours of an incestuous affair with his half-sister. Gordon Byron! If you want more depth on what was going on at the Villa Diadarthea, it. I did a rabbit hole on this. So if you want to hop onto our Patreon, you can hear more

about it. So we've got Byron. We got John Polidori, Byron's physician, who also eventually was Christina Rosetti's uncle. We have Claire Claremont, so good, they named her twice. She was Mary Shelley's step-sister and Byron's kind of obsessive ex. We have Percy Shelley, a romantic poet who fell in love with his mental William Godwin's teenage daughter, just as his first marriage was going tits up. And Mary Shelley said teenage daughter, who invented an entire genre at the Villar DiDiardati when she was just 18 years old. Percy Shelley's first wife drowned herself in a link. Yes, she did. And at this point, Mary and first, we're doing a lot of reading about it to remind myself of the whole horrible bunch of people today. It is a whole horrible, I mean, fascinating,

but oh my God. It is extensive. So yes, at this point, Percy and Mary had kind of gone off to Europe together and would eventually get married in Europe, I think, actually later this year. But we're not quite married at this point because Percy's, Shelley's first wife hadn't drowned herself on a lake yet. Lovely bit of the story. More importantly, this was the year without a summer. I'm not going to lie, I've borrowed a little bit straight from a rabbit hole I did here. In 1816, catastrophe struck the world, the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in what's now known as Indonesia caused a volcanic winter that would lower 1816s temperatures worldwide. Europe suffered food shortages exacerbated by the recent Napoleonic wars. Harvest failed,

food riots ran ripent and typhus epidemics plagued the continent for years after. In this cold, miserable year with no summer, our incestuous inmates gathered at the Villa Di Adati. They read fantastical stories to while away the freezing wet hours, and there was a challenge to write a terrifying story. from this challenge in John Polidori would come the vampire which I've spoken about at length in our episodes on Carpe Joculum from Byron would come the third canto of Charles Harold's pilgrimage the continuation of his Byronic hero from Percy Shelley came haunting visions of eyeball nipples

again see our Carpege Oculum episodes for more context because I'm not going into all of that here and from Mary Shelley We don't have the time to talk about the eyeball nipples right now from Mary Shelley came Frankenstein on modern Prometheus because she casually invented a whole genre to get away from the irritating men she was with. Her book was published anonymously in 1818. And then later Mary Shelley revised the text for an 1831 edition that was published under her name and that's the version we're talking about. That's the version that's commonly around now

and that we're familiar with. Yes. In her introduction to that book, she does talk a lot about that summer in the filler. And obviously it's not quite to get away from the annoying boys that she did the whole genre. She talked about kind of coming down each morning and like, no, I haven't thought of one yet. No, I haven't thought of a story yet. Like, just very frustrated about the whole thing. But I quite like the way she talked about Polidori's story. He said, poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole. What to see? I forget. Something very shocking. and wrong, of course.

Poor Polidori. Also, a small, this world, not intervention, what do I mean, tangent, the Hindus, she says in the introduction, give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Incredible. Invention, it must be humbly, admitted does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos, et cetera, et cetera. Yes.

And that's one of the bigger things we'll go into. So have you read Frankenstein before we were doing it for this? Yes, but a very long time ago, like teenager at best. Fair enough. How about you? I have read it multiple times. It's not quite a read every year, but it's definitely like a read every few years book for me. It is a favourite as far as classics go.

I forgot quite how old-fashioned it reads in comparison to say Dracula. Yeah, I think Dracula is really, it's in the same century but it's at the other end of the century like it's almost 20th century it's quite a modern novel. A big shift in tone during that time yeah and this is as well as being you know 1816 this is also someone who is hanging around with a bunch of romantics yeah yeah and that's going to have an effect on the writing you'd think it you'd think it might and it does yeah and the by the way one of the reviews I usually have a look at reviews of whatever books

we've been looking at. Obviously, because she was a woman. Yes. She did get some specific types of reviews at the time and, to be honest, in the century following. Was it very don't get hysterical love? A little bit. My favourite slash least favourite was the British critic who had taxed the novels flaws as the fault of the author. The writer of it is, we understand, a female. This is an aggravation of that, which is the prevailing fault of the novel. But if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should, and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment. Incredible. You think Fratchett's worst ones were bad. That's very get-back in the kitchen, isn't it? A little bit, yeah. And I think this must have been when she was still

anonymous, because otherwise there would have been a whole bit slagging her off of being who she was, I expect. Yeah, especially considering Mary Walson Craft's daughter and all of that jazz. Dirty, feminist coming in and putting ideas about the duty of creation into all of our heads. Right. So, you have read it before a lot. A lot. Obviously, because you've read it a lot, I'm going to say it's a favourite of wheels, is it?

It's a massive favourite. It also started because a friend and I were kind of, co-working on two separate novels but together because they were sort of, yeah, there was like steampunk novels but set in the same timeline. So hers was set after mine and we were, Mary Shelley was in mine. It was a whole thing involving Mary Shelley fighting off for the apocalypse. Bad me, I'd forgotten that. Have you finished out yet?

God no. None of it's even typed up. It all lives in notebooks. It's like handwritten. Right. I tell you right now, there's a lot of Mary Shelley stuff that was in notebooks and handwritten and that got lost. So can you put them safe?

I mean, they are... I'd go gallivanting around Europe and leave them in the safekeeping of a man. I wasn't going to go gallivanting around Europe and obviously I wouldn't leave them in the... Okay. Yeah, that's fair. At some point, I might write it. Okay. But yeah, that was Mary Shelley fighting off a zombie apocalypse.

So obviously that was the first time I read Frankenstein is when her and I started having that idea. And I went, oh, this is a completely different book to what I thought it was. That was the first time you'd read it? Yeah, I mean, this was such a long time ago we started making those plans. that would have been not quite 10 years ago, but not far off. Oh, no, I know, I just mean it's, I know you and I both read a lot of the classics when we were insufferable teenagers. Yeah, I think I lent more Russian in the classics reading when I was an insuffer

teenager. I never got to. I also had that weird anti-Dickens phase. Yeah, that was a weird anti-Dickens phase. I've always loved Dickens. Yeah, I blame my GCSE drama teacher for that entirely. Can't be helped. Can't be helped if you've got about.

teacher. But yeah, what about you? It was your kind of perception of the book going in, especially this time if you've not read it since you were a teenager? Yeah, I mean, I remembered liking it a lot. And I was, yeah, I certainly wasn't dreading going back to it because it was an old one or anything like that. I know it's a genre sparking novel. And I know Mary Shelley's very interesting. And yeah, it's... There's a lot more kind of overwrought emotion in it than I remember, and I'm putting that down to the fact I'm no longer a teenager. Yeah, that's fair.

That's just kind of like a fish doesn't have a word for water type thing when you're 15, isn't it? Yeah, that amount of emotion just feels like a very normal thing. Yeah, this is normal and rational. This is just how people think, isn't it? Yeah. Whoa, wo is me. Like for good reason, but he starts early.

Oh, he really does. It doesn't leave himself a lot of room to go to, like, escalate the grief and the connections. No, he starts at a very high level and then pretty much just stays at that level. Ironically, considering how much of this book takes place in mountains, there's not a lot of feats and valleys. My grief was as level as the landscape was not. Right, sorry. Framing device. It's got a framing device.

So one of these things that roots this quite firmly in the 18th to 19th century for me is the almost fated framing device. There was no way this was going to be introduced as anything other than someone told me this story. However, I like that it's four layers deep at one point. So we have the nice chap at the beginning who's writing to his darling sister. and quite amusingly old-fashioned English. We have then, of course, Victor Frankenstein, who starts to tell his story. Within that story, we have the monster, the creation. What are we going to call him?

I think creation. Okay, we have the creation who starts to tell his story. And within that, there is a fourth story about Felix's. Felix and Agatha. Yeah. Yeah. Safely. Safely.

Yeah. Terrible stuff. Brilliant stuff. But at one point I did just go, hang on, one, two, three. Well enough done that I was at no point confused. No, I wasn't confused and I knew where we were and who was telling what story. But I did kind of, because you're so in the story, the framing device doesn't come up partway through the book. There's a couple of moments where Victor very clearly is addressing the person he's telling the story to, but mostly it's just not there.

and the end of the book is very abrupt and so you suddenly come out and it's Robert writing his letter again and I sort of read that and went fuck me how long was this fucking letter I mean I know how long it was over 200 pages that is a hefty messenger pigeon just because I don't know if we're going to be able to revisit Robert Walton

I would like to read out a couple of his absurd wonderful bits of phrasing the simple farewell my dear excellent Margaret which is how I will be ending my letters from now on. Excellent. And also, yet some feelings unallied to the bross of human nature, beat even in those rugged bosoms.

I love Robert Walton. Yeah, he's right. He's very sweet. I also want to quickly point out, this is not in a, well, it's got an anachronism, so it's a bad book thing. But Robert Walton, and then within the book, Frankenstein story as well,

there are multiple references to the rhyme of the ancient mariner by Sam Taylor Coleridge. Which was published in 1798. this book, arguably, we don't know exactly when this book is set. We just know it's the 1700s. Well, yeah, 17 something. So either all of it happens within two years, which it doesn't. Yeah. It doesn't work. It isn't anachronism. But it works thematically. You can't have a guy who's going off to sea for that long and not reference the rhyme of the ancient mariner, especially considering it was like still in the public consciousness in a very intense way at that time. Isn't it interesting to think it's modern, modernish pop culture at the time this is being

written? Yeah, that was like a cultural reference, a touchstone that anyone reading this would immediately get. I mean, arguably, a lot of people will get. But like in a different way, it's in a different way. It's like if one of us was, I don't want to say Taylor Swift. Take it off by Taylor Swift. I was going to go Taylor Swift as well. I'm not comparing Taylor Swift to Sam Taylor Coleridge. We're not doing the dance. I don't know it. I've got to learn. I've had to learn quite a bit of it because one of my colleagues is definitely going to make you do a video. So I got ahead of myself. I love that there is no one in my life that makes me do this. However, she's seven months pregnant, so I think I might get away with doing the sitting

down version. Excellent. No, I'm going to come back to Robert Wilson a couple of times. All right, good. Okay, good. I'm glad. I just wanted to make sure we're here. Speaking of, shall I actually summarize what happens in this? Oh, yeah, that's part of it. Sorry, I got ahead of myself in a framing device kind of way, let's say. Yeah, no, we're saying up for the end. Oh, so I met a co-host. I met a co-host one Halloween night, a dreary nearly October, nearly, sorry, a dreary, nearly night of November. And she spake thus. And she spake thus. I will say with the summary, I was just going to do a ham, sorry. That's all right, that's all right. I was just going to do a few bullet points,

But then, just as I finished reading this yesterday, or finish like my note-taking read, I was trying to explain to my partner how abruptly this ends and ended up rapidly summarising it to him, and I'm just going to summarize it to you in exactly the same style. Okay, cool. So there's this guy, right, Robert Walton, and he's decided to go on an expedition to the North Pole. And while he's off on this ship, they spot a sled in the distance and go, ooh, and then a bloke turns up floating on a bit of ice. And obviously they rescue him. And Robert immediately is like, well, I'm in love with this man, and he's my new best friend.

because Robert really wants a best friend, bless him. So sweet. He's so sweet. Anyway, this new best friend is like, well, before you decide you want to be best mates with me, let me tell you my entire life story. And he goes right back to before his own birth. I'm not going to go into like the relationship between his parents because that's a thing.

But he has really idyllic childhood. Then his sister wife gets adopted. Well, it's his sister, but also fiancé slash cousin. He meets his bestie, Henry Clevel, gets. really into natural philosophy, as one does, goes off to school, tries to create life, makes life, but then goes, oh, God, no, and just runs away from it. Me sewing. Me reaping.

Did not like that. Does not do anything about it. Just sort of. Oh my God, right? Right. Just has a fever for two months. Then, finds out his little brother's been murdered, goes off home, finds out another ward, but one he's not engaged to, is accused of the murder.

he's obviously sure that it's actually this thing he created that did it because he spotted him in the distance. Yeah, because he spotted him in the distance that one time. He can't prove it in any way, shape or form, so this girl goes down for murder and gets hanged. So he goes off and wanders around some mountains because he's depressed again

and bumps into the thing he created. So then we get a story and a story and we find out that this thing had to go and learn things like fire and shelter and how to speak by himself, which he did by spying on a family. He learns their whole story, which I won't get into because it's long and very dramatic. It involves the Turkish prisons.

No way, the French prisons. French prisons, but there's definitely some Turks involved. He learns himself. Anyway, he's reviled, miserable. They don't want to be mates with him. No one wants to be mates with him. He decides to try and track down his creator ends up in Geneva. It turns out he did kill the small child and frame the other girl for murder.

Anyway, he explains to his creator. He wants a girlfriend because he's obviously very sad and quite lonely. Maleolowness epidemic. Malellowness epidemic. It's a real problem. Sorry, that's not self-inflicted. This is not self-inflicted. This is Victor's fault.

So Victor is like, right, fine. I'll go to remote Scotland. I'll make you a girlfriend. He makes it. And this time before bringing life to it, he goes, oh, God, no. He destroys it. I remember this. Creation not is not happy about this.

Anyway, then Victor accidentally sails to Ireland, as you do. His best mate Henry gets murdered by the thing. Eventually he goes home, marries his sister-wife. She gets murdered. Immediately. His dad's depressed and dies. So then a chase starts. And he starts following the monster.

which eventually leads to him being on the ice and get him pulled up by this boat. So now he's finished his story to his best, he's got nothing else to do. He's apparently kind of given up on the monster and just dies. Just die. Which where the monster turns up and is like, well, that's really depressing. I'm going to go kill myself on an ice floe. See ya. And Robert Waldron goes home.

Recurring theme of getting very upset when you get exactly what you wanted in this book. Yeah. Can I say every time we mention Justine, I'm just going to get annoyed again. because of how Victor acted as he left her. Yeah. Which was, I rushed out to the court in agony. The tortures would be accused did not equal mine. She was sustained by innocence,

but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom and would not forego their hold. Throughout, he's like, oh, this person's about to be hanged even though she's innocent. I feel worse, though. Yeah. But, like, less than a chapter later, Victor says, I was guiltless. Yeah. Which, no, my dude, you were fucking not. You were very guilty.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Through negligence, if nothing else. Very much so. You made a mistake to start with, but after that, it became negligence. Yeah. I am not sympathetic to Victor Frankenstein. Just spoilers for the rest of the episode. I'm a little sympathetic at the start.

I'm, like, very briefly. It does not last long. Have you got a favourite quote? Yeah, this is when he is in the middle of his mania, kind of, you know, it's the first one. The mania, not the depression, like going through the working 24 hours a day to find out about natural philosophy enough to build the person. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted. I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life. I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.

Ooh, the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. That's the nicest way I've ever heard somebody talk about a body decomposing. Yeah, that is a lovely description of decomposition. How about you? Is yours a bit less grim? Kind of, this is. I'm likely in this book. I'm the short one, but this is from the creature during his plea for a wife. remember that I am thy creature

I ought to be thy Adam but I am rather the fallen angel whom thou drive us from joy for no misdeed because it very much thematically goes into a lot of interesting stuff I really felt like I should have read Paradise Lost before I started

I always feel like I should have read Paradise Lost and yet 10,000 lines It's really big written in the 1600s Yeah Is it really have you read the whole thing No I've read bits of it when I was a teenager because obviously I had a lot of fascination with religious literature

I always end up reading sections of it when it's referenced somewhere else at this point I may as well have just read the whole thing but I haven't so yeah it's possible you have read all of Paradise Lost you have just not read all of Paradise Lost in order yeah there must be huge bits in it that never get referenced is the problem I have read the rhyme of the ancient Mariners that's all right

I forgot how long the rhyme of the ancient Mariner was and I was checking when it was published and then obviously I clicked on it and started reading it and then you know you know when you notice how small like the scrolly thing is at the side of the screen I was like oh yeah no this is a master poem I'm not sitting and reading all of the rhyme of the ancient mariner right now no you have read it before though oh yeah no I have obviously I know yeah let's talk about the big thematic stuff which uh technically where this is not an episode on the rhyme of the ancient mariner well well no technically technically

what would all of the enactment? Even though as far as Mary was concerned, it may as well have been a book about the flame of the ancient mariner. Despite the fact that it wouldn't have been published when this book was set. God, Mary. It's fine.

It's fine. Nature versus nature and the duty to one's creations. This is a big thing. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say what the big theme is, but you can make a good argument for this being it. It's juicy to one's creation, and then it's hubris in the pursuit of knowledge.

I think those are the two. yeah those are the two things yeah there we go done but yeah i mean just a it is such a sad book yeah for that reason um and it's not a sad book because of the constant rambling about victor's grief um but i i will say i'm not sure it's going to make one of my absolute favorite books because of the just repetition of this man's fucking paroxysms of unhappiness um However, to be fair. It was reading it all in one sitting might have been a mistake. Dramatically taking to one's bed for two months every time something bad happens.

Like, if you could. If I could, I would. I would try then to refrain from recounting it in detail to a new friend. Yeah. I would try and skip over the two months of my, you know, grief-soaked bed. Yeah, I would sort of just leave that as like, and then I had a lie down. anyway. For two months again.

Yes. My usual two months lie down after this grief. Anyway, sorry. Nature versus nurture. Yes. Interesting. We kind of get the,

I'm going to say the three, because we do start with Robert Walton, who talks quite a lot about his own upbringing in a way that makes me think, you know, it's meant to be relevant as a comparison. And that he was allowed to run pretty wild, but then became very self-educated. Yeah, and he has a chip on his shoulder about it.

He is frustrated that he did not get, any more education than he could seek out from himself. But I think it did him well. Yeah, no, I do. I think that's maybe one of the things that made him slightly less mad and able to say, oh, actually, yeah, I wish to turn back when it ruled. But anyway, more importantly, obviously, is Victor and his creation. And so Victor has this gorgeous upbringing, you know, with both of his parents alive.

You know, let's not worry too much about the age gap there. We'll skim over that lightly for now. It's very much a thing. It was very much a thing. Yeah. It's idyllic. He is loved. Yes, he's so loved.

And he loves the people. He's with and he learns what he wants to learn. And yeah, he goes into great detail about what a lovely upbringing he has. And then he very callously and unthinkingly denies that to the person. he makes, denies any part of it, denies even recognition. Yeah, and I think this is the interesting question of the book. It's what does Victor owe to this creature? And so often, and again, I know with, and I'm looking at this slightly with modern context,

you have a protagonist who does shitty things. There is a bad child to blame it on. Yeah. Like, I'm rewatching by Jack Horsman at the moment because it's not a depression. I know, but I just fall into it every now and then. I know. I've not been able to watch it all the way through since the first time. It's a fantastic show. Good God. But yeah, and so much of that comes back to, you know, sin we get sin, bad childhood, bad childhood. But Victor has this idyllic example. And does that make a difference in what he does owe to what he has created?

I think it probably does a bit, yeah. I mean, I try not to, when it comes, it's hard, isn't it, to draw the line. but I've always found it very difficult to continue excusing the sins of the child once they have their own child. And that's probably not fair of me. And when you grow up, you know, you see the sins of your parents a bit differently when you see them just as people. But in this case, Victor, okay, fine, had the original fright ran away. You can excuse that. But then took absolutely no interest in what had happened next, despite the fact that this person he had created had obviously not immediately died and wandered off. Yes. It's conscious and existing in some way.

And then just the sadness, the, it's just awful reading the bit where he's on his own in the woods and then watching the family he can't be a part of. To me, by far the most emotional part of this book was that part. Like, I don't really give a shit what happened to the rest of them in comparison. And obviously, you don't keep liking the creation for very long. I don't know, but if I, I mean, the child murder, but well, yeah, no, of the child murder and it's obviously it's not in any way black and white, it's all

very grey areas, but if I had to pick aside at literally any point in the book, I'm pretty much always on the creation side. Yeah, yeah. Like, Victor did this. I thought it was really interesting before the creation comes to life. Victor thinks so much of what

he is doing. Yeah. There's this great line in chapter four, a new species would bless me as its creator and source, many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. And no father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Yeah. You have to wonder maybe whether some of what he's experiencing is some kind of break after because his mother dies very soon before he leaves.

Yes. But even say, yeah. I watched very interesting, obviously TikTok spying on me quite appallingly. I watched a very interesting short video, somebody talking about how, I expect we'll talk about this much later in the episode, but how the fact that Victor Frankenstein is quite often depicted as a mad old professor in later works, does his character a disservice in interestingness? Because it's more interesting for this to be a privileged, happy boy. Yeah.

who's just overtaken with I'm so smart. And it's so focused on whether or not he could, he didn't think about whether or not he should, that whole aspect of it. It's more compelling with that being a young boy, a young student. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, you get the feeling from a few different descriptions of him, like how he didn't immediately get a natural science lecture

and so he hated it for ages afterwards. Yeah. But he's that particular kind of smart-ass that Mary Shelley must have met a lot of probably married one. And if you think about Percy Shelley was sort of mentor by William Godwin, the sort of people that her father was surrounding himself with, especially. I'm assuming she was meeting a few of these types. Oh, yeah. When the tour around Europe was the thing rather than the gap you are in India. But I think something that's interesting, I'll talk more later about adaptations of Frankenstein.

but one of the motivations that gets ascribed to Frankenstein a lot of the more serious versions of adaptations is trying to defeat death in some way, normally inspired by something like death of his mother or the death of a close loved one. Yeah. And I feel like that's really underlying here. It's not really a surface level thing at all.

It is potentially a motivation, but he's never really stated outright that he wants to defeat death. It is about creating something new. It is about this new creation that he wants to, in theory, create like a super race and then be responsible for it. Yeah. Or get credit at least, yeah.

But, oh, yeah. The intro to the 1831 edition that Mary wrote, I thought, kind of summed up the horror quite well, the horror that he would have felt, which was, frightful must it be, or supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist.

He would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. That's her kind of describing the dream she'd had that led to the thing. But yeah, I suppose the underlying thing is him not thinking it would work. Yeah. Like he can indulge this dream of like being godlike. and then, but actually it happening is so far beyond what you expect it, especially like this is like his first go in it. Yeah.

It's interesting as well. You read this like just the mechanics of the whole thing. And the kind of, again, the pop culture version is sewing big bits of body together, isn't it? Yeah. Whereas this is very much like he's taken all the little, you know, computer parts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's also, it's not detailed in any way. way, which I suppose it's partly, you know, there's only a limited knowledge of, it's limited

how much of a detailed knowledge of anatomy, Mary Shelley, would have been able to have, especially like 18 years old writing the first draft of this. But also, I think it kind of adds to the horror of it. You don't have a really clear visual and you don't know exactly how anything is. And Victor is intentionally vague about exactly how he's pulling all of this together because he is telling this story and he doesn't want anyone to get any ideas from what he has done. yeah yeah he's made him look horrendous absolutely and he didn't mean to he was trying to make him look beautiful yeah that was his vision and he made him make foot tall

yeah i mean this is the other thing with you know that's on you victor who made him eight foot tall and really strong but maybe you should have started with like making a super race that you could still taking a fight. Let's head to the left. I've been making a man. Lave hair and sallow yellow skin stretched across his face. He's good for sending me into conno conno.

Put him in fishnets, it'll fix him. I've always said so. Small gold hot pants, that's the ticket. Gold hot pants for the creation. Dr. Scarf? Right. Sorry. But yes, no, the hope that, to, I'm going to be a wanker for a second.

To me, the scariest bit of the whole thing was the tension leading up to him, introducing himself to the family, the creation waiting outside the cottage. By far, the scariest bit for me. The horror, to me, is the horror of the lack of belonging, the lack of identity, the lack of any kind of affection, just the sadness when he said, you know, If anybody showed any affection to me, I'd return it a hundredfold. You're like, oh. Yeah, and especially as he said, his whole journey to get to that point is so sad.

He didn't know how to make fire. Yeah. Tie that into this whole idea of the subtitle of modern Prometheus, and he's not even been given that. Yes. Oh, and it, yeah, it's dreadful stuff. Like, and the point that you learn is that the human is created with the capacity and the longing for love, that part is nature.

Yeah. And like, refusing to fill up that void is the kind of neglect of nurture that creates a monster. And, you know, that's a very simplified way of putting it. But it is what we see in reality and in very much in fiction, in a more black and white way in fiction. And that's, and it then brings up the big question. Victor, obviously, he fucked up by not help. teaching the monster things like fire and how to speak and giving him just anything. Just a hug.

Should Victor have created the bride? Was there any chance of redemption there? No. No, I think he made a good point in that he didn't really know what he was doing and there was no guarantee that this new creation would be in any way sane or like the original creation or do anything but make things much worse. That's fair. What do you think?

I kind of felt like he should have done it. Oh, okay. Tell me. I just feel like his two choices, the only two people who could ever potentially not revile the creation are Victor or something else he makes to be the creation's partner. Yeah. All right, but what if, what would be the next, like morally then, if we're following this to the end, what's the next step if he'd done it and the new creation didn't like the old creation and also would. violent. There it is true. And I'm not sure. You then kill them both. Is that the next moral thing? Well, I mean, yeah, his, like the other moral thing is, does he kill the creation to stop the creation from passing other people? But then that is killing another sentient person

that he is responsible for. I think he has to make the bride. And I think he has to stick around and make sure then that all works. Well, I don't think it's ever said as a choice, but I don't really see why the choice of rehabilitation of the creation has never explored. And I mean, it is said that there is just no way anyone can look it in without revulsion. But Victor really, I feel like, could have tried. Well, that's the thing as well. His family just adopts people a lot. That's that thing.

Yeah, that's kind of what they do. I'm not saying that, you know, the creation could have ended up getting married to one of the random siblings. But I feel like Victor could have probably convinced Henry and then his sister wife and the others to accept this creation. But it doesn't care to him. No. Obviously the murder of the young boy of William does make that bit a bit more difficult. But even if you're not bringing the creation home to family, just finding him somewhere to live,

visiting him, kind of trying to rehabilitate, I feel would be the one moral path I can see at this point, once you've already fucked up enough for the creature to the creation to bugger off and murder a couple of people. Yeah, and that's, as you said, that's the nature versus nature thing. The creation would not get to the point of murdering a small child if he had not lived what he had lived through to get to that point,

and that is kind of on Victor's head. Of course, so we think. Always a chance that this is an unreliable narrator situation. Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing I like about the framing device, is that we kind of almost know, there's no way Victor's not editing a little bit as he goes along. Feels I really like just in the writing, we don't know for sure that the creation has done that murder,

until the end of his story. Like, obviously, it's incredibly likely that he did do it. But because of the, especially the bit of the girl being framed and that's such a complex motive. That, to me, is what makes me think, oh, unreliable narrate at a moment, because it goes for a crime of passion, killing somebody, especially when they're so small

that it really might have been an accidental overuse of force. Yeah. But then to go straight off framing somebody. and to say that you've learnt those ways through watching Felix. It is complicated and may be very difficult to prescribe all of that to the monster. One thing I should have done and didn't was to look properly into the other books that the creation said he'd read. So Plutarch's Lives and the Sorrows of Werta. Yeah, I don't really do.

Because I expect both of those kind of give a clue to the building box of his personality. yeah and it's possible Paradise or certainly does well yeah very much so and that's where he learns a lot of the religious dogma that he brings to Victor this idea of I should have been your Adam

yeah I should have been your Adam that's a poem in itself isn't it I should have been your item yeah which speaking of do you want to move on to hubris because I have some Adam and Eve thoughts would you sorry

no I would not Adam and Eve it yes let's move under hubris i saw it coming i groaned and then i said it anyway yeah you did all of that to yourself i know it's dreadful stuff isn't it really i'm going to go and have a two months lie down about it should we finish the podcast first otherwise this is definitely not coming out anywhere near halloween yeah great christmas episode though um apparently apparently by the way the term modern prometheus came from Kant, who used it to describe Benjamin Franklin as the Prometheus of modern times in reference to his experience of electricity. Interesting. So, you know, we got the whole galvanisation and a tree

in there. And you've also mentioned here, Prometheus, Icarus Frankenstein, name a more iconic trio. Right. Yeah. But yeah, so Prometheus, obviously, being a little more blameful than icarus but even so those i think are the three i will now go for should i be called upon to name three really hubristic people exactly so yeah um and hubris as well as particularly this idea of emulating divinity and transgressing against the gods that very specific definition of hubris i think it's doing that i mean he's trying to create life which is meant to be the purview of god and god alone in like a christian perspective i'm not saying that's my specific. I've not suddenly gone weirdly Christian. No, no, no, yeah. But yeah, very much.

And I mean, I think that would be assumed at this point as well. We're talking, we're not talking a time that is full of atheism. No. Or certainly not vocal atheism. There were some atheists and vocal atheists in that friend group. I think either Byron or Shelley, and now Byron or Percy, and I can't remember which got in trouble for atheism at school. Well, I'm pretty sure it was Percy. But Victor's never said to be atheists. But Victor's not said to be an atheist, and there's no real discussion of atheism in the novel. So we can assume this is somewhat a Christian perspective still, written as a somewhat Christian character. Yeah.

But yeah, yeah, he just straight up does the thing you're not meant to do. Well, I'll tell you what, it's very much a piss, you know, this is where Prometheus, Icarus, all this comes in. You feel more like you're pissing off the ancient gods at this point, don't you? Yeah. like I feel like the Christian god you don't usually get in the situation where you can try and do the god thing yeah whereas yeah when you go back to the Promethean

I'm tricking Zeus and bringing fire back because gods that weren't quite omnipotent omnipresent etc exactly yeah tying into the Christian mythology though I mean this idea is Victor's Eubis all comes in the pursuit of knowledge he wants to know stuff more than anything else

he wants to create life because he wants to know how that works and he starts thinking of himself as a worship creator and the story of Adam and Eve their sin is going for fruit from the tree of knowledge and they eat that apple and they become aware of their nakedness and are ashamed and there's a moment from the creation where he says was I a monster a blot upon the earth oh that I had forever remained in my native wood nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger thirst and heat. He wishes he had not eaten, he wishes he had not left the forest and

seen that companionship and care can exist because that if he had stayed in the forest, he might never have learned that he could never have that. Yeah. I was the line, the apple was already eaten. The angels are on bed to drive me from all hope. Yeah. Actually, I can't even remember. I was like that good point, whether that was the creation

or Victor Frankenstein who said that. No, I can't. Both of them are constantly seeing themselves as one of the Paradise Lost cast. Yes. As I believe they were originally known. Yeah, no, I'm with you there. Extended biblical universe. With that, it raises the interesting question of,

is Victor Frankenstein's sin going too far in the pursuit of his knowledge, or is his sin not taking responsibility for his creation? is creating the creation, sorry, I was trying to think of literally any other way to word that, is that a sin or is the sin not taking responsibility after he did it? Hmm, well, both I would say, if we're going by, and I think we always should, Granny Weatherwax's definition of sinners when you treat people as things. Yep. I would say both of those are pretty much on point, aren't they?

Yeah, very much so. He is. I think the creation was a sin, not because, obviously, in my view, he's trying to outdo God, but because he is reducing the human consciousness to something he would have control over in some way. Yeah. I don't think his motivations for the creation of a human were as pure as he was writing out, because what he was writing out was, I want to bring, you know, light in the darkness, I want to bring some kind of immortality,

which I think is a very different motivation to making a whole new person. Yeah. If he'd studied medicine and tried to go for immortality, that's a different kind of hubris. That's also a bit defying God, but I think on a very different level. Yeah, and that also goes into alchemical stuff,

the idea of the philosopher's stone, which I'm sure there was some alchemy nudging around the edges of all of this. There always is in situations. well yeah definitely he was reading some alchemist stuff wasn't he yeah but yeah i don't think it's a binary thing i don't think one thing is more of a sin than the other but i think it's interesting to compare the two yeah yeah i do think the first one could be more of a mistake and therefore more for more for the second seemed more like a conscious uh or not even a realisation of that's what he was doing perhaps because he thought so little of the

person who created yeah yeah and he just he puts his guilt in all the wrong places once he realizes he has done wrong yeah he calls william and justine the first hapless victims to my unhallowed arts yeah yeah oh my god yeah good point yeah he knows there but then he still kind of doesn't take responsibility he feels guilt about all the destruction the creation is causing but he never considers that actually he caused that by treating the creation a certain way yeah he blames himself because he made this thing yeah but he doesn't understand where he did the making he blames himself for plugging in electricity and galvanising some sewing together body parts

whereas he should be blaming himself for abandoning something he created he never really reckons with that side of it in the same way yeah yeah that is a good point i i will say the whole bit where he's like recovering with the help of his friend henry while they're still at university I'm just going, are you not worried that it's just going to turn out of you just decided that's forgotten about that bit can I throw in my specific Victor Frankenstein as a dumb bitch bit here

please right the death of fucking Elizabeth yeah oh my God right the creation says to him when he's asking make me this bride and he's like I will threaten you if you won't do it out of love for me because obviously you don't love, have any love for me.

He says, I will work at your destruction, nor finish, until I desolate your heart. And then, after Victor decides to tear this thing apart and go, ah, before making it alive, the creation says to him, I shall be with you on your wedding night. Now, Victor assumes from this that the creation is going to turn up and try and kill him on his wedding night and that he can shoot it and he'll be done. Yeah. It does not occur to Victor for a second that he is not going to be the victim,

despite the creation, literally saying, I'm going to desolate your heart. Not I'm going to kill you. You'll need to listen. Yeah. So then, wedding night, creation doesn't go for Victor. He goes for Victor's bride

because that will desolate Victor's heart. And Victor says in this story, he's telling to Robert Waldron, If I, for one instant, I had thought, what might be the hellish intention of my fiendish adversary, I would rather have banish myself forever from my native country and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth than have consented to this miserable marriage. I was like, dude, how did you not guess that that was the hellish intention of your fiendish adversary? If I was going to guess one hellish intention of my fiendish adversary, it would be that. Yeah.

The thing he literally said he was going to do. Hellish intention, hymfer, hympha, you know, classic himpha. Classic himpha. But also, I do think it's quite interesting that, you know, he says, if I guess that's what he was going to do, I would have banished myself and wandered a friendless outcast, which is exactly what he has done to this guy. Yeah. You made a friendless outcast.

Yeah. Yeah, there's, yeah, the underlying, every sad man in it is sad because he doesn't have a friend. Yeah, this is literally just melancholing this epidemic all over the place. Yeah. Taken to really a new level, I would say, which is lovely. I will say that the whole, the section in which he gets married and then very quickly widowed does have one of my favorite, like, bits of overall description, but that I love, which is the rain had ceased for a moment and I saw the fish play in the waters as they had done a few hours before. They had then been observed by Elizabeth. Nothing is so painful to the human mind is a great and sudden change.

But just, yeah, just the thought, oh, here are the fish again, but yesterday, Elizabeth was looking at them. Now they're shit. Not quite, but you know what I mean? No. That's a really good way of, like, describing loss. Yeah, no, it's a really fantastic depiction of grief. Mary Shelley does that really well. Yeah, important to note that I fully believe Mary Shelley knew exactly what she was doing.

Oh yeah writing Victor Frankenstein I'm like Yeah when I am calling the character stupid I'm not calling the author stupid Yeah yeah I think this frustration at Victor is like somewhat intended

by the writing Yeah But yeah the creation Just having this I'll tell you what it is The creation is punished for the sins he hasn't done yet Yeah

It's what it seems like Isn't it? It's like they both come from this opposite direction that, like, one of them has this wonderful loving star, one of them has complete isolation and desolation, and then Victor does the crimes, and eventually does, has the punishment, but, like, the monster does start with the punishment for the crimes, the end goes to do it. And he says, doesn't he, like, am I thought to be the only criminal?

All of humankind is ind against me? And his kind of horror is he learns how, Because his first observations of humankind are this one small, sad, poor family, and he is slowly learning more about them. He's kind of horrified when he learns about all the horrible stuff humankind can do. Yeah, yeah. He's like, God, you have the riches of cottages and vegetables, and why would you have more? Oh, the love of the shepherd's hut when he finds it. Yeah.

Oh, this is great. No rain. Look at this. What a good idea. smart sport I am dreadful stuff

I'm talking about this as a horror text oh yeah because this is you know this is early this is gothic this is kind of

the foundation of sci-fi but it is a horror story and that was the brief that was the competition was write something scary and it does something that has become a trope

one of my very favorite tropes in horror, thriller anything that builds suspense, which is just not showing you the scary thing at all for the whole first act. Yeah. So you get any actual descriptions of the creature are so few and far between you. You get one when he first rises, and then that's kind of it, almost. And it is, it's all about contrast and disappointment.

Victor says, I'd selected his features as beautiful. And then his yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries. His hair was lustrous, black and flowing. his teeth of a pearly whiteness but those luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets

and his shriveled complexion and straight black lips I feel like he just he cuts in thorners right get enough skin yeah that is the problem but immediately after that the creature is you know like I said abandoned he turns up once kind of at Victor's bedside

and then Victor goes down to the courtyard and then we don't see the creature again. Victor goes on with things and has a lie down for two months and starts going through hell and he finds out William has been murdered and he assumes it's the monster, but he can't know for sure and the reader doesn't know for sure. Yeah, yeah. And again, blaming the monster for Justine, we don't know for sure, he doesn't know for sure. We don't see the creation again until chapter 10.

My chapter numbering is kind of weird, by the way, because my physical version had volumes that restart the numbers, whereas my Kindle version I was working from because my physical volume is really pretty and I didn't want to put past it in it just has numbers going all the way through so if that's confusing for some people but yeah we don't see the creation again

until he comes to the mountains in chapter 10 and then he is incredibly impressively eloquent yeah yeah like oh did you just like wake up knowing all this like how to speak beautifully and yeah and then you get the story and he is sympathetic for so much of the story

that by the time you get to, and it's a few chapters, you know, the creation's... Good chunk of the book. Yeah. It's quite a few chapters. So it's a few chapters from first seeing him again at all to finding out that he actually did a murder. Yeah. And it's, the big comp I always go to for this is Jaws, because it was just very memorable.

We studied this when I was, like, doing my GCSEs and I had a really great teacher, which is you don't see the shark for the first third of the movie, which is great, because that was only because the big animatronic shark they were building was not done in time when they started Princeville. But it really works. The first like three shark attacks in the films, you just see a fin. And it's amazing.

It builds up the tension so much that the shark is terrifying by the time it first turns up because you've been anticipating it for so long. And so yeah, this is obviously Mary Shelley did it first. I think it's really great as a horror trope and as a really early example of this horror trope to build this up by being completely invisible.

and then by the time you see it, it's sympathetic before it's scary. Is there a, I feel like this is a, you see it more in older books, but there might be a term for it anyway, but you are never in any doubt that this is going to end horribly

because the narrator keeps telling you. He won't tell it exactly why, but he keeps saying, oh, if I'd known then that things were going to get much worse than blah, blah, blah. But like the whole time, he's like, and like, I'll tell you right now, we got fucking worse than this, but.

And that's the nature of the framing device as well, because we start at the end of the story. We know this is building up to the monster running around on a sled and Victor desolate on an ice flow. And it is the more natural way of telling a story, isn't it? That's the thing. It doesn't surprise me that this was so popular. And it's so popular in a lot of stories. It's order in a way that it's more expected now for you to be the fly on the wall. There is honestly like a weird, you know, I have lots of criticisms over my. modern media literacy. I've seen a weird thing. I spotted it in the Discord subreddit the other day of someone referring to foreshadowing as spoilers. And I feel like there are some people who are

complain that Frankenstein starts with a spoiler. And I judge those people hard and I do not think that is how we should consume media. Foreshadowing is not spoilers. Also some spoilers are just fine. It's fine to go into Frankenstein not knowing that it doesn't have happy ending. Dracula is another one. It's sort of told out of order so you know some of how it's going to end and you don't know exactly how all the bad things are going to happen, but you know it's not all going to be happy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I mean, even in this, like, you know, it's going to be bad, but you don't know in what way. All you know is that Victor Frankenstein lives to tell the tale and he's not happy about it. Yeah. And so every nice thing he

talks about is therefore tinged with, oh, yeah, when he talks about how wonderful his sister wife is. And they talk about the sweet. I've got to stop. She's like raised as a sibling that he then married. I know it's weird. I know it's weird. It is a literal sister wife situation. Also, I keep forgetting a name. So sister wife. Elizabeth. Elizabeth, thank you. Sorry, I've read like Wow, way to erase the female perspective. I remember Justine's name. Oh, yeah, that's all right then. So I've read, like, a ton of summaries of different adaptations of Frankenstein and the names get changed to all.

Yeah, no, fair enough. I've got a lot of women's names in my head. I thought it was so few. You always do. Well, as I always, I'm a bit of Monica. I bet you weren't expecting mumbo number five. also just a quick sidebar on the horror point one bit that really stuck with me when Victor destroys the bride before animating her

the remains of the half-finished creature whom I had destroyed lay scattered on the floor and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being like okay you didn't mangle the flesh of a human you weren't far off Like, to me, that's a really horrific mental image. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, I was when they said, and I tore it apart, I was like, oh, I'm glad you haven't described that in any more depth, to be honest, because it doesn't say how far along he was, but he made quite a lot of progress. Yeah, there's this idea of, like, desecration.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, desecration survived, yeah. Yeah. But he doesn't see it as that because he's never had enough respect for his own work, really. Yeah. As being of horror, obviously, there's lots of different kinds of horror and some are gory and some are not. but so much is terrifyingly built in this without any real witness. There's no blood.

Yeah, that's an interesting part of it, isn't it? Like, there's no, yeah, there's no splatter of blood across the world. The monster kills for, sorry, I've called him the monster now. And you know what? He is murdering people at this point. But the creation kills for the sake of this person being dead. Yes. To harm Victor, not for the sake of hurting the person he's hurting.

Yeah, he does. still isn't good. Yeah, but he's not taking pleasure in the actual act of violence. Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he doesn't like it. He talks about hating it. Yeah. I mean, again, at that point, you're like, well, stop it, then.

You could not kill people. You killed, you're a little boy and, oh, I hated it so much, but then you did it a couple of times, didn't you have any... It does sound like the kind of, you know, not very convincing, released interview from the police interrogation room. I didn't like it. Yeah. So you want to talk about some of the inspirations and illusions with Mary Shelley?

I did. And although I think both of us could talk about this for many hours, we're going to try not to. We're going to try not to largely for your benefit, dear listeners, but also partly for ours because we'd like to sleep one day. And so we're not going to go into depth about the occult writers that Victor Frankenstein got really into because, A, I think we've probably covered them at some point, and B, you can just get way too into it. Yeah. So, but quick a griper aside, horrible phrase, but here it is.

One of the first things he wrote in his academic career was the nobility and prescellentia feminine sexes on the nobility and excellence of the feminine sex, a work that aimed at proving the superiority of women using capitalistic ideas. And that was quite after receiving the patronage of Margaret of Austria, which may have been related to the topic matter. But yeah, even so, in the 1500s, having a work like that is pretty cool. Yeah.

And I imagine Mary Shelley was pretty familiar with it. I would imagine so too. And business later works. But so going into slightly more rooted in reality, Frankenstein as a name. It has engendered, like, a surprising amount of discussion and controversy. Yeah. So, Mary Shelley said that the name Frankenstein came to her in a dream with everything else.

And, you know, despite what I'm about to say, that doesn't mean that she's lying, even if, like, the other theories are correct. You forget stuff and it pops back up in dreams. Yeah. Not really. It can lodging your subconscious without lodging in your conscious. She had a lot going on. she did a lot of travelling, she'd recently lost a child, all this stuff.

So I would never, I would never try to discredit Mary Shelley. However. We've already minded about her anachronisms. We've done enough. Yeah. Some academics, most notably Radde Floresco and his 1975 bestseller in search of Frankenstein, say that the Shelley's visited Frankenstein Castle, or at least it's Enveron's. in Vardens, one of those two, in 1814, and quite probably.

Yeah, it's around the area they were travelling, isn't it? Yes, there's no solid proof they actually went to the castle, but they were definitely in the area. There is an extra dimension of interest to this, not just the name Frankenstein, because it's where Johann Conrad Dipel was born, and he was a theologian come alchemist who had apparently been accused of grave robbing, experimentation on cadavers and like general devilry. Yep. Culling your soul to the devil, blah, blah, blah, blah. The usual stuff you get done.

The fast stuff. Yeah, exactly. And it's possible that Mary Shelley heard these tales during her travels. Yeah. And wrote them down or internalize them or whatever. The town of Frankenstein is another interesting possible source. And that's in Poland. And it was what is now Poland.

The geography around there composes me greatly. When we get more than 50 years into the past, but it was the site of a grave-digger scandal in 1606. Ooh. And I mean, this may well be coincidence, but it's very interesting either way, so we're going into it. It's one of those, ah, yeah, this was probably a witchcraft hysteria, I thought, as I was reading it,

although that doesn't seem to have been like spelled out in the couple of sources I was reading. But there were basically eight grave diggers who were accused of and who admitted to under torture, I would say quite importantly, causing a plague that killed around 2,000 people. Right. By making powdered poison from corpses and scattering or smearing it around to kill people. Okay.

That sounds pretty dubious as it is. It starts sounding really medi-uppy when you read about their supposed eating the raw hearts of young children and powdering stuff they stole from churches, including wind-up clocks and using that powder for witchcraft. I would find it quite challenging to powder a wind-up clock. Be too, but we're not witches. True, yeah. We must always ask ourselves, could Nanny Ogg powder a wind-up clock? And that is, unfortunately, I do believe that Nanny Ogg could powder up a wind-up clock if she had to.

But I don't think she would. No, no. That's a waste of a good clock. That is a waste of a good clock. Magrat might try because one of her books told her to. But it will probably end up a pumpkin. Yeah, yes, exactly so. finally. Anyway, there was a really interesting paper looking at these various series

by Powell Kaptur, and I will link to that, and you'll like it. What I also think you'll like, and I haven't read it, but I'm just guessing from the description you'll like, is a book Power Kaptur read called To Dinner and There Mary on the Food and Drink in Samuel Peep's diary. Oh, yeah, I definitely want to. Yeah, I'll send you a link to that as well, yeah. Sorry, did you come across in looking at the name Frankenstein? I came across something very briefly, and I did not have time to go down the rabbit hole, because it would require actually buying a text, and I didn't have time to them read a whole, but there's a book about lost stories from the French Revolution. And one of the people mentioned is a Frankenstein

who was experimenting with making automata. No. Yes. That does maybe tie into something else I've read about the Frankenstein complex, which is from Asimov's short stories, novels and the Frankenstein complex is meant to be like a fear of mechanical men automaton's so yeah there's probably some overlap yeah how weird yeah no i know i haven't so yeah we should look into that that's very interesting yeah expect to follow up on this list and possibly a whole bonus episode on just people called frankenstein yeah no that i've got like a little list of Wikipedia links that are Frankenstein this, Frankenstein that.

The Frankenstein grave digger scandal was the most tempting and so that's why we went. Fair enough. Other influences, allusions, things like that. We've got Prometheus, obviously. Interestingly, Mary Shelley probably would have seen Prometheus as baddie. So she would have taken the Pythagorean view that he had brought fire to humanity.

and thus seduced them into meat eating. Right, because... Yeah, she was what would become known as a vegetarian. Right, yeah. Like, I think natural diet or something like that was what it's called, which interestingly, she gives to the creation. Yeah, he doesn't eat meat at all. Yeah.

Which I don't know if everyone would have seen as like, oh, this is a good thing. Most people might read it and thought, oh, paca more you know, but she would have seen that as a... Yeah, that's the problem with the creation of a high and... Fuck. I tell you what, it's what's what's wrong with a lot of me a lot of the time. And yet, and yet, Joanna, I've been quite severely iron deficient, and I'll tell you what I've never done. You've not murdered a small child. I've not murdered a small child. I've not murdered a chat called Henry and I've not murdered a lovely sister-wife called Elizabeth.

No matter how revoking she might be with her weirdly mild manners. Yes. Is it nature or is it nature or is it vegetarian? But yeah, sorry, so Prometheus. That was pretty much it on Prometheus. I thought it was interesting that he's pretty much, you know, I would say universally considered as, yeah, you know, he brought his fire. Good lad. Yeah, he's a heroic figure, well, tragic heroic figure, obviously, what with the whole liver

pecked out thing? But yeah, also, of course, the discovery of fire was the first thing that brought the creature, the creation. and I keep correcting myself again, but any comfort. Yes. You know, there's ups and downs to fire. I've always said that. That's famously what you say.

Also, I think you may have, you definitely talked about in your rabbit hole. I can't remember if you just talked about it in the intro. But Galvani and Darwin and everyone, Erasmus Darwin, actually. Yeah. Who I think I've talked about in the context of erotic botanical fiction. do you remember that? Yeah, no, I do remember. That was a rabbit hole as well.

That was what I was talking about the fucking clock. Oh, God. But yeah. Yes, Darwin. Oh, Erasmus Darwin. Yeah, yeah. Galvani. Galvani, I think probably being the most interesting one here because he was the chap who did animal electricity.

He was one of the first people to do it. He got some of the ideas wrong. He believed, I think, that there's something in. forensic in animal parts that created the electricity. And I think one of his contemporaries figured out that there was quite a lot to do with the metal cables he was using as well. But it's all very interesting, even so if you try and not think too hard about the disembodied frog legs.

Fia Galvani and Franklin, I mean, Franklin's very obviously referenced when we're talking about the kite and the everything that Victor's dad gets up to with the old lightning. also I just learned this from I think the Woodland Trust the other day that beach trees used to they used to be a superstition attached to them that they didn't get struck by lightning yeah

in fact they do get struck by lightning as much as any other tree of that of a similar height would do in its position however they usually survive being struck by lightning because a beach tree regenerates its bark constant and has very weirdly smooth bark. That's how you can do the beech tree. Because of that, in a storm, the outside of a beech tree is sheathed in water. It is wet all the way down.

And if it is hit by lightning, it earths. Something like an oak tree, such as the one that spouted fire and became blasted into ribbons. In this book, not in the Woodland Trust podcast. They weren't quite so overall. But because of the craggy bark, it's got dry spots in it. And so if it is struck by lightning, the lightning may then, or will often then strike at the heart of the tree. Because it's got a dry way in. Yeah.

That's really interesting. That is really interesting. And almost unrelated to this book, but not quite. And so there we are, shoehorning it in with a lovely beechwood shoehorn. I don't know. I don't think that's a traditional use. But, yeah, I think, I mean, Paradise Lost is the other obvious. BS1. Yeah. We should mention one more time. This is not going to become a deep dive into

Milton though because nobody's got the time to deep dive into. Neither of us have read it. Well, we have probably between us read to the entirety of Paradise Lost as we've established. Yeah, but I mean both of both the main characters here, Victor and his creation. I just think it's interesting how they cycle through seeing themselves as different characters in Milton and thus in the Bible. but as Adam, as God, as Satan. Yeah. Both of them definitely see themselves as a fallen angel at some point.

Yeah, which then ties back into very interesting themes of knowledge and original sin. Yeah, yeah. And I do like how we're not planting original sin on a random woman in this one. One might say that the female characters in this can tend towards the one-dimensional. However, what one cannot say is that they are as fucking annoying as the male characters. yes they aren't annoying there's a little bit of Shelley in Mary Shelley in Elizabeth I think when she talks about spending her days daydreaming being away with the fairies and kind of taking the creative note rather than the scientific note because I feel like that's how she described her own childhood yeah I don't think it's um as female representation goes it's not the best it's not the worst it's definitely not the worst um yeah I mean they're not I I mean they're not I I think I'm related to most of what we've just been talking about. But I feel like the most, oh, where is it?

Bloody hell. The most casual saxism I saw in it was from Robert Walton, our favourite, when he talks about, when he's talking to his sister, addressing his sister. If you do, you must certainly have lost that simplicity, which was once your characteristic charm. Under that, I wrote, bitch. I feel like there's a whole diatribe you go on about the way Robert Walton speaks about craving male companionship and the people he works with and a queer reading of it as well. I nearly texted you as I was reading it.

Like, this is gayer than I remember. But then I thought maybe I was simplifying it. The opening of the book feels very gay. I mean, I do think, you know, you can't put modern understandings of sexuality under something historical. And I don't mean that in a they were roommates way. Like, yes, Sappho was definitely shagging women. and I do mean the understanding of how that existed and was talked about was different.

You do see this kind of affectionate discussion of what could still be a platonic relationship in a way you absolutely wouldn't in a modern context. And I wonder if part of that is that it's written by a woman. Yes, as well. Because, to be fair, Byron and that are pretty overwrought about all the relationships, not just the romantic ones. Exactly. This is not just a woman.

This is a woman hanging around with like Byron and Polaroie right there. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely more of an emotional depth to a new relationship than one might expect. Yes, very much so. Although it does sound like Victor Frankenstein is a compelling fellow. People put up with him for a lot longer than I'd have expected. Yeah, I do feel like there's something in him, he is charismatic, even if he is not to us as the reader. Yeah, yeah. Oh, poor old thing, hasn't he suffered enough without me slag him off constantly for two hours? No, he hasn't. No, he hasn't.

I think I've been meaner, to be honest. Yeah. Well, let's talk then about how his image has been bastardised in entertaining ways. Let's talk about, I really want to talk about adaptation. Again, I will try not to talk about this for five hours. It is very deep and very interesting. The reason I want to talk about adaptation is because I think if you haven't read the book, Frankenstein, or really engaged in any conversation about it either,

you have a very specific image of this green shamans. monster with bolts in his neck and a big line of stitches on his head who can't really speak and you have a doctor with waiting for a thunderstorm and shouting it's alive and a hunchback's assistant named Eagle

and I want to look at where these different ideas, these different motivations for Frankenstein where they come from in adaptation as opposed to what comes from the actual book and I'm really interested in the origins of Eagle The origins of Eagle. The Origins of Eagle. The Root of All Eagle. I am not talking about literally

every adaptation of this or every reference to Frankstown that's ever been, because there is a lot and you can go on a big Wikipedia rabbit hole if you really want to. Two main things I want to talk about. First of all, Universal Pictures and their Monster Canon, which is something, again, if you want to refer back to one of our rabbit holes, I've talked about a lot in the context of werewolves. So the kind of, the first screen adaptation, I am also mostly focused on screen adaptations here, not like stage adaptations. The first screen adaptation. Very quickly, the stage one. I think Mary Shelley watched one.

Yeah, she did. They were contemporary. I think there were some before she had come out as the author of the book even. Oh, wow. Okay. Wow. But yeah, so the first screen adaptation is a silent film, Frankenstein, Baylesson Studios in 1910. And it's very, it's 15 minutes long.

So obviously, the story is highly truncated. There's no framing device. And the monster disappears when Frankenstein finds true love. Ah. Very sweet. We get to Universal when we go into the talkies. So we have Frankenstein Universal Pictures, 1931. And this is actually adapted from a stage play, Frankenstein,

An Adventure in the Macab by Peggy Webling, which was a play in 1927. We don't have a lot, we don't really have the script for that. It's kind of a lost play. There are some notes and there are some reviews from the time. But the film version is directed by a guy called James Whale. I'll come back to that later. And it's Boris Karloff, very famous figure from these things, as the creature. And this is where we, this film is where you start getting that Frankenstein visual.

I mean, it's black and white, obviously, but greenish square head. Yeah. This is also in this film, the monster is named Frankenstein after his creator. Ah. And in this, and this is a detail from the play, Frankenstein has a hunchbacked assistant named Fritz. Ah, I am. That then gets a sequel, Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. Again, James Well, Boris Karloff.

this will now become a thing through the universal monster canon at the end of each movie it seems like the monster's dead and then in the next movie he's alive that bride of Frankenstein kind of takes more from

Mary Shelley's story and it's kind of includes the demand for a bride obviously and the bride gets made but then she doesn't like him and it's a whole thing and that's where you get

that iconic bride of Frankenstein look the sort of tall black beehive hair with a big white streak in it it's good stuff and then there's a threequel son of Frankenstein this is the last one with

Boris Karloff as the creature and in this Bella Lagosi plays a character called Igor, spelled with a Y rather than I, he's not an assistant, he's an antagonist, he's actually the one controlling the monster. After this, Universal, their monster stuff kind of leans more

B-movie and gets quite silly. So you have the ghost of Frankenstein in 1942 and this is kind of, there's a kind of loose cannon being followed through all of these films, but being reckoned and ignored as necessary. Loose canon ever loose cannon? that. Loose canon of a loose canon. In the ghost of Frankenstein, Lonchaney Jr. is playing Frankenstein

as in the monster. Lonchini Jr. would go on to be the wolfman. He's like the first big, Larry Talbot, the first big famous werewolf. Is he the man of a thousand faces? Or is that his dad? I can't remember. Quite possibly. And Igor comes back in this. It's Igor and the monster tracking down Ludwig Frankenstein, who's the son of the original and they're trying to get the monster fixed up because he keeps dying at the end of movies. And this is where we start getting another really common theme across adaptations. Eagle's brain gets put into the monster. And brain transplants become the big thing in adaptation of Frankenstein.

That's why the stitches across the forehead, because it's all about what brain can we put in this body, and then we'll also fix up the mangled body in the process. To confuse the canon even more with actors, the next movie we get is 1943, Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. So by this point, Loncheney Jr. is now playing Larry Talbot, the Wolfman, which if you didn't listen to The Rabbit Hole I did on Werewolves, the Larry Talbot Wolf movies are where we get the first example of werewolves being changed specifically by the light of the full moon. This is getting so AO3. I know, right? Oh my God. How much Mary and

Shally stuff is there on AO3? Sorry, we're looking at that at the end. We are looking at that at the end. So in Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. Now Lon Cheney is playing the Wolfman and Bella Lagosie is playing the monster again and they kind of become friends. Then we get House of Frankenstein in 1944. Lonchaney's in this as the Wolfman. Again, Dracula's also in this. Glenn Strange plays the monster. Glenn Strange? Yeah.

Lovely name. There's a guy called Dr. Neiman. He's the evil scientist in this. There's no actual like Frankenstein, apart from the monster whose name is Frankenstein. And there's an incarcerated criminal named Daniel, who is a hunchback, who serves as an assistant in the movie and eventually gets a new body. And I'm not summing up the plot of all of these, because they're insane. They're ridiculous, yeah, there's no point. And then there's House of Dracula in

1945. This is another big crossover. We're not getting any Dr. Frankenstein. We're not getting any assistance because the origin is so well established. The big thing that happens to Frankenstein, as in the monster in all of these movies, is he died at the end of the last one, somehow he's alive at the beginning of the next one, and then at some point someone's brain goes into someone else's body. The last of nature. Yeah, the last of the universal ones is Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein. get very silly. I thought the hammer was getting silly.

Yeah, so let's talk about Hammer. So this is later, this is 1957. This is Hammond's Frankenstein in glorious Technicolor. And these movies were a bit more serious and very dark and gross. You help me out a lot with this. Your husband has a book on the history of Hammer House of Horror. Jack's so into Horror. So the first of these is The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957.

This is Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein and Christopher. Lee as the monster, really great line from the book that you were sending me some stuff from. Christopher Lee, who fulfilled Hammer's requirement for a very tall man with some knowledge and experience of movement and mime. Imagine that being like where you hire. That's how you discover Christopher Lee. Yeah, this is, he did this before Dracula. He then obviously went on to play Dracula for the Hammer. This was Hammers' first like horror. This was Hammers' first big horror. Yeah, this is pre-Dracula. So obviously then Christopher Lee would go on to become Dracula and then he would, I mean, he was already a badass.

He was Christopher Lee, but we could do a whole episode just on Christopher Lee. Cushing's still quite young and beautiful at this point, isn't he? So I suppose he's a bit more of a reflection of. Yes, very much so. God, piece of Cushing was so beautiful. He was. Those cheekbones, like you could shave with those. Anyway, interestingly, there were also some copyright discussions with Universal.

The Hammer had to prove that the script was based on the book and not taking anything from the Universal movie. and there's Baron Victor Frankenstein who is awaiting execution for the murder of his maid telling his life story to a priest because of course actually the monster did it he created a body and he took his old mentor he killed his old mentor's brain

and put that in the body of the monster that he made but the brain got damaged in the process so you get this violent creature rampaging kills Justine I feel like even without the brain being damaged you'd be a bit pissed off Yeah there's a whole lot of other stuff going on Well, it's called Justine, is he? Is she? Well, no, it's his maid, but she is pregnant with his child because he's not a very nice man.

Baron Victor Frankenstein from the Hammer movies, he is a bad guy, straight. Right. Okay, okay. The monster is, there is not one monster across all of these movies. It's a lot of brain transplants and people dying. Oh, more of that. The consistent thread across the movies is Baron Victor Frankenstein, who is very nasty and who is played by Peter Cushing across all these movies. That's interesting. Yeah, a couple of reviews of The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957.

Fasadis only, say the Daily Telegraph. Among the half-dozen most repulsive films I ever countered, claim the observer, Tribune, meanwhile, is asserted that the logical development of this kind of thing is a peep show of freaks interspers with visits to a torture chamber. Quite so. Yep. So then we get revenge. And moreover, I hear it was originally written by a woman.

Then we get Revenge of Frankenstein in 1958. There's an assistant here, a hunchback named Carl who gets his brain transpired into another body, goes mad, dies. Again, very quick summary. A review of that. The whole thing is, to my taste, a vulgar, stupid, nasty and intolerably tedious business. It goes on for much longer. It's a short quote there. Briefly, in 1958, Hammer starts trying to get stuff on the small screen.

There's a pilot called Tales of Frankenstein. It never takes off. of Frankenstein, tales of Frankenstein, like Rug Rat Babies. They also start at... Rubbred babies, what I mean? Muppet babies. Muppet babies, thank you. They also start completely racconning the canon to suit them in all of these movies.

1964, we get the evil of Frankenstein. There's an assistant in this one called Hans, as far as I know, not Arratchback. In 1967, Frankenstein created woman. There's a different assistant called Hans in this one, who ends up possessing his ex-girlfriend's body, I think. It got weird. Yeah, things do get a bit of porn in Hammer sometimes. Oh, it gets like nasty.

Frankenstein must be destroyed in 1969. There's a former assistant called Frederick who was committed for going insane and then more brain transplant. More brain transplants. There's the horror of Frankenstein in 1970, which is a parody slash remake of the curse of Frankenstein, which is the first of the time.

Still made by Hammer. They did a parody of their own movie like 15 years later. Still with Cushing? No, this is the only one that was, Cushing. There's one last Cushing one in 1974, Frankenstein and the monster from hell, and this is set in an insane asylum. The assistant is Herr Schneider, who is a homicidal inmate who gets grafted on hands and eventually becomes the moot groaning monster who goes grabbing on hands. Yeah, grafted. There is sewing stuff on. But yeah, what I found

interesting is that in Universal, the continuity is the monster. And in Hammer, the continuity is the doctor, is the baron, is Victor Frankenstein. Some other films we then start getting in this time period, when I found interesting. Jesse James meets Frankenstein's daughter from 1966, which is a Wild West one. It's actually Victor Frankenstein who made a monster his evil granddaughter, who's gone out to the West and is doing horrible things, including making a subservient monster, who she dubs Igor. Ah! We're starting to get some Igor. 171, Dracula versus Frankenstein, which is not Universal Lawhammer, but does feature Lon Cheney Jr. playing Groton, who is an assistant working for Dr. Duria, a descendant to Frankenstein.

I just did a quick Google, by the way, and it's Lon Cheney, who was the man of thousand phases, yeah. Frankenstein, the true story, 1973, this was a British made for TV one, which was kind of closer to the book, except everything happens in the wrong order and all the names are changed around. But all the names are really it. And this is, Victor Frankenstein is working with Henry Clavel and his motivation here is very much reviving the dead. This is something that starts being a common thread is, generally it's his mother dying in childbirth, but there is some kind of tragedy,

and it makes Frankenstein really focused on immortality and bringing back dead people. But Clavel dies of a heart attack, so Frankenstein gives the creation, he's making Clavel's brain, hijing since you. We get my... Very favourite, which is one of my favourite films from the work of one of my favourite makers in 1974, we get Young Frankenstein by Mel Brooks.

All right. You know, I am a huge sucker for Melbrook's movies. This is Gene Wilder playing a descendant to Victor Frankenstein. It is a parody. It's inspired by the Universal Movies. It's even, it's shot in black and white, even though it's 1974, and it even used props from that 1931, that first Universal movie. Oh, lovely. And this has a hunchback servant named Igor.

Yay, we got there. This is kind of, so this is great. This is a parody of Frankenstein. Yeah. So it is parodying a really common idea from Frankenstein that also kind of, it's like reverse engineered this trope. Yeah, yeah. The trope didn't fully exist in a fully formed way

until it was parodied in Young Frankenstein. And I'm looking at this, because obviously Igor is such a huge part of the Discworld books. And these are these sewn together hunchbacks. They are the assistants. And so much of them, he's kind of founded on Young Frankenstein specifically. The original Igoor was played by Marty Feldman, who is an incredible British comic actor, among other things, responsible for co-writing the four Yorkshireman sketch. Wow.

I want to throw that in. That's a hell of a TV item. But yeah, this is where the various assistants do kind of coalesce and we finally start getting Igor. And then just a couple of... Congeal into Eagle. Congealing into Eagle, which is what he would have wanted. There's a couple of other adaptations I want to mention. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from 1994,

which is Kenneth Branagh directing and playing Victor Frankenstein with Robert De Niro as the creation. Yeah. Really? I've never seen this. I really want to see this. I've never heard of this. It's mostly faithful to the book.

It has the framing device. But Frankenstein's motivation is cheating death after the loss of his mother. Again, that's the theme that they're using. which comes up a lot more in adaptations than ever does in the original book and again it's brain transplanty and eventually this whole thing at the end where the creature it goes off the rails at the end and stops following the book it ends with Victor trying to bring Elizabeth back to life

after his creation has killed her so he stitches her head and hands onto Justine's body and this is straight from Wikipedia summary reanimates her as a disfigured mindless shadow of her former self and then the creature demands Elizabeth as his bride and then Elizabeth sets herself on fire and fixture in the creature escape and that's the end. Good, I think.

I was not going to look at this because it's been so long since I saw this movie that I forgot Frankenstein was a part of it. My partner reminded me when I was talking about like an adaptation. 2004's Van Helsing, which I don't know if you remember this movie. Yeah, the main thing I remember about this movie is... I think Jack's watched it fairly recently.

It's got Kate Beckinsale in it and I feel very strongly about Kate Beckinsale, obviously. Yeah, yeah, can't blame it. But yeah, that starts with Victor Frankenstein and Count Dracula and their resistant, Igor, creating a monster before Dracula turns on Frankenstein and kills him and it turns out Eagle was secretly working for Dracula. That's like the prologue before the actual...

I'm not even going to try and explain the actual plot of the... movie Van Helsing. I don't think it really has one, is it? I know, and I need a lot more drinks to try. It's got a crossboat. Yeah. You don't need a pot if you've got a crossboat.

I've always said that. When I have seen him really enjoyed was Victor Frankenstein from 2015, which is, so this is, again, Eagle kind of didn't exist until it was parodied in 1974. Then in 2015, we get Victor Frankenstein, which is from the

perspective of Eagle. This is starring James McAvoy and Daniel Bradcliffe. Daniel Radcliffe is Eagle Frankenstein is played by James McAvoy and Eagle starts as a hunchback clown working at a circus and Frankenstein hires him and cues him of his hunchback

and the eventual monster in that is named Prometheus and I would be remiss if I talked about adaptation and didn't mention my favourite batch at home of adaptations which is the TV series Once Upon a Time which has a doctor That got Frankenstein in it well they do a whole thing eventually where they go to a place called the land of untold stories which is i think is the budget got tight and everything they were using from that was public domain

there's like a whole jekyll and hide storyline where the actor is sam whitwer who uh you wouldn't be familiar with nerds will know as the voice of doth mall and a lot of other star wars characters in animated star wars canon um he's really talented voice actor he's quite a good for this collector as well but from the very first season there is a character who is eventually revealed to be Frankenstein, and they always planned on this because they named this character, played by David Anders, Dr. Whale, after James Whale, who directed the 1931 Curse of Frankenstein. Oh, good grief. He also ends up with weirdly blonde hair at some point, because as well as being a once

upon a time, he was also starring as a bleached blonde character in Eye Zombie, just next little Frankenstein detail. And there's also just one last one, which I haven't seen yet, because The new new one. The new new one. Camer del Toro. It's on Netflix, November 7th. It's got Oscar Isaac as Frankenstein and Jacob Allaudy as the monster. And I don't think it's going to be, based on the reviews I've read so far,

I don't think it's going to be super accurate to the story of the book. Yeah, he's also in that 1994 one. Oh, no, he's in the 2015 one. I've read a lot of summaries, Francine. Oh, mate, don't worry about it. Yeah. He may as well have been in all of them. He seems like the kind of guy who could have been somehow.

Yeah. based on the reviews I've read of the new one I don't think it's going to high very closely to the story but I think it's going to high very closely to the ideas and thematic stuff and it's Guillermo del Toro and it's got Oscar Isaac in it so I'm very very excited for that and that was as brief as I could make that history of Frankenstein on screen but I think that's just it's very interesting yeah to see what emerges from the story and how little of it is actually in the story yeah for sure love that awesome and now I've done that

Francine, have you got an obscure reference for me? Yeah, yeah, I do. It is, I'm afraid. Byron. Oh, for fuck's sake. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm kidding.

Here he is again. I did Byron. But yes, so there is a... Shelley references her friends and Percy Shelley's poem several times throughout this. Because why wouldn't you put in the little stories of your mate poetry? But one of them was... I contemplated the lake, the waters were placid, all around was calm, and the snowy mountains, the palaces of nature, were not changed. So the palaces of nature, whereas in quotation marks, and therefore we can fairly confidently say that Byron therefore exists in the Frankenstein universe, because it is from Child Harold's Pilgrimage, which I have not read in its entirety, but from a quick skim read, looks like a very politically aware gap year.

of a poem. It is, that's part of what he worked on at Villa Diodarcy as well. That makes sense. There's a lot of Alps. But these recede. Above me are the Alps, the palaces of nature, whose vast walls have pinnacled in clouds, their snowy scalps and throned eternity in icy halls.

Excellent. Nothing better than reading a bit of Byronic meter, actually. I'll tell you what, say what you like about the man, and we often do. Yeah. You had a grasp of metre. He did. Rarely rivaled.

rhyming alps with scalps is questionable but you know it's a long poem i'm going to allow it we'll allow it when a poem is going on for that long sometimes you've got to go for an but snowy scalps hang on what's the pratchett character called like snowy peak or something we found a byron reference listeners answers on a postcard please not brought to us by an albatross because that would be anachronistic, Mary Jay. Anachronistic. I'm like, we barely talked about the ancient mariner and this, by the way. Oh, the right of the ancient mariner.

But like, I think anyone who's red boat gets it. Yeah, the creatures and albatross hanging around Victor's neck. Yeah, you've done a bad thing. Now you've got to deal with it. Even if you then do something a little bit better, you've got to spend the rest of your life going around and talking about it to unsuspecting wedding guests. Yeah.

Don't invite Sam Taylor Coleridge to your wedding, guys. don't shoot an albatross. Well, also don't shoot an albatross. Pro tips. Whatever you do, don't do both. Definitely don't do both. Anyway, we're just going to ramble incoherently if we stay on these microphones. In fact, we probably will as soon as we sign off from the official episode.

But thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Trichelam Make You Threat, does the classics. As you might have noticed, we have tried lots of new things this year. So if you like us doing classics and you want to hear more, ditto, if you like, book reviews, theme revisits, all of that. please do tell us. Yeah. Give us feedback.

We like it. The places you can give us feedback, of course. You can join our Discord. There's a link down below. You can follow us on Instagram at the true show, make you frat. On blue sky at makey fret prod. On Facebook at the Trisha Makeyfrat, join our subreddit R slash TTSMYF. Email us your thoughts, queries, castle, snacks, reviews, and not albatrosses.

The Trichamakeefret pod at gmail.com. And if you want to support us financially, go to patreon.com forward slash the Trushamakeyfrette. Or you can exchange your hard earn pennies for all. all sorts of bonus nonsense. And until next time, dear listener, don't let us detain you. I remember the albatross. Everyone remembers the albatross.

You can't forget the abatross. You can't forget the fucking up. That's the point of the albatross. That's the whole thing.