FRANKENSTEIN – FACES OF THE MONSTER – Frankenstein Diaries: Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley

The 200^th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s creation and publishing of her novel “Frankenstein, or, The New Prometheus” is soon upon us, both the origination in that summer of 1816 on Lake Geneva and the first publishing of the novel in 1818. In the book, the creation of a living being from the parts of the dead, brought back to life had a description of a gangly oversized being of horrid visage, which Victor Frankenstein said he intended to be beautiful, but somehow, didn’t come out right.

“How can I describe … the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! … His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips …” From this brief outline of horror has come a stream of imaginings in film and art to represent the horror of Mary Shelley’s idea.

Today, the image of the Frankenstein Monster is indelibly etched in our consciousness, but that image of a square, flat-topped head with scars and bolts in the neck have mostly come to us from the 1931 movie version make-up of Boris Karloff, created by Hollywood make-up artist, Jack Pierce. But there have been many iterations of what the creature of Victor Frankenstein’s experiments with life and death would look like. Here are a collection of some of the many faces of the monster…

Boris Karloff Frankenstein 1931