Tag Archives: Victor Frankenstein

Johann Konrad Dippel – Frankenstein Castle and Dippel’s Oil

Johann Konrad DippelWas “mad scientist” and alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel the inspiration and original model of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein? Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley never mentioned Dippel or a castle in Germany in any of her previously known writings, but the ties and contacts are rife with connections.

Johann Konrad Dippel was born in 1673 and died in 1734. He wrote over seventy works and treatises on mathematics, chemistry and philosophy, most written under the pseudonym of Christianus Democritus, with his texts now buried in various academic collections. He went to University in Giessen, Germany and lectured at a number of universities, ultimately at Strasbourg University in France, where Johann Goethe also studied in the city where Gutenberg first printed before establishing his press in Mainz, and just down the Rhine River from Darmstadt University in Germany, with many students travelling between them.

A contemporary professor who complained bitterly about Dippel’s ideas of theology also praised him with a bit of ironic shade, “Dippelius was an excellent chemist and a good physician; and this procured him many friends and admirers, as all men are fond of riches.”

This perhaps alludes to Dippel’s more commercial ventures and reputation as bit of the charlatan, though perhaps not intentially. He was an alchemist, trying to turn base metals to gold, and searching especially for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixer Vitae, the secret to extended, if not eternal life.

Dippel was an early chemical manufacturer. He created a concoction called “Dippel’s Oil” or “Dippel’s Animal Oil” used primarily as an agent in the tanning of animal hides, from where it most likely gets its name, and in cloth colouring. but also having some animal based in ingredients. It was also said locally around to be useful in calming the pangs and distempers of pregnancy. Whether it was to be used topically, digested, or as an aromatic, is unclear. Its chemical composition with ingredients like Butyronitrile Methylamine and Dimethylpyrrole Valeramide would suggest that ingesting any significant amount would not be very healthy. It was reputed to be a foul smelling business and this form of use may have also been a local joke around Darmstadt.

alchemy labDippel’s connection to Frankenstein comes from his days at the castle on the hilltop near Darmstadt above the Rhine River Valley below Mainz. Johann Dippel was resident there for a time when the castle had fallen vacant of its lordly Franckenstein family owners after the Reformation  and the War of European Succession. Dippel tried unsuccessfully to induce the Landgrave of Hesse to deed him the castle in exchange for Dippel’s providing the duke with the secret of everlasting life, the infamous elixir.

He never did come up with a successful Elixir of Eternal Life while at Darmstadt and eventually moved on, with the locals rather chasing him away like those pitchfork wielding villagers in the Universal Frankenstein movies. His permanent acquisition of the castle was opposed and the legends of his making his oil and formulas from the body parts of human corpses was likely an early form of conspiracy theory, born from his boiling animal bones to get ingredients, mixed with the castle’s time as a prison where prisoners were buried in pauper’s graves, and it was hinted that he dug them up to make his concoction, and therefore an easy connection to digging up the dead to bring eternal life.

Curiously, there is another connection between Dipple and the world of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story, though indirect. John Polidori, Lord Byron’s companion that summer of ghost stories on the shores of Lake Geneva, is reported to have committed suicide by drinking Prussic Acid, more commonly known as Hydrogen Cyanide, which Sherlock Holmes always managed to deduce from its smell of bitter almonds. Prussic Acid gets its name and is derived from the painting pigment called Prussian Blue, which is now sometimes used as an anti-radiation medicine.

Prussian Blue was created by a Berlin paint-maker named Johan Diesbach, who reportedly made it from potash, from which potassium chloride is derived, that he got from Johann Konrad Dippel, one of the chemical ingredients at the core of Dippel’s work and a common chemical manufacturing compound today.

Dippel moved on from the castle at Darmstadt, still ever seeking his life sustaining elixir, but in the end it may have had the opposite effect. He died of complications of chemical poisoning, either from his close work with some very toxic substances over time, or perhaps sampling his own elixir formula, which may have had the opposite effect than the one intended.

Mary Shelley encounters Dippel’s Oil and the story behind it on the Rhine Trip in 1814 as told in the “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley” when she was feeling the sensations of her first pregnancy.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Victor Frankenstein Movie – Sewn of Borrowed Parts

It’s Alive – The Monster Arrives and Quickly Dies

victor_frankenstein_mcavoy_radcliffeReview – Warning, spoilers abound. Okay, I looked forward to the new revisiting of the Frankenstein story with some anticipation, but rather like the creature itself, the movie of “Victor Frankenstein” seems a construction of parts from other movies brought to life by a spark of imagination before being destroyed by its creators, a giant creature with two hearts instead of one, intended to power it for a modern audience, but ultimately ending in an epic failure of hubris. (Currently about 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, fairing a little better with viewers than reviewers). It’s not a bad movie, offering enough entertainment value to fill the time, but rather less than fulfilling the promise of new generational watermark.

There’s something about the opening with its rip off of the “movie” Sherlock Holmes style of stopping the action for a graphic representation of what the characters are sensing, with the music and graphic tone that almost immediate says “hey, I’ve seen this before”, from which it never quite recovers, like a patient with a fatal flaw that will ultimately kill it. The effect is abandoned for most of the movie until the end, when it reappears and you’re head is saying, “oh that’s what that was for”. The film story certainly has some inventive turns and tricks, but staggers unevenly between clever solemnity and buddy comedy. For purists, it has as much in common with the literary “Frankenstein” of Mary Shelley as did “Frankenstein’s Army” but the director, Paul McGuigan, stated on the publicity trail that the book of Frankenstein was boring, so might as well have at it. Victor Frankenstein offers at least one reference to his sewn together creature as “The Modern Prometheus”, so there, but all the rest is pretty much movie iconography references including one lame mispronunciation of the name as Fronkensteen, so you presumably get the Mel Brooks crowd. In fact, the whole Igor as hunchback assistant, mostly comes from the “Young Frankenstein” take. The club scene could have added a tap dance of “Puttin’ On The Ritz”, but that was an opportunity missed.

Victor Frankenstein, neither a doctor, nor a baron, but a bright medical student gathering animal parts from zoos and in this case the circus, where he has cut of a lion’s paw, from some lion we have not seen, witness the circus hunchback perform a medical miracle to save the beautiful trapeze artist performing (without a net), who falls, breaking a collar bone. Frankenstein rescues the hunchback from a cage and in the escape through a clever bit with a mirror, a pursuer is killed. The two are sought for murder by an oh too clever police detective on his own crusade of God verses science.

Victor Frankenstein transforms the hunchback into a fine upstanding young man by draining the puss from a cyst on his back that has somehow also bent his body, straightening his posture with the brace, that also manages to transform a young man who has never left the circus since he was a small child him into an erudite charmer, given the name of Igor, who can now enter London society with the slightest notice, whose medical genius has come from some medical anatomy books, while a London hospital can’t seem to manage to properly medicate a patient with a broken bone.

Victor Frankenstein, who seems to have the skills of the most masterful surgeon of his age while still a student ignoring his studies, and a chiropractor to boot, claims his purpose is to improve mankind but has built a horrid animal monster from decaying flesh in the form of a sort of monstrous monkey that attacks the college theater when shocked into life with his special “Lazarus Fork”, which presumably a wealthy young toff is impressed enough by to be willing to murder to corner the technology market of bringing dead flesh to life.

The God thumping cop closes in on Victor Frankenstein’s London mansion laboratory, without a warrant, mind you, and the whole operation moves, rather like the second super expensive device from Contact, to another location, a remote castle in Scotland belonging to the rich kid, where the creation of a giant man with a heart to spare and extra lungs, turns into an epic failure, when Frankenstein finally realizes he can’t bring back his brother, whose death he feels responsible for in a childhood accident, to the living.

Frankenstein says he wants to create a sentient, intelligent being, but doesn’t seem to take the least precaution, when his animal experiment goes viciously wrong, but decides to proceed on Igor’s suggestion to build a powerful giant, without any thought at all to its mind and that it might have a bad temper being shocked to sudden life by a lightning bolt. The brain consideration only seems to come with some thought of a sequel (I doubt we will ever see). The creature when it comes to life, however briefly, seems to have an uncanny similarity to the monster as drawn for the Mr. Magoo cartoon version of the Frankenstein story, but where in the cartoon, the horrible creature spoke with the intelligence Frankenstein intended, here the monster just pretty muck breaks things before its two hearts become a pin cushion with anatomical directions. And the last line, “this is not life”, a slant riff on the old Colin Clive line “it’s alive” from the 1931 version, as Victor Frankenstein looks in the dead eyes of the botched monster he’s created, discovering that he has not made what he intended,  seems oddly apt for the effort as a whole.

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VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN – THE MOVIE

Igor Finally Gets his Story Told!

Daniel Radcliffe James McAvoy Victor Frankenstein Movie

Daniel Radcliffe as Igor and James McAvoy as Victor Frankenstein on set

A big budget retelling of the Frankenstein story has finished shooting and will be showing in theaters  November 25th (in the US) from 20th Century Fox. The release date was recently pushed back from Halloween to Thanksgiving, switched with a Ridley Scott film, “Martian”. The project originated in 2011 and began filming at the end of 2013. The film stars James McAvoy as the titular Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Daniel Radcliffe as his assistant Igor, with Jessica Browne Findley from Downton Abbey as Lorelei. This version of the story from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus” takes a revisionist twist, telling the tale of obsession and hubris from the point of view of Dr. Frankenstein’s friend and assistant, there to observe his downfall. The movie was originally titled just “Frankenstein”, but in a crowded field of like projects in advance of the 200th Anniversary of the publishing in the novel in 1818, they went with a more specific Victor Frankenstein.

The story, (20th Century-Fox official synopsis) tells “when Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his trusted assistant Igor go too far in their noble attempts to aid humanity, Victor’s obsession turns to madness. He then unleashes his final creation — a monstrous figure that holds unimaginable terror for anyone its path”. Some photo images from the production have been released of the actors on the set, but the monster creation has yet to make an appearance. See Trailer

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel did not have an assistant character named Igor, and Victor Frankenstein was not really a doctor, but a student at Ingolstadt University. The idea of an Igor assistant first appeared in Universal’s “Son of Frankenstein” movie, with Bela Lugosi playing a character name Ygor, with a hunched back. Universal needed something for their other horror star to do in the Frankenstein series, and Bela went on to play the monster as well, later. Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” riffed off the assistant, now named “Igor” as a hunchback with a shifting hump, played hilariously by Marty Feldman, with his shifting eye to go with it.

I doubt there was any idea to give Daniel Radcliffe a humped back, and all images suggest a more urbane young gentleman, rather than an accented flunky, with the intent to give the age old, oft-told horror story the more recent “Sherlock Holmes” treatment, as a buddy movie of young idealistic scientist gone mad. Filming locations were all in the UK, and the characters suggest the heroes spend a good deal of time in the social club and theatrical world, between carousing and body parts hunting, so the German and Swiss settings of the novel appear changed to early 19th Century England. The filming locations included the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Manchester Town Hall and Albert Square in Manchester, Dunnottar Castle in Aberdeen and Hatfield House in Hertfordshire

The script for Victor Frankenstein was written by Max Landis who came to the fore with the high budget “found footage” effect film “Chronicle” and is directed by Scottish director Paul McGuigan, known for “Lucky Number Sleven” and “Wicker Park” but has mostly been directing television, notably the “Sherlock” series and “Devious Maids”. The Victor Frankenstein film also features actors Andrew Scott and Mark Gatiss from the “Sherlock” tv series, with Callum Turner, Freddie Fox and Louise Brealey in a large cast.

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