Original subtitles

[Narrator] June 1816, on the shores of Lake Geneva,

an 18-year-old woman who will soon be known as Mary Shelley

rides out a terrible storm.

She's come here with a group of famous writers,

something she herself dreams of becoming.

[Expert 1] This is someone who is trying

to have a literary career.

She's determined to make her name to be known.

[Narrator] From the darkest corners of her imagination,

she will create a monster unlike anything

the world has seen before...

Frankenstein.

[Expert 2] The protagonist of the story

is Victor Frankenstein.

[Narrator] A scientist who defies the laws of nature.

[Expert 3] He succeeds in animating the body of a corpse

cobbled together from various human pieces.

[Narrator] A cautionary tale

drawn from real life scientific experiments.

[Expert 4] The fear of what science could unleash

if it goes unrestricted.

[Narrator] Inspired by personal tragedies...

[Expert 3] Mary's life was shrouded by death.

[Narrator] ...shaped by a violent age.

[Expert 4] That's when people turn to murder.

[Expert 2] This would eventually become

one of the most popular and important stories

of the 19th century, and on into the 21st century.

[Narrator] This is the truth behind Frankenstein

and how a monster evolved over more than two centuries.

♪ ♪

[thunder]

In the summer of 1816,

in a rented villa just outside Geneva,

Mary Godwin and her travel companions

have been trapped inside by the bad weather for days.

She's come here with two literary giants.

One is Lord Byron,

the most famous and scandalous poet in England.

[Emily Zarka] There's a lot of controversy

surrounding Lord Byron,

who is a notorious rake and

sort of Lothario at the time,

pushing the boundaries of literature,

of life, of free love.

[Narrator] The other is also notorious.

He's Percy Shelley, Mary's future husband.

[Fern Riddell] Percy Shelley

is a famous young poet.

He's had some success.

He's become known as a new voice.

[Zarka] Mary and Percy Shelley were kindred spirits,

but their relationship was very taboo.

They met when Mary was a teenager

and Percy was already married with children.

[Riddell] To run away with a married man,

which is what the teenage Mary Godwin has done,

is the most scandalous thing that you can do.

But Mary is convinced that she's in love.

[thunder]

[Zarka] They, I'm sure, imagined their summer to be filled with,

you know, boat rides and leisurely walks

and time spent in the sun.

But the reality is that it was torrential downpour

for most of the summer on their supposed vacation.

[Narrator] The brutal conditions outside

trace back to a disaster that began a year earlier,

half a world away in Indonesia.

♪ ♪

[Dan Riskin] In 1815,

there's a volcano that goes off,

Mount Tambora.

It releases so much material up into the atmosphere

that the sun cannot get through.

And you end up with changed weather patterns for a full year

all around the world.

People called it "Year Without a Summer."

[Riddell] Crops fail and there's starvation everywhere.

It's a really terrifying time.

It's not a time where we understand

what is happening globally.

All people know at this time is that summer has vanished,

and no one knows if it's going to come back.

[Narrator] Nature suddenly feels unpredictable, even hostile.

For Mary and the others trapped in their villa in Geneva,

a growing sense of dread takes hold.

They turn to storytelling to pass the long, dark hours.

[Zarka] According to the records,

Byron proposed a dare for them:

to come up with the most scary story possible.

[Narrator] For inspiration, they delve into the dark tales

of old Europe, stories of ghosts, demons,

and the supernatural.

[Zarka] This was sort of their tales around the fire.

[Riddell] So, they're getting this idea of how to horrify

each other from the books that they're reading.

[Narrator] A spark that ignites Mary's imagination.

[Zarka] That evening, Mary said that she had a dream of a corpse

that was somehow reanimated.

[thunder]

And that spurred her on the journey to write Frankenstein.

[Narrator] Days after her dream, the 18-year-old teenager

begins drafting what will become

one of the world's greatest works of horror.

[Kinitra Brooks] Frankenstein is so ingrained

in our popular culture.

We are still talking about Frankenstein today.

[Riddell] Frankenstein's monster still resonates with us today

because the idea that the dead can come back to life

is actually a really ancient one.

We hope that somehow we might be able to change our fate,

we might be able to beat death.

[Narrator] As Mary begins shaping her story,

she draws inspiration from a new artistic

and intellectual movement sweeping across Europe:

Romanticism.

[Darren Reid] The Romantic Period

sees a return of human emotion

in the literary circles

of the time.

[Brooks] Romanticism is really, in part, a reaction

against the rationality of the Enlightenment Period.

[Michael Chemers] The Enlightenment was a movement

that began in the 18th century.

An embrace of rationalism,

logic, empiricism, and science.

Romantics believed that the Enlightenment,

for all the good it did, failed to account

for some of the most important parts of the human experience:

the vast, and the dark, and the deep.

[Narrator] A world beyond rational explanation,

where awe and terror give rise to creatures

born from the human imagination.

[Chemers] And so monsters become a very important part

of this tradition of romantic storytelling.

[Narrator] Beyond rising to Lord Byron's challenge

to create the scariest story ever,

Mary is also writing under the weight

of an extraordinary family legacy.

[Riddell] She's the daughter of these two

exceptional radical philosophers.

[Chemers] Mary Shelley's mother was a very, very important

feminist thinker named Mary Wollstonecraft.

And she had been married to Mary's father, William Godwin,

who was a great progressive intellectual of his day.

[Riddell] So imagine that pressure.

There is this massive expectation on her

that she will be a successful writer.

[Narrator] But being the daughter of two famous writers

also has its advantages.

[Zarka] Mary was brought up with more education

than most women at the time.

She was exposed to ideas and texts

that maybe other women her age wouldn't have come across.

[Narrator] Including books on science,

a key inspiration for Frankenstein.

[Reid] She is living in a world that's changing,

where science is on the rise,

where human curiosity is on the rise,

that allowed people to conceive

of new ways of thinking about the world.

[Narrator] This is the era of the Industrial Revolution.

An age of breathtaking progress,

where daily life is reshaped by steam power,

steel, and machinery.

[Reid] Scientific discovery is so wildly out of control

in this period.

It's almost every week something new is emerging.

So, a major theme of Frankenstein

is the fear of what science could unleash

if it goes unrestricted.

[Narrator] As science fuels industrial progress,

it's also transforming medicine.

One particular medical experiment

becomes a key inspiration for Mary Shelley's creature,

one conducted by an Italian physician, Luigi Galvani.

[Zarka] Luigi Galvani was an anatomy professor

educated at the University of Bologna.

He was very invested in experimenting with life,

what caused it, what could end it,

and what caused our bodies to move in the way we did.

[Chemers] There were many, many different theories

for how life actually works.

But Luigi Galvani believed that the vital spark

that animates living creatures was electrical in nature.

[Riddell] He's calling it animal electricity.

And it's this very old idea that comes to us

from the ancient world,

that your body is full of powers and forces that you cannot see

that give you that vital spark of life.

[Narrator] Galvani takes the idea one step further.

He believes this invisible force that gives body life

can be controlled from the outside, by electricity.

[Riskin] In the late 1700s, humans are just starting

to wrap their heads around electricity.

It's this brand-new phenomenon

that scientists are just learning about.

You know, today we have all these applications

for electricity that we don't think twice about.

But back then, it was unclear

how this stuff was going to be used.

We just knew that it had potential to be important.

[Narrator] And on January 26, 1781,

Luigi Galvani decides to test his electrical theory

on a dead frog.

[Riskin] He was working with

some very fundamental early tools.

There's something called a Leyden jar,

which is basically like a cylinder sticking down

into some salt water inside a glass jar.

And you can charge it by rubbing static electricity on it

so that it's got a charge ready to go.

And then if you touch it, it makes this pop,

and there's a spark,

and it releases all of its electricity at once.

[Narrator] Galvani's goal: to make the dead frog move.

[Zarka] He took legs of a recently preserved frog.

He then applied an electric current.

[Riskin] And lo and behold,

dead muscle tissue twitches.

[Chemers] He discovered that he could make the limbs

of dead animals move

if he ran an electric current through them.

[Riskin] Galvani didn't know how all of it worked,

but what we've come to understand now

is that our cells are set up

so that there is a charge differential

on different sides of the cell membrane.

And that is how a neuron sends a signal down.

That is how muscle activates so that the muscle twitches

and so that you can move things.

[Zarka] Which solidified his theory that it was possible

to stimulate this electric force in the body

and cause reanimation.

[Riddell] This is the big science,

the really exciting new discovery

that everyone wants to know about

and everyone wants to talk about.

[Chemers] These experiments appeared to be much on the mind

of Mary Shelley in Geneva in the year 1816

as a breakthrough and in our understanding

of how the human body works.

[Narrator] For Mary, the implications

are both fascinating and deeply disturbing.

[Zarka] If this idea of electricity is present

in, you know, living things,

then could we also use it to revive dead bodies?

[Narrator] That concept becomes even more terrifying

when another experiment suggests

it may actually be possible.

[Narrator] September, 1816.

After spending the summer in Geneva,

18-year-old Mary Shelley

makes the 740-mile journey back to England,

eventually settling in the spa city of Bath,

where she continues working on Frankenstein,

drawing inspiration from Luigi Galvani's frog experiment

and its implications that something dead

can seemingly be brought back to life.

[Riddell] She herself has said

it was hugely influential to her

and her understanding of how

the monster in Frankenstein

was given life.

[Narrator] Even more so after she reads of an experiment

conducted more than a decade earlier,

one that pushed the boundaries of science even further.

[Zarka] On January 18, 1803,

a crowd gathered

in an amphitheater

to watch some experiments.

Some of these people in the room were dignitaries and scientists.

[Narrator] They've come to London to witness

the latest work of Giovanni Aldini.

[Zarka] Giovanni Aldini was Galvani's nephew,

and he took his uncle's work even further.

[Riskin] Now, Galvani's work

has moved us centuries ahead

in terms of our understanding

of muscle.

But Galvani's nephew, Aldini,

a few decades later,

decides to look for more applications of this.

[Narrator] But Aldini's not interested in working on frogs.

He's using a dead human body.

[Riskin] Aldini's thought is, if I can make muscles

reanimate in an animal, could I do it in a human?

[Reid] Could the body

be brought back to life?

[Chemers] He took the body

of a recently hanged man,

a criminal named George Foster.

[Narrator] A brutal murderer executed

for drowning his own wife and child.

[Riddell] And within an hour of his death,

he's on a table in the College of Surgeons

in front of a huge audience.

[Riskin] Aldini attaches electrodes to the face

with saline solution so that it can transmit the charge.

And then he applies electricity.

[Zarka] When he applied the current to his head,

the jaw twitched, the face contorted.

[Riskin] And not only does the whole face contort

in this really grotesque way,

but the left eye opens.

Once Aldini has shown that this works on the face,

he starts doing other parts of the body as well.

[Zarka] And the legs and arms began to move.

[Riskin] It's moving the way a living thing does.

[Zarka] The crowd was shocked.

I mean, gasps were heard, people were shouting.

And many people interpreted this as being signs

that he had indeed restored life to the corpse.

[Reid] And the stories that come out of that

spread all across Western Europe.

There was something about death that wasn't quite as final

as people had previously imagined.

[Chemers] This moment had a profound effect

on scientific discourse over the next hundred years, really.

[Narrator] And a profound effect on Mary Shelley.

But something else is on her mind: death.

Less than a year ago, she buried her first child,

a daughter born too soon, and lost within days.

[Chemers] It was the child of Percy Shelley.

[Zarka] Mary's life was shrouded by death.

Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died a few days after childbirth

from complications.

[Narrator] While giving birth to Mary herself.

[Zarka] All of this is sort of culminating

in a very emotionally wrought experience.

[Brooks] So, she is doubting

her ability to create life.

She is asking these questions about God, about science.

Is there a way in which she as a woman can create a life

that doesn't cause her to lose her child,

and that doesn't cause her to lose her life

the way her mother did when birthing her?

[Riddell] So, she's experiencing that pain and loss and horror.

[Narrator] Dark feelings she shares

in her personal journals.

[Chemers] Mary Shelley writes pretty candidly

about this horrific recurring nightmare that she had

where she was confronted by the reanimated remains

of her own child.

[Zarka] There's a really moving and horrific line

in one of her journals where she is basically saying,

only if we could have rubbed her back to life

in front of the fire, if only that,

you know, spark could have been brought back to her.

[Riddell] To have had all of those experiences so young,

they are the core part of her work.

[Zarka] It definitely influenced her Frankenstein.

[thunder]

[Narrator] December, 1816.

Six months after Mary begins writing Frankenstein,

she leaves the city of Bath for a day-long carriage ride

back to her hometown, London.

[Riddell] Mary and Percy have been

together for a couple of years

when his wife Harriet dies.

Within a month, Percy and Mary have got married.

This legitimizes her, it makes her Mary Shelley,

the name that we recognize.

In London, she continues to flesh out the main character

of her novel, Dr. Victor Frankenstein.

[Riddell] Frankenstein is very much a man who believes

that through science and power and his own ego,

he can have the gift that God gives us, given to women,

the power to create life.

[Zarka] She had already lost a child.

So motherhood was something

that was important to her.

[Chemers] So, it's very difficult to imagine

that Mary Shelley did not have

these issues on her mind when

she was writing Frankenstein,

and that she was maybe

trying to find a way,

at least through Victor, for humans to procreate

without the danger of actually giving birth.

[Narrator] To do that, Victor creates a creature

stitched together piece by piece,

from human remains.

[Chemers] He assembles the body by getting raw materials

from graveyards, morgues, and charnel houses;

the charnel houses where they would store the corpses.

[Narrator] Victor Frankenstein may be a work of fiction,

but the questions Mary Shelley raises through his character

were very real.

[Riskin] At the time, Mary Shelley is writing

about this fictional doctor who

is creating a fictional monster

out of body parts,

real scientists and real doctors

are obsessed with the same kinds of questions.

People are dissecting cadavers,

they're changing their understanding of anatomy

and physiology and how the human body works.

[Narrator] For centuries, dissection in England

was heavily restricted, shaped by the religious belief

that the body must remain intact

for the soul to enter heaven,

until the Murder Act of 1752.

[Riskin] The Murder Act changes everything,

because now it is declared that any criminal who is executed

for their crimes becomes a cadaver

that can be dissected by doctors.

The thing is, although that does make quite a few available,

it's not enough to provide for the demand,

because there are so many people

who want to do these dissections.

[Reid] And what happens when

you've got a lot of demand

and limited supply?

Well, the market finds a way,

and, boy, did it.

[Narrator] A black market for dead human bodies emerges.

[Riskin] So, now you get graverobbers

going into cemeteries,

digging up recently deceased people,

and then selling those cadavers to medical schools or to doctors

to use for these dissections.

[Narrator] Societal anxiety regarding bodysnatching

is woven into Mary Shelley's novel.

Victor Frankenstein is determined

not just to study death, but to reverse it...

to create life itself.

An idea reflected in the book's subtitle,

The Modern Prometheus.

[thunder]

[Chemers] Prometheus is a character from Greek mythology.

And the story goes that Prometheus made humans

out of clay that he got from the river

and breathed life into them from his own divine spark.

[Narrator] What Prometheus does next

infuriates the king of the gods, Zeus.

He steals fire from him and hands it to humanity,

his creation, giving them the power to forge their own fate.

[Chemers] For this crime of stealing fire from Zeus,

Prometheus was chained to a rock,

and an eagle came every day to eat his liver.

And he suffered like that for 10,000 years

at the hands of Zeus.

Victor Frankenstein and Prometheus

are similar in many ways.

They both break boundaries that they're forbidden to break.

[Narrator] The difference is,

while Prometheus loves his creation enough

that he's willing to accept punishment for it,

Victor does the opposite.

[Chemers] When he sees the features of this creature

that he's created, he himself is struck with abject horror

about what he's done.

[Brooks] He is literally disgusted

by the child that he creates.

[Chemers] And he abandons his creation.

That's what makes him the modern Prometheus,

is that he created life, but then abandoned it.

Meanwhile, the monster goes on and tries to figure out

a way to survive in a cruel world where he is not accepted.

He's treated extremely badly.

And as a result, he realizes

that in order to get what he wants,

he's going to have to become violent.

[Riddell] One of the things Mary is making clear in Frankenstein

is a very parental thing.

She's very clearly saying, "When you create something,

you are responsible for it. You can't just abandon it."

[Narrator] Just as science can't abandon its responsibilities.

[Reid] Mary Shelley is trying to articulate

if science exceeds ethics, that it will lead to disaster.

[Narrator] A chilling warning that will shock readers

as Mary Shelley's novel is about to be unleashed

on the world.

[Reid] People were absolutely shocked by what it contained.

[Narrator] A year and a half after Mary Shelley begins

writing Frankenstein in Geneva, her novel is finally published.

It's released anonymously.

[Zarka] I think Mary's hesitance at the time

came from practical reasons.

Back then in the 19th century,

this kind of gothic story

that pushes the boundaries of

religion, conceptions of life,

and of human reality,

would've been probably dismissed at the time

had it come from a woman.

[Narrator] Another reason is her reputation.

[Riddell] There was quite a lot of scandal

around her and Percy at this time.

So, perhaps she didn't feel

publishing as Mrs. Shelley,

maybe she just wasn't quite ready for it then.

[Narrator] The book is poorly received.

A commercial failure.

[Reid] The first edition probably only sold

about 500 copies.

So some people loved it,

but those people who didn't

were absolutely shocked,

because it was pressing a lot of moral buttons

that made people deeply uncomfortable.

[Narrator] Four years after her novel comes out,

another major setback hits Mary Shelley:

the death of her beloved husband, Percy.

[Riddell] She's now also the tragic widow.

Percy Shelley drowned in Italy.

[Narrator] At only 29 years old,

he is found washed ashore after his boat sinks in a storm.

But within a year, Mary's fortunes start to turn.

Her novel is given a second life on the London stage.

[Riddell] Turning it into a stage play

is kind of a genius idea.

[Narrator] Because theater is the mass entertainment

of its day, Frankenstein reaches a much larger audience.

[Brooks] Remember, a lot of

folks couldn't read at that

point in time, so they got their

entertainment from stage plays.

[Chemers] So, in 1823,

the first theatrical production

of Frankenstein

was staged in London.

And the title of the play was called

Presumption! or, the Fate of Frankenstein.

[Riddell] And very, very quickly

it becomes the toast of the season.

It's performed 37 times in its first run.

[Reid] And that's when the monster himself

starts to become reinterpreted.

[Brooks] The creature is painted blue,

which later turns into green.

As well as this is the first time in which the creature

is referred to as Frankenstein.

Frankenstein is the name of Victor,

not the creature himself.

The creature in the novel is referred to as that,

the creature.

[Reid] Not only that, the intelligence of the creature

becomes greatly reduced.

He's been greatly dumbed down.

And like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy,

the more adaptations of Frankenstein happen,

the more corrupted and less elegant the story becomes.

[Narrator] But despite these changes,

Mary greatly appreciates this new attention.

[Chemers] Mary Shelley went to actually see this play,

and she wrote about it in a letter to a friend of hers.

[Riddell] When Mary goes to see the stage play,

she says herself, "Lo and behold, I found myself famous."

Which is this incredible moment where you see

that she's realizing this literary career

that she has been building,

this thing that she's been hoping for,

has come true for her.

She's a success.

[Narrator] As audiences continue to flock to stage adaptations

of Frankenstein, the novel's fears about science, death,

and the human body begin to play out in the real world,

in Scotland.

[Riskin] In the 1820s

in Edinburgh, Scotland,

the whole world of medical

education is just exploding.

[Zarka] And we also had an influx of people

moving into cities.

So Edinburgh became this hub of medical anatomy and education.

[Riskin] The only rate limiting step

is the availability of cadavers, because every single student

has to do dissections in order to graduate.

And there just aren't enough bodies to go around.

[Narrator] Making matters worse

is the 1823 Judgment of Death Act,

which now allows judges to commute death sentences,

reducing executions

and limiting the supply of bodies for dissection.

[Reid] Graverobbing cannot meet the growing demand for cadavers.

You can't dig up old bodies.

They're not usable.

They've decomposed, right?

So, what's the only solution?

Create a new cadaver for yourself.

And how do you do that?

Kill someone.

[Narrator] As Edinburgh struggles

with overcrowding and poverty,

two men living hand-to-mouth in the city's slums,

William Hare and William Burke,

see an opportunity to finally get ahead.

[Reid] Life in 19th century Edinburgh was grim.

And as beautiful as the city is now, it was a horror back then.

In fact, the locals used to call it Auld Reekie, or Old Smelly.

[Narrator] To make ends meet, Burke and Hare rent out beds

in their run-down boarding house.

[Chemers] In one case, one of their tenants perished

while in their care.

[Zarka] He was an older individual

who died of natural causes.

[Chemers] And rather than alerting the authorities,

they decided to take the body to a certain Dr. Knox,

who was an anatomist who was always looking for fresh bodies

to study and experiment on.

[Reid] Robert Knox was a highly respected surgeon,

and his anatomy lectures were famed in the city

for their insight and their accuracy.

[Narrator] And for fresh cadavers,

Knox is willing to pay top price.

[Reid] Robert Knox would pay the pair

around about 10 pound per body,

which was a lot of money in those days.

[Chemers] And so they hit upon a scheme that they might actually

not wait for people to just sort of die,

but maybe would hurry the process along

in order to make a little money.

[Reid] Burke and Hare turned to murder.

[Zarka] They would lure them into the promise

of lodging and safety, get them drunk,

and then suffocate them.

[Narrator] After killing their victims,

Burke and Hare would bring them to Dr. Knox.

[Zarka] And for all he knew, these were corpses coming

from totally regular circumstances.

[Reid] And that was how they were able to kill people

and then sell the bodies without suspicion.

[Narrator] Over a period of 10 months,

Burke and Hare kill and sell the bodies of 15 victims

until their murder spree finally comes to a stop

on October 31, 1828,

Halloween night,

with the murder of their latest boarder, Mary Docherty.

Before Burke and Hare can take her to Dr. Knox,

her body is discovered by two of their tenants.

[Zarka] At this point, there was literally a body on their hands,

and they were arrested.

[Narrator] But when the case goes to trial,

suspicion alone isn't enough to secure a conviction.

[Zarka] Despite Mary's body on their premises,

they didn't have enough forensic evidence to really convict them

until they convinced Hare to turn against his partner.

[Narrator] Based on his testimony,

William Burke is found guilty and sentenced to death

while William Hare escapes execution.

As for Dr. Knox, he is cleared of any wrongdoing.

[Chemers] Dr. Knox was able to say,

"Well, I had no idea where these bodies were coming from."

So, he avoided prosecution

because he just claimed ignorance.

[Narrator] The much-publicized scandal

exposes the sinister side of modern science.

[Zarka] The public conception of how the science was happening

had gathered additional attention.

And not just curiosity from the public,

but I think some criticism from the public.

So it was a much darker way

that the public was viewing science at the time.

[Narrator] Tapping into that dark cultural zeitgeist,

and bolstered by the theatrical success of Frankenstein,

Mary Shelley revises and republishes her novel.

[Riddell] What she does with that 1831 text

is make the monster even more monstrous.

[Reid] The creature is much less redeemable.

The emphasis is put much more on the creature

being inherently evil.

[Narrator] This time, she puts her name on the novel.

And this time, it's a smash hit.

[Riddell] Frankenstein is very much of the moment.

It's seizing on things that people are really fascinated by:

new science, God, creation, life, death.

It's a book that captivates the popular imagination

very, very quickly.

[Narrator] And as those anxieties evolve,

so, too, does the monster.

Frankenstein is poised to become a global phenomenon.

[Narrator] 20 years after the success of her revised edition

of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, just 53,

dies from what some now believe was a brain tumor.

But the monster at the heart of her novel,

and the questions it raises about scientific progress,

continues to draw in larger audiences.

[Brooks] Mary Shelley could

never imagine just how big

her creature would become.

[Narrator] By the early 20th century, a new medium is poised

to reshape Frankenstein once again.

This time through the power of film.

[Chemers] One of the first films

ever made was Frankenstein.

It was made by Thomas Edison

in 1910.

[Narrator] The film taps into a new scientific quest

to understand the human mind.

One that captures the imagination and anxieties

of a new generation-- psychoanalysis.

[Chemers] The film owes everything

to a reading of Freudian psychology

where the monster is actually an expression

of Victor's darkest side,

his most uncontrolled, monstrous aspect of himself.

Mary Shelley's story changes dramatically.

[Narrator] Over the next two decades,

the world, too, changes dramatically.

Through the Great War, modern science and technology reveal

terrifying new weapons capable of killing and maiming

in ways never seen before.

Millions are dead.

Millions more bear the scars.

[Reid] It's in that context that

body horror starts to emerge as

a popular form of entertainment.

In a world that's dealing

not just with death,

but bodily mutilation on a scale that was hitherto unimaginable.

[Narrator] It's into this fractured world that in 1931,

Universal Pictures releases its radically new vision

of Frankenstein.

[Announcer] When this dead hand moves,

the monster created by a man they called mad

is turned loose to strike terror into the hearts of men!

[Zarka] This pretty much changed the game

when it came to depicting the creature.

[Riddell] What the 1931 film does,

through Boris Karloff's incredible transformation,

is it's given us an image

of Frankenstein

that has never changed.

It's been in kids' cartoons, it's been in TV shows,

it's how you dress up at Halloween.

[Narrator] The film also immortalizes the role

of the monster's creator, Victor Frankenstein.

[Zarka] This film does become sort of the basis

for the mad scientist ideal

that we're familiar with in film

and in pop culture even today.

Him, you know, screaming,

wide-eyed, shaking his hands

in, like, excitement, "It's alive! It's alive!"

[Victor Frankenstein] It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!

[Zarka] It's both shocking but also comical.

That was different from the way Shelley portrayed him.

[Narrator] Through the 20th century and into the 21st,

the creature continues to be reimagined

from a stitched-together monster

to tragic figures born from science without ethics,

then abandoned by the worlds that create them.

[Chemers] As the monster evolves, it begins to take on

more and more characteristics of a complex character,

rather than merely an engine of destruction.

[Brooks] He is a creature for which we feel sympathy.

And recently we see this in Guillermo del Toro's adaptation

of Frankenstein, which stays true

to the essence of the story.

[Zarka] And that's something that I think Shelley

definitely valued, and I respect that he honored that.

But he does change some major elements in the story.

[Chemers] The monster has gone from being sympathetic

to being a sex symbol,

so Frankenstein's monster as a romantic hero.

[Brooks] Our contemporary body positivity movement

has expanded the bodies we understand as acceptable.

Bodies like the creature,

it's no longer someone you want to pity;

now it is someone that you want to love and care for.

[Narrator] Despite all the changes, one constant remains:

Mary Shelley's chilling warning that unchecked ambition

and progress could one day lead to disaster.

And for some, that day is already here.

[Riskin] This is the dark edge of science.

[Narrator] It's now been over 200 years since Mary Shelley,

on a dare by Lord Byron, wrote Frankenstein.

And in that time, the story has never lost its grip on us.

[Reid] Frankenstein becomes

the archetypal manmade monster

that deals with our obsession

with death, overcoming it,

and the limits of ethical science.

[Chemers] Frankenstein still to this day has a massive impact

on the discourse of scientific ethics.

I did a study one year

just recently of the number

of scientific journal articles

that use the word "Frankenstein"

in the title in some way.

And it was about 250 in a single year.

[Narrator] A term that's come to describe technologies

replacing the natural order of things.

[Chemers] So, we talk about genetic engineering,

the notion of human gene editing is quite horrific

and often referred to as a Frankenstein's monster

sort of enterprise.

[Riskin] In Mary Shelley's time,

you've got this idea that an arm

from one person who's died might

be reattached to someone else and used again.

And you can imagine that that's got a potential upside,

but it's also potentially terrifying

for all the reasons that she lays out in her book.

There are technologies today that are just the same.

We can take a baby who is born with a genetic disease

that will kill them in just a couple years,

and we can just change them so that the baby lives a full life.

But we can also, with that same technology,

decide that that baby shouldn't have brown eyes,

it should have blue eyes.

And there's a line there that we could cross

using exactly the same technology.

[Narrator] From cloning to gene editing,

Mary Shelley's fear of science overtaking ethics

has never left us, and it has thrived in popular culture.

[Chemers] Jurassic Park is, without a doubt,

a highly romantic take on Frankenstein.

There is science gone horribly wrong.

The dinosaurs are merely a symptom of the real problem.

[Narrator] At its core is a scientist

so blinded by ambition that he cannot foresee the disaster

his work is about to unleash.

[John Hammond] Our scientists have done things

which nobody's ever done before.

[Ian Malcolm] Yeah, yeah, but your scientists

were so preoccupied with whether or not they could,

they didn't stop to think if they should.

[Riskin] One of the things that makes the story of Frankenstein

resonate so well for everybody

is that it touches on a basic human fear about the future.

That we as a species are going to create a technology

that is going to have a life of its own

and we just stop being the dominant ones in control.

[Narrator] A fear that still resonates today

as AI becomes increasingly powerful.

[Brooks] Artificial intelligence

can be seen as today's creature,

today's Frankenstein.

[Riskin] There are some eerie similarities

between Frankenstein's monster and artificial intelligence.

First of all, they're both created by humans.

Second of all, they're built out of stolen human pieces.

Mary Shelley's monster is made out of all these body parts

that are stolen from people,

and artificial intelligence has been built from stolen pieces

of intelligence-- writing, books, movies.

All these things that we created have been absorbed

by artificial intelligence to make it smarter.

[Zarka] I think that we have created a technology

that has gone beyond our limits

of understanding

and our control.

[Riskin] When Galvani could take a dead muscle tissue

and reanimate it, he was playing God.

When Aldini could take a cadaver and make its face open its eyes,

he was playing God.

And scientists today, with artificial intelligence,

we're also playing God.

[Narrator] But fear of the unknown

is only part of the story.

[Narrator] As it was in Mary Shelley's time,

new technology also brings the potential for positive change.

[Chemers] One of the things that monsters teach us

is that we are always evolving.

And there is hope that we can adapt and evolve fast enough

to cope with the changing environment

in which we find ourselves.

[Riskin] The truth is that all the science that was going on

in Mary Shelley's time has led to great advances in medicine.

We have so much power now to heal

and to help people live longer lives.

[thunder]

[Reid] Frankenstein's monster endures because it reminds us

of our own capacity to make mistakes,

to create things we lose control of, to take responsibility

for those mistakes we do make

and to try to correct them.

[Zarka] What acts are good? What acts are bad?

What does it mean to be alive?

And I think those questions are so profound

and ones we still haven't answered yet.

[Riskin] That tension has just never gone away.

And that's why Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

still scares the devil out of us today.

[Chemers] It's a living story

that is told again and again and again.

And we still tell it to this day.