Original subtitles

- We're about to unfold the story of Frankenstein,

a man of science who sought to create

a man after his own image without reckoning upon god.

He deals with the two great mysteries of creation,

life and death.

I think it will thrill you,

it may shock you, it might even horrify you.

So if any of you feel that you do not care

to subject your nerves to such a strain,

now is your chance to

well we've warned you.

(thunder crashes)

- [Narrator] As our story begins,

sunlight seems to have suddenly vanished from our world.

An unusual dark dust cloud hovers over Earth.

The year is 1816 and no one suspects

that this colossal cloud is the result

of a massive volcanic eruption

that took place on the other side

of the planet a year before.

In Switzerland the end of the world

seems to loom over the region of Lake Geneva.

It's snowing in the middle of June

and night falls around noon.

(melancholy music)

(thunder crashes)

In a villa on the banks of the lake,

a young woman writes the story that came to her in a vision.

Mary Shelley, a young, quiet, and reserved

English woman left her father's home

at the age of 16 with her lover and future husband,

romantic poet, Percy Shelley.

Together they spend most evenings behind

closed doors in the company of their friends.

Among them is Lord Byron, one of the most

outrageous and daring poets of the period.

A rockstar of his times.

United by their love for sublime vertigo and gothic thrills

these bright and decadent dandies

drink opium wine, read ghost stories

by the fire and take pleasure in frightening each other.

One drunken night Lord Byron suggests a literary

challenge, each person is to write

a horror story.

- Mary, when Byron suggested they

should all write stories couldn't think of one.

She was distraught, every day

she came down to breakfast and they said

Mary Mary have you thought of a story yet?

No, she hadn't she was mortified,

she was embarrassed.

- Shelley would keep turning to her saying,

we expect a lot from you, Mary.

We expect you to be a great writer.

When are you gonna come up with this piece of...

Huge pressure my goodness on an 18 year old

to come up with something that's really special.

(solemn music)

- [Narrator] I busied myself to think

of a story, Mary wrote.

A story to rival those which had excited us

to this task, one which would speak

to the mysterious fears of our nature

and awaken thrilling horror.

One to curdle the blood and quicken

the beatings of the heart.

I thought and pondered vainly,

I felt the blank incapability

of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship.

- She went back to bed, she thought and thought

and the story didn't come until she fell into

a reverie, not a dream, but a reverie.

(mysterious piano music)

- [Narrator] That night, overwhelmed

by her own imagination her eyes wide shut

the young woman dreams with acute

precision of the pale figure

of the artist of sacrilege kneeling

before the hideous creature he has created.

Mary Shelley has just dreamed up

the very first monster of science,

Dr. Frankenstein's monster.

A creature that would mark centuries and minds

all over the world, the seed from

which modern science fiction would grow.

(unsettling music)

In the early 19th century, Mary Shelley's

entire childhood is devoted to reading,

dreams, and imagination, in one of England's

most eminent cultural circles.

In the pre Victorian era female writers are rare

but Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft

is an educated writer, philosopher,

and one of the first English feminists.

She writes novels, essays, and a history

of the French Revolution and becomes

famous for her Vindication of the Rights

of Woman, a critical piece denouncing

the patriarchal society of her time.

- Mary was still regarded as

the extraordinary unique heir

to Mary Wollstonecraft and she grew up

with a sense of herself as somebody special.

People came to look at her as Mary's child.

Shelley himself, when he came to visit

her father's house when Mary was 16

viewed her as this extraordinary creature, Mary's child.

(clock ticking)

Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother

who died tragically giving birth

to Mary after two suicide attempts.

(birds chirping)

It's clear that Mary from her earliest years

was visiting the graveyard,

going to her mother's grave,

tracing out probably her first

letters as she learned to read

by finding the letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

and making those into words herself.

And it seems very natural that that would

be the place to which she would take Shelley

as a young man courting her

at her father's house but secretly.

- [Narrator] Percy Shelley has deep admiration

for Mary's father, William Godwin,

the most radical free thinker of England

and fierce advocate of the French Revolution.

His reputation attracts all of the intellectual

elite in a century where the distinction

between artists and scientists

did not yet exist.

- She was an extraordinary young woman

and has had an extraordinary upbringing herself

with these very brilliant parents.

Most young women at the time did not have much education,

certainly couldn't go to university,

Mary Shelley couldn't go to university.

- She was very much formed by her parents,

William Godwin, political philosopher

Mary Wollstonecraft the Vindication of the Rights of Woman,

and she did have some formal education

but much of her education was sitting

at the dinner table of the Godwins

and all the great scientists and writers

of the day would come and have supper there.

- [Narrator] Mary is instantly captivated by Percy Shelley's

charisma, the brilliant 22 year old

is indeed quite the catch.

He has beauty, intelligence, pedigree,

poetic talent and revolutionary ardor.

This great romantic poet, fascinated by science

will be the true inspiration for the hero

of Mary's novel.

Despite his great liberal ideas,

Mary's father disapproves of this relationship

and permanently disowns his daughter

when she runs away with her lover

to take to the roads of France.

The escape of the young romantic

couple embodies the English avant garde

literary movement in search of inspiration,

thrills, and experience.

By car, on foot, or on the back

of a donkey their incredible journey

takes them through a country partly

destroyed by the Cossacks.

At the end of the road they discover the Alps,

Switzerland, Lord Byron and the gothic knights

which would lead to the vision of a hideous

creature and its obscure creator, Victor Frankenstein.

(thunder rumbles)

In Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein

isn't the name of the awful creature

but of its creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein.

Far from being the mad scientist we imagine,

the protagonist is a handsome and talented

young medical student.

This prince charming has a secret obsession,

a burning ambition, alone in his laboratory

like an alchemist, Victor Frankenstein is

searching for the secret of life.

He studies anatomy, examines the natural

decomposition of bodies and investigates

the boundaries between life and death.

- (foreign language)

(gate creaking)

- [Narrator] The young Dr. Frankenstein

aims to create a complete human being,

entirely from reassembled body parts.

To gather the pieces of this morbid puzzle

he digs up material from cemeteries

and visits slaughter houses for a grim

and sordid patchwork.

Early 19th century science was preoccupied

with the study of the human body.

- The first thing he does to go hunting

about in graveyards looking for bits of bodies

and this of course was very common

during Mary's upbringing because

there were grave robbers often medical students

who would get a little money from

bringing to their tutors, a suitable body

for anatomical work.

- [Narrator] The moon gazed on my midnight labors

while with un relaxed and breathless eagerness

I pursued nature to her hiding places.

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil

as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps

of the grave or tortured the living

animal to animate the lifeless clay.

- Victor Frankenstein describes himself

as being in a frenzy,

of being in a trance when he begins

the creation of his new human life.

We see this from the way he locks

himself in his laboratory for months,

the way that he does not emerge,

he does not respond for letters

from his fiancee Elizabeth Lavenza.

- He's quite arrogant in a way

and I think he feels that he's destined

for high things and nothing's really going

to stand in his way.

- (foreign language)

- And although Frankenstein's creation of life

from dead bodies might seem

far removed there is some association

I think in Mary Shelley's mind between

birth and death.

- In addition to the loss of her own mother

she had a tragic loss during the first year

that she was with Shelley of their

first little baby who they'd called Clara.

- I assume quite heartbreaking,

very short notes in the diary she kept

saying you know that the baby

was alright and then one morning

she wakes up and finds her baby dead.

(chimes ringing)

- And Mary then wrote in her journal

of having dreams where the child

had come back to life.

It's difficult not to think of that

when we see her two years later

writing the story of a creature

being quickened into life.

- (foreign language)

- [Narrator] Creating life, the idea

was also very appealing to great engineers

and brilliant inventors eager to recreate

the mechanics of life down to the smallest details.

At the time Europe was shaken by a new invention,

Jacques de Vaucanson and Jaquet-Droz

successfully created a series of larger

than life automatons.

With the help of surgeons they then

tried to recreate the main functions of the human body.

The automata of the Enlightenment era

embodied the scientific vision of the time.

The human body was a machine

and that machine could be broken down to pieces,

analyzed and duplicated.

Mary Shelley draws her inspiration from

this new current of modern thought

as well as from her own tormented personal experience.

- Mary's father suffered from narcolepsy

which is this curious illness of simply

falling asleep at the table

and appearing to be dead and then coming back to life again.

Well that's just something Mary

saw over and over again as a child.

And I think that must've fed into her idea

of how you can quicken somebody back into life again.

- Mary Godwin is fascinated by this moment

where you kickstart life

and in the novel, in 1818 she says

I got the instruments of life around me

that I might infuse a spark of life,

the word spark which is this divine spark.

Only it's coming from somewhere else,

probably from electricity.

(electricity sparks)

- [Narrator] Around the same time another

current turns the century upside down, electricity.

A mysterious energy that scientists are

only just learning to master.

In 1790 physicist Luigi Galvani is the first

to try and claim divine power for himself

by reviving a dead animal with electricity.

He conducts experiments on dead frogs

and manages to make their legs move.

A few years later, his nephew Giovanni Aldini

goes even further.

He tries to revive mammals before crossing the line

and taking on a human guinea pig.

- In 1803 he went even further and did an experiment

with a recently hanged criminal

called Foster from Newgate Jail, a murderer

and he put him on a slab, wired him up to a huge

voltaic battery to see what would happen

and he twitched and there were spasms

and crucially his one eye opened

and that's very very similar to the creation

scene in Frankenstein.

(electricity buzzes)

- (foreign language)

- [Narrator] A creature made of scraps,

scarred hands and face stitched together,

a fictitious character that foreshadows

the mutilated men.

The broken faces that were also

stitched up by surgery

and the first prosthesis of the time.

As though history had never ceased

to make Mary Shelley's novel

a reality for the last two centuries.

As early as 1910 Victor Frankenstein

found his first real life counterpart.

His name, Alexis Carrel,

a young brilliant surgeon, Carrel

began extracting organs from cadavers

in an attempt to transplant them

into living bodies.

He successfully sewed arteries and veins

which no one had ever done before.

He thus became a great pioneer of organ transplants.

Carrel operated in rooms entirely

painted black, everything must be black

he insisted even the surgical team's attire.

Consciously or not, Carrel quotes

the words of Victor Frankenstein.

In 1912 he wrote, one day science

will discover the mystery of life

and from that day on we will

be able to create human beings.

Three months later he would receive

the Nobel prize for medicine

and 20 years later Carrel sank into scientific madness.

He firmly believed in his intellectual superiority,

convinced that he belonged to an intellectual elite

whose duty was to shape humanity.

The surgeon became the apostle of a eugenic

movement proposing the elimination of madmen

and simple minded people.

It was as if the obsession with forging life

could only lead to disaster.

(suspenseful music)

(thunder crashes)

(clock ticks)

- [Narrator] It was on a dreary night of November

that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony,

I collected the instruments of life around me,

that I might infuse a spark of being

into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.

(thunder crashes)

(unsettling music)

- He selected all these elements to make

him perfectly proportionate, he's like Vitruvian man,

like Leonardo's man, everything is in proportion.

But when you look into his eyes there's something

odd about him, those watery eyes,

says Mary give the game away.

He's dead behind the eyes.

You look into his eyes and you realize

there's something missing.

- Victor Frankenstein is horrified when

he looks at his body he describes it as a catastrophe

and actually profanes saying great god

what had I assembled.

- I always find it very tempting

to say that it's all in the eye of the beholder

and that actually Mary intends us

not to see a hideous creature but to see

Frankenstein revolted by what he's done

and that makes the creature hideous.

(suspenseful music)

- Frankenstein lives and rushes out of the room

in a postpartum moment of depression.

The heart of the book is a manufactured

person rejected by his dad.

That's the key moment in the entire book,

everything else flows from that,

both ways before and after.

Rejected by his dad and the fact that it's

a creature who's been created without

the intersection of a mother.

(dramatic music)

- Come in.

Come in.

- [Narrator] How could Mary Shelley have imagined

that 100 years after her novel

the physical features of her creature

would forever be associated with the traits

of the actor Boris Karloff.

- Sit down.

- (foreign language)

- [Victor] Take care now, Frankenstein, take care.

- Nobody read Frankenstein,

it's a tiny expensive elite edition.

That's 1818, 1823 suddenly a play appears on the London

stage, it's a huge hit and by three years later,

eight different versions of Frankenstein

are on the west end stage in London,

eight different versions competing with each other.

And some changes have taken place.

The monster or the creature has become

the monster, is no longer highly articulate, he grunts.

(grunting)

(screaming)

Instead of being beautiful and well proportioned

with lustrous black hair, like in the novel

he's a bug eyed monster like Karloff, green makeup.

- [Man] Frankenstein made him out of dead bodies.

(grunts)

- All of that is invented by the theater,

that none of it's got anything to do with the novel.

And that's how it gets into the culture.

So when Hollywood makes the Karloff version

in 1931 it picks up on the theatrical tradition

as much as the novel.

(grunts)

(screams)

- [Announcer] Karloff, Karloff, Karloff.

- [Narrator] From that moment on the character

of Frankenstein's creature would appear

in over 100 films and plays, creating

a classic stereotype for the science fiction

and horror genres and becoming a key element of pop culture.

The numerous adaptations of the novel

spread the idea that Frankenstein

wasn't the name of the doctor,

but that of the creature.

More importantly, they established

the image of a mute monster devoid of intelligence.

In Mary Shelley's novel, the monster bears no name.

But he turns out to be a much more complex being

than he seems, perfectly capable

of reasoning and feeling.

Left alone, the creature escapes

from Victor Frankenstein's laboratory

and takes shelter in the forest

where he lives like a wild animal.

But far from remaining in a primal state,

he starts to evolve, he discovers the use of fire,

sharpens his senses, and marvels

before nature and the passage of the seasons.

- So the creature in some ways, embodies the whole history

of human evolution, birth, understanding

the senses, looking at the moon,

that wonderful scene where he looks at the moon

and tries to understand why it's light

in the day time and dark at night.

- [Narrator] In the process of learning

how to live in the wilderness,

the creature discovers what he looks like

and the gruesome ugliness of his face.

- He's seen himself, seen a reflection of himself

and that he's horrified by what he sees.

And I think that's very troubling

to the reader because partly

what Mary Shelley is doing there

she's again playing on an ancient myth,

she's playing and the myth of Narcissus

looking at himself and being

in love with what he sees and the poor

creature instead of being delighted

with what he sees is aghast and horrified.

(melancholy music)

- [Narrator] Now aware of his own appearance,

the creature wanders in the forest

like a wounded orphan, a glimmer of hope

shines upon him when he discovers the house

of a modest family and secretly watches them for months.

- He gradually listens to a family

and realizes this is language and he learns

their language and then he sees

them reading and he manages to work out

that the words that come out somehow

match these marks on the paper and then

he teached himself to read.

- He humanizes himself by watching these people,

how they care for each other, how kindly

they treat each other and how industrious they are

with their content with their little lot.

He seems like a good person,

he's blessing these people for bing

what he'd like to be.

- Very quickly the monster

adopts a very beautiful language.

He's far the most eloquent person in the book,

far moreso than Frankenstein.

- [Narrator] The more I saw of them,

the greater became my desire

to claim their protection and kindness.

I persuaded myself that when they should become

acquainted with my admiration of their virtues,

they would compassionate me, and overlook

my personal deformity.

Who can describe their horror

and consternation on beholding me?

- The minute they see him,

they see evil because he appears unlike them.

And because he is alien he must be bad.

- And so when he's rejected by people he goes bad.

- And the creature understandably takes

his revenge by burning the cottage down.

(melancholy music)

He isn't actually a monster in his spirit

at all and Mary goes out of her way

to show how the creature is right

when he tells us it's humanity

who make him what he is.

It's not what he is born as.

- In many ways this monster is created

from William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father,

his theories about the perfectibility of human beings.

- (foreign language)

- [Narrator] Was I, then, a monster,

a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled

and whom all men disowned?

The cold stars shone in mockery,

and I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me.

A slight sleep relieved me from the pain of reflection,

which was disturbed by the approach of a beautiful child.

He uttered a shrill scream, I grasped his throat

to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet.

- [Narrator] Faced with contempt and horror

the creature becomes a monster.

His gentle nature is gone, bitterness,

hatred and violence are all that is left.

Consumed with loneliness he takes a long

journey back to his creator,

the only person who can offer him the affection he longs for

Mary Shelley is haunted by a terrible fascination

with history, the great concepts

of freedom and equality that arose

from the French Revolution had paved

the way for a new era of hope

but ended up leading men to even greater misfortunes.

Mary Shelley's mother and father visit

France in December 1792 and are horrified

to see all their dreams of freedom

crushed by human perversion and injustice.

If men are good, then why did they turn evil

during the reign of terror?

The wonderful dream spearheaded by the people

had become a hideous, political monster.

(church bells ring)

In August 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley

leave their villa on the banks of Lake Geneva

and travel to the Sea of Ice,

a glacier at the foot of the majestic Mont Blanc.

(mysterious music)

They fall in love with the staggeringly

beautiful mountains, their jagged peaks

and eternal snow.

The Alpine landscape is a magnificent

yet dreadful vision that plunges them

into an odd trance, a mixture of pleasure and fear.

Overwhelmed by a deep sense of the sublime,

they stand before the dramatic setting

where the confrontation between the creature

and its creator will take place.

- But she thought this was a really desolate place,

the end of the world, great place

to have a cosmic meeting between

the creator and the created.

- And that's where they meet.

Above the glacier, above those massive frozen waves.

- [Narrator] I suddenly beheld the figure of a man,

at some distance, advancing towards me

with superhuman speed.

I perceived, as the shape came nearer,

sight tremendous and abhorred,

that it was the wretch whom I had created.

Rage and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance,

and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words

expressive of furious detestation and contempt.

Cursed be the day, abhorred devil,

in which you first saw light.

Cursed be the hands that formed you.

You have made me wretched beyond expression, begone.

Relieve me from the sight of your detested form.

- [Narrator] I expected this reception.

All men hate the wretched.

Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable

to every other and trample upon me alone,

to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency

and affection, is most due.

Remember that I am thy creature, I ought to be thy Adam,

but I am rather the fallen angel,

whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

(melancholy music)

- When he finally meets Frankenstein

on the glacier, he feels that

you know Frankenstein is kind of god like figure

who has created him and given him life

but then not looked after him

then sent him off into hell.

- He read three key books, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther

which told him all about growing up and friendship,

Milton's Paradise Lost which told him

all about what it's like to be the new Adam

and Plutarch's Life of the Greeks

which told him about heroic behavior, how to be a hero.

So his entire life is in those three works

of literature and he explains this to Frankenstein.

And so he says I've done all this and yet

everyone rejects me.

(melancholy music)

It's this rejected child

saying to his dad, come on dad

I need support, I need help, I need a partner,

I need to belong.

Mary Wollstonecraft in the Vindication

of the Rights of Woman writes,

the greater part of the horrors

in this world which stalk the world in hideous form,

she says, is down to the negligence of parents.

So there's a lot of autobiography in Frankenstein.

- The question of whether there's something

of Mary Shelley in the creature

is quite a tricky one I think

because her novel is dedicated to William Godwin,

it's dedicated to her father

and it's difficult to know how to read that

to know whether that is a genuine tribute

or whether there is something reproachful

in that on whether there is a sense

that she has been a neglected, abandoned child.

Mary Shelley is re writing the biblical creation myth.

She puts three lines from Paradise Lost

as the epigraph of the book,

did I request thee, maker to mold me man?

This is where Adam after the fall,

in Milton's poem is asking god,

why did you make me?

And of course this is basically

the big question the creature has

for Frankenstein when he meets him,

why did you make me?

- (foreign language)

- (foreign language)

- [Narrator] 50 years after Alexis Carrel's

experiments, Victor Frankenstein once again

finds a real life counterpart.

In a documentary called experiments in the revival

of organisms, Soviet propaganda shows

how new techniques allow various organs

to function independently.

A heart can now go on beating outside of the body.

And a dog's head separated to the body

can function thanks to a machine.

A few years later Demetri Demikhov

goes even further.

In 1953 he attaches the head of a puppy

on an adult dog's back and creates

a very strange creature.

- [Man] (foreign language)

- [Narrator] In the middle of the Cold War

American neurosurgeon Robert White

has a bigger ambition than his Soviet rivals.

In 1970 he tries an astounding operation.

Transplanting the head

of a monkey onto another monkey.

White claims he's conducting these experiments

in order to save human lives.

He imagines a patient whose head would be viable

but whose body would be fully paralyzed.

Why not transplant his head onto another body?

(sinister music)

Here's what he said a few years prior to his death.

- [Robert] I predict that what has always been the stuff

of science fiction, the Frankenstein legend

in which an entire human being

is constructed by sewing various body parts

together will become a clinical reality in the 21st century.

- [Narrator] Was this pure fantasy from a surgeon

driven mad by his own powers?

Or a necessary transgression in order

to prolong life?

How far can and should science go in manipulating

bodies and creating hybrids?

Where do we draw the line?

- (foreign language)

- The bride of Frankenstein.

(celebratory music)

- [Narrator] Soon, a female version

of the creature appeared in the movies.

In Mary Shelley's novel, however

the events take a rather tragic turn.

Moved by the plea of his creature,

Victor Frankenstein agrees to cross another boundary.

He promises to make him a mate.

And so the monstrous Adam would have

an equally twisted Eve

and finally bid loneliness goodbye.

- So Victor Frankenstein agrees to create

a mate on condition that the creature

will disappear into the wilds of South America

in the jungle and never be seen again.

So off he goes and travels across Europe

and eventually goes to this remote island

in the Orkneys to as far away

from the scientific community as possible

and it's all very remote.

Always very remote, you gotta be

as remote as possible from any sort of mainstream science.

(mysterious music)

- If he does bring her to life

she does mate with the creature

they might produce a new race

of creatures that are going to be

bigger and more powerful than mankind

and that instead of mankind blessing

him as a great hero he's actually

going to be the cause of the destruction of the human race

so that worries him.

But there's another very interesting

anxiety he has which is the thought

that when he animates this creature,

she might look at the monster and think

I'm having nothing to do with him.

I'd much prefer Victor, so there is this

real sexual fear that this huge female creature

might pursue him.

(melancholy music)

- In this makeshift laboratory

he starts creating a mate and successfully

pulls off the operation for a second time

which by the way means it's replicable

which means that in scientific terms, it worked.

(dramatic music)

- And quite quickly he seems to create

this female and is ready to bring her to life

but then he stops.

- Then in this terrible scene in Scotland

he makes a mate and then aborts it.

And throws all the piece of the mate all over.

And the creature's watching, that's it.

It's no more mister nice guy after that.

You know he almost creates a mate

what a dreadful thing to do so not only

does he reject the creature

but he aborts the creature's mate.

At that point the creature turns into Boris Karloff.

- I shall be with you on your wedding night.

- After that of course there's no quarter

from the creature he's gonna go around,

he's gonna destroy, if he can't have a mate

he's gonna destroy Frankenstein's mate.

So he kills Elizabeth on their wedding night.

(screams)

- [Narrator] It came from the room

into which Elizabeth had retired.

She was there, lifeless and inanimate,

thrown across the bed, her head hanging down

and her pale and distorted features

half covered by her hair.

While I still hung over her in the agony of despair,

I happened to look up.

With a sensation of horror not to be described,

I saw at the open window a figure

the most hideous and abhorred.

A grin was on the face of the monster,

he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger

he pointed towards the corpse of my wife.

- [Narrator] By depicting the murder of the doctor's fiancee

Mary Shelley's novel reaches an unprecedented

level of violence and terror.

The reserved young woman is long gone.

She has become a fully fledged writer

who has freed herself from all conventions

with startling audacity.

Her story was so visionary that two centuries

later the Frankenstein novel has become a myth

for the modern world.

(delicate music)

- Frankenstein's heart, Lieutenant.

- Frankenstein?

It's still living?

- It can never die.

- Never?

- Frankenstein's story is very old, you've never read it?

- One of the extraordinary things about

Frankenstein is that an 18 year old girl

managed to create what's really a modern myth.

So myths are always bigger than the basic story.

They reflect some need in society

and they also have this capacity to transform

and be applied by later generations that's

kind of what myths do.

- I mean to me it means a novel,

it means theater productions, it means films,

it means all sorts of things.

But out there, for people who haven't read the book

and maybe haven't seen that many

of the movies either the F word is about

a brilliant way of expressing anxieties about progress.

(explosion sound)

- 1945, Japan, the atomic apocalypse

hits Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The words of American scholars seem to resonate

like an echo to Mary Shelley's novel.

My god, what have we done?

- I think the obvious application

of Frankenstein perhaps in the 20th century

would be something like the atom bomb.

The idea of a scientist pursuing what

seems very legitimate research, something

that's groundbreaking but then

immediately or very soon afterwards

has very destructive consequences

which are not something that the scientists

might've foreseen.

I think this is something she's

very prophetic about actually.

- I think Frankenstein is the creation myth

for the modern world.

A world where human beings have taken control

of things that used to be attributed to god.

(electricity buzzing)

- [Narrator] With her creature,

the young novelist foresaw a world

in which science and technology would dominate

man's future even if it meant

denying our own humanity.

Today, science explores new forms of life

and seeks to recreate them with artificial creatures

like a new species transcending human kind.

Will man ever be supplanted

and subjugated by the beings he has created?

Will we ever hear an android, a cyborg

or any kind of artificially intelligent creature

utter the same words that Mary Shelley's monster

said to Victor Frankenstein?

You are my creator, but I am your master.

- We've crossed a line,

we've crossed a line that shouldn't be crossed

and I think that is the fear that haunts

the technological age.

That it's a step into the void,

just as the monster steps into the void

at the end of Frankenstein.

(melancholy music)

- [Narrator] In the final pages

of her novel, Mary Shelley leads her characters

towards the end of their tragic journey,

consumed by the loss of his fiancee Elizabeth,

Victor Frankenstein has only one obsession left.

To destroy the monster he created by chasing him

onto the arctic ice even at the cost of his own life.

- We've got the science of vitalism,

we've got electricity, we've got galvanism,

she added a new science, polar exploration.

And she thought this is a great setting for a big finish

for Frankenstein.

(ice cracking)

- They're pursuing each other into a more and more bleak

and barren world into this desolate place,

the kind of murder glass of the north.

The creature and the creator almost

seem to have become one and united

in their hatred of each other.

- Frankenstein is on the trail of the creature

and the creature is on the trail of Frankenstein

and they're both sort of hunting each other,

they just locked into this hunter and hunted relationship

and it doesn't matter how it ends,

they just trudge off together.

(mysterious music)

- [Narrator] I was hurried away by fury.

revenge alone endowed me with strength and composure.

I beheld my enemy at no more than a mile distant,

but now, when I appeared almost within grasp of my foe,

my hopes were suddenly extinguished,

a ground sea was heard, the thunder of its progress

became every moment more ominous and terrific.

In a few minutes a tumultuous sea rolled between me

and my enemy, and thus preparing for me a hideous death.

(waves crashing)

(unsettling music)

- [Narrator] Victor Frankenstein dies a victim

of his obsession and his irresponsibility

towards his creature.

His fate and tragic end are reminiscent

of the mythological character Prometheus

who stole the fire of knowledge and made

men out of clay thus unleashing divine punishment.

Mary Shelley made Victor Frankenstein a modern Prometheus

as indicated in the second title she gave to her novel.

(dramatic music)

At the end of the story,

the creature is left alone to mourn

the death of his creator, like a child

abandoned forever.

- [Narrator] Oh, Frankenstein,

what does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me?

thou didst seek my extinction,

that I might not cause greater wretchedness

and thou wouldst not desire against me

a vengeance greater than that which I feel.

Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine,

for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease

to rankle in my wounds

until death shall close them for ever.

- There is a hint that the creature

is just going to do away with himself

out of a state of misery, and you know

there's nothing left for him in the world

and in a way the purpose of his life

had become this terrible pursuit

of the purser and the pursuit

and once that's gone

there's nothing left, he has no mate.

But what happens is he just disappears into

the darkness.

- And he's gone.

Into the dark and the ice and that's all.

- [Narrator] And now, I bid my hideous

progeny to go forth and prosper,

Mary Shelley wrote in the preface to her novel.

For 200 years the creature has devotedly

honored his creator's wish.

He has left such a strong mark on the collective

psyche that everyone has almost forgotten

about his literary origins

and the novelist who gave him life.

(waves crashing)

(dramatic music)