Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Detroit Riots of 1943

Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man is playing at the Mayfair theater in Detroit. Outside, a car is overturned, ablaze. This is not an accident. It’s June 1943 and the Race Riots are sweeping through the city.

In the early Forties, when the city’s automobile plants switched to wartime production, recruiters scoured the Southern States for manpower, drawing some 300,000 whites and 50,000 blacks to the Motor City. Racial tensions flared as early as 1941, when blacks were settled into newly built housing projects. Cross burnings and violence ensued. The tension reached its fever peak in the spring of 1943 when blacks were promoted at U.S. Rubber, Hudson, and Vickers. White workers walked off the job when blacks were allowed into the Production Department, served as plant guards or were hired as tool-makers. In late May, over 26,000 men paralyzed Packard assembly lines when a handful of black workers were brought onto the factory floor to work alongside whites.

The riots, fueled by spurious claims of violence by either side against the other, ignited on June 20 and roared for three days, until Federal troops restored peace. Blacks bore the brunt of the violence. An investigation revealed that of the 34 people killed, 25 of them were blacks. Of 600 people injured and 1800 arrested, over 75% were African-Americans. A recurring story tells of blacks being pulled off city buses and beaten. Blacks driving their cars were stopped and chased away, their cars demolished and burned.

The Riots made the local papers, but very little information traveled beyond, censored so as to preserve national morale in wartime. At best, a few American newspapers ran short items about brief cases of “labor unrest” in Detroit. It would take decades for the story to be fully revealed.

The Mayfair theater on Woodward Avenue was built as a synagogue in 1902, it’s striking Beaux-Arts dome structure the work of Albert Khan, the “architect of Detroit”. It was transformed into a playhouse and civic theater in 1922 and modified again into a movie house, The Mayfair, in 1930. The building was taken over as a performance space by Wayne State University in 1951 and now serves as the Bonstelle Theater.

The Mayfair went dark on those terrible days of June, 1943. Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the quaint Hollywood horrors within were no match for the real monsters prowling outside.

The Bonstelle Theater on Historic Detroit.

From the Frankensteinia Archives:Genesis of Frankenstein

Significant anniversaries this past week: It was 195 years ago that Mary Shelley first conceived of Frankenstein, and it was 80 years ago that Robert Florey filmed a now legendary and famously lost test reel, with Bela Lugosi, for Frankenstein at Universal Studios. Here, from our Archives, is a post celebrating these events.

June 15, 16 and 17 are important dates in Frankenstein history.

In 1816, on the evening of June 16 and late into the night, the very concept of Frankenstein was first seeded.

In the spring and summer of that year, the extreme weather conditions created by the massive Tambora volcano explosion blanketed Europe with violent thunderstorms. Out on Lake Geneva, at Cologny, the vacationing Lord Byron and his guests were confined within the walls of the Villa Diodati. As rain poured and thunder cannonaded across the Jura, Byron, his physician John Polidori, his friend Percy Shelley, Shelley’s companion and wife to be Mary Godwin, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont gathered around the fireplace and entertained themselves as best they could.

On that appropriately stormy night of June 16, Byron read aloud from a book called Fantasmagoriana, a 1812 French translation of a German collection of ghost tales. Influenced by the stories — as described in the book’s subtitle, of specters, revenants and phantoms — Byron suggested a game. “We will each write a ghost story”, he said.

As Mary wrote in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, “I busied myself to think of a story, a story to rival those which had excited us to this task.” It would take a few days before inspiration struck, as Mary claimed, in a waking dream. The first reference to Frankenstein would appear in her diary on June 24.

One hundred and fifteen years later, in 1931, writer-director Robert Florey and a skeleton crew assembled on the leftover sets from Dracula, the stairs cleaned of their cobwebs and the parquet redressed with lab equipment, to shoot the legendary — and lost — Frankenstein test reel, with Bela Lugosi as The Monster. Rehearsals were held on June 15, filming proceeded on the 16th and 17th. Though accounts differ wildly as to Lugosi’s appearance in makeup, the test, reportedly twenty minutes long, was the talk of Universal. Within ten days, James Whale had exercised his power at the studio and taken over from Florey, and the project was on its way.

Frankenstein was inspired by a book of quaint ghost stories and a parlor game for bored and excitable intellectuals. On the very same day, one hundred and fifteen years later, Robert Florey directed the screen test for the first talking Frankenstein picture.

The first event was the genesis for Frankenstein. The second one made Frankenstein an icon.

Previous posts: The Villa Diodati. Mount Tambora.

Fantasmagoria is available again, complete and in a new English translation.

Shelley's Ghost

A rediscovered painting of Mary Shelley, never shown before, is just one of the treasures currently on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. The small oil painting, dated to 1843 and attributed to Richard Rothwell, surfaced in 1955 and has only recently been recognized for what it is. Another, later portrait of Mary by the same artist is quite famous.

Shelley’s Ghost is an extraordinary exhibition devoted to Mary Shelley, her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. On show are notebooks, letters, art and artifacts, over 100 pieces in all, including the original manuscript of Frankenstein and precious personal objects such as Mary’s delicate dressing case and Percy’s carefully preserved baby rattle.

One particularly poignant object is an elaborate gilt display containing locks of Mary, Percy and their child Florence’s hair, along with one of Percy’s quill pens.

There was a time when a snippet of hair was a prized memento and Mary no doubt cherished these souvenirs of her beloved Percy. One of his tresses is dated 1822, the year he died. Mary was apparently generous with her own clipped curls. Mary Shelley expert and collector Daniel Raymond of Montreal reports that another lock of Mary’s hair, originally sent to an admirer, is kept at the New York Public Library.

Barring a trip to England, Shelley’s Ghost can be experienced through its dedicated and amazingly complete website, a stunning achievement in itself. All the exhibits are pictured and heavily annotated, and you can even read Frankenstein in manuscript form. There are numerous supplements including podcast readings of letters and poetry, contemporary music, and a map of a walking tour of Shelley in Oxford. There's also a fascinating video introduction by the show's curator, Stephen Hebron. The site’s layout is beautifully realized, navigation is easy and perfectly intuitive. One hopes the site, a significant resource, will stay up well after the show closes, come March 27.

Click through to the Shelley’s Ghost website and explore the lives and works of a remarkable literary family.

Shelley’s Ghost website.

Frankenstein manuscript.

Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family is the exhibition's companion book, by Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth C. Denlinger.

Related:
Portraits of Mary Shelley

Frankenstein in Paris

A vintage postcard of a Paris landmark, the storied Théâtre des Gobelins on the avenue of the same name. Boulevardiers, bistro habitués, a cyclist and, perhaps, theater staff pose outside. A postmarked stamp indicates 1908, but the photograph itself might date ten, even fifteen years back. Of particular interest to us: The sandwich board poster advertising the theater’s current offering, Le Monstre et le Magicien, the French Frankenstein play. It’s very likely the first ever photograph of a Frankenstein marquee.

“The Monster and the Magician”, directly inspired by Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, the London stage phenomenon of 1823, opened in Paris at the Porte Saint-Martin in 1826. Not only would its success rival that of the British original, Le Monstre borrowed Presumption’s star when T.P.Cooke, the first actor to play Frankenstein’s Monster, came to Paris to reprise his celebrated role in the new French version. Amazingly, Le Monstre was still being staged eighty years on, at the turn of the century. I could find no listing of the players for this version, the last actor of record to play the Monster’s part being a certain M. Ravel in a revival of Le Monstre et le Magicien at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique in 1861.

The Gobelins, a spacious 800-seat theatre, was built in 1869 as a home to large-scale spectacles the likes of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Its unique and elegant façade, dominated by the floating figures of a man and a woman representing Drama and Comedy, was sculpted by Auguste Rodin, no less, in his young Beaux-Arts student days. The Gobelins began showing films in 1906 and became a permanent movie house in 1934. The aging interior was gutted and transformed into a twin-screen cinema in 1993, operating as the Gaumont Gobelins-Rodin until its final closing in 2003, and used as a warehouse since then.

The good news is that the original façade has survived, protected under the historical monument act, and an entirely new building is currently being erected behind it to house the Pathé archives and museum.

Gobelins, though suggestive of folkloric monsters, is actually the name of a famous family of 15th century dyers whose factory turned to tapestry work in the early 1600s. The name, today, is literally synonymous with fine tapestries.

Théâtre des Gobelins postcard on Carthalia.

With thanks to Jeffrey Eernisse.

Frankenstein in the Park

Colin Clive and Mae Clarke take five at a rare location outing for Frankenstein, shot between August 21 and October 3, 1931. Note the microphone hanging overhead.

Film historian Jack Theakson identifies the mike as a cylindrical Western Electric model, either the 47-A or the 53-A. The sturdy device swiveled at top and bottom, allowing the operator to aim the mike as needed. Introduced in 1928, the model proved enormously popular for broadcast and film applications and remained in use until the mid-thirties when condenser mikes were phased out in favor of the newer ribbon-type microphones.

The location here is the original Busch Gardens, the direct ancestor of today’s amusement park empire. Once the winter home of brewing magnate Adolphus Busch, the 32-acre spread was opened to the public in 1913 and became a prime tourist attraction, even getting its own Pacific Electric Railway stop. The park offered miles of scenic pathways, botanical wonders, fountains, manmade waterfalls, rare birds and a collection of vividly colored sculptures of fairy tale characters. Events included dog shows, boat rides, alfresco entertainment, and your admission ticket sometimes entitled you to free beer.

The park’s studio proximity translated into its frequent use for outdoor scenes, notably in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone With The Wind (1939). The Frankenstein crew stopped over on a beautiful summer day to shoot the brief, bucolic scene where the ever-patient Elisabeth tends to her convalescing fiancé, Borzois lounging at their feet. By the way, Borzois were also featured in the sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), seen pulling maid Una O’Connor around in the opening scene at Villa Diodati.

Interestingly, another famous horror film, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had begun shooting on the same day as Frankenstein, August 21. The connection carried through to Busch Gardens, where Fredric March’s Jekyll would sit on a bench and, upon observing a cat attacking a nightingale, spontaneously transform into the monster Hyde.

The original Busch Gardens closed in 1937 and the city began cutting up the park for housing. A few artifacts such as terracing effects, treetrunk-shaped cement troughs, and bits of stone walls and fencing remain, scattered among the private homes in the area.

A technical description of the Western Electric 47-A Amplifier.

Remembering Busch Gardens, from Pasadena Living Magazine.

Pasadena Gardens, an illustrated history of the original Busch Gardens.

With thanks to Sally Stark for the wonderful photograph, and Jack Theakson for the technical information.

Benjamin Franklin Meets Frankenstein

Based on Duplessis’ famous etching of Benjamin Franklin, with a little Karloff thrown in, artist Mikey Hester has designed a nifty Franklinstein t-shirt (image slightly cropped here), available through the Threadless online store.

The connection between the Franklin and Frankenstein has been explored extensively. The real-life Franklin and the fictional Victor Frankenstein were contemporaries, and both were electrical experimenters. Frankenstein observed a tree shattered by lightning, and Franklin apocryphally flew a kite and a key in a thunderstorm, inspiring movie Frankensteins to release kites, capture lightning and zap monsters to life.

Mary Shelley was familiar with Franklin and his experiments. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was tutored in politics by Dr. Richard Price who supported the American Revolution and corresponded with Franklin. One of her publishers, Joseph Johnson, had released Franklin’s works in London, and her lover, Gilbert Imlay, was American and a Revolutionary fighter. Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, was influenced by Franklin’s politics and he was a member, as was Franklin, of the scientific Royal Society of London. Mary Shelley’s companion, Percy Bysshe Shelley, studied Franklin and was conversant with electrical experimentation.

There is frequently quoted speculation that Mary’s choice of name for her scientist was inspired by, and perhaps even an homage to Franklin, though “Frankenstein” was not a rare name and Mary had almost certainly encountered it in 1814 during her trip down the Rhine and a stopover in the vicinity of Burg Frankenstein. Nevertheless, it is said that Franklin’s electrical experiments were so widely known and notorious that the novel’s original readers, back in 1818, would have easily made the Franklin/Frankenstein connection. Many scholars have since explored the influence of Benjamin Franklin on Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy and Mary Shelley, and its reflection in Mary famous novel, making Founding Father Benjamin Franklin one of numerous men of science of the era who are thought of as the “real” Frankenstein.

A quick Googling reveals that images mashing Franklin and Frankenstein are fairly common. A few are sampled here: Another t-shirt, this one on Zazzle; The greenish character is Benjamin Franklinstein, "American leader in the field of undead rights", as profiled on the Uncyclopedia; The black and white image is from Young Franklinstein, a Spanish site, and the Franklinstein photograph is from Komplexify. There’s more, if you care to go looking.

Lastly, courtesy of Wonderful Wonderblog, Franklin-Stein appears on an Ohio lottery ticket from Halloween 2008.

Mary Wollstonecraft history source: Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler’s The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein (2006).

Related:
Monster Money

Frankensteinian : The Secret of the Golem

The August 2008 issue (#238) of the British Fortean Times magazine carries a fascinating and significant article about the Golem of Prague, meticulously researched by Ivan Mackerle.

The legend tells of Rabbi Loew of Prague, in the late 1500s, who fashioned a powerful Golem to protect the Jewish community from its enemies. One day, the creature ran amuck, bringing death and destruction to the ghetto. Deactivated, the Golem was hidden away in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, the stairs to the storeroom removed and access thereafter forbidden.

Tracing the origins of the legend and a possible basis in historical fact proves problematic.

According to ancient lore, Golems were never built as warriors. They were meant as a test of sorts, an experiment to measure the abilities of their Kabbalist creators. The Talmud names five Rabbis who made Golems, but Rabbi Loew is not among them. Golems were animated with magical words carved into their foreheads or worn around their necks, but Rabbi Loew animates his Golem in a very unusual manner, inserting a slip of magical parchment into its mouth.

Key characters and locations in the story cannot be found in historical documents, and there is no record of the pogrom that would have motivated the creation of a protector Golem. Most tellingly, it seems that Rabbi Loew himself cannot be placed in Prague on the crucial dates in the legend.

Closer examination of the tale reveals a creature that behaved rather un-Golemlike, a “strangely down-to-earth” creature, as Mackerle puts it. Golems quickly grow in size until they become unmanageable, but this one lived quietly for twelve years, performing simple household tasks. He even had a human name, Yossele.

Here Mackerle formulates an interesting hypothesis that, given the lack of historical evidence to support the legend, could explain Rabbi Loew’s unusual Golem. Mackerle’s purpose is to demonstrate that something, somehow, could have inspired the legend. Imagine, then, a man who suffered from a form of mental illness, taken in and cared for by the kindly Rabbi. He suffers from occasional fits, perhaps an epileptic condition. The legend’s parchment inserted in the mouth could suggest medicine taken orally, or the practice of placing of a rag in the mouth during a seizure. Ultimately, the man suffers a violent and very public attack of some sort, a burst of uncontrolled anger, and dies. In the end, the event is hushed up, “to avoid unpleasant consequences for the rabbi and the ghetto”, and the body of the strange man is relegated to the attic.

Whatever inspired the tale of the Prague Golem, the story of its purported resting place in the Old-New Synagogue’s attic has yielded numerous stories of death, or madness and otherwise horrified reactions for its rare visitors. Well warned, and armed with ultrasound equipment and the permits that took two years to obtain, author Mackerle concludes his investigation by climbing the iron rungs to the building’s roof and its forbidden storage space.

Unless the Golem has been long removed — and there are many claims to that effect — or it has crumbled into dust, of which there is plenty packed into drifts among the rafters, the Old-New Synagogue’s attic proves barren of monsters or new clues.

Ivan Mackerle’s article is like a supernatural detective story, intelligently written and packed with details. It’s a wonderful read, a valuable document of Golem lore, and well worth seeking out.

A sidebar article by David Sutton chronicles the Golem in culture, touching on the claim that Mary Shelley was inspired by the old legend. There is no evidence of this, but there is no doubt that the Golem movies of Paul Wegener had some degree of influence on James Whale and the writers and designers of the Universal studio’s Frankenstein of 1931.

The beautiful cover painting is by Owen Richardson.

Also pictured: A statue of Rabbi Loew in Prague, and Paul Wegener as The Golem (1920). Note the Frankensteinian "asphalt spreader's" boots.

The First Monster: T.P.Cooke

It was on this day 185 years ago — 28 July, 1823 — that the first performance of the first Frankenstein play was given in London. The first actor to ever play Frankenstein’s Monster was T.P.Cooke.

Thomas Potter Cooke, born in 1786, served in the Royal Navy as a boy. He was still a teenager when he quit the sea and embarked on a stage career that, over a span of 56 years, would make him one of the most popular actors of his century. His specialties were monsters and sailors.

In what seems like an endless repertoire of nautical dramas, Cooke became known as “the sailor of the British stage”. His heroic sea-farers so captured the popular imagination that, according to Maura L. Cronin, “the actor became the embodiment of a ‘national son', a patriotic figure with cross-class appeal.” His success was such that it inspired early forms of merchandizing. Fans could purchase colored engravings or porcelain figurines of the actor posing in sailor roles such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Long Tom Coffin. Yet, in an era when actors embraced typecasting as a ticket to fame, Cooke boldly jumped genres and enjoyed equal success playing supernatural villains.

In August 1820, Cooke took on the part of Lord Ruthven, Polidori’s Vampyre, first imagined by Lord Byron on that fateful stay at the Villa Diodati that provoked Mary Shelley into writing Frankenstein. Cooke dressed his Ruthven in a silver breastplate, a kilt, sandals and a feathered hat. A vanishing trick using a puff of smoke and a breakneck trap door caused a sensation. After his 1823 Frankenstein, Cooke would play Vanderdecken, the “Balzacian, diabolical genius… a half-living, half-dead, rational lunatic” (J.Q.Davies, The Opera Quarterly, 2005) in the 1826 production of The Flying Dutchman; or, the Phantom Ship, penned by the notorious “Fitzball”, Edward Ball. The New York Times reported that a ghostly magic lantern effect in this one was “a marvel of stage illusion”. Back in 1823, the winning illusion of Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein was Cooke himself.

As The Monster, Cooke wore a wig of wild hair, a tight-fitting tunic, and exposed skin colored a light blue. In various reviews, Cooke’s face is said to have been white, blue or a pale green. A fellow actor, William Oxburry, wrote that “T.P.Cooke gave the charnel house monster a green, putrescent hue.”

Confusion about Cooke’s exact facial coloring would persist (it could have changed over his numerous returns to the part), but reviewers were unanimous in praise of Cooke’s performance. The London Morning Post report was typical: “T.P.Cooke well pourtrays what indeed it is a proof of his extraordinary genius so well to pourtray—an unhappy being without the pale of nature—a monster—a nondescript—a horror to himself and others… Too much cannot be said in praise of T.P.Cooke, his development of first impressions, and naturally perceptions, is given with a fidelity to nature truly admirable. Take for instance the pourtraiture of his first sensations on hearing music, than which nothing can be finer.”

The music scene, often praised, was an inspired piece of pantomime where The Monster, hearing a flute, snatches at the empty air and holds his fists to his ears. Mary Shelley herself, attending the play in late August, was delighted with this. Cooke’s Monster was mute, and his whole performance relied on what was then called “dumb show”.

The most memorable scene in the play would be The Monster’s spectacular entrance, stumbling out of the laboratory and crashing through a high balustrade to the ground to confront a dagger-wielding Frankenstein. Oxburry recalled, “What can be more dreadful than his manner of walking against the balustrade…”

An engraving (reproduced at top) immortalized the scene. It shows The Monster in streaming light, towering over its disarmed creator, the sword snapped in half. We get a fair idea of The Monster’s toga-like costume, but the face is an idealized portrait of the actor, not a representation of his Monster who, reviewers said, had a shriveled, ghastly complexion with straight black lips. Images of Cooke in his numerous roles are all more or less the same (see a large selection here). He always appears dead center in an operatic pose, legs wide apart, arms raised, dressed in different costumes but, for all the different hats, wigs or occasional whiskers, the face is always the same, natural and recognizable.

The play was a phenomenal success. It quickly moved to a larger theater to accommodate the crowds, and copycat versions were hitting London stages within a month. By year’s end, five different versions — including burlesque parodies — had been fielded. Over the next three years, no less than fourteen versions were staged in England, France and America. In a revival of Peake’s version, actor Richard John O. Smith, a reliable stage villain who had often played the dastardly pirate to Cooke’s noble sailors, would inherit the part and, in turn, achieve a degree of fame as The Monster, though not as indelibly as T.P.Cooke.

In July 1826, Cooke traveled to Paris to appear in a new version of the story, Le Monstre et le magicien, at La Porte Saint-Martin. James Robinson Planché, recalled, “his success was so great that “monstre bleu”, the color he painted himself, became the fashion of the day in Paris.” Blue or green, color confusion continued as Le Journal des Débats reported, “we saw with pleasure that the monster, so frightening with his green skin and counselor’s wig, had very good manners…”. In England, Punch noted that Cooke was “the original Monster in Frankenstein — and a very original monster, too, who made a furore in Paris, and gave the color to gloves, Vert de monstre (monster green)”.

In an October 1853 article, The Illustrated London News calculated that T.P.Cooke had portrayed The Monster 365 times, “a whole year in the company of the Monster”. The writer recalled Cooke’s Monster as “that shape-less, sightless, speechless, mass of movement without thought, that glides forward rather than walks”. Cooke’s unique approach to supernatural roles was praised: “Others played ghosts and demons with unquestionable success; but how mechanically, and solidly… It was he who first infused them with a true poetic element – gave them a dreamy indistinctness – a vague suggestive shadow, which, while it chained the sense, set the imagination loose… proof of how art – which is so powerful in giving beauty its due force – can even serve to redeem the gross, and throw a charm over the appalling!”

T.P.Cooke and his Monster are forgotten now, but Cooke’s performance was, for a time, the unavoidable influence, the template for Frankenstein’s Monster. You can still see a reference to it in Charles Ogle’s wild Monster of the Edison Company’s Frankenstein film, in 1910.

For a century, no less, Cooke’s Frankenstein Monster was an image as pervasive and iconic as the flattop and bolts version of Boris Karloff, in Jack Pierce’s makeup, is to us, today.

References:

A detailed remembrance of T.P.Cooke, by Maura L. Cronin.

Text of the play, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, and the first reviews.

Genesis of Frankenstein

June 15, 16 and 17 are important dates in Frankenstein history.

In 1816, on the evening of June 16 and late into the night, the very concept of Frankenstein was first seeded.

In the spring and summer of that year, the extreme weather conditions created by the massive Tambora volcano explosion blanketed Europe with violent thunderstorms. Out on Lake Geneva, at Cologny, the vacationing Lord Byron and his guests were confined within the walls of the Villa Diodati. As rain poured and thunder cannonaded across the Jura, Byron, his physician John Polidori, his friend Percy Shelley, Shelley’s companion and wife to be Mary Godwin, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont gathered around the fireplace and entertained themselves as best they could.

On that appropriately stormy night of June 16, Byron read aloud from a book called Fantasmagoriana, a 1812 French translation of a German collection of ghost tales. Influenced by the stories — as described in the book’s subtitle, of specters, revenants and phantoms — Byron suggested a game. “We will each write a ghost story”, he said.

As Mary wrote in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, “I busied myself to think of a story, a story to rival those which had excited us to this task.” It would take a few days before inspiration struck, as Mary claimed, in a waking dream. The first reference to Frankenstein would appear in her diary on June 24.

One hundred and fifteen years later, in 1931, writer-director Robert Florey and a skeleton crew assembled on the leftover sets from Dracula, the stairs cleaned of their cobwebs and the parquet redressed with lab equipment, to shoot the legendary — and lost — Frankenstein test reel, with Bela Lugosi as The Monster. Rehearsals were held on June 15, filming proceeded on the 16th and 17th. Though accounts differ wildly as to Lugosi’s appearance in makeup, the test, reportedly twenty minutes long, was the talk of Universal. Within ten days, James Whale had exercised his power at the studio and taken over from Florey, and the project was on its way.

Frankenstein was inspired by a book of quaint ghost stories and a parlor game for bored and excitable intellectuals. On the very same day, one hundred and fifteen years later, Robert Florey directed the screen test for the first talking Frankenstein picture.

The first event was the genesis for Frankenstein. The second one made Frankenstein an icon.

Previous posts: The Villa Diodati. Mount Tambora.

Fantasmagoria is available again, complete and in a new English translation.

The Ghosts of Frankenstein's Castle

I noticed a significant bump in readership this week. Some of it is traceable to my new MySpace Frankensteinia presence (if you’re on MySpace, add me!) and some of it is due to interest generated by the broadcast on the Sci-Fi network of a Ghost Hunters International episode on Frankenstein’s Castle.

The show focuses on purported ghostly happenings at the Castle ruins in Darmstadt, Germany, with only a passing reference to Mary Shelley having supposedly been inspired by a visit there. Mary’s famous novel is described as being “about a mad scientist who created this monster out of body parts”. No kidding, that’s a direct quote. And this, by the way, seems to be the standard level of research expended for the entire program, which turns out to be something halfway between Scooby-Doo and Reality TV.

Legends, folklore and rumors are the hard facts upon which our intrepid reporters base their investigation. We are treated to lots of quick-edit fisheye shots of the rather nondescript castle (nothing at all like the one in the photograph above), accompanied by a mournful Halloween soundtrack. Most of the program is shot in spooky night-vision black and white, the player’s eyes glowing eerily as they stalk the castle overnight with their handheld digital ghostbuster equipment. “Entities” we are told, “communicate with sound that is beyond human hearing”.

The team’s Ludicrous Meter must have gone off the scale when they stood around asking questions out loud, trying to raise a medieval German knight and his ghost fiancée. I’m guessing that the “entities” present *have picked up some colloquial American over the 400 years they’ve spent haunting the premises and that they understand the concept of speaking up “so we can tape you”, and the meaning of the command to “rock the pews”. Best laugh in the show comes when one of the investigators shouts, “Yo, hey! Come on out! Let’s go!”.

Nothing much happens, except for host Donna Lacroix being “freaked out” by moving shadows. We visit a bare room billed as “Frankenstein’s Secret Laboratory” and a tiny chapel occupied by a statue of a bad luck knight who broke his neck and is said to have hung around forlornly ever since. He puts in an appearance of sorts, rattling a doorknob.

The Ghost Hunter team interview “Frankenstein expert” Walter Scheele, a charming man who’s excellent, slightly accented English is inexplicably subtitled. Mr. Scheele, by the way, is the historian who floated the disputed theory that Mary Shelley knew about the experiments of alchemist Konrad Dippel and used this as a springboard for her tale.

At the end of the program, Mr. Scheele identifies some recorded noise as a voice saying, “Arbo ist hier!”, and that’s the clincher. Ol’ Arbogast von Frankenstein himself checked in, so it’s case closed.

The team auto-pronounce their rather uneventful evening “a complete success!”. Mr. Scheele’s restrained, polite satisfaction is interpreted as “over the moon” and he is said to have been “totally taken aback and dumbfounded!”. The hosts are shamelessly self-congratulatory throughout the program and completely bowled over by their own “methodology and protocol”. In the end, your reaction to the program will depend on whether you judge it by what you’ve seen, or what the enthusiastic hosts tell you you’ve seen.

The program is viewable online on the Sci-Fi network’s Ghost Hunters International website. Streaming will not work if you’re outside the U.S., but you can see it in five chunks on YouTube, starting here.

I blogged previously about Castle Frankenstein here and here, and you can see the Castle itself live on the Burg Frankenstein webcam.

Frankenstein's Bicycle

Inventor Karl Drais lived in Germany, across the border from Switzerland, where Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. Among other things, Drais invented an early stenographic typewriter, a type of wood stove, a means of recording music on punched paper, and the screw-driven meat grinder still in use today. Just like Mary Shelley, Drais was influenced by the effects of the explosion of Mount Tambora. Mary crafted a story that became a modern myth. Drais invented the bicycle.

Drais’ original concept, a two-man, four-wheeled vehicle, predates the Tambora event. Drais had begun working on a simple, human-powered conveyance in 1812, but it was the devastation wrought by Tambora that accelerated his work. In 1816, while Mary Shelley started on Frankenstein, harvests failed and a food crisis gripped Europe. Horses were slaughtered for meat. Drais was moved to develop a means of horseless transportation. His early designs were simplified for use by a single rider. Two wheels were aligned, front and back. The rider straddled the vehicle and propelled — and stopped it — with his feet. Drais called the invention a Running Machine. It was sometimes referred to as a hobby-horse. It would become known as a draisienne, or draisine.

In 1817, even as Mary Shelley was writing her book, Drais staged demonstrations in which he drove his device long distances in record time. Enthusiasts began to experiment with the new vehicle. Going downhill without brakes produced near-inevitable crashes. Unpaved roads being too hazardous, draisines were tested on sidewalks, resulting in pedestrian collisions. By 1818, the year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published, Drais’ early velocipede was being banned all over Europe. The inventor moved on to other things.

Karl Drais died in 1851, the same year Mary Shelley passed away.

The draisienne, of course, came to be improved upon with chain drives, brakes and reliable steering, leading in a direct line to today’s sophisticated bicycles and motorbikes.

Next time your ride your bike or fire up the Harley, have a thought for Karl Drais, Mary Shelley, and their volcanic inspiration.

A lively history of Karl Drais and his invention on New Scientist.

A biography, and the draisine, on Wikipedia.

An historical chronology of the bicycle.

Frankenstein's Volcano

Mount Tambora stands on the island of Sumbawa, south of Borneo. It is one of 150 active volcanoes that dot the 17,508 islands of Indonesia.

In early April of 1815, Tambora kicked into gear, spewing dark clouds, jets of fire and lava. After a week of heavy activity, Tambora detonated with a force estimated at four times that of the famous explosion of 1883 at Krakatoa. It is the most violent volcanic eruption ever recorded in human history. Roughly half of the mountains’ height of 4300 meters (14,000 feet) was pulverized and shot as hot ash 45 km (150,000 feet) straight up into the stratosphere where it began its slow slide around the planet.

Some 10 to 12,000 people died as a direct result of the explosion, the choking rain of ash and fire, and tsunamis it provoked. By the time its effects dissipated, some 5 years later, Tambora had killed an estimated 70,000 worldwide through extreme weather, famine and disease.

The sheer volume of ash from Tambora, along with that of lesser explosions that year at La Soufrière in the Caribbean and Mayon in the Philippines produced a volcanic winter, perverting the global climate. Beyond the immediate and catastrophic effects across Indonesia, the sulfurous shadow of Tambora reached around the globe.

Through summer and fall of 1815, England experienced brilliant red sunsets. In Italy, pumice floated on rivers and red snow fell. The snow was a muddy brown in Hungary.

In 1816, the Northern hemisphere would experience its coldest summer on record. The northeast United States was enveloped in a dry fog that neither rain nor wind could disperse. Through the veil, sunspots could be observed with the naked eye. Frost destroyed crops in New England and river ice appeared as far inland as Philadelphia. Up in Quebec City, a foot of snow fell in June.

Crops failed ‘round the world, spreading famine in China, then on to Ireland. Food was rare and prices rose across Europe, provoking riots in Britain, France and Germany. Rainfall that year was twice the annual average.

That summer, in 1816, in Switzerland, on Lake Leman, just outside Geneva, Lord Byron’s guests arrived at Villa Diodati. The vacationing party included Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (she and Percy would wed in December), Claire Claremont and John Polidori.

Mary Shelley wrote, “…it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” She remembered watching lightning storms marching across the mountains in the evening: “One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up – the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.”

Trapped indoors, the party entertained themselves reading ghost stories. You know the rest.

Frankenstein was seeded in the heart of a volcano. Wrapped in dark clouds and catastrophe, it raced clear around the world to meet its mistress, signaling its presence in the electric scrawl of unnatural lightning. Today, through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the explosion of Mount Tambora is still being felt.

On Wikipedia, read about Mount Tambora and The Year Without a Summer.

A fascinating discovery: The Lost Kingdom of Tambora.