Birth of Frankenstein

Young people today associate Frankenstein and Dracula with the monsters created for them in film and TV, not the originals in print that are a bother to read. I read an abridged version of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula” when I was in grade school and learned what an epistolary novel was like, the narrative running through a series of letters and diaries.

Dracula on the page wasn’t as terrifying as the film character that typecast Christopher Lee. I also asked why a creature that could transform into vapor or a bat at will, a creature with superhuman powers and a gaze irresistible to women could be repelled by simple items found in any Pinoy home, like garlic or a crucifix. Perhaps Dracula was born in the wrong time because he is a perfect endorser for sun block cream and better makeup. Maybe my yaya used him to force me to pray and eat more adobo.

In many vampire films I saw before reading Stoker’s novel, Dracula was killed in many ways: trapped by running water, impaled on a cross, burned to cinders by early-morning sunlight, or dispatched with a wooden stake through the heart as he slept in a satin-lined coffin that held earth from his birthplace. Stoker’s Dracula was decapitated with a bowie knife, and his hunters protected themselves or imprisoned him in a circle of consecrated hosts. The difference between the print and film Dracula made me reflect on what people wear in Halloween costumes today and conclude that a primary source of terror actually comes from Hollywood, not our own culture.

When Capiz started an aswang festival that the humorless Church doused with holy water, I thought it was a novel idea that would preserve and popularize our folklore and the creatures of Philippine lower mythology better known as: aswang, tianak, tikbalang, mambabarang, manananggal, etc.

These creatures are close to extinction because they cannot survive in an urban setting.

Manananggal will get caught in TV antennae, electrocuted by live wires, or get cancer from cell site towers. The tianak that sucks unborn babies from their mothers’ wombs had her work cut out for her when Pinoys lived in bahay kubo with thatched roof and bamboo-slat flooring. But how can she get her fill from people who live in concrete houses with CCTV and security guards? And the type that steals cadavers from wakes will find the embalmed, formaldehyde-enriched corpses inedible.

Vampires and aswang are things of the past, and the modern Pinoy has other things to be scared of, like: traffic, abusive cops, corrupt politicians, and a galaxy of tasteless TV and movie stars. To curb the tide a bit, I once considered teaching a course on the 19th-century horror novel, which led me to the preface of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or “The Modern Prometheus” (1818) that reads:

“I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than anything I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story founded on some supernatural occurrence.

“The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. The following tale is the only one which has been completed.”

In another preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley provided more detail on the genesis of Frankenstein:

“Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and [my husband Percy] Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.

“They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin (I speak not of what the doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.

“Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bound of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together; I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out; and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

“The idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of terror ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still. The very room, dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else.

“I returned to my ghost story—my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night! Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”

The next morning Mary wrote the first line:

“It was on a dreary night of November.” The story turned into the novel that gave us Frankenstein.

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu