This monster tale is true! 
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT . . .
One dreary night in 1816, a handful of writers huddled by a fire, listening to a storm rage outside. The friends often got together to read ghost stories, but on this night, one of them—a poet named Lord Byron—challenged the others to a scary-story writing contest. They all took pen to paper and began, but only one of them ever finished. She was the youngest writer in the room—just 19 years old—and her name was Mary Shelley.
Mary’s spooky tale was published as a novel two years later. The book was so terrifying, many people doubted that a teenage girl could have written it. Some thought her husband—a poet named Percy—wrote it. (He didn’t.) The story is grisly—it’s about a scientist named Victor who builds a creature by fusing dead bodies together. Everyone the monster meets treats him cruelly, so he murders the scientist and the scientist’s family.
Sound familiar? It should: Mary Shelley’s fictional monster was named after its creator: Victor Frankenstein. Despite all of its gruesome parts (or maybe because of them), Frankenstein became a huge success.
A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT . . . THE SEQUEL
Mary Shelley died in 1851, but if she were alive today, she’d probably be proud of the legacy her novel has left behind. Frankenstein has been adapted dozens of times into plays, movies, comics, songs, commercials, video games, and other books.
Some of the most popular movie adaptations feature actor Boris Karloff playing the monster. Karloff starred as the creature in three films during the 1930s: Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and Son of Frankenstein. In each of the movies, he’s dressed as a tall hulking man-like monster with a broad forehead and clamps coming out of his neck. To play the part, Karloff wore four-inch platform shoes that weighed in at 26 pounds. He also had a square-shaped block stuck to his skull by makeup artists. The block was designed by artist Jack Pierce, who spent months studying anatomy and surgery for inspiration.
“I figured that Frankenstein, who was a scientist but no practicing surgeon, would take the simplest way [to] put in a brain. That is the reason I decided to make the monster’s head square and flat like a shoebox and dig that big scar across his forehead with the metal clamps holding it together,” said Pierce.
Karloff did not enjoy dressing up for the part. “I spent three and a half hours in the makeup chair getting ready for the day’s work,” he said. “The makeup itself was quite painful. There were days when I thought I would never be able to hold out until the end of the day!”