The Cultural Legacy of Frankenstein

The enduring legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is all around us, in the books we read, the shows we watch, the music we listen to, the costumes we wear, the items we consume and even in the language we use. In print and television advertisements the creation scene alone has long been an ironic touchstone for a wide array of products and services. More grimly, media outlets have even associated Frankenstein with the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Frankenstein complex’, a term coined by the science fiction author Isaac Asimov long before that outbreak, describes a universal fear of robots that continues unabated amid the rise of AI in virtually every aspect of our lives. And yet, since May 2025, animatronics of Frankenstein’s monster, along with the Bride, Ygor and other characters inspired by the movies based on Frankenstein and other Gothic novels, have thrilled huge crowds at Universal’s Epic Universe in Florida. Metallic or wooden effigies of the creature can be found throughout the world, including outside Frankenstein’s pub in Edinburgh and on the northeast corner of Plaine de Plainpalais in Geneva. Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein has been a prominent tourist destination in Bath since 2021. Frankenstein Day is celebrated throughout the world every 30 August, the author’s birthday. The Frankencast, a dedicated podcast, keeps recovering cultish or obscure adaptations of Frankenstein and related works. Curated by David Sandner, The Frankenstein Meme houses a vast database of Frankensteiniana.

Frankenfiction

Frankenscience, frankenfoods, frankenstorms, frankenphemes, frankenwords: these and related neologisms constantly pop up in academic journals and the media. Scientists, engineers and creators of all kinds keep expanding the intellectual ramifications of the Frankenstein story. Writers and artists continually revisit the plots and characters – so much so that ‘Frankenfiction’, to adopt Megen De Bruin-Molé’s term for literary mashups, has become commonplace in an age of cultural recycling and transmedia adaptation. Musicians have found in Frankenstein ample metaphors and imagery with which to work. Film scholars and reviewers keep describing blockbuster movies as ‘Frankensteinian’, regardless of genre, whether it is a musical horror comedy like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) or dystopian science fiction, most notably Blade Runner (1982), or even superhero team-ups such as X-Men: First Class (2011) and Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). There are Frankensteinian television programmes, such as ‘Be Right Back’ (2013), an episode of the technohorror anthology series Black Mirror (2011-present) in which a woman in mourning struggles to accept an android replicant of her dead boyfriend. Cybermen, emotionless posthumans that have long stalked Doctor Who (1963-present), are well-known descendants of the world’s most famous man-made creature. In ‘The Haunting of Villa Diodati’, a 2020 episode, a lone Cyberman even travelled back to 1816 in pursuit of a mysterious substance inadvertently kept by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the real-life lover of the future author of Frankenstein (then known as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin). The multimedia Whoniverse is not done with the Frankenstein story, as Jack Heath’s recent addition to the Doctor Who novels series, Frankenstein and the Patchwork Man (2025), attests. And the Cybermen will surely return, again and again.

Stage and Screen

Mary Shelley’s hideous progeny has prospered beyond her wildest, darkest dreams –increasingly so over the past half-century amid the expansion of commercial and populist means of cultural production, including self-publishing services, fan fiction fora and social media. Obscuring the book’s ambiguous descriptions of the ‘fiend’, ‘daemon’, ‘creature’, ‘wretch’, ‘devil’, ‘being’ and ‘ogre’, Boris Karloff famously personated Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ on screen during the 1930s. Nearly a century later, that iconic, usurping portrayal now contends with relentless waves of parodies, pastiches and reworkings in every conceivable type of textual and visual representation. The creature also looks like Herman Munster, Frankenweenie and Benedict Cumberbatch (or Jonny Lee Miller, depending on which night you saw the National Theatre’s staging of Nick Dear’s Frankenstein in 2011 as they interchangeably played the lead roles). Ygor, Igor or Igor-like figures have permanently joined an extended cast of characters. A multimedia engagement with Frankenstein is not a modern phenomenon. Staged within five years of its appearance as a novel, a play version renamed Presumption, or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) by Richard Brinsley Peake enjoyed immediate success in London. Fritz, the prototype of the bumbling assistant also known as Igor or Ygor, and other elements introduced or adjusted there, quickly took hold of the public’s imagination. Imitations, variants and burlesques followed that year and ever since. One of the most influential stage versions was written by Peggy Webling, in 1927, and formed the basis of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). The popularity of that film led to the making of many sequels from Universal Pictures, including the widely imitated Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Hammer Studios followed with their own miscellaneous series in the 1950s and well into the 1970s. Film and television adaptations have appeared in every subsequent decade and at least three more are in production for major studios.

Monster mashups

Monster mashups as diverse as the American television and spinoff film series The Munsters (1964-2022), the television and comics serial Penny Dreadful (2014-20), and multimedia family franchises like Hotel Transylvania (2012-present), have played with Shelley’s properties for years. Comic books, graphic novels and manga have proven particularly popular spaces for Victor Frankenstein and the creature, including frequent cameos in the most famous stables in the industry, DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Michael A. Torregrossa found in the Grand Comics Database 3,671 examples produced up to 2018, but even this does not track cartoon strips and other types of quotidian but no less clever word-and-image publication. Lavish visual reworkings are legion. A sequel to a 1983 illustrated version of Frankenstein published by Marvel Comics, Steve Niles and Bernie Wrightson’s unfinished comic series Frankenstein Alive, Alive! (2012-18) follows the suicidal monster as he navigates civil society after the death of his creator. Kawashima Norikazu’s sadomasochistic manga Her Frankenstein (1986; translated into English in 2023) sees a wimpy teenager adopting the appearance of Karloff’s monster to impress a beautiful but disturbed cinephile. Nobuhiro Watsuki treats Victor as a real scientist in Embalming (2007-15). The master of horror manga, Junji Ito produced an earnest but highly inventive treatment of the novel in the mid-1990s, and this was made more widely available to English-speaking audiences in 2018. M. Chandler and Linus Liu followed with a volume published under the Manga Classics brand in 2020 (also called Frankenstein). Derivatives of Karloff’s monster have appeared in mainstream cartoon series, Scooby-Doo (in 1969) and Rick and Morty (in 2015 and again in 2023) among them. The monster also takes on the antagonist role in the long-running Konami video game series Castlevania (1986-present), as well as in dozens more game-based Gothic team-ups. More direct adaptations of Frankenstein have been issued on the leading systems such as Nintendo, Sega and Atari. A more recognizably Shelleyan creature recently helmed La Belle Games’s The Wanderer: Frankenstein’s Creature (2019).

Novels, poems and plays

The creature has popped up in other novels, including one of Stephen King’s most famous horror stories, It (1986). King has revisited Mary Shelley’s themes throughout his career, in such novels as Pet Sematary (1983) and Revival (2014). Frankenstein has also long fascinated today’s leading writer of speculative fiction, Margaret Atwood. Such influence manifested early in her career as the poetry cycle Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966) indicates. One of Scotland’s most popular contemporary poets, Liz Lochhead, devoted a whole collection to the creative revelries of the Frankenstein story, Dreaming Frankenstein (1984), as well as a psychodrama now known as Blood and Ice (first performed in 1981 as Mary and the Monster). Important writers around the world keep invoking Shelley’s work – most notably, in recent years, Ahmad Sa‘dāwi, whose Frankshtāyin fī Baghdād (2013; translated into English as Frankenstein in Baghdad by Jonathan Wright in 2018) won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and the grand prix de l’Imaginaire. Or leading novelists have contrarily striven to produce anti-Frankenstein works, as in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019). Amid this lengthy and broadening cultural afterlife Frankenstein has also been retold many times in prequel, sequel and spinoff novels, and they are the focus of my book Frankenstein Retold (2026).