Suggested Media List
The NLM offers a list of books, films, and other media related to the traveling exhibition, Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature/Frankenstein: Penetrando en los secretos de la naturaleza. Consider planning reading clubs, movie screenings, or other types of public programming to engage your community while hosting this traveling exhibition.
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones | 1818 | ISBN: 9780743487580 | 280 (varies by edition) pages | high school and up | Fiction
Genre: Gothic horror/English literature/classic/Victorian/science fiction
Told in an epistolary narrative, Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment that involved putting it together with different body parts. When the creature escapes, Frankenstein wrestles with his decisions.
Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan Tyler Hitchcock
W.W. Norton & Company | 2007 | ISBN: 9780393061444 | 352 pages | college/adult | Nonfiction
Genre: Horror/Film/Monsters/history
A lively history of the Frankenstein myth, tracing its evolution from a Romantic nightmare to its prominence in today's imaginative landscape. Frankenstein began as the nightmare of an unwed teenage mother in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816. At a time when the moral universe was shifting and advances in scientific knowledge promised humans dominion over that which had been God's alone, Mary Shelley envisioned a story of human presumption and its misbegotten consequences. Two centuries later, that story is still constantly retold and reinterpreted, from Halloween cartoons to ominous allusions in the public debate, capturing and conveying meaning central to our consciousness today and our concerns for tomorrow. From Victorian musical theater to Boris Karloff with neck bolts, to invocations at the President's Council on Bioethics, the monster and his myth have inspired everyone from cultural critics to comic book addicts. This is a lively and eclectic cultural history, illuminated with dozens of pictures and illustrations, and told with skill and humor. Susan Tyler Hitchcock uses film, literature, history, science, and even punk music to help us understand the meaning of this monster made by man.
Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Science Nonfiction by Michael Sims (editor)
Bloomsbury | 2017 | ISBN: 9781632860422 | 395 pages | Adult | Nonfiction
Genre: Science fiction/Victorian literature/Horror/Monsters/short stories/History
Long before 1984, Star Wars, or The Hunger Games, Victorian authors imagined a future where new science and technologies reshaped the world and universe they knew. The great themes of modern science fiction showed up surprisingly early: space and time travel, dystopian societies, even dangerously independent machines, all inspiring the speculative fiction of the Victorian era. In Frankenstein Dreams, Michael Sims has gathered many of the very finest stories, some by classic writers such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells, but many that will surprise general readers. Dark visions of the human psyche emerge in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "The Monarch of Dreams," while Mary E. Wilkins Freeman provides a glimpse of "the fifth dimension" in her provocative tale "The Hall Bedroom.' With contributions by Edgar Allan Poe, Alice Fuller, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many others, each introduced by Michael Sims, whose elegant introduction provides valuable literary and historical context, Frankenstein Dreams is a treasure trove of stories known and rediscovered.
Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein by Linda Bailey
Tundra Books | 2018 | ISBN: 9781770495593 | 56 pages | ages 5-10 | Nonfiction
Genre: Biography/history/monsters/picture book
The story of the girl behind one of the most well-known novels -- and monsters -- ever, perfectly timed for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. How does a story begin? Sometimes it begins with a dream, and a dreamer. Mary is one such dreamer, a little girl who learns to read by tracing the letters on her mother's tombstone and whose only escape from her strict father and overbearing stepmother is through the stories she reads and imagines. Unhappy at home, she seeks independence, and at the age of seventeen runs away with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, another dreamer. She travels to Europe and surrounds herself with more poets and writers, including Lord Byron and John Polidori. On a stormy summer evening, Byron suggests a contest to see who can create the best ghost story. After nine months of daydreaming, 21-year-old Mary Shelley's terrifying tale is published, a novel that goes on to become a very well-known monster story.
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Frankenstein directed by James Whale
Universal Pictures | 1931 | 93% Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 70 minutes | Narrative
Genre: classic horror, monster, black & white, sci-fi
This iconic horror film follows the obsessed scientist Dr. Henry Frankenstein as he attempts to create life by assembling a creature from body parts of the deceased. Aided by his loyal misshapen assistant, Fritz, Frankenstein succeeds in animating his monster, but it escapes into the countryside and begins to wreak havoc. Frankenstein searches for the elusive being and eventually must confront his tormented creation. This classic film diverges significantly from the original novel and instead is based on the 1927 play by Peggy Webling.
Frankenstein and the Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night directed by Philip Smith
BBC | 2014 | 53 minutes | Drama-documentary
Genre: documentary/gothic horror/history
On 16 June 1816, trapped inside a villa by insatiable thunderstorms erupting across Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Lord Byron challenged his party of young bohemians to a ghost story competition. This made-for-TV drama documentary depicts the events surrounding the creation of Mary SHelley's classic novel.
Lisa Frankenstein directed by Zelda Williams
Focus Features | 2024 | 52% Rotten Tomatoes Score I 101 minutes | Rated PG-13 I Drama-documentary
Genre: Dark comedy/teen romance/horror
A misunderstood teenage girl, Lisa, meets and develops a relationship with a reanimated Victorian-era corpse. After a set of playfully horrific circumstances bring him back to life, the two embark on a murderous journey to find love, happiness, and a few missing body parts along the way. Close Close All Open All
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Frankenstein (podcast episode)"In Our Time"
"In Our Time" | 2019 | 55 minutes | Adult | Podcast
URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00051n6
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Mary Shelley's (1797-1851) Gothic story of a Swiss natural philosopher, Victor Frankenstein, and the creature he makes from parts of cadavers and which he then abandons, horrified by his appearance, and never names.
Frankenbook Arizona State University
Arizona State University | 2018 | Adult | Website/"Digital reading experience"
URL: https://www.frankenbook.org/
Frankenbook is a collective reading and collaborative annotation experience of the original 1818 text of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The project launched in January 2018, as part of Arizona State University’s celebration of the novel’s 200th anniversary.
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