As the air finally chills, the Halloween decorations fly out of the garage. There are the usual ghosts and skeletons and the witches maydaying into trees. And there’s another old reliable: green face and yellow eyes, flat head with matted black hair and a bolt sticking out of his neck. This is Frankenstein as imagined by our popular culture — not just Party City but Hollywood too, whose 1931 classic film Frankenstein had Boris Karloff looking much the same. And for the life of me, I’ve never been able to figure out why. The monster in Mary Shelley’s novel is so hideous that immediately after he’s brought to life, Victor Frankenstein rushes out of the room, fleeing “a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.” I always imagined him with filthy hair and sunken eyes and a disfigured mouth. How did we turn him into some half-reptilian John Kerry? 

Who knows? Among the many other popular misrepresentations of Frankenstein is that he’s called “Frankenstein,” which is the name of his creator; the monster is referred to by Shelley’s characters as “the creature” or “the fiend.” The original Frankenstein was conceived under fittingly fiendish circumstances. In 1816, Mary, her lover Percy Shelley, their 4-month-old baby, and Mary’s stepsister Claire arrived for a vacation at a lake house near Geneva. They were joined by Lord Byron as well as his doctor. What followed was an ordeal of bad weather and unwanted sexual advances that culminated in a suitably gloomy challenge from Byron: Everyone should write a ghost story.