the Famous Monsters gallery

Dracula (Christopher Lee)

Dracula. First published in 1897, Bram Stoker's Dracula is the most celebrated tale of horror ever written. Although the genre can be traced back to Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole's The castle of Otranto and many others of the early XIX century, Stoker took the horror inside the normal life of the people of London, hiding the monster into their cellairs. The name is inspired to Vlad IV "Tépes" Dracula, prince of Wallachia (1431+1476). He was son of Vlad Dracul ("Vlad the devil") and Dracula means "son of the devil". He was said "Tépes", the impaler because of the cruelty of his punishments while imposing his firm government on his kingdom which was always under threat from the Turkish empire. It was said that he liked to eat surrounded with impaled men. But Dracula the vampyre has almost nothing to do with the Rumanian prince, even if the folk memory of this remarkable ruler in the Carpathians contributes to verisimilitude of the tale.

Frankenstein. "Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus" was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's first and most important novel. It was conceived during the wet summer of 1816 when Mary, Shelley and Claire were staying at Maison Chapuis at Montalègre, close to Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati at Cologny near Geneva. Inspired by the German ghost stories they had been reading, Mary, Shelley and Byron decided to write tales of the supernatural. Mary's was the only story to be completed and shhe tells, in her Preface to Frankenstein, how the original idea was born out in one of her nightmares. Mary was not quite nineteen years old when she began to write her novel in June 1816. Frankenstein - or better "the monster of Frankenstein" as it is often confused with its creator, Baron Victor von Frankenstein - and its story is based on deep reflections on gothic terrors, galvanism (medical treatment by electric currents), the then theories concerning the origin of life on Earth, and the roman myth of Prometheus plasticator who animates a human figure of clay (this recalls the myth of the Golem), and it is not to be confused with the grecian myth of Prometheus, who stole the fire to the gods to give it to the humans.

the monster of Frankenstein (Boris Karloff)

Mr. Hyde

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll is the protagonist of the novel "The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" written by Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson in 1886. He is a scientist who looks for the way to split the good part of the personality from the evil one. He find a potion which effectively annihilate one part of his personality, but the one which remains is the bad one, turning him into the evil Mr. Hyde.

Nosferatu, prince of the night. Nosferatu means not-dead in Rumanian. The German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau choose this name when in 1922 decided to make a film based on the novel Dracula written by Bram Stoker, without paying the copyright to Florence Stoker, Bram's widow. So, all the original films were burned for plagiarism, and if we still can see this masterpiece of horror (which is also the first movie about vampyres), we have to thank some unknown German pirates who made illegal copies of this illegal film (who said that piracy is harmful?). The sullen figure of the Count Orlock "Nosferatu" was interpreted by Max Schreck (incidentally "Schreck" means "fright" in German), a then popular actor of theatre. In 1979 the director Werner Herzog made a remake of Nosferatu, interpreted by Klaus Kinski, but the original is still the more frightful.

Nosferatu (Max Schreck)

A monster of Dr. Moreau

Doctor Moreau. Dr. Moreau is a French scientist - created by Herbert G. Wells in his novel "The Island of Dr. Moreau" - who left France after causing a sensation for his horrifying experiments of vivisection, and he moved in a little island in the Pacific Ocean (located approximately at the coordinates 5oS 105oW) in where he created strange beings half beasts and half humans that considered him as their god, but finally they turned against their creator.

Golem. Creature of the Jewish tradition. the Rabbi mould a body of humanoid appearance with the clay, then write on its forehead the word "EMETH" in Hebraic characters, which means "truth". To kill a Golem you must erase the "E" from its forehead, turning the word into "METH", which means "death". A very popular novel about the Golem was written by Gustav Meyrink in 1915. From this novel in 1920 the German director Paul Wegener made a film called "Der Golem".

Golem

The mummy. The modern myth of the walking mummy born in 1932 with the movie "The mummy" directed by Karl Freund and interpreted by Boris Karloff (already famous for the part played in Frankenstein). Karloff had to act with twenty meters of bandages and after six hours of make-up: he could hardly walk and they had to carry him on the set with a litter. A famous remake was made in 1959 by Terence Fisher for Hammer Film, dramatized by Jimmy Sangster, with Peter Cushing and Cristopher Lee as the mummy.

The mummy - playbill

The creature from the Black Lagoon playbill

The creature from the Black Lagoon.This creature appeared in three movies: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954, from a story by M. Zimm, directed by Jack Arnold, with Richard Carlson, Richard Denning, Julie Adams; The Revenge of the Creature, 1955, directed by Jack Arnold, with John Agar, Lori Nelson, John Bomnfield, Nestor Paiva; The Creature walks among us, 1956, directed by John Sherwood, with Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Leigh Snowden.

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