Think you know everything about Frankenstein’s creation? Think again. Sure, you know the guy: green skin, bolts in his neck and a face that could scare the life out of you. Oh, and a vocabulary that doesn’t go much beyond a few grunts. But here’s a Halloween trick for you: Just about everything you picture when you think of Frankenstein’s creature is different from what Mary Shelley originally dreamed up. So how did we get from her famous novel to the monster we know today? Turns out, Hollywood gave the big guy a little makeover.
To help us separate Hollywood’s scary version of Frankenstein’s monster from Shelley’s original creation, we spoke with Andrew Scahill, PhD, an assistant film professor at the University of Colorado Denver. As it turns out, the creature has quite the backstory. In fact, according to Scahill, “Shelley’s creature could probably hold his own in your book club.” Who would have thought?
Read on to find out how the creature we know today came to be, and why there’s more to him than meets the eye.
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When did the original Frankenstein come onto the scene?
“It started with some very literary people trying to entertain themselves during terrible weather,” says Scahill. The year was 1816, and 18-year-old Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) was spending the summer near Lake Geneva with a group that included her future husband, Percy Shelley, and the poet Lord Byron. When Byron challenged everyone to come up with a ghost story, she initially drew a blank. Then came a waking vision of a student watching a body he’d pieced together come to life. That was the spark for Frankenstein, which was published anonymously on Jan. 1, 1818, when Shelley was just 20.
If it’s been a while since you’ve read the book, here’s a refresher: Victor Frankenstein is a scientist who figures out how to bring a creature (made of body parts from corpses) to life, only to recoil in horror at what he’s created. But there’s a twist. “Victor has already told us what to think of him, and then this supposedly loathsome being begins describing his first experiences of the world,” Scahill says. “Cold. Hunger. The pleasure of birdsong. We have to spend time with him.” Suddenly, it’s not so easy to decide who’s the real monster here. After all, as Scahill puts it, Victor “has brought someone into the world and immediately made his own disappointment that person’s problem.” Talk about a rough start to life.
What did Mary Shelley’s monster look like?
Shelley’s original creature looked nothing like the monster you see on Halloween decorations. “Very little of that familiar image survives a reading of the novel,” says Scahill. “He is yellow-skinned, fast and extraordinarily strong.” He is also roughly 8 feet tall, and “his skin barely covers the muscles and arteries underneath.” But Victor had actually tried to make his creation attractive. “The hair and teeth are lovely,” Scahill explains. “Everything together is unbearable to him.”
And there’s another wrinkle to this description. We’re seeing the creature through the eyes of the very man who brought him to life and immediately regretted it. “We tend to receive it as an objective inventory of what’s wrong with the creature,” Scahill says. “But we are also hearing a parent describe a child he wishes he hadn’t made.” It makes you wonder whether the creature was really quite as horrifying as Victor made him out to be.
Why did he turn green in the 20th century?
You can thank Hollywood for that one. Well, mostly. The green-faced monster we know today owes much of his look to Universal’s 1931 film Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff as the creature. But the unusual skin color really goes back further than that—and has its roots in the theater. “An unnatural complexion predates Karloff by more than a century,” says Scahill. In fact, an 1823 stage adaptation called Presumption described the creature’s skin as “light blue or French gray.” Meanwhile, the National Library of Medicine has described actor T.P. Cooke’s stage portrayal as having a green face and blue body paint. “Those accounts don’t quite agree, so I wouldn’t turn them into a neat origin story,” Scahill notes.
Fast-forward to 1931, when makeup artist Jack Pierce was tasked with bringing Karloff’s monster to life. He used greenish, or gray-green, makeup, even though the movie was filmed in black and white. Why bother with color? It all came down to how makeup appeared on camera. “Black-and-white film doesn’t respond to every color in the same way,” Scahill explains. Different shades could appear lighter or darker depending on the film stock and lighting. “Something quite odd in the dressing-room mirror could look convincing on screen.” In this case, Pierce wanted Karloff to look as though the life had been drained right out of him. “The audience needed to feel that something was wrong with this skin, even though they couldn’t see the color he was actually wearing.”
And Pierce didn’t stop at the skin. He also gave the creature that unmistakable flat head. “Pierce worked backward from the imaginary operation,” Scahill says. “How would this man have got a brain into that head?” The makeup artist imagined Frankenstein cutting open the skull, inserting a brain and fastening everything back together. That explains the scar across the forehead and the metal clamps. As for those famous neck bolts? They’re generally understood to be electrodes.
To pull off the look, Pierce built up Karloff’s head using cotton and collodion, a liquid that hardens as it dries. He added heavy eyelids, while the costume’s shortened sleeves made Karloff’s arms appear unusually long. The result was a far cry from Shelley’s original description. And yet, as Scahill points out, “the face looks handled, altered, damaged. It also looks hurt.” Not bad for a few hours in the makeup chair.
Why did this green hue become a Frankenstein staple after this?
“The film was black and white. The things you could buy weren’t,” Scahill says. “Magazine covers, model kits, Halloween masks—all those versions of the creature needed a complexion, and green became the familiar choice.” Before long, that green face was everywhere.
And television helped keep it that way. In 1957, Screen Gems began distributing Universal’s classic monster movies to TV stations, introducing the creature to a whole new audience. Then came Aurora’s Frankenstein model kit in 1961, followed by The Munsters, which turned a Frankenstein-inspired monster into a sitcom dad. Even though the show aired in black and white, the 1966 movie Munster, Go Home! let audiences see Herman Munster in full color.
All that exposure helped cement the look, especially for kids who grew up seeing the monster on everything from toys to Halloween costumes. “I think we underestimate how often we encounter these characters through their souvenirs,” Scahill says. “A child can know exactly what Frankenstein looks like years before finding out what happened to him.” By then, imagining him as any other color was pretty much out of the question.
What else about the creature is vastly different in the book vs. the majority of pop-culture representations?
Here’s another shocker: Shelley’s creature isn’t some lumbering brute who can barely string two words together. He’s actually intelligent, well-read and quite the talker. So how did he go from delivering thoughtful speeches to mostly grunting his way through Hollywood? According to Scahill, “that happened on stage first. Peake’s 1823 creature was speechless, so Hollywood inherited a performance tradition built around gesture and movement.” And while Karloff’s monster did pick up a few words in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, his silence became one of his defining traits.
But that’s hardly the only liberty Hollywood took with Shelley’s story. Here’s what else might surprise you:
- He’s not just a mindless killer. In the 1931 film, Karloff’s creature accidentally drowns a little girl after tossing her into a lake, believing she’ll float like the flowers they’ve been playing with. Shelley’s version is far more deliberate. “Shelley’s creature deliberately strangles William, knowing he belongs to the Frankenstein family,” Scahill says. “Those are very different things to ask an audience to reckon with.”
- He doesn’t have a criminal’s brain. Remember the whole mix-up involving the origin of his brain? That’s a Hollywood invention. “The 1931 film gives the creature an abnormal brain taken from a criminal, so there’s a ready explanation for his violence inside his skull,” Scahill explains. “In the novel, we have to work through his experiences and his choices.”
- There’s no Igor. Sorry, Igor fans. “Victor works alone,” Scahill says. The assistant Fritz appeared in the stage tradition and the 1931 film, while Bela Lugosi’s memorable character didn’t arrive until 1939’s Son of Frankenstein.
- The famous electrical laboratory isn’t in the book. All those crackling machines and dramatic switches? More movie magic. “Shelley also withholds the precise method of animation,” Scahill says. “The elaborate electrical laboratory supplies a spectacle where the book leaves a gap.”
- The creature never gets his bride. While Hollywood gave us Bride of Frankenstein, things play out differently in the book. Victor begins making a female companion but destroys her before bringing her to life.
And here’s where things come full circle. Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Frankenstein, starring Jacob Elordi as the creature, gives him back something many movie versions have denied him: his voice. “Elordi’s creature gets to develop, to learn and to describe what has happened to him,” Scahill says. But don’t mistake it for a completely faithful retelling. Del Toro gives Victor and his creation a chance at forgiveness, while Shelley’s novel ends with the creature speaking over his creator’s dead body. As Scahill puts it: “All that eloquence, and the person who most needed to hear it is gone.”
Oh, and one last thing about so many people calling the monster Frankenstein. Scahill isn’t bothered by it. “If we read the creature as Victor’s abandoned son, why shouldn’t he have his father’s name?” he says. “I like the idea that the culture has given him something Victor refused to offer. Calling him Frankenstein is a mistake that tells the truth.”
Sources:
- Andrew Scahill, PhD, assistant film professor at the University of Colorado Denver and author of The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema; email interview, Oct. 13, 2026
- MoMA: “James Whale (Director). Film still from Frankenstein. 1931″
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