CULTURE, ART & LITERATURE Frankenstein, a Horror Story WARM-UP Riconosci questi personaggi? Conosci la loro storia? Cosa pensi che abbiano in comune? SPEAKING 1 2 his wife. The monster then escapes to the North Pole and Frankenstein follows him to kill him, but the hard conditions of the North Pole make him die. The monster accuses mankind of having no compassion, but he cries when his creator dies. The story ends with the monster leaving on a block of ice to go and die. The author 3 4 13 Frankenstein is not a terrible monster with a square head, a scar on his forehead and a nail in his neck! Frankenstein is the name of its creator in the novel by Mary Shelley. Frankenstein is a sad story more than a horror novel. It s about someone s difficulty in being accepted because of their diversity. And this is a very contemporary problem, isn t it? The plot Dr Frankenstein is a scientist who doesn t accept the limits of science and wants to recreate life in a laboratory. He eventually creates a living monster made of body parts from dead men, but when he sees his monster alive , he is scared and abandons him. The monster escapes and goes to the Swiss Alps, where he is rejected by everybody because of his nonhuman aspect. He wants to communicate, but he is constantly rejected, so he decides to get revenge on his creator and starts killing the people he loves: his brother, his best friend, and 36 Frankenstein was written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1797. Yep, a fine lady wrote this scary story! She was a novelist, a dramatist and a travel writer with an adventurous life. At the age of 16 she ran away to Switzerland with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet, and in the next two years they had two children. She started writing Frankenstein when she was 18 because of a challenge among friends: who could write the best horror story? At first, critics did not like the book and considered it disgusting and horrible , but then Gothic novels (novels with supernatural, scary elements) became very popular and today Frankenstein is one of the best horror stories of all times. GLOSSARY alive: vivo commitment: impegno eventually: alla fine to follow: seguire forehead: fronte mankind: umanità nail: chiodo novel: romanzo to reject: respinto revenge: vendetta to run away: scappare scar: cicatrice square: quadrato scared: spaventato to turn into: trasformare