With just over a week until Halloween, I decided to provide the readers with some trivia related to Frankenstein, ghosts, vampires, and werewolves.
- Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was the result of a proposal between Mary Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician Dr. John Polidori to write horror stories. Byron wrote Fragment of a Novel (a.k.a. A Fragment, a.k.a. The Burial: A Fragment), an unfinished vampire story. Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre, a short story that might have helped inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
- Whether or not Stoker was inspired by The Vampyre, he was influenced by Charles Darwin (e.g. Dracula crawling animal-like down the wall of his castle, changing into a wolf), Jack the Ripper, and the exploits of Vlad Dracula. It should be noted that it was actually Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin who came up with the theory of evolution, and that Mary Shelley refers to Erasmus Darwin in the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.
- Just as there was a real Dracula (meaning Son of the Dragon, since Vlad Dracula’s father was Vlad Dracul, a member of the Order of the Dragon that fought the Turks), there was also a family named Frankenstein. Interestingly, the Frankenstein family helped build Bran Castle, in which Dracula would reside. Even more interesting, the Frankenstein family were adversaries of Vlad Dracula due to being aligned with his enemies the Saxons.
- The Blair Witch saga was inspired by the story of the Bell Witch near the town of Adams, located in Robertson County, Tennessee. The Bell Witch was said to be a spirit who tormented a man named John Bell and his family and allegedly murdered John Bell by putting a bottle of poison at his bedside after he fell ill.
- Little Red Riding Hood is a werewolf story. The same can be said for the Three Little Pigs.
- The 1935 film did not show the main character changing into a werewolf because it was thought to be too Darwinian.
- The 1941 film The Wolf Man was a metaphor for Nazi Germany, in which the main character’s life is thrown into chaos, and he is on the run after becoming a werewolf. Thus he was a good man who became a murderer and knows who his next victim will be by seeing the pentagram (a metaphor for the Jewish yellow star) in the palm of that individual.
I am also presenting the following hypothetical situation:
What would happen if someone approached Joe Biden dressed up as the Grim Reaper and said “I am death. I have come for you”?
