Frankenstein's Monster - The Creature's Name

The Creature's Name

Mary Shelley's original novel never ascribed an actual name to the monster; although he does call himself, when speaking to his creator, Victor Frankenstein, the "Adam of your labours". It has become common vernacular to refer to the creature by the actual name "Frankenstein", though this actually happens only rarely on screen. The name Frankenstein was probably taken from a castle near the German town of Darmstadt, where Shelley and her husband had traveled through on their way from Basel.

A joke about the name became the subject of a sketch on Conan. On his various shows over the years, Conan O'Brien has featured a character named "Frankenstein", played by Brian Stack, who is a genial version of the classic Universal appearance of the character. In the March 23, 2011, of O'Brien's TBS show, a viewer criticized O'Brien for calling the character "Frankenstein", when in the original book the creature had no name and Frankenstein was the name of the creator. In response, O'Brien showed a clip of the monster coming to America through Ellis Island in the 1920s. An immigration official reviewing the creature's paperwork tells him that "Frankenstein's Monster" is too cumbersome a name, so he shortens it to Frankenstein. Thus, Conan declares that referring to the monster simply as "Frankenstein" is correct.

In Dean Koontz's Frankenstein series, the monster goes by the name "Deucalion", which he presumably chose sometime in his 200-year existence. The name is a reference to the son of Prometheus in Greek mythology, as his "father", Victor Frankenstein, is presumably the being whom the novel referred to as "The Modern Prometheus". The Universal film series generally refers to the character on screen as the Monster, the Creature or Frankenstein's Monster, although this practice wasn't always carried over into the film titles, such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (in which no human character by the name Frankenstein actually appears and the title refers to the monster). The 2004 film Van Helsing, a Universal production that reimagined several characters including the Monster, directly assigns the name Frankenstein to the monster.