It’s that time of year when days are getting shorter, fallen leaves crunch under our feet, and people’s hearts turn to figures of primordial terror. That’s right, it’s Spooky Season. There is no other time of year when it is socially acceptable to have a knife wielding, blood-splattered mannequin of Michael Myers right in front of your house (At least, not if the HOA has something to say about it). 

For over a century, Halloween in America has built up a catalog of characters and symbols to embody its spirit. We have the classic icons, Jack-o’-lanterns and black cats, which were often featured on the earliest printed Halloween cards. Then we have supernatural figures that originate from incalculably old myths and legends, such as ghosts, werewolves and vampires. And who could forget skeletons, which have represented death for centuries and across many cultures?

Indeed, Halloween is a celebration of all that taps into our oldest and most primitive fears and taboos: death, dangerous animals, witchcraft and the spirit world. Our ancestors would have lost sleep at the thought of being terrorized by phantoms, witches and blood-sucking monsters. The Salem Witch Trials happened in our own country, after all. However, we use this spooky imagery playfully, with the understanding that it’s all in good fun.

And yet within the list of canon creatures lies some particularly modern additions. To me, one stands out as having a very specific and relatively modern origin: Frankenstein’s monster, colloquially known as just Frankenstein.

Other Halloween characters, such as wolf-men and vampires, have been described since medieval times and emerged from stories circulated orally among communities. Frankenstein, on the other hand, was conceived of by one specific person only about 200 years ago.

At the age of 18, during a rainy summer in Lake Geneva, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin accepted a challenge to write the most frightening story possible. She was an unwed teen mother, having escaped from England to the European Mainland with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, just two years prior. She was, however, remarkably well-read and educated, being the progeny of anarchist thinker William Godwin and early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft.

Though her mother died shortly after her birth, Godwin exposed his daughter to the most advanced scientific thought and radical philosophy of their time. She was alive at a particular cultural moment, when experiments in electrocuting dead bodies made the resurrection of the dead seem like the next big scientific breakthrough.

Mary Shelley’s first child died only two weeks after birth, so the thought of reigniting the spark of life in the dead had steeped in her consciousness before writing the book.

Shelley only saw one adaptation of her novel, the 1823 play “Frankenstein: or the Demon of Switzerland.”

The version of Frankenstein’s monster that is well-known today was first popularized by Universal’s 1931 adaptation of the story. It’s this popular conception of the creature that I like to call Campystein, due to it being popularized by campy, old horror movies. The original novel does not state anything about the monster having a flat head or bolts in his neck. These were one of the many liberties taken by the studio in retelling the story.

It was one of many famous monster films produced by Universal Pictures from the 1920s through the ‘50s, whose catalog includes an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” earlier that same year. Like many a film adaptation to follow, the Universal Studios version of Frankenstein contains quite little of the original source material.

So many iconic moments and motifs we associate with the Frankenstein story, such as the hunchback assistant, the electrocution and the exclamation of “It’s alive!” by Dr. Frankenstein are not found in Shelley’s novel. In fact, Victor Frankenstein created his monster as an undergrad, never even receiving a doctorate in the original story.

In Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein describes his creature as having watery eyes, sickly yellow skin and black lips. Victor explains that he intended for his creation to be handsome, with ideal proportions and attractive features. It just so happened that the creature he made from pieces of corpses, ended up looking like a corpse (gasp!).

The novel also depicts the creature as being highly intelligent and articulate, having read classic books such as “Paradise Lost” and reflecting on his own existence based on them. The creature also laments his never-ending agony of loneliness, as anyone who encounters him is too terrified to befriend him. This concept of Frankenstein’s creation being a tormented philosopher isn’t seen in the most popular adaptations of the story. Instead, he’s shown to be a lumbering oaf whose most profound sentence is “fire bad”.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the latter, watered-down version of the monster is the one we have been made to be familiar with. For most of a century, the Frankenstein creature of popular imagination has been dictated by film, television, comics and even breakfast cereal.

In the few decades following the 1931 film, so many cash-grab sequels had been made that the monster stopped being scary for most people. The 1964 television series, “The Munsters,” exemplifies this, as it depicts Frankenstein’s monster as being the breadwinner of a family of monsters living as middle-class Americans.

There have been so many iterations of the creature in the last century that listing off all of them would require writing an entire book. Campystein is just more marketable than Shelley’s original.

I, personally, never particularly liked Campystein. As a child, I observed the “Twilight” craze and found vampires to be way more exciting in comparison. The only part of the Frankenstein lore I found fascinating was, understandably, the reanimation of dead parts. It’s only now, as an English major that I’ve read the 1818 novel and find myself obsessed with the anguished creature and his flawed creator.

Frankenstein’s monster is a manifestation of modern anxieties about the advancement of scientific progress at the expense of morality. In this light, it almost feels inappropriate to slap a caricature of him on a 100-count bag of fun-sized candy bars. He’s treated as just another cliché stock-character, no different from a werewolf or vampire. 

However, I don’t think that we should necessarily snub our noses at the green-skinned, flat-headed manifestation of the character. Campystein has a sacred, nostalgic place in American culture that is now inseparable from the celebration of Halloween. The Universal Pictures monster has, over a few generations, evolved and melted into our folklore, so that it’s difficult to imagine the holiday without him.

The creature of the original story and the creature of our imaginations are so different that they shouldn’t be considered the same character. It’s an apples-to-oranges type of situation. So, let’s not lecture our friends and family about how inaccurate their costume is compared to the book or condescendingly remark that “Frankenstein is actually the scientist, not the monster.” Besides, Frankenstein is the monster, either way you look at it.

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