Every once in a while, a story rises quietly from the corners of literary history and taps me on the shoulder. Lately, it has been Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, especially now that Netflix has released a new adaptation starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. I see it everywhere. Numerous bloggers have spoken about it and recounted the chilly tale that formed this story. I have not watched it yet; I feel I am waiting for the perfect moment, a stormy, dark and cold night where the kids are sound asleep.
It feels almost right to pause, breathe and revisit the strange, electrifying night that brought literature’s most haunting creature to life before allowing a modern retelling to wash over me. The true, eerie and deeply human night that gave birth not only to Frankenstein but also to the modern vampire.
If there was ever a perfect moment to return to that night, it is now.
The year was 1816, remembered as the Year Without a Summer. A volcanic eruption on the other side of the world had darkened the skies across Europe. Temperatures dropped. Storms arrived with an almost supernatural intensity. Lake Geneva looked like a scene from a gothic painting, heavy with mood and tension.
In the middle of that unsettling summer, four young writers found themselves gathered in a villa overlooking the water: Mary Godwin, who would soon become Mary Shelley, quiet, brilliant and still grieving personal losses at only eighteen; Percy Bysshe Shelley, her lover and a philosopher-poet; Lord Byron, Europe’s infamous literary celebrity; and John Polidori, Byron’s young physician, forever walking in his shadow.
One stormy evening, Byron suggested they each try writing a ghost story. It was a simple challenge, born from boredom and restless imagination, yet it would reshape the entire landscape of horror and science fiction.
Mary Shelley’s story began long before that night. She carried an inheritance of intellectual daring and personal tragedy. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her father was William Godwin, a philosopher with radical ideas about human perfectibility. Their home had been a sanctuary of books and revolutionary thought.
But tragedy arrived early. Mary’s mother died shortly after giving birth to her. As she grew older, Mary endured the loss of three children in infancy, the drowning of her husband at twenty-nine and the death of her half-sister. She later kept Percy Shelley’s preserved heart wrapped in silk inside her writing desk. Grief and brilliance shaped her life in equal measure.
In the villa, she struggled to find a story at first. Everyone else had begun writing, and she felt the pressure of their expectations. Then, one night, as she drifted in that space between waking and sleep, she saw a vivid, unsettling vision. A young scientist kneeling beside a lifeless body he had stitched together. Lightning flashing. Machinery humming. A single yellow eye opening. And the horror on the creator’s face at what he had brought to life. She woke with the image intact and wrote it down. At eighteen, she had created one of literature’s most enduring works of imagination.
Count Dracula
Mary was not the only one reshaping the future that night. In the same villa, John Polidori conceived a very different creature. His story, The Vampyre, introduced Lord Ruthven, a cold and aristocratic figure who would become the model for every elegant vampire that followed. Before Polidori, vampires were bloated corpses from folklore. He transformed the creature into a seductive, predatory aristocrat, and he modeled Ruthven on Byron himself. It was a sharp and daring act of literary revenge. Polidori’s work laid the foundation for Dracula and the entire tradition of the modern vampire.
Tragedies that occurred rather too early
The tragedy is that each of the four young writers in that villa would meet a sorrowful fate. Byron died at thirty-six during the Greek War of Independence. Percy Shelley drowned in a storm at twenty-nine. Polidori died by suicide at twenty-five, overwhelmed by debt and despair. Mary Shelley lived longer than all of them but carried immense grief throughout her life and died at fifty-three.
It feels strangely fitting that a night filled with lightning, storms and restless imagination would gather such extraordinary yet fragile lives. Their stories became immortal, even as they did not.
Looking back at that single night, it becomes clear that reality can be far stranger and more mysterious than anything fiction dares to invent. The storms, the genius, the grief, the rivalry, the visions and the tragedies all came together to create stories that have outlived their creators by two centuries.
I will watch the new Frankenstein soon. But first I wanted to sit with the truth behind it. The night when lightning struck twice, and two of literature’s most unforgettable monsters stepped out of the shadows and into the world.