In my assignment I am going to write about the story of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which has been made into films by lots of people. I am going to write mainly about the version of Frankenstein by Kenneth Branagh.

The story of Frankenstein starts at the end where Victor Frankenstein is on a ship telling the captain the story of his life. It then shows Victor as a child, meeting his new orphan sister Elizabeth. The story then goes to Victor as an adult and his mother dies giving birth to his brother. This gives Victor the idea of bringing people back to life using electricity. He experiments on a frog, and it works, so he decides to bring a human back to life. He uses the body of a man who was hung for murder. It works on the human but when he realises what he has done he tries to kill the monster, but does not succeed. The monster goes to the nearby town but leaves because everyone is throwing things at him and trying to hurt him. He goes into the forest and meets a blind man, who he makes friends with, but he has to leave because the blind man’s family think that he is trying to hurt him. The monster is thrown out of the house and becomes very angry at Victor for making him. He sits and tries to read part of Victor’s diary. He decides he wants revenge. He meets a boy by the river who is Victor’s brother and he kills him. Victor’s family think it was the housekeeper and she is hung for it. Victor then goes away on his horse and meets the monster. The monster pushes him into a cave and they sit and talk. The monster tells Victor that it was him who killed his brother and that he wants him to make him a woman, or he will kill everyone that Victor loves. The monster chooses the woman that was hung for Victor’s brother’s murder and Victor refuses to make him, which makes the monster even angrier. Victor and Elizabeth then get married. On their wedding the monster kills Victor’s father. When Victor and Elizabeth go back home that night they hear a noise outside and Victor goes to see what it is. The monster comes into the house and kills Elizabeth by pulling her heart out of her body. Victor decides to bring her back to life but the monster wants her so she kills herself. The story then switches back to where it was at the beginning of the film when victor was talking to the captain of the ship. Victor Frankenstein dies as he is talking to the captain. The monster comes in just as he dies and starts to cry. The captain asks, “Why do you weep?” and the monster replies, “Because he was my father”. They have a funeral for Victor and as they set alight to him to burn his body the monster jumps into the flame and holds his body as they are both burnt.

In the Kenneth Branagh version of the story the monster is shown as an outsider because there are no close up shots of him and he has no name. Victor Frankenstein thinks of the monster as an experiment and nothing else. All the way through the film there is ice and storms. This shows the coldness of the human heart. There is also fire in parts of the story, which shows the monster’s anger and his want for revenge. The blind man in the story is the only person that likes the monster. This is because he doesn’t judge him because of his looks. The blind man also knows how the monster feels because he is also thought of as an outsider. In the film the whole story is set high up in the mountains, which shows that humans think they are better than everyone else- they think they are gods. The monster will not kill Victor Frankenstein but kills his loved ones. This is because the monster wants to punish Victor Frankenstein for what he has done to him but he cannot kill Victor Frankenstein because the monster believes that he is his father.