The gothic tale of Frankenstein and his construction of a human being who runs amok has, with the help of numerous films, become one of the most vivid of horror stories. But Mary Shelley’s original novel, written in 1816, dealt more sympathetically with ‘the daemon’, showing how an initially beneficent creature is hammered into a daemon by the way he is treated. Her ideas, and her dramatic but poignant story, is brought to life in this sound dramatisation. For a century Bram Stoker’s Dracula has reigned supreme as the undisputed masterpiece of horror writing. We have all grown up under the shadow of the elegant Count, at once an attractive, brutal and erotic creature of the night.
