From the moment it was published in 1818, Frankenstein, a classic horror story, has been enormously popular and continuously in print in many languages. The story has inspired plays, poems, parodies as well as other stories, novels, and more than 40 movies. The monster derives from the novel by Mary Shelley and is the result of man's tinkering with nature and his untamed desire to create and apply his knowledge.

The name of the scientist is sometimes wrongly used as that of the monster itself, and hence for any monstrous creation. Frankenstein's popularity is partly because it is the first modern myth that used science to release the monster. Frankenstein is sometimes compared with politics, nuclear science, genetic engineering and other agents of change to warn against experimenting with things we don't understand.