Frankenstein

An English captain named Walton sails north to find a passage over the pole. Trapped in the Arctic ice, his crew sees a giant crossing the frozen sea on a dog sledge. The next morning they pull a dying European off a drifting floe. His name is Victor Frankenstein, and he agrees to tell Walton everything, hoping the story will cure the captain of his own ambition.

Victor grew up happy in Geneva with his father Alphonse, his adopted cousin Elizabeth, and his friend Henry. As a boy he read old books of alchemy; as a student at Ingolstadt he learned real chemistry and discovered how to give life to dead matter. Working alone in an attic room for two years, he built a man eight feet tall out of parts taken from graves and slaughterhouses. On a November night the thing opens its yellow eyes, and Victor, horrified by what he has made, runs away and leaves it alone in the world.

The creature teaches itself to speak by watching a poor family through a crack in their wall, and learns to read from books it finds in a lost bag. When it finally shows itself, the family beats it and flees. Rejected everywhere, it walks to Geneva, kills Victor's little brother William, and lets an innocent servant, Justine, hang for the murder. Then it finds Victor on a glacier and asks for one thing: a companion of its own kind.

Victor agrees, travels to a bare island in Scotland to build her, and then destroys her half-finished. The creature promises to be with him on his wedding night, and begins taking everything Victor loves — his friend, his wife, his father. What is left is a chase across Russia and out onto the polar ice, where the two of them, hunter and hunted, come to Walton's ship to finish it.