Just in time for Halloween quirky director Tim
Burton has unleashed Frankenweenie, his latest
spectacular movie about a young boy named Victor and his beloved
dog Sparky.
When Sparky meets his untimely end, a heartbroken Victor decides
that instead of saying goodbye he will try to bring his pet back
from beyond the grave. But could it be done?
Let's look at the story and the science behind it. After
reading this, you could even have a go at making your own battery using a potato or a
lemon. We don't advise you to try to bring anything back to
life with it though - urgh!
Frankenweenie is a spooky children's story, filmed using
incredible stop-motion animation. This type of film making
involves taking tens of thousands of photos of models, moving them
very slightly each time. When the pictures are played one after the
other then the characters are brought to life.
Stop motion has been used for monster movies for years - watch
the original King Kong to see an early example which mixed
stop motion and live action. Tim Burton has used it before in
two other Halloween movies, The
Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride.
Frankenstein's Monster - the story
"Look! It's moving. It's
alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving,
it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!"
Boris Karloff stars as the
monster in the 1931 film Frankenstein.
The story of Dr Frankenstein and his infamous monster was
created by Mary Shelley way back in 1818 (they might not have had
horror movies in those days, but they loved horror stories).
In the gothic tale, the brilliant scientist Dr Victor
Frankenstein becomes obsessed with the idea of using electricity to
bring creatures back to life. Unfortunately, when he does
manage it the results are disastrous as the monster runs out of
control.
Colin Clive and Dwight Frye in
the 1931 film Frankenstein.
Frankenstein is one of the original monsters, and is still one
of the favourite costumes for "trick or treaters" around the
world...
Frankstein's Monster - the science
Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein by two real
scientific discoveries:
- On 26 January, 1781, Italian surgeon Luigi Galvani discovered
that electricity made muscles spasm. In true Halloween style
he found this out while dissecting a frog in his laboratory with
the help of his assistant.
Electricity from a nearby machine travelled down the scalpel and
made the frog's muscles jerk, although at the time Galvani thought
that the frog itself was generating the electric charge.
- 18 years later, in 1799, a physicist called Alessandro Volta
invented the world's first battery and used it to repeat Galvani's
experiments. He proved that electricity from outside the dead
frog was making it jump and dance like it was alive.
In the next few years scientists conducted more and more
ghoulish experiments, even using electrical power to make the
bodies of executed criminals jump, twitch and quiver. Who
needs Halloween horror films!
All of these ideas and experiments came together in Mary
Shelley's famous book in which a deranged scientist manage not just
to make a dead body jerk around, but to actually bring it back to
life...
So what's happening?
Put simply, while we are alive (whether we are frogs or humans)
we move when our nervous system sends an electrical signal to our
muscles.
The electrical signal travels through our nerves and makes the
muscle contract which moves our skeleton. You see, learning about
the way that our body works isn't just a matter of biology. The
physics of electricity is important too...
In the real life experiments of Volta and Galvani, sending an
electrical signal into the body of a dead frog bypassed the brain
and sent a signal through the nerves to the muscles, with the same
effect.
Unlike the story of Frakenstein's monster, or Frankenweenie for
that matter, it doesn't matter how much electricity you put into a
corpse - you will never get the brain working again. Without an
internal power source the body can't send it's own signals when
something touches it.
Sadly, or maybe we should say thankfully, Mary Shelley's and Tim
Burton's Halloween frights are definitely science fiction, not
science fact!
Find out more about the nervous system and the part that
electricity plays by clicking here or completing this Nervous
System activity at BBC Bitesize.
Why not play Dr Frankenstein and generate your own electricity
using nothing but a lemon, potato or carrot. Watch the video
from Monkey See below and visit our experiments section to find out
more...