Frankenstein

Henry Frankenstein has abandoned his university studies and moved into an old watchtower with his hunchbacked assistant Fritz, stealing bodies from graveyards and gallows to assemble a human creature from salvaged parts. His fiancée Elizabeth and his friend Victor Moritz are alarmed; his former professor Dr. Waldman accompanies them to intervene. Henry, wild-eyed and certain, refuses to stop. That night he uses a lightning storm to animate the creature.

The creature is brought in — enormous, lurching, bolts in its neck. Henry is euphoric. But Fritz made an error: sent to steal a normal brain, he dropped it and substituted one labeled "criminal brain" from Dr. Waldman's laboratory. The creature is docile at first, turning toward a shaft of light through the skylight. But Fritz torments it repeatedly with a torch, and the creature, terrified of fire, responds with increasing violence. It kills Fritz. Then it kills Dr. Waldman, who stayed behind to study it, and escapes into the countryside.

In the film's most notorious scene, the creature encounters a little girl named Maria at a lakeside. She invites it to play, and they throw flowers into the water together. When the flowers run out, the creature — with no understanding of what it is doing — throws Maria in. She drowns.

At Henry's estate, wedding celebrations are underway. The creature finds Henry's room and attacks Elizabeth before fleeing. Maria's father carries her body through the village and a mob assembles. Henry joins the hunt. The creature finds him and drags him to an old windmill. They struggle at the top; the creature hurls Henry down, but Henry survives, landing on the millwheel below.

The mob sets fire to the windmill. The creature is trapped inside, screaming in the smoke and flames as the mill burns. The villagers believe it is dead. The film ends at Henry's home, where he is recovering and the wedding preparations resume — a domestic peace restored, the question of what was made and unmade left to hang in the air.