First Contact: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

It's finally happened: the answer to my antici… pation

How many times a day do you think about the Roman Empire the queer subtext of Frankenstein? It's sad that so many people seem to spend their whole lives without once doing it. And it's so easy, almost banal, to notice the wealth of potential queer readings of the story of a cisgender man who usurps the female role of giving life; a man who has no problem with building another man, but recoils in terror when asked to build a woman; a man to whom, when he's promised a visitation on his wedding night, it doesn't occur that his wife is involved in the picture. Dr. Frankenstein's unnatural creation, a child who is already an adult, a creature begotten outside the boundaries of heterosexual intercourse, shatters by the fact of simply existing the taken-for-granted necessity of marriage, parenthood, inheritance, and the elaborate pantomime of Regency courtship. Popes have had an accurate instinct in choosing IVF as their nemesis: once artificiality is invited to the dance of procreation, the artificiality of our family models is instantly exposed.

Which is why something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show was sooner or later destined to exist. I like to imagine what would have been said during the pitch meeting:

"Sir, I have a new script for you."

"All right, let's hear it."

"It's about two young lovebirds who get lost in the road on a stormy night and knock at the door of an ominous-looking castle."

"I like where this is going."

"Turns out the castle is the home of a mad scientist."

"Promising so far. Go on."

"In fact, he's a barely disguised—or rather, barely dressed, exquisitely disguised homage to Dr. Frankenstein."

"Oh, my! What do the youngsters do?"

"They just kind of stand there while the mad scientist sings about transvestism."

"Wait, what does that have to do with the story of Dr. Frankenstein?"

"Well, the man he's building in the lab is a breathing, talking sex doll."

"Remind me, who's the target audience for this?"

"Plot twist: the previous model he built escapes his cage."

"Oh, my!"

"Don't worry. He just sings a song and is promptly hacked to death with a pickaxe."

"That escalated quickly."

"Later that night, the mad scientist sneaks around the castle to seduce his sweet, innocent guests. Each separately, then both."

"That sounds complicated."

"It's actually super easy. Barely an inconvenience."

"Did you test this with viewers?"

"Trust me, they'll adore it for decades."

When I came up with the idea of the First Contact project, I wondered at what moments in my life I could have encountered the movies I was putting in the schedule. Metropolis, for example, is one of the conceivable choices of an informal film club run every year by a friend in college, a chemistry major who was obsessed with classic cinema. But when would I have ever had the chance to discover The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Not on Colombian television, that's for sure; I remember the angry parent letters complaining that Ranma ½ was confusing the kids. In late night cinema? No way. My parents enforced a totalitarian curfew. In Catholic school? Unlikely. This movie would have given some of my ordained teachers a heart attack—but not without first giving them a boner.

I made very few queer friends at my hometown, a dangerously homophobic place it took me the first half of my twenties to successfully flee. But even after I learned of the existence of this movie, I wouldn't have been caught dead speaking of it. My brain was still on full alert, watching for the slightest slip of word or body language that could mark me as a target. To most people who knew me, I remained closeted until a month before my wedding. Anything I could have wanted to know from the extensive heritage of queer culture was right there, just one torrent file away, but I still needed to give myself permission to walk under the rain and knock that door.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is probably the kind of shock treatment I could have used back then, a perfumed, silky glove slapping me in the face, an abrasive bite leaving marks of lipstick and stubble. I lived through times when the thing my oversanitized education needed was something like this story about a couple of proper, well-behaved, straight Christian youth going through a night of wild erotic liberation, first shown on theaters at the same time that Puritan America was being loudly invited to partake in a societal metamorphosis of ways of loving and ways of being, an invitation that continues to be rudely refused for no good reason.

Time to void my queer membership card: I have very little patience for musicals. Just not my thing. The first musical film I ever enjoyed was Happy Feet, because the queer subtext landed close to home for me. But I sense a certain something in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in its playfully trashy aesthetic, its matter-of-fact subversion of nuptial rites, its unafraid, unashamed disdain for standards of decency. It is the kind of art that fulfills the noble task of comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Lisa Frankenstein

Journey back to the 80s with a black horror comedy "coming of rage" story featuring a script by Diablo Cody and an impressive retro vibe and soundtrack.

Diablo Cody, writer of Jennifer's Body, and Zelda Williams, director and daughter of Robin Williams, made a movie that I've been waiting 30 years for — a black comedy with a gothy female lead that's got a killer soundtrack and is an ode to 80s (and earlier) horror movies. 

Lisa Frankenstein — a stellar pun of a title that sets the scene and mood, all bright colors and crimped hair and pastel wallpaper — follows the adventures of the unfortuitously named Lisa Swallows, a high school senior in 1989 who's just... a bit odd.  A few years prior, Lisa's mother died in a freak slasher/home invasion attack, and her dad remarried soon after, blending families with another mother and daughter. Carla Gugino is perfectly cast as an aerobics-attired-clad, conservative 80s evil stepmom. 

Like her cinematic forebears Lydia Deetz and Veronica Sawyer, Lisa is herself strange and unusual. She loves The Cure, Universal horror movies, and spending time in the graveyard with a beautiful sculpture of a young man who died 200 years ago. 

The plot sparks into motion when a lightning bolt brings the dead young man back to life somehow (we're not really told how or why, but honestly, does it matter? Even Victor Frankenstein just used lightning and an old body, so check). He shows up at Lisa's house and their relationship begins in earnest. 

The Creature (played almost entirely silently by the wonderful Cole Sprouse of Riverdale fame) is missing a few parts — an ear, a hand, some genitalia. Together, he and Lisa start harvesting body parts from local town denizens to help get patched up. He's giving Billy Butcher vibes from Hocus Pocus, if we're being honest, and it works. 

Each time he gets a fresh new body part, a quick trip to Lisa's backyard tanning bed makes him just a bit more human and life-like. This neon-red 80s take on the doctor's slab from old Frankenstein movies made me laugh every time I saw it — this film has absolutely delightful visual gags and retro throwbacks that just work. There's a pun concerning Pabst beer and Pabst the director that is absolutely chef's kiss. 

There's not a terrible amount of plot, as this is a fairly short comedic romp that's somehow light-hearted but also simultaneously violent and funny.  It's a movie that I look forward to rewatching, and if I were still in high school, it would definitely become my personality for a few months.

If you liked similar movies in the 80s and 90s like Jawbreaker, Weird Science, Heathers, My Boyfriend's Back, But I'm a Cheerleader, or Beetlejuice, you'll probably get a kick out of Lisa Frankenstein.

--

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: Incredible needle drops(including a Pixies' song that's worth the price of admission), superb set design, and an authentic and successful 80s vibe.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Poor Things: on eating life with a big spoon

When an unstoppable id meets an immovable world

A brain extirpated from an unborn fetus and transplanted onto a dead adult's head sounds like the farthest thing from comedy. And yet Poor Things finds a way to turn this gruesome premise into an unapologetic exploration of the bodily experience, mishaps and all. Deliberately oblivious to the constraints of "polite society" (it's no coincidence that in her former life she had the same name as the famously horny Queen Victoria), this newly formed creature meets the world with inexhaustible wonder. Every sensation is new, every place is a delight, every new friend is interesting. Not only is it uncommon to see a Bildungsroman about a female protagonist; this protagonist is, in a twisted way, already a grown-up whose brutal honesty makes up for the maturity she supposedly lacks. The milestone life experiences that usually crush a part of us, leaving us slightly more jaded each time, only make her open up even more. She has nothing to disguise, so she can't be humiliated, and the unwise few who try to manipulate her with fear or shame end up swallowed, digested and excreted by her continuous hunger for more life, more learning, more freedom. The story places her in the well-trodden plot of finding herself, except she's never been lost. She's already comfortable in her own being; the only thing she's missing is a taste of everything.

There are, however, problematic sides to this characterization that aren't acknowledged in the story. With a baby's mind and an adult's appearance, she quickly falls into the trope of Born Sexy Yesterday, which is exactly what Victorian patriarchs want her to be: available, pliant, undemanding. This is what moves them to prey on her in the first place, although it's the same trait that allows her to more easily get rid of possessive lovers, because her sexual needs aren't tied to one specific person. She's happy to be taken, but not owned. The problem is the alteration to her humanity that it took to get her to that carefree state. It's hard to cheer for her erotic experimentation when one remembers that she's mentally a child who doesn't know she's a child. Poor Things wants to answer the question of what a woman's life could be if men's attempts to control her bounced off her without effect, but the device it chooses to employ for approaching that question results from extensive, violent male manipulation of a female body. A woman shouldn't have to literally lose her mind and identity in order to become her own person.

I'm not a woman, so I'm unqualified to declare whether Poor Things is feminist. Women who have reviewed this film have already delved into that topic, both mildly approvingly and very much not, and it's probably a good sign that varying answers are possible. Liberation shouldn't take only one form, and some flavors of liberation will be more appealing to some people, and others more to others. It may be too much to expect this single brain-transplanted creature to fix Victorian inequalities, but in each of her personal interactions, one can notice a growing desire to share her joy for life. The lover who kidnaps her thinks he's using her, he thinks he's a hedonist, he thinks he's free from social conventions, but he's unable to appreciate what she could teach him. She's the real hedonist, the real user, the really free, so of course she leaves him when he refuses to be as free as she is. The friend who teaches her about the pains of the world thinks he's breaking her, he thinks she needs a dose of reality, but she's the one who lives in reality. It doesn't even occur to him to do what he can to alleviate the suffering around him. She does try, and it doesn't matter that others predictably take advantage of her good intentions. This is not a character at whom you can yell "you ought to know better." She exists in a broken world, but the story is not about that broken world. The function of this plot point is to mirror Buddha's path toward enlightenment, which started when he left his pampered palace life and saw suffering for the first time.

You may have valid reasons to criticize this hypernarrow focus on one individual's personal progress, but it's a choice the film does consciously. Several shots are filmed literally with this extreme focus: the protagonist's singular perception dominates the angle from which you're allowed to see the story. We're shown a world with multicolor skies and air railways and impossibly tall towers, and it's an open question whether that's what the world is like or that's how it appears to her. Meeting the outside world for the first time is such a surreal experience for her that even the background landscape shines to the point of warping around her.

The structure of the film is similarly affected by the way she inhabits life. The plot is interrupted by big digressions that she takes to with natural ease, existing purely in the moment. She makes impulsive yet significant choices with no care for narrative momentum, sometimes forcing a scene to snap into an unrelated trajectory. What she wants and what she does is not interested in our expectations of how life should proceed, so it can be jarring to have to adjust to her journey's irregular pace, and that's the point. When we feel like Poor Things is failing to follow the established rules of filmmaking, it's the character seizing her fate in her hands and playing with it.

For all that she discovers and grows and moves past, she's still a child at heart, still motivated primarily by fun, still untainted by learned cruelty. And when she deals with a broken world by exposing her entire, unbreakable self, we may react with shock, or amusement, or pity, or concern, but in the end, we can't help harboring a little nagging bit of envy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Novella Project: Eynhallow by Tim McGregor

The rare sidequel that finds the right question to answer

It's very hard to come up with a derivative work that adds something valuable to the original. No one asked for Han Solo's backstory, for example. To craft an expansion of an existing narrative, you need a good nose for the questions the text left hanging in the air. And even then, not every question will matter to readers or be able to make a sufficient case for itself.

Author Tim McGregor has found a worthy void to fill and created a great story of his own to put in that space. As you may recall, in chapters 19 and 20 of Frankenstein, the terrified doctor takes refuge in the Orkney islands to build a female mate for his lonely creation. For some reason, Mary Shelley included very little details about the location and the rhythm of its everyday life. But it would have been interesting to know more. How did the inhabitants of the islands feel about that mysterious stranger who took residence among them? Did Victor make any friends there? Any enemies? McGregor's new novella Eynhallow offers a gradually enrapturing answer to these questions Shelley didn't see fit to explore.

By giving a true-sounding voice to the unwitting neighbors whom Victor put in danger without a second thought, Eynhallow sets itself up not so much as a reimagining of the original novel and more as a missing chapter, one that makes the reader reevaluate Victor's evidently more self-serving account of the events. Life in the Orkneys is portrayed as harsh and precarious, and McGregor uses the arrival of a rich visitor as an opportunity to pry deeper into Victor's personality. The version of the doctor we get in Eynhallow is an oblivious manipulator who doesn't pause to recognize the exploitative dynamic he establishes with the locals. Far from the lonely genius of Romantic lore, he's a parasite who consumes people's time, possessions, and dignity. And that's before we even address his gravedigging habit.

Narrated with impressive believability in the voice of a housewife exhausted by the daily demands of subsistence work, the secret creation of an artificial person is filtered through the referents of Orcadian culture, equal halves influenced by tales of Celtic fair folk and Norse giants. We know what Frankenstein's creature is, but here the reader learns what the creature strikes common people as. Let's recall that the doctor never shared the steps of his method with the world; for the rest of humankind, his creature would exist at the other end of an insalvable epistemic gap, describable only in the vocabulary of myth.

Moreover, Eynhallow gives a bone-chilling answer to an urgent question that wasn't even spoken in the original text: if the doctor was trying to build a reanimated woman from dead parts, whose parts did he take? Who was that woman in her community, and how does her loss affect the people who knew her? By making intimate acquaintance with the victim of such macabre arts, we get a deeper glimpse into the corrupted soul of the man capable of using them on her.

Here the book boasts another advantage of not having Victor as the narrator: freed from clinical jargon, the process of being transformed into a walking corpse is described with sincere panic by an unforewarned lay observer. If you think it's scary to watch Bride of Frankenstein, imagine being her.

This short but memorable book goes beyond finding a hole in the story and inventing what could fit in there: it grows into its own rotten limbs and increases the tension until it escapes in a howl of fury, despair and confusion. Long after Victor has left the Orkneys and forgotten about their people, the consequences of his scientific profanation continue to haunt the place. For powerful men, their irreparable depredation of a defenseless community may be a minor episode beneath mention, but for those who have to endure it, it's the defining event of their history. Eynhallow not only provides an entertaining addition to a classic of literature, but also honors the lives ruined by progress pursued irresponsibly.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

Reference: McGregor, Tim. Eynhallow [Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2024].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Frankenstein at 200: What Monstrosity Looks Like

One might have been forgiven, in 1966, for thinking, "Welp, that's the end of Frankenstein, right there." It was in that year, you see, that the world got Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. In this, um, "movie," notorious outlaw Jesse James escapes down to Mexico, where the only doctor in town, and the inhabitant of the ancient castle in the village — you know, one of those great ancient, European-style castles that tiny Mexican villages are always known for — is Doctor Frankenstein's granddaughter. Not daughter, but that's the least of our worries. Jesse's traveling with his only surviving gang member, Hank, who's hurt. When Maria Frankenstein, the "doctor," sends Jesse out into the village to get medicine for Hank, she takes the opportunity to chop out Hank's brain, give him a new one, and turn him into a beefy kill-machine. Even when compared to its awful, awful companion film Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, produced by the same company in the same year, this movie is stunningly incompetent. Words simply fail.

If it were a piece of literature or a cultural icon any less durable than Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it would have seemed like the gas tank was entirely empty at that point. The book was 150 years old, after all, and James Whale's iconic films were both over thirty years old, and had been followed by over a decade's worth of increasingly dubious sequels and spin-offs that saw Frankenstein's monster paired with several members of the Frankenstein family tree, the Wolfman a few times, Dracula, Abbott and Costello, and...at some point, who could even keep track? So when you've got fly-by-night, drive-in movie producers putting Frankenstein's heirs in the Old West, it would sure seem like the creative well was dry, and the world might have had its fill of Frankenstein movies.

And yet.

You may recall Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe's recent turn in Victor Frankenstein. Or you might recall the stage play Frankenstein with Sherlock Holmes Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller. Or, unfortunate soul, you may recall the film I, Frankenstein in which the creature gets caught up in the, um, ancient war between...*checks notes*...I guess gargoyles and demons? And there were in the 1990s Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound, which featured time travel, and Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which featured Branagh and Academy Award-winning screen icon Robert DeNiro wrestling naked in some type of amniotic goo. The point is, if the world should one day tire of reincarnating Mary Shelley's creature, it will be a long, long time hence.

But Shelley's work has invited re-interpretation ever since its original publication 200 years ago — even by Shelley herself. The book first achieved prominence not upon its initial, anonymous publication, but upon its first adaptation to the stage, in 1823. The success of the stage play led to the publication of the second edition of the novel that same year, and the first time Mary Shelley was credited as the author. In 1831, Shelley herself radically altered the text, and published a new version of the book, which takes much of the blame for the events in the novel away from Victor Frankenstein and attributes it rather to fate. There is something primal in Shelley's story, something fundamental that has found continued resonance with the human spirit even through the seismic upheavals in culture, society, and technology that have taken place over the last two centuries.

Shelley's original version of the text carried this epigraph, taken from Milton's Paradise Lost:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

Guillermo del Toro has called Frankenstein the ultimate teenage novel, a book forever echoing familiar adolescent feelings like, "I didn't ask to be born," and "How can the people who gave me life not understand me at all?" That is an apt observation, and almost certainly contributes to the book's longevity. And it can't be ignored that Shelley wrote the novel when she was a teenager, herself. But baked into del Toro's observation is a perspective, and it is the Creature's. Del Toro's implicitly suggesting that the reader does and should identify with the Creature, and it is the "monster" who is the point-of-view character. I feel the same way, which is something I discussed in the first installment of this series.

But I also feel that the lessons of the novel, or the cautions and warnings baked into it, extend far beyond one's adolescence and are lessons we must continually re-examine and re-visit on a societal level, specifically because of the cultural and technological upheavals that have led from Shelley's youth to our present. We have accrued greater power over life and death than ever could have been imagined in even the most outlandish speculations of 1818. The casualties of World War I 100 years later could scarcely have been imagined, let alone the notion that organ transplants would one day become routine medical practice. The "horror" of Shelley's imaginings — pillaging corpses for their organs to put into another body — has now saved countless lives. And, unless I am consumed by flame and if I die with my driver's license on me, one day part of me will live on in someone else. Hopefully it's a good part...

As long as humankind is faced with the question of "Though we can do this thing, should we do this thing?" I believe Frankenstein will stay with us, constantly re-invented and re-imagined for our times and our contemporary struggles. And, sure, for crappy movies here and there that are just trying to get mileage from the name. But Mary Shelley seemed to believe that Victor Frankenstein was the guilty party, and his creation Frankenstein's first victim. That's how I read it, anyway, sitting here 200 years later. And that remains instructive. What are the ramifications of our decisions? Our technologies? Our innovations? What might the human cost be? What constitutes "acceptable losses" in the pursuit of knowledge?

But maybe none of this applies to you. I doubt it applies to me. I am neither a creator of technologies nor a wielder of great power. So the thing that I take away from Frankenstein, and the thing that maybe we all need to be reminded of more than anything else, is that those who are different from us are no less human, and we all, in fact, have an obligation to one another. This is not, I think, a lesson we will ever fully learn, and if we need Mary Shelley's Creature to remind us of this from time to time, then long may he live.

Published by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, songwriter, and longtime Franken-fan.

Frankenstein at 200: It's Alive

When I think of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, I tend to think of them as a single, longer film that adapts the whole of Mary Shelley's source novel, although the two films were produced with some four years between them. And as indelible and enduring and influential as these films are, I have to wonder what kind of film we might have had if Colin Clive had not been crippled by alcoholism. This is selfish, certainly, to be handed a masterpiece and ask, "but what if...?"

Make no mistake: these two films are masterpieces. Masterpieces of horror, masterpieces of cinema. And they are masterpieces fitted together by a jigsaw of damaged human beings who continued the tradition, nearly 100 years on, of the outsider's love song that is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. And, believe it or not, here we are nearly 100 years later, looking back at these films. As I write this, the first film will soon be 88 years old. When I looked at the novel, I discussed some of the ways in which we are still wrestling with the themes that animated Shelley's 1818 work. When it comes to the films, though, the actual documents have less on the surface to do with ongoing human struggles of privilege, responsibility, accountability, and monstrosity, but many of those topics still roil under the surface of these films. What elevates the movies, in my mind, are the performances of Boris Karloff and Colin Clive under James Whale's direction.

Ernest Thesiger (L) and James Whale (R)

First, a quick look at the technical aspects of James Whale's direction. For an easy comparison, watch Tod Browning's Dracula and then Frankenstein. Browning's shots are almost all locked down, and treat the material like a stage play. This was common in the silent era, but directors began to innovate past it with moving cameras and using tracking shots to move through scenes in depth. But the advent of sound film set all that back again, due to the need to hide microphones in the scenes. You'd think from watching Dracula that directors might have still been limited in those ways, but Frankenstein gives the lie to that. There are gorgeous, subtle tracking shots, like the one that follows Henry Frankenstein and Fritz out of the graveyard shadows to the fresh earth they are going to dig up for body-harvesting purposes. And there are numerous extreme tracking shots. Some help convey the urgency of hunting for the creature in the Frankenstein home, shots that go through walls and from one room to the next to the next in single, unbroken takes. Another is the agonizingly long tracking shot that follows Maria's father at he carries her drowned body through the town as it prepares for a wedding feast and celebration.

Then, there are the performances. For all of the talk of "monster" and "creature," Boris Karloff does nothing but humanize the role he inhabits. There are the big moments, like when he reaches for the sun the first time he sees it — craving light in a metaphorical and literal sense — and the small, almost imperceptible moments, like when he pets Maria's small hand, marveling quietly at its perfection, in contrast to his own scarred hands. As lovely and engrossing as I find Karloff's performance in Frankenstein, it is in Bride of Frankenstein that he is permitted something not seen in any of the other Frankenstein films (Son of.., Ghost of..., House of...): he speaks. Karloff's wordlessness helps carry scenes like the famous moment in which he comes upon a hermit's hut in the forest, and two lonely souls find solace in each other's company (again, notice Whale's direction here in the slow dissolve out of the scene), but his joy at being able to begin making himself understood helps fully realize this character. Abnormal brain or no, this is a living being that simply wants to enjoy the company of others and not be tormented because of his appearance and the fears of others. I so connected with Karloff's performance in these moments that I wrote a song about it.

Boris Karloff and Colin Clive

 A decade before I did that, though, I wrote a different song inspired by Colin Clive's performance. There is a deep sadness in Clive's performance that has always struck me as conveying the weight of all that was lost in the gap between his ideas and their reality. The quest to stave off death, prolong life, and cure disease is certainly a noble one, although the introductions to both Frankenstein and Bride couch the doctor's obsession in terms of attempting to play God. I tend to think of this spoken moral more as a way to appease the censors of the time than the actual thrust of these films, but that could just be me. I find Clive's portrayal of Henry Frankenstein to be a deeply empathetic one, and the filmmakers have eliminated so much of what I find distasteful in the character of Victor Frankenstein from Shelley's novel. In the film, the doctor does not turn his back on his creation because of a shocking appearance, nor does he abdicate any responsibility toward it in favor of simply returning home to his former, aristocratic pursuits. Clive's Frankenstein agonizes over what to do with his creation, whether or not it can be taught, or helped, or made to understand. Yet his efforts are undercut by man's inhumanity to the other...first and notably by Fritz tormenting the creation with lit torches. Colin Clive's Frankenstein recognizes what Whale tells us implicitly in a lovely sequence of shots at the end of the first film, with Frankenstein and his creation looking at each other through the spinning mechanism of the windmill. Reflections of one another. Their fates bound together.

Clive's quiet intensity exists only in the first film, however. By 1935, the actor's alcoholism had purportedly advanced to such an extreme state that it isn't any wonder he spends most of The Bride of Frankenstein propped up in bed. He died less than two years later, at only the age of 37. As a result of Clive (and his character) being sidelined, much of the heavy lifting in the movie falls on the very odd shoulders of Doctor Pretorius, played by Ernest Thesiger. Pretorius is a deeply strange character, who I admit has grown on me, but it took a minute. What has not grown on me is the shriekingly hysterical performance of Una O'Connor. She was a longtime friend of James Whale, so I appreciate him giving her the work, but almost the first ten minutes of Bride revolve around her shrieking from one person to another about this and that. I'm reminded of the line in Ed Wood when Ed's financiers ask why he gave Tor Johnson all the lines, and Ed replies, "Lugosi's dead and Vampira won't talk. I had to give the lines to somebody." I cannot help but wonder what that film might have been with a more-active Frankenstein, but then, who knows? Maybe we would not have gotten the charming introduction featuring Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley herself, explaining that the story continued past the burning windmill. Who can say?

My favorite picture of Elsa Lanchester

One thing I must point out, however, is that the credits for Frankenstein read, in part, "Based on the novel by Mrs. Percy B. Shelley." This is abhorrent, even for 1931. To Whale's credit, as my wife pointed out, in Dr. Waldman's anatomy class at the university, which is shown near the beginning of the film, the students are both men and women, which had to be a conscious choice, and possibly one that somebody fought for. I can think of a number of other films with similar scenes (some of which I've reviewed for this site), and this is one of very few I can think of that features a co-ed science class.

In the end, I confess I enjoy the Universal Frankenstein movies, even those that came much later, and after a few other actors donned the flat head and neck bolts. I find Bela Lugosi very fun to watch as Ygor in both Son of Frankenstein and Ghost of Frankenstein, and enjoy spotting the same three or four actors cropping up in different roles throughout the series. But it's the first two films that created, cemented, and deserve the legacy of the Frankenstein tale. While shaving off some of the thematic elements that I think make the book resonate even today, they nevertheless provide a relatively faithful adaptation that succeeds on its own substantial merits.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.

Microreview [Book]: Creatures: The Legacy of Frankenstein

A collection of varied stories that continue the story and the themes of Frankenstein to great effect.

Joining Vance in his celebration of Frankenstein at 200 this month, I'm looking today at a timely volume from Abaddon books, which explores the mythology two centuries on through a new set of stories edited by David Thomas Moore. Creatures: The Legacy of Frankenstein is a collection of five long novelettes and/or short novellas exploring the legacy of Victor Frankenstein and his creation through a series of shared universe stories, dealing with other creators in other situations, all of which circle the same themes of life, death, autonomy and monstrosity that the original text evokes so effectively.

For me, Creatures draws on some foundational English Literature experiences, as Frankenstein basically bookended my secondary school career. I didn't read the novel itself until my final year, as part of a term paper on Gothic fiction which pretty much my late teen aesthetic (Rebecca-from-Jane-Eyre meets a less experimental version of The Rules of Attraction, I guess), but I have stronger memories of performing parts of a dramatised version in first year. At the time, I was tall, awkward, and had just moved back to the UK from Australia with a deeply uncool hybrid accent. I'd also just started getting periods, and I have strong impressions of trying to work with classmates on this strange, tragic story while feeling crampy and sticky and wrong, as if my entire body was about to give itself away and condemn me to eternal embarrassment on top of all its other betrayals. That I associate this feeling -- which I assume was happening just as much during Maths and Science and History and all the other highlights of the English Year 7 curriculum -- with Frankenstein specifically is, I think, an indicator of how resonant the myth is even when filtered through age-appropriate dramatisations. I've never quite gotten over the tragedy of the creature, perhaps because at the time I encountered it, the feeling of wrongness felt all too real.

The stories in this volume proceed in chronological order, from the mid 19th century to a contemporary tale, and I believe that all five also feature the original creature somewhere in the story, although only in Tade Thompson's "Kaseem's Way" does he get to speak to the audience directly. The story alternates between the first person, epistolary narrative of the creature and the perspective of Kaseem, a Black boy from London who ends up becoming the ward of a scientist named Gull. Twelve years after meeting Gull, Kaseem is now deep into illegal scientific practices alongside Radha, another young scientist, when Gull's discovery of Victor Frankenstein's original notes leads to a replication of that experiment, drawing the attention of the creature and the authorities down on the pair. By placing Frankenstein's work into the hands of two young people of colour in 19th century London, Thompson's opening story immediately sets the myth in a more diverse context, playing on the power structures inherent in both the science fiction conceit and the real-world societies of the time to great effect. Neither Kaseem nor the creature ultimately come out well in this story, but the end has a fitting amount of rage to see them both off in style.

"The New Woman", by Rose Biggin, is a decadent, queer, female-driven story set in the last days of the 19th century, in a "bohemian assemblage" centred around Mrs Stella Moore. Into this company of artists has been brought a medical student, Christine Sparks, who has been experimenting on embalming corpses in formaldehyde, and her description of her work captures the imagination of another artist, Fran, who has been "sculpting" with dead creatures (think taxidermy, but with more glitter). It quickly transpires that Christine and Fran already know each other quite well, and that the next stage in their relationship will be a joint project to create a work of living art out of a corpse. Their creation, Eve, ends up being realised and impacting their relationship in ways that neither predicted. Of all the "creatures" in this volume, Eve ends up being the most well realised, and her journey from "living artwork" to a fully realised person, cognisant of the limitations of her state, is compelling and tragic. Unfortunately, that tragedy also ends up punishing its queer characters in favour of heteronormativity, which I can't quite forgive it for.

Of all the tales here, I felt Paul Meloy's "Reculver" had the least to bring in a speculative sense, although it deals interestingly with disability and wartime experience, drawing parallels between the myths that built up around those who fought, and the parallel mythology of those who, for whatever reason, didn't. Of all the stories, it leans most heavily on the motif of the outsider: its teenage protagonist, who had polio as a child and has been left with a bad leg, feels he does not fit in to his small seaside town, but it's not clear who among the remainder of the cast does. The protagonist's obsession with childhood crush Ann Bennett and the man she begins a relationship with, Geoffrey Dodd, forms a large part of the plot, as does the reaction of Ann's "shellshocked", violent father. Told in an almost slipstream style, with lots of odd dream sequences and narrative skips, the direct appearance of the Frankenstein myth in "Reculver" ends up feeling more minor than any of the other stories, and it was less successful with me as a result, although as a standalone it would still be a strong experience.

Emma Newman brings what, on the surface, feels like a classic Ashes to Ashes style period police procedural in "Made Monstrous", with a detective and his assistant dealing with a series of "mysterious" corpse thefts whose basic purpose won't come as a supririse to a reader coming to this story as part of a Frankenstein collection. However, as the title indicates, this is a story that plays particularly heavily on the "who is the monster" element of Frankenstein and there's an interesting subversion of Victor's original intent in how the mystery plays out. Detective McGregor is a compelling lead in all of this, and I have to note that this is the second time, after Carlos Moreno of After Atlas, that Newman has made me root strongly for a gruff male detective who represents the system but has also been deeply, irreversibly wounded by it. WPC Hannerty, despite a deeply unpromising introduction through McGregor's casual chauvinist lens, ends up being a great addition too, and the relationship between the two leads is one of the best parts of the story. Emma Newman's involvement in this collection was a major factor in my picking it up and I was far from disappointed with her contribution here.

And then there's "Love Thee Better", by Kaaron Warren. This story, frankly, terrified the hell out of me. Protagonist Nina, and her partner Declan, are gifted paid berths on a mysterious medically-inclined cruise ship run by her father's family friend, after an accident leaves accident at the building site he works on which ends up completely removing his arm. It quickly becomes clear that the main passengers are either waiting for limb donations or want to be donors; this is only the tip of the weird iceberg and there's very little hope of Declan or Nina getting out untouched. Worse, there's a sense of claustrophobia and fatalism among all of the passengers, Nina included - while there are hints that not everybody is on board with the captain's agenda, nobody does anything to stop themselves from falling prey to it. I find stories which feature utter complacency in the face of horror far more terrifying than reading a story where people are struggling against their fate, and the timelessness and lack of escape that the cruise setting brings only makes this worse. Of course, this is a Frankenstein story, so limb transplants are not the whole story, and the way the introduction of artificial life takes place here is just part of the tense, relentless escalation. I think this was an excellent story, but I felt sick for about an hour after finishing it, so there's no way I'm going back to check.

Put together, this is a very strong collection: what the stories as a whole lack in inter-relatedness and consistency, they make up for in terms of the sheer breadth of the Frankenstein experience that they cover between them. There's no simple moralities here, no clear answer to questions about scientific progress, life and death, revenge and forgiveness, or the condition of otherness which the original story deals with so successfully. Equally, with the possible exception of "Kaseem's Way", these are all stories that I think would work even for readers unfamiliar with the original: each stands alone, narratively speaking, and these are universal themes. Whether or not you're a fan of Shelley's 200-year-old masterpiece, Creatures is a worthy, varied anthology.

The Math

"Kaseem's Way" by Tade Thompson: 8/10 - smart and socially aware, with a strong sense of continuity from the original novel.

"The New Woman" by Rose Biggin: 7/10 - lush, unsettling queer aesthetic let down by the ending.

"Reculver" by Paul Meloy: 6/10 - effective as an exploration of otherness and belonging, not so much as a work of speculative fiction

"Made Monstrous" by Emma Newman: 8/10 - feels straightforward on the surface but has powerful hidden depths

"Love Thee Better" by Kaaron Warren: 7/10 - creepy as hell, which I guess is a good thing here?

Average: 7.2/10.

Bonus: +0.8 covers a wide range of thematic areas without detracting from the coherent whole.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Moore, David Thomas (ed). Creatures: The Legacy of Frankenstein [Abaddon Books, 2018]

Frankenstein at 200: Society Be Damned

Maybe a decade ago, I worked on the script for a TV movie about Frankenstein's monster that never made it out of development, for a studio that will not be named. The exec we were working with, the director and I, got nervous about how much latitude they might have if they took on the project, being unsure of exactly what intellectual property Universal owns when it comes to Frankenstein. So they asked me to make it *not* Frankenstein's monster. Same story, but just...not Frankenstein's monster. Somebody else's monster, maybe?

This was a challenge. I don't know exactly what Universal owns and doesn't own either, but certainly Mary Shelley's book has long since entered the public domain and filmmakers have experimented widely with adapting and re-working the story. Take, for instance, the long but partial list of film and stage adaptations over at Wikipedia. But I was given the task of subbing out Victor Frankenstein and his creation for...anything different.

Here's the thing about that: Mary Shelley's vision has become so utterly foundational in our shared sense of the fantastic that I didn't see a path forward except by looking back further than 1818, the year Shelley published her novel. How could I conjure a mythology that didn't set an audience on the defensive immediately with thoughts of, "They're just ripping off Frankenstein"? So I went backward, and looked at the idea of a golem made from mud or clay, and either an alchemist or rabbi having created it. These legends predate Shelley by sometimes hundreds of years, but the themes of many of these stories run in close parallel to those Shelley explored in Frankenstein.

It was not a perfect solution, and the movie never got made. If I ever revisit that project, though, you can bet I'm switching dude back to Frankenstein's monster, because I didn't fall in love with science fiction and horror because of Kabbalistic stories of mud men. I fell in love with those genres because of Mary Shelley's creation.

I cannot know what Mary Shelley was thinking or feeling when she wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, but my aim here is not to present a scholarly, comparative lit exploration of her book, now celebrating its 200th birthday. But this seemed like a great opportunity to revisit the book, which I hadn't read in a decade and a half, and celebrate what about it still speaks to me today.

* * *

If we think about Frankenstein as a classic tragedy, then clearly Victor Frankenstein is the tragic hero, but what would be his tragic flaw? The facile answer is "attempting to play God," but I don't think the text fully supports that. It's not his playing God that dooms him and his family, it's his abdication of responsibility. After he forges his creature from unknown materials, he has lots of opportunities to head off the tragic outcome that ultimately befalls him, but he always chooses a different way. So it might be abdication, a refusal to take responsibility for his actions, or it could simply be idleness. As the privileged son of a wealthy syndic, Victor Frankenstein never knew want or need, and simply did things as his whim took him. He went to university just because. He made a creature from cast-off bits and gave it life just because. He went back home and married his cousin just because. I am perhaps being uncharitable, but the point is that nothing much seemed of great import to Victor except his current idea of how to pass the time. This is a criticism, I feel, that Mary Shelley would have had with all of those who, like Victor, made up the upper strata of society at the end of the 18th century. And, possibly, with her husband Percy Shelley, upon whom she probably based much of Victor's personality and circumstances.

I am reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald's final assessment of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, where narrator Nick Carraway says of them:

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

By the time 19-year-old Mary Shelley attended the fabled summer getaway on Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron — in the bizarre, inexplicably hostile summer of 1816 that had many across the globe fearing the end of the world — in which she came up with the idea for Frankenstein, she had already given birth twice. Her and Percy's first child had died after being born premature, and after the birth, Percy had left Mary and run off with another woman for a brief affair. I have to wonder how much Percy Shelley's abdication of responsibility toward his and Mary's sick child informed Victor's abdication of responsibility toward his "offspring." I have to believe it did influence Mary's depiction of, if not Shelley, those situated like him. How could it not?

In my reading, I see the creature as a sympathetic figure, and an innocent. His crimes — and he racks up a pretty healthy string of murders — are the culmination of a long, brutal lesson taught him over and over again by the human beings he encounters. I'm ascribing my own feelings regarding the creature to Mary Shelley's design, and I fully realize that my interpretation may not match her intent. But there are a couple of events that take place during the creature's long sojourn in the outbuilding behind the De Lacey cabin that I find fascinating. The first is the story of how De Lacey (the blind old man) and his two children came to live in that desolate cabin, and the other is the related story of Safie, Felix De Lacey's fiancee, who arrives unexpectedly.

As I discussed in the previous post, in Shelley's original construction, the creature hides away for months in this outbuilding, and learns not only language by watching the De Lacey family, but also history and poetry, including Milton's Paradise Lost, from which the book's epigraph comes ("Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?"). The creature believes the De Laceys to be the most gentle and admirable of all people — and truth be told, they may well be, which makes what Felix De Lacey does later doubly horrifying — and his opinion is reinforced when the reader learns the story of Safie, Felix's fiancee, which also reveals why the De Laceys live in such dire material circumstances.

The De Laceys, late of wealthy Parisian society, were acquainted with a certain Turkish merchant who was arrested, it is implied, wrongly. Out of an abundance of character and virtue, the De Laceys conspire to release the Turk from prison and secret him to safety. This is admirable stuff (the Creature is listening)! The Turk is so grateful, he promises his daughter Safie to Felix for a bride (and they love each other, so this is all a win-win). But the duplicitous Turk is lying, and actually intends to take Safie away with him after the De Laceys spring him from the hoosegow. Again, the Creature is listening. Self-sacrifice is met with duplicity. But eventually, after the De Laceys effect the Turkish merchant's escape from prison and safe passage from Paris, and after Safie is denied her return to Felix...after the De Laceys are found out and banished from France to a remote hovel in Germany, after all that, Safie shows up to be with her true love, Felix. So...true love wins? In the face of society? Maybe?

Here we leave the parameters of the De Lacey story and get into Safie's personal story. Here Mary Shelley does something that had to be uncommon in fiction from 1818, in that she gives a female character agency. Safie discovered her father's plans for her, and discourses at some length about the decision that she made not to return to her Turkish origins, which would have severely proscribed the type of life and agency she might possibly realize. It was hard for me, as a modern reader, to separate Safie's feelings about female agency from those of Mary Shelley. In Safie's story, we get possibly the clearest and most concise argument for women's equality to be found in the book. Though Safie's criticisms are couched in terms of religion ("the Arabs won't let women do...xyz..."), it's no stretch to see that the lives of European women in Shelley's time were almost as narrowly defined. If Mary Shelley stakes out a position on women's equality, in the tradition of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, in Frankenstein it is through the micro-drama of Safie. It may or may not be stretching things to say that the Creature, when presented with the idea of fully human women being treated as "lesser than," saw in the struggle for women's equality the passion of his own heart.

This leads us to the sad resolution of the Creature's time as a silent observer of the De Lacey home. He has closely watched a family that treats the elderly/women/foreigners with dignity and respect. They are, no doubt, aberrant, as they might be in some circles today, but in the most admirable of ways. Yet, when he, with his monstrous appearance and proportion, presents himself to them, he is literally beaten, driven from the house, and the house is found so contaminated by his presence that the inhabitants never return.

So in the end, what is Mary Shelley saying about humankind? Nothing good, it would seem. Not only are those who are illegitimately lauded for their basic human competence (Victor Frankenstein) incapable of taking responsibility for their own foul-ups, but the most generous and magnanimous of people (the De Laceys) will violently reject those who are different from themselves. Regardless of circumstance, the status quo demands adherence. And people like the "Creature," or others who are similarly misunderstood, stand little chance of acceptance, regardless of the content of their character.

It is hard to argue with Mary Shelley, even today, that the comfortable, born-well-off individual can not simply do whatever he wants without consequence. Perhaps it is this enduring dynamic that makes the murderous Creature so relateable. Despite the characters in the book speaking in such hyperbolic praise of individuals who fundamentally reject taking responsibility for their own actions, there is, it seems, an implied subtext that resonates to this day — 200 years later — suggesting that those on the outside of this privilege, looking in, are forever playing a rigged game.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, Emmy-winning producer, writer of two songs about Frankenstein, and author of at least one unproduced script inspired by it.

Frankenstein at 200: An Outsider's Love Song

We never forget our first loves, yeah?

Sometime in the mid-to-late-1980s, KTXH Channel 20 — the local UHF channel in Houston, Texas — showed 1931's Frankenstein and Dracula. I could not yet have been ten years old, and I don't know why I wanted to watch these two movies, how I'd heard about them, if I had seen them before, even — nothing like that. But I remember being excited to watch them, I remember finding them in the TV Chronilog (the Houston Chronicle's broadcast TV listings), and to this day, I remember sitting down on the floor of my parents' bedroom to watch them.

Me, as I type this.

This was when colorization of black-and-white movies was an abomination a new thing, but these prints weren't colorized in that sense. They were tinted, as some prints had been upon initial release. I remember Frankenstein being green, and Dracula being primarily blue. I don't recall what my impressions of the films were beyond 1) I liked Frankenstein more, and 2) I now believed old movies to be super, super awesome. In addition to kicking off my lifelong fixation with classic films, Frankenstein has stayed with me as a key inspiration for much of what I have explored as a fan and created as a musician in the three decades since. But I didn't realize until Worldcon 76 published their schedule, featuring a panel on Frankenstein at 200, that 2018 was the bicentennial of Mary Shelley's novel's initial publication. That seemed as good an excuse as any to take a detailed look back at the themes underlying this work, which became a foundational text for both science fiction literature and horror filmmaking, and how those themes continue to resonate today.

* * *

Since Mary Shelley first published Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus anonymously in 1818, re-tellings and adaptations of her vision have abounded. From stage to screen, there are almost certainly too many versions to count. And I've seen a lot of them...all the Universal versions from the 1930s and 40s, Young Frankenstein, Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and God help me, Lady Frankenstein, Flesh for Frankenstein, and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.

But for our purposes, I'm going to focus on discussing Mary Shelley's novel and the two films James Whale made in 1931 and 1935, respectively, Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein. I feel like the novel (specifically the original 1818 edition) and Whale's film adaptations are all excellent, and these incarnations capture the thing that has kept me so fascinated by the story since...well, literally since I can remember. If I can boil that attraction down to a single sentence, it is this:

The "monster" is not the monster.

I have long believed that the creature is more like me than not, that I have more in common with "the other" than I have in opposition, and that I have in my power the opportunity to cause great harm in another's life if I am unwilling to see that person as they truly are, beyond any outward appearance. These are lessons that have stuck with me, courtesy of Frankenstein, and throughout this series, I intend to look at these themes and others that still find resonance across two centuries.

* * *

In many ways, I believe Shelley and Whale were both outsiders, and however intentional or not, I believe their work to be a celebration of the misunderstood and the outcast. Shelley was a woman living among the intelligentsia of the late Regency Era in England, the daughter of a trailblazing feminist writer (Mary Wollstonecraft) and a progressive thinker and writer critical of society's structures (William Godwin). James Whale was openly gay throughout his Hollywood career. I cannot speak to the pressures either Mary Shelley or James Whale felt, or their experiences with belonging to traditionally marginalized groups. But that belonging has been in my awareness of Frankenstein for at least the last 20 years, and I have felt for all that time that these two storytellers may have had good reason to identify more with the misunderstood, underestimated "monster" at the heart of this story than with the landed gentry and prosperous, "civilized" individuals like Victor Frankenstein.

In my reading of Shelley's novel and my interpretation of Whale's films, I find these to be subversive works released via mainstream outlets. In both, I don't think it's an accident that I empathize the most deeply with the "monster." But from the way that they told their stories, I believe that both of them crafted their presentations in a way that gave audiences cover for not getting it...allowing them to miss the point and still enjoy the work. Neither novel nor film paint the masses of humanity in a pleasant light, so it follows that the underlying message might have sailed right over the heads of most of their audience.

First, a quick look at the key differences between these works. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus begins as an epistolary novel in which an adventurer and ship's captain named Robert Walton recounts to his sister his attempt to procure a ship and a crew in order to try to be the first to reach the North Pole. As they cross into the Arctic Circle, they find a man struggling in the water, his team of sled dogs having drowned, and they rescue him. This is Victor Frankenstein, and he begins to recount to Walton his tale, in which he has a happy childhood, is presumed from a very early age to be engaged to his cousin Elizabeth, and heads away from his hometown of Geneva to attend university. While there, he distinguishes himself in the fields of chemistry and natural philosophy, and embarks on a secret quest to reanimate dead tissue. He succeeds, creating a giant, human-like creature, but is so repulsed by the creature's ugliness upon its awakening that Frankenstein abandons it, and the creature disappears. The creature slips through the woods, slowly coming to understand life, and hides himself in a small outbuilding behind a household consisting of a brother and sister, and their gentle, blind father. From close observation of this family, the creature learns language, and then complex ideas on life and morality. (If you haven't read the book, more than likely you're not familiar with the creature becoming extremely eloquent.) Eventually, he tries to introduce himself to the family, having been their secret benefactor for many months, providing firewood and other aid. But upon seeing him, the brother attacks him and drives him from the home. The creature then heads toward Geneva in search of Victor, with the demand that Victor make for him a mate — a female creature as rudely formed as he — that he might no longer be alone. Frankenstein refuses, ultimately, and the creature hastens the death of all whom Frankenstein loves, prompting Frankenstein to chase the creature to the ends of the Earth...or, at least the pole.

Between Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, if taken as a single whole, the film adaptation is pretty faithful. Certain characters are pared away or consolidated, and there is the strange addition in Bride of Frankenstein of an eccentric character named Dr. Pretorius, who takes it upon himself to teach the creature language and help make the case to Frankenstein (inexplicably renamed "Henry Frankenstein" in the films) that "the monster demands a mate." There is no Captain Walton, no North Pole, and Frankenstein does finally consent to make a female creature. But the broad strokes are more or less the same.

In the book, Walton and everyone in Victor's life praise him to the stars as all that is noble and good in mankind. But his actions don't bear out this celestial approbation. Upon his creature waking, Victor is so revolted that he runs headlong into the street, bumps into his friend Henry, and reluctantly returns to his apartment and laboratory. Finding the creature gone, he feels relief, and then never seems to give it another moment's thought. "What happened to that giant creature I created from spare parts? Well, he's not here, so oh well, not my problem!" Later, his refusal to grant the creature's wish is rooted entirely in the creature's physical appearance. He listens to the creature's words and entreaties, decides to acquiesce to the request, and then literally looks at him and changes his mind. This happens repeatedly. And finally, on his deathbed in Walton's ship, Victor berates the crew members for not willingly dying in pursuit of impossible folly. He has learned nothing, it seems, and as he looks back at all that has happened, he finds himself blameless in his dealings with his own creation. He seems like kind of a dick. But as the novel's main character and principal narrator, Shelley allows her reader to invest in and empathize with Victor, should they want to. And the other characters in the book help make the case for him...but I don't think Mary Shelley believed he was blameless, or noble, or just.

Similarly, Boris Karloff's monster was sold as an absolute horror. Audiences were expected to recoil from the abomination, and hide their eyes behind their popcorn buckets. But James Whale didn't shoot him as an abomination. The lingering shot of Karloff reaching for the sun the first time he sees it, the playfulness and naivety that lead him to a deadly mistake with the young girl Maria, and the suffering the monster endures at the hands of a torch-waving Fritz all serve to humanize Frankenstein's creation, and these moments abound likewise in the second film. I don't think James Whale thought the creature, despite its billing, was a monster.

And nor do I. To me, in their own ways, these are works that signal to other outsiders that you may be different, but you are still worthy of understanding.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, Emmy-winning producer, writer of two songs about Frankenstein, and author of at least one unproduced script inspired by it.

Microreview [TV series]: The Frankenstein Chronicles

They’ve squared the circle! Sean Bean's character shuffles off his mortal coal…yet is alive again for Season Two?!?

Doesn't Sean Bean look vaguely surprised to be still alive? Him and me both!

Both seasons currently available on Netflix!

It’s one of the longest-running gags in show business: cast Sean Bean in your TV series and there is an extremely high chance his character will perish by the end of season one. If in a movie, he’ll probably die heroically, indeed motivationally, spurring the surviving heroes on to greater successes; in TV series, his specter looms over the remainder of the show, meaning everything that happens from then on occurs in the shadow of his sacrifice (since he is usually innocent of any wrongdoing but is executed/killed anyway). So when I finally watched The Frankenstein Chronicles, I knew to expect a gruesome end for Bean’s “John Marlott” at the end of season one. I don’t even feel the need to issue a spoiler alert so far, because Sean Bean’s near-inevitable death early in projects is a truth universally acknowledged.

But now I must give you fair warning for the major (if extremely easily predictable) spoiler ahead: not only was I not disappointed (he is hanged), the makers of The Frankenstein Chronicles managed to jolt me out of complacency. They altered the Sean Bean death formula in a unique way, providing a (sort of) plausible pretext to have their cake and kill him too! To speak plainly, Marlott truly does die, in public, after being framed, but he is pseudo-scientifically restored to life at the very end of season one. How marvelous that the makers managed to murder Marlott but maintain him as main character (and astonishing alliteration!). This feat is surely the great triumph of this TV series.

You said it, Sean Bean!

Sad to say, there aren’t many other triumphs in this ho-hum costume drama. Bean brings his customary gravitas and Sheffield brogue to the role of Marlott, and the makers did a reasonably good job in constructing the mise en scene, recreating a broadly believable atmosphere of early 19^th century Britain, but the story itself is a bit slow, and the Forrest Gump-like obsession with having Marlott bump into all the luminaries of the day is tiresome. 

It was dumb when Forrest Gump did it, and no better today...

I hear A&E, which handled the US broadcast of this British show, dubbed it “thrilling and terrifying” and yet overall, it was neither. Here’s a more accurate epithet: “more or less watchable despite the slow pace.” Yet despite this lukewarm endorsement, I must admit I’m hooked and will finish watching season two; any show which manages to retain Sean Bean into a second season is spellbinding!

The Math:

Objective assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +2 for finding a (barely) plausible pretext for having Bean’s character survive execution (it’s like a Ned Stark do-over!)

Penalties: -1 for the plodding pace, -1 for the thoroughly irritating Forrest Gump effect

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 “still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore” for regular viewers, 8/10 for major Sean Bean fans

[For more info on our scoring system, see here.]

This snide review brought to you by Zhaoyun, ardent fan of Sean Bean’s on-screen death scenes as far back as Patriot Games and reviewer at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.

Microreview [film]: Lady Frankenstein

The...um...Meat

The Frankenstein story is my favorite in what might be considered the classic horror canon -- I enjoy it more than vampires, werewolves, and/or zombies in their many iterations. I like it so much I even wrote a song about it once (like to hear it? here it go...)



That abiding love is the only thing that enabled me to push through all the way to the end of Lady Frankenstein, an 85-minute movie that seemed like it went on for three hours.

Over the years, I had heard a little about this movie (notice the monster gripping his own shaft on the poster above), so I certainly didn't expect it to be "good," but I had hoped for interesting. See, it has Joseph Cotten in it, who you may remember from a couple of movies with Orson Welles called Citizen Kane and The Third Man, or alternately from Alfred Hitchcock's personal favorite of all of his own films, Shadow of a Doubt. I knew that the 1970s saw Cotten in some B and B+ horror movies, but some of those are pretty good, like The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Soylent Green. But seeing him in this just hurt. It didn't help that his assistant -- the Igor character -- is named "Charles," and when Cotten calls out to him, it sounds like he's calling to Charles Foster Kane.

Here's the gist of the film. Take the standard Frankenstein story -- with the Baron and his experiments and the gravedigging and whatnot -- but now add to the mix that Frankenstein has an adult daughter Tania who has just returned from medical school and wants to participate in her father's work with "transplants." While Tania sleeps, Frankenstein and Igor, er, Charles, do their big experiment they do with the lightning and whatnot, and, sadly, the monster's face catches on fire. Frankenstein assesses the situation quickly: "I don't care what he looks like, I want him to live!" Well, apparently the filmmakers didn't really care what he looked like, either, because the result is a bulbous-headed doofus that is one of the worst monsters I've seen in any film. The monster kills Frankenstein and hits the countryside, looking for couples having sex so he can kill them. Why couples having sex? Why not? Tania wants to prove that her father was onto something though, so she apparently marries Charles (I guess?) as they begin lying to a sarcastic police inspector who smells a rat in Frankenstein's death. Charles, who is now crippled (I guess?), is too old and run down for Tania, so she suggests they kill the mentally challenged servant Tommy, and put Charles' brain in Tommy's otherwise underutilized skull. That way Tania can screw a body she likes, and still have stimulating conversation after. Blah blah blah, pitchforks and torches, the camera operator loads the wrong filmstock in the camera for some of the outside scenes so everything is weirdly blue, I ponder cancelling my Netflix Instant subscription, more boobs, some fire, and finally, mercifully, the movie comes to its wearying conclusion.

The Math

Objective Quality: 2/10

Bonuses: +1 for Mickey Hargitay, who may have actually been The Most Interesting Man in the World (seriously, look him up) playing the sarcastic police inspector

Penalties: -1 for turning what started as a female-empowerment in the sciences story into a bloody striptease; -1 for using Joseph Cotten against me

Cult Film Coefficient: 1/10. Really, really bad.

This is bad, but it turns out things can be even worse. Check out an explanation of our non-inflated scores here.