Mary Shelley’s gothic horror novel Frankenstein has long captured Hollywood’s fascination, dating back to Universal Pictures’ first 1930s adaptations starring Boris Karloff. But on the eve of the Academy Awards, there seems to be renewed interest in the more than two-centuries-old monster.
In February, Diablo Cody’s gender-swapped Lisa Frankenstein wrapped its “coming-of-rage” story in bubblegum-pink sensibilities. Meanwhile, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-nominated film Poor Things sets its Frankenstein tale in 19th-century Victorian England. The director Guillermo del Toro, a legend in the monster genre, has his own interpretation—Frankenstein—in the works for Netflix, with an estimated 2025 release date. And this month production is starting on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Bride of Frankenstein adaptation for Warner Bros., starring Christian Bale.
According to Michael Chemers, the director of the Center for Monster Studies at U.C. Santa Cruz, the Frankenstein trend may reflect a new, insidious societal fear. “All monsters embody some form of social or personal anxiety,” he says. “In terms of Frankenstein, the anxiety has to do with the unethical use of science.”
It raises the question: Could our renewed fascination be rooted in our apprehension about world-changing technological advancements such as A.I.?
Tales of Terror
The Frankenstein retellings of the 1950s—The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), for instance—came at a time when public discourse revolved around atomic energy, so there was a “tremendous fear of unbridled science that was being pursued without recourse to ethics,” Chemers says.
In the subsequent decades, other monsters had their turn under the sun. In the 1960s, with the rise of spirituality and the occult, ghosts were all the rage; then came the 1970s and its real-life monsters—Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.
By the late 2000s, the vampire as a seducer became ubiquitous in media franchises, ranging from Twilight to The Vampire Diaries to True Blood. These characters emerged at a time when the dominant culture’s understanding of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. rights was evolving. “Gay and lesbian readers have been quick to identify with the representation of the vampire,” the author James R. Keller wrote in his 2000 book, Anne Rice and Sexual Politics: The Early Novels, “suggesting its experiences parallel those of the sexual outsider.”
The 2010s saw a resurgence of the zombie in The Walking Dead, World War Z, and Train to Busan. “In both the zombie apocalypse and the destructive path of globalization, individuals are empowered as states fail,” Niagara University professor David A. Reilly wrote in his 2016 book, Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics. The zombie, according to him, represented our fear of the international other.
Which brings us to today, a time when the creation we arguably fear most is A.I., and its explosive growth. Twenty-one U.S. states are passing or have already passed legislation to regulate its design and development. In 2023, the European Parliament passed the A.I. Act, meant to limit the technology’s wide-ranging implications in spheres ranging from education to medicine to entertainment, and last year’s Hollywood labor strikes sought protections against the use of A.I. by film studios and streaming platforms.
“There’s a sense of foreboding and dread that we are about to create something that we don’t understand and can’t control,” Chemers says.
But while A.I. has prompted fears that machines may one day replace humans across a variety of sectors, there’s also a degree of respect and awe for the technology, which is reflected in our recent considerations of Frankenstein’s monster.
In Poor Things, the scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) loves his monster child, the beautiful Bella, played by Emma Stone. The rakish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) tries to win her affections, while the patient scientist Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) ultimately reaps the rewards of her love.
In Lisa Frankenstein, set in the American suburbs of the 1980s, Cole Sprouse plays the Creature, who turns out to be the boyfriend Frankenstein (Kathryn Newton) always longed for.
Even in The Creator, a 2023 science-fiction film set in a future where humans go to war against A.I., the child with the power to end the war is portrayed as a sympathetic and adorable mix of human and A.I. robot. (The film has been nominated for two Academy Awards, in sound and visual effects.)
Whereas in the original Frankenstein, the monster blackmails his creator to provide him with a companion, these more recent iterations show the monster as worthy of human admiration and love. It may not be possible to rein in the Creature, but that doesn’t stop the other characters from wanting to sleep with it.
Just as we scramble for ways to protect ourselves against the potential exploitation of A.I. for nefarious purposes, products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E have been openly embraced as search engines, copywriters, and meme generators.
“There’s a sense of foreboding and dread that we are about to create something that we don’t understand and can’t control.”
But as we integrate the technology into our daily routines, we are also acutely aware of its imminent exponential growth. According to a recent study by OpenAI, the tool’s computational power has doubled every 3.4 months since 2012, thanks to advances in machine learning. And as we continue iterating on it, the technology becomes better at imitating human speech and thought.
This idea is reflected in Lisa Frankenstein, where Lisa repeatedly puts her Creature through a tanning bed (the 1980s equivalent of a galvanizing mechanism) to add parts to his mutilated body, gradually humanizing him. (Interestingly, one of the parts that Lisa must secure for her partner is a hand, a part of the body that A.I. still struggles to represent.)
In both Poor Things and Lisa Frankenstein, monsterization is something that is meant to be embraced, an improvement on the original human form. Monsterization allows the protagonists to access parts of themselves that they otherwise would never have explored in the first place.
It’s telling that, in Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Netflix adaptation, the Creature will be played by none other than the devastatingly handsome star of the moment, Jacob Elordi, who played Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’ recent film, Priscilla.
“The general feeling of Frankenstein is that the true monster is the doctor,” Chemers says. “The fault lies with the creator.” And perhaps that’s what’s most fascinating about this postmodern view of the gothic classic—the desire to be the Creature, or at least couple with them. If you can’t beat them … sleep with them?
Lynn Q. Yu is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL