“More original horror!” is always a curious statement to read from fellow horror fans. In the last few years, we’ve seen everything from a modern resurgence of new slashers, to subversive takes on the home invasion subgenre that once dominated the 2000s, to the slow, gradual return of fresh horror comedies. True, franchises may have a chokehold on the box office and wholly original concepts may be rare after a century of cinema, but contemporary horror always manages to reinvent itself by recycling classic storytelling frameworks and updating them with inventive twists, as horror is and will always be cyclical.
Mary Shelley’s original classic Frankenstein novel— a reflection on morality of new science and Galvanism of the time and the subsequent potential impacts on life and death— has spawned hundreds of movies, TV series, novels, stage adaptions, video games, and comics, and over two centuries later, creators are still finding new ways to modernize its central story. Or, rather, creators are still utilizing its central story as a skeleton to tell harrowing modern stories in digestible ways, particularly with three of the latest film adaptions in 2023 (plus one with a festive twist, the newly released Santastein.)
With few (if any?) male characters in the mix, Laura Moss’ Birth/Rebirth grapples with modern family structures, as two vastly different women from different walks of life find themselves as partnered mothers to a little girl who dies suddenly— the one being her actual mother and the other responsible for bringing her back to life. Despite their differences, both women represent different facets of single motherhood and modern womanhood in the 21st century, as the girl’s actual birth mother conceived her via IVF and working hours on end to support her, while the other is so clinical and unaffectionate in her approach to caring for the girl that the girl is seen as merely experiment fodder to the woman.
The latter woman seems to have little interest in birthing and raising children of her own, instead, using her reproductive system and its materials as a means to aid the reanimation of her experiments, to the point of eventual cervical damage. After her cervix gives out, both women come together to find pregnant women (and use their pregnant bodies’ plasma) to keep the little girl alive. One woman does it for love; the other does it for science. While not explicitly romantically involved, the newfound relationship between the two women with a common goal could even be perhaps considered queer-coded, depending on the viewer, which feels very Bride of Frankenstein.
‘birth/rebirth’
Birth/Rebirth is one of the only reanimation flicks to hyper-focus on the specificity of female bodies and all their complicated nuances, which it never shies away from showing to the audience, to the point of comparisons to all things Cronenberg. And as the mad scientist performs the pregnancy abortions on herself for her experiments, she always remains in control of her bodily autonomy. Nobody is objectifying or making a spectacle of her body in a sexual way, and Moss’ choice to force the viewer to really look at all the graphicness (the post-pregnancy blood) standardizes its normalcy of these procedures in everyday real women’s lives, which is seldom seen in these films. True to a Frankenstein tale, the lines of morality are blurred and complicated, as both women resort to anything to keep this reanimated girl alive, even after she exhibits signs of violence and aggression. Moss nor her script itself judges the grisly acts of these women— they leave that up to the viewer.
Released just a few years after the Black Lives Matter movement especially came into prominence, Bomani J. Story’s timely The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster puts a Black teenage girl in the driver seat of the mad scientist story— a rarity in the Frankenstein subgenre. After losing her mother and brother to gun violence, the “angry” Black girl believes death is a disease that can be cured, pissing off her racist teachers who resent her defiant worldviews. She lives with her father in the projects, where she secretly starts experimenting with Galvanism to bring her late brother back to life, but, naturally, her brother doesn’t come back the same, as they never do. Like Victor Frankenstein, Vicara (Laya DeLeon Hayes) has suffered so much loss in her life that believing death can be fixed is an understandable coping mechanism— factor in watching her community get torn apart by socioeconomic injustices like violence, drugs, and police corruption, and her so-called anger and desire to enact change feels more than justified.
Even through its contemporary lens, Angry Black Girl readdresses the core theme of the original Frankenstein story that perhaps we’re doomed to become what people say we are. After she reanimates him, Vicara’s brother stalks the neighborhood at night and gets accused of being a monster, until he eventually indeed behaves like one, and the death toll continue to rise in the neighborhood. Spiraling out of her control, Vicara’s monster ravishes his way through whatever is left of (their) family, until Vicara’s talents can bring some members back. Her family is reborn again.
‘The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster’
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things begins in black and white in the Steampunk era, as the newly resurrected Bella (Emma Stone) awkwardly stumbles around mad scientist Godwin’s (Willem Dafoe) mansion, likely as both a visual aid for, what begins as, the metaphorical lack of color in Bella’s life and as a nod to the original Universal Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein films. Godwin, or God, had discovered Bella’s pregnant corpse after taking her own life and presumes that, since Bella herself had no desire to live, he should give her unborn baby a chance and reanimates Bella with her unborn baby’s brain. The reborn Bella learns at rapid pace and refuses to give into conventional social politeness, indulging in all things sex, desserts, and anything else that give her pleasure— even turning to sex work simply because she enjoys getting paid to have sex.
Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 31-year-old novel of the same name, Poor Things trades scares for laughs, save for some eye-stabbing a corpse and Bella’s darkly, darkly funny fascination with the macabre. In fact, the scariest thing in the film (to the male characters surrounding her) is her unabashed sexual appetite, or her need to get “c*cked,” as she calls it, and her refusal to comply to anything they want her to do. Lanthimos recently recalled how long the film took to get made, and perhaps the long wait was a blessing in disguise, as these unapologetically raunchy desires of a female character are much more digestible for 2023 audiences than they would’ve been a few decades prior, post-Sex and the City, post-“SlutWalk,” and within the dawn of the OnlyFans era. Whereas the novel tells Bella’s story through other characters’ perspectives, Lanthimos’ film is told through hers.
But Bella’s sexuality isn’t her only desire in her journey to self-discovery: she wants to become a doctor like her father figure Godwin, just like he wanted to become a doctor after his own father. Godwin’s grotesque facial features are the result of serving as his father’s scientific experimental muse, which Godwin perceives as an honor (though the modern audience watching knows this was really abuse.) His background makes sense as to why he’s protective but proud of Bella, in spite of all her rebellion. In lesser Frankenstein adaptations, the Godwin character would fail to be nuanced and be played as more monstrous, emphasizing the “mad” in mad scientist; instead, Godwin is appalled when another character suggests that he created Bella as his own sexual toy (the joke being that, of course not, but also because he is a eunuch.)
‘Poor Things’
While the glut of Frankenstein films— stemming from Shelley’s original Victor Frankenstein himself— feature men in the “mad scientists” roles, Birth/Rebirth, Angry Black Girl, and Poor Things subvert this trope, as even the experimented-on woman Bella is becoming a doctor herself. All of these women are seeking knowledge and are smarter than their male counterparts (in the films in which men do exist, at least.) The women are looking for a sense of control over their lives, and ultimately get it, to varying degrees of success— which simultaneously feels both updated and faithful to the roots of Mary Shelley’s complicated feminist legacy.
The release timing of these films is coincidental, but the “reborn” motif they share feels particularly resonant in 2023. The entertainment industry itself is undergoing a rebirth, as it navigates post-pandemic streaming-versus-theater release consumption and its recovery after the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. The massive success of Barbie has now pushed the demand even further for female-driven stories like these ones into the mainstream market. Even one of the highest grossing concert tours of 2023 was Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” tour, which, by definition, means rebirth or revival. As per usual, horror has proven itself a foreseer of all of it, with thematically relevant films like these and its own rebirth, as horror has had a huge hand with keeping box offices alive and well in these turbulent times with no signs of stopping.
Editor’s Note: Up next? Lisa Frankenstein comes to theaters on February 9, 2024!