Frankenstein's Creature on Film in the Twenty-first Century: Posthuman Monster, Saviour, and Victim Narratives

Abstract

This article offers an original reading of six contemporary cinema and television adaptations of Frankenstein by arguing that the creature's depiction reveals three previously unheralded narratives of posthuman embodiment. Collectively, these engage with—and, often, subvert—the culturally dominant filmic reading of the creature as monstrous, while also displaying an urgent engagement with the ethical concerns around modern technophilic science, particularly synthetic biology. Posthuman monster narratives are, superficially, the most reactionary in their depiction of the creature as a threat to the human subject. Nevertheless, in films such as Frankenstein Reborn (Leigh Scott 2005) and Frankenstein vs. the Mummy (Damian Leone 2005), the creature's intertextual stylization also reveals an underlying hybridization of identities that gestures toward Haraway's notion of cyborgean fusion. The posthuman saviour narratives, Frankenstein (Marcus Nispel 2004) and I, Frankenstein (Stuart Beattie 2014) continues this arc by promoting identity confusion over stability, a concept that is replicated by the films’ discordant amalgamation of diverse genres. By exploring the subjective embodiment of Frankenstein's creatures, these adaptations move toward the concerns of Frankenstein (Jed Mercurio 2007) and Frankenstein (Bernard Rose, 2015), posthuman victim narratives that consider the suffering of those engineered/synthetic beings that capitalistic bioscience increasingly has the potential to create.