#frankenstein

#frankenstein

If you're an overachiever, suddenly you're in seminars with grad students. They would sit there and be like, 'I only know the word in German to describe the feeling I get when I read this chapter,' Then it's some 20-syllable-long word that is so specifically a reference to the feeling and I was like, 'God, I'm out of my league here.'

Victor's imperious, cold, demanding physician father drums medical science into his son's head, beats him when he makes a mistake, and mistreats the boy's beloved mother, who dies young. Victor blames his father for failing to save his mother's life, and his determination to discover how to conquer death is less a response to grief than a vow to best the older man.

"When you read Mary Shelley's book, it is like a tour of different exotic locations," Frankenstein production designer Tamera Deverell says of the source material for her new Netflix film. "It takes place in Lake Como in Italy. It takes place in Switzerland. It takes place in Edinburgh, where we shot. It takes place in the north. It's a fantastic travelogue."

I'm quite a fan of Gothic horror movies. As a young teenager, I experienced the gloriously Technicolour-saturated world of the Hammer movies late on Saturday night TV when no one was keeping an eye on me. A star of several of those films, Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell' (with Peter Cushing) and Taste the Blood of Dracula' (with Christopher Lee), was the iconic British actress Madeline Smith.

The best horror stories are those that don't rely on jump scares or bloodied campground killers to frighten. The scariest part of The Wicker Man isn't its eponymous effigy; it's realizing what the natives of Summerisle will do to placate their gods. And while the ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel may unnerve readers of The Shining, it is Jack Torrance's maniacal relapse that truly grips the spine.

The latest adaptation of Frankenstein, directed by Guillermo del Toro for Netflix, appears to be recentering the story on the creature (Jacob Elordi) and his perspective on his creator (Oscar Isaac). After being kept in the shadows, the creature takes center stage in the latest trailer, and we even get to hear his (surprisingly articulate) voice. Check out the trailer below: "My maker told his tale," the creature says, "And I... will tell you mine." This trailer positions the creature as the hero, with the doctor shown as an angry villain. "If you are not to award me love," the creature warns, "then I will indulge in rage."

"Here Comes the Motherfucking Bride" is the tagline from this first teaser trailer for Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!, which stars Jessie Buckley as the titular (yet nameless) undead creation brought to life as an eternal companion for Frankenstein's monster ( Christian Bale). And it certainly sets a tone for what looks to be an ambitious, wild, and feminist take on Mary Shelley's classic horror tale.

As I circled the statue, the skies opened. I stayed put, moved by the creature's lonesome, grief-stricken gaze. I ran my hand along his scars and thought of my own, rough and raised beneath my rain jacket. It was impossible not to see myself in this monster. After all, he was why I was there.

"This is the voice of World Control," a metallic, nonhuman baritone blared from a spherical speaker atop a bank of computers. "I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content, or the peace of unburied death." The men and women in the room-the greatest minds in the American scientific establishment-froze in horror. The computer, a defense system that had become self-aware after gaining control of the world's nuclear weapons, continued: