Vampires? Zombies? Busted. Frankenstein and his monster are the New Hotness. With not one, not two, not three or four, but FIVE new Frankenstein-inspired films in development, a play by 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle, a creepy new roleplaying game and the final volume of Dean R. Koontz’s wildly popular Frankenstein series released today, it’s never been better or easier to be (big, scary and) green (with apologies to Kermit the Frog).
Thanks to Boris Karloff’s performance in director James Whale’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, most people imagine the monster as a big, green stumbling, mumbling monster, but the original story depicts the creature as an articulate, self-educated rebel whose falling out with his estranged creator somewhat parallels Satan and God in Milton’s Paradise Lost. The monster is the ultimate outcast, created from the clay of life and cast into a world that will always fear him and never understand him. While Whale’s golem-like monster continues to dominate the public imagination, savvy authors like Koontz have increasingly returned to the original novel for their inspiration.
Koontz’s five Frankenstein novels take Frankenstein’s original characters, a scientist whose knowledge of life and death is only exceeded by his hubris and the cast-off creation who haunts him, and transposes them into the modern era. Victor Frankenstein has harvested the fruits of his research to extend his own life for hundreds of years. He is as obsessed as ever with his ongoing experiments, only now he hopes to use them to replace the entire human race. His first creation, now known as Deucalion, hopes to cleanse himself of his dark past by ridding the world of his sadistic creator. Thanks to Frankenstein’s safeguards, Deucalion is unable to kill him himself and must ally himself with the human beings who hope to stop the rogue scientist and his new, deadly creations.
The last volume of the series, Frankenstein: The Dead Town, is out today. Check out the trailer, courtesy of the team at Bantam Dell.
