For this year’s 31 Nights of Horror Challenge, the Day 26 prompt is Frankenstein. We watched the Frankenstein Family on Amazon Prime.
Storyline
Set in present day Los Angeles and told entirely from the perspective of the Monster. After he is artificially created, then left for dead by a husband-and-wife team of eccentric scientists, Adam is confronted with nothing but aggression and violence from the world around him. This perfect creation-turned disfigured monster must come to grips with the horrific nature of humanity.Our Thoughts on Frankenstein (2015)
Right away, we have never seen this one before and wow what a take. It had everything you would imagine as a modern day re-telling of one of the classics. Most remakes of the classic movie monsters are just bad. We watched The Wolfman as part of this challenge and hated it.This is a very interesting take on the Frankenstein tale. We get to see the Monster basically take his first breath and become born into this world. He slowly becomes accustomed to being alive when suddenly he’s betrayed by his creator and thus sets about on a rampage. This film illustrates it fairly well and I feel like the character of Adam/Monster is fairly sympathetic. He lacks a vocabulary like in the novel and in the 1994 adaptation, but it’s far more realistic for the vocalization capacity of a newly formed creature. Bernard Rose does a fairly good job directing and the pastoral dream sequences are nice in particular. It has a nice pace and good use of practical special effects. The Monster’s transformation was thoroughly engaging and I feel if anyone is a fan of the horror genre that they should at least do themselves a favor and see this interpretation.
7 out of 10
Trivia
Closed captioning on the film gives away the climactic discovery of the monster’s, that he has a name. As Wanda is searching her phone for information on Elizabeth Frankenstein, a quick shot suggests that the Frankensteins were affiliated with some corporation named Shelley. This is a direct reference to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote the original story. The character who attempts to autopsy the monster is named Dr. Pretorius. This is a nod to the film Bride of Frankenstein (1935) which has Doctor Septimus Pretorius as the main antagonist pushing Henry Frankenstein to continue his work. The idea that a created body would be riddled with cancers actually has historical precedent. Attempts at de-extinction have tended to fail because cloned cells have difficulty with replication, which is basically what happens with cancers. The first successful attempt to bring back an extinct species in 2003-the bucardo, a species of wild goat-did not live long because of tumors.
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