Why Frankenstein?
I chose to adapt Frankenstein because of its atmosphere — that brooding, relentless atmosphere — and because it is, at its heart, a devastating story about rejection and otherness, about the ways cruelty is learned and then passed on. I’m also fiercely drawn to the Victorian era in England: its anxieties about sexuality, gender, class, and commerce. And I find it remarkable that this novel was written by an eighteen-year-old woman.
I’m perpetually fascinated by what happens to a story over time. Few characters in literary history are as recognizable as Frankenstein’s monster, yet the creature most people picture — Boris Karloff’s lumbering, green-skinned giant with bolts in his neck — bears almost no resemblance to the sophisticated, articulate, achingly beautiful creature Mary Shelley actually wrote. Why did that version disappear while the movie monster endured? It’s a question that haunts me.
My relationship with this novel is a long one. Before my junior year of high school, it was assigned as summer reading, and I remember sitting by the pool at our condo in Ponce Inlet, turning its pages in the heat. That school year turned out to change the trajectory of my life. My English teacher, Phyllis Wright, ignited something in me — a passion for literature, and for Gothic literature in particular. That same year I read Jane Eyre over Christmas break, and we read John Gardner’s Grendel in class. I don’t remember every discussion, but I remember talking about the sublime, and I remember the feeling of those conversations.
Years later, as an English major at Southern Methodist University, I took a Gothic literature course and returned to Frankenstein again — this time alongside Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The novel kept finding me. Eventually, I stopped being surprised by that.