Diablo Cody and Zelda Williams’ camp new take on the body horror of Frankenstein is sure to make Mary Shelley blush in her grave.
In Lisa Frankenstein, the titular 1980s teenager (played by Kathryn Newton) salvages body parts from her peers to reconstruct her undead boyfriend, The Creature (Cole Sprouse), in the most anatomically correct way possible.
“He kept that. It’s in his bedside table,” jokes Kathryn of the penis Cole’s character chops off of an unexpecting teen, only for Lisa to surgically attach it to the re-animated corpse.
“It’s already falling apart,” joked Cole. When asked why, he quipped, “Oh, just use.”
Diablo — who was inspired by Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel, as well as the 1985 John Hughes movie Weird Science — unpacks how the scene came to be.
“Well, I was thinking to myself, as she's harvesting these body parts for him, they have to have an emotional significance to them,” explains Diablo. “So, the hand belonged to somebody that hurt her, the ear belonged to someone who didn't listen to her. And the penis [laughs] belonged to this guy that —”
“Wouldn’t sleep with her,” Zelda finished the thought, noting that she “was so excited to pitch” that scene for her feature directorial debut.
“Because the scene as it played out for me in my mind was very much what ended up being on the screen too,” she adds. “Because I remember telling [Diablo] even, 'I want this in slo-mo and the shadow of it.' For me, I was like, 'It's going to be over the 2001: A Space Odyssey song.' And then, that was too expensive, also might have been too derivative. So, we went with a different song, but it very much was one of my favorite [scenes] to wrap my head around.”
Citing John Waters and Tim Burton as her inspirations, Zelda explains that she wanted to find “that kind of humor in violence, because I know sometimes for many people, that isn't really the case. But with movies like Death Becomes Her, when violence gets taken to such a comical extent, I think it removes the teeth from it, and I love that.”
A dark comedy horror for a new generation, Lisa Frankenstein certainly evokes the kind of humor that was easier to get away with in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but through a refreshing female gaze.
Lisa Frankenstein is now playing in theaters.
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