Frankenstein by Sidney Perkowitz

Author:Sidney Perkowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2018-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

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MONSTER NO MORE: A CONVERSATION WITH THE CREATORS OF PENNY DREADFUL AND I, FRANKENSTEIN

Eddy Von Mueller

In the two hundred years since its fateful first appearance in print, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus has exercised a powerful hold on artists, authors, dramatists, illustrators, and creative professionals of every stripe. As the arts and media have marched ahead and new forms have emerged, at every stride, Frankenstein and his monster have been there. It comes as no surprise, then, to find Shelley’s characters cropping up in some of the new century’s most dynamic and popular media forms, including the serial cable drama, the graphic novel, and the contemporary big-screen special-effects spectacular. A conversation with the principal creative forces behind two noteworthy recent additions to the ever-growing body of Frankenstein content, the 2014 feature film I, Frankenstein and the cable television series Penny Dreadful, which ran for three seasons on the Showtime Network, highlights the ways in which screen artists today continue to mine a wealth of meaning and inspiration from Mary Shelley’s remarkable book.

“It is amazing to me that this young person, essentially still a girl, wrote the book that has become, along with Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, one of our defining myths,” said John Logan, the creator and showrunner of Penny Dreadful, who is effusive in his appreciation of Shelley’s achievement. “I probably saw the Boris Karloff Frankenstein on black-and-white television,” he recalls, and “the whole first and second generation Universal series, I watched them religiously.” But it was the novel that most captured his imagination, and provided the spark for his ambitious series.

“I didn’t read the book until after college,” Logan recalls. “I assumed I had through osmosis seen every conceivable version of it on the screen [but] the book is so profoundly and shockingly different from the film treatments.” Revisiting Mary Shelley’s novel years later, during what he describes as a “deep dive into the works of Wordsworth, which led to Byron and Shelley and a study of all the romantics, just for pleasure,” he was struck by the psychological complexity and linguistic beauty of the teenager’s magnum opus. “It’s a doppelgänger story: two separate people, two sides of the soul at war with each other—both eloquent, both fearful, both strangely innocent. The binary relationship between Dr. Frankenstein and his creature, and the eloquence of the creature, which I had forgotten since I read the book in the ’80s, was so overpowering I thought, ‘Oh my God, I want to do a Frankenstein version which really deals with that elemental issue, with the proper poetry.’”

That impulse to capture the depth and poetic richness of Shelley’s book grew into a complex ensemble drama about Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), a “deeply religious woman” caught up in a web of dark supernatural forces in the Victorian era, which Logan describes as a “microcosm of our own world.” Though the series draws on a dazzling array of 19th- and 20th-century sources—it is in some ways a grand pastiche of horror and the uncanny in film and literature, riffing on Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and H.

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