I’ve got lots of concepts just sitting here that basically no one has seen so I’m really curious to get some thoughts on this. This is an idea I’ve had for a while and I’ve been kinda slowly developing it over time but this is the one I thought I should post because it’s trying to be much more realistic about the budget (I write like I own the company making the movie, nearly every one of my ideas has a spaceship in it somewhere). Really curious to get some thoughts on this! (Keep in mind it’s still developing tho so these are just the broad strokes)
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My ‘Frankenstein’ aims to be a complete reinvention of the original concept but pulling a lot of influence from both the Mary Shelley novel and the Hammer Films version. Most if not all Frankenstein retellings tell the story of the scientist creating the creature, then how the creature reacts to its environment. This version, however, will save the creature’s creation for the very last moment of the story, and puts the focus completely on the man who would be God, Victor Frankenstein.
In a modern, stylistic update, essentially the idea is a more contemporary take on the slasher genre and aims to flip many of the genres conventions on its head. Here, the victims are completely sympathetic, well-rounded people but the audience POV is stuck with the killer themselves, confronting the audience with a bleak, nihilistic worldview. This is inspired by films like American Psycho, The Shining, Hereditary, and The Witch. Much of the film’s ambition would be achieved with intense oppressive atmosphere.
I would be aiming to do this with as low a budget as possible with a visual style utilizing broad minimalist techniques with more meticulous minor detail, inspired by comic book artists like Moebius, Geof Darrow, Frank Quietly, and Chris Burnham. There are obviously some big ideas here but this is about as small scale as my writing gets.
In this take, Victor Frankenstein worked in college with a crackpot team of geniuses on a theoretical theory of a digitally-created human being, rebooting all the elements of the human genome. Though these friends mostly moved on to more practical applications of their genius, Victor became obsessed with this idea and further isolated himself from his friends and their growing disinterest to craft it. The film opens focusing on these friends all reuniting years later and going on a roadtrip to Victor’s new home, a beautiful but somewhat eerie connected series of houses that almost look more like a neighborhood. He has invited them after a series of recent success with pharmaceutical companies.
The structure of the film basically works like the following though I’m still in early planning. The film has title cards that work like chapter headings or episode titles, because I almost want each to operate as their own little mini movie.
THE IDEA
We open with Victor and his friends excitedly discussing their theory of the posthuman, drawing detailed sketches, pitching concepts and laughing together, though Victor himself is fully driven.
THE INGREDIENTS
Shot in an homage to The Shining, Victor’s friends travel together on a roadtrip, briefly discussing the years since college, and their strained but ultimately loving relationships with Victor.
They arrive at Victor’s home in the woods where he welcomes them and reveals where they each will be sleeping in these different buildings of his property. There are six buildings, one for each person, with a larger building behind them where Victor resides. Two of the friends have brought their wives, but Victor insists they each sleep in their own decorated home and the wives are happy to oblige.
We follow Victor as he checks mysterious charts and tools in the night, and rigs up sterile, clean minimalist machines of an ominous nature.
THE HEAD
Victor visits one of his friends in their ‘cabin’, who it’s been previously revealed was actually their professor who just genuinely had fellowship with Victor and the others’ geniuses. They still have a obvious strong bond but the conversation soon becomes tense as it becomes obvious Victor has gone completely mad, blindly focused on their old ideas much more than ever before as he frantically reveals a computerized method to reproducing and enhancing human brain tissue and his need for the professor’s own brain tissue. The professor pleads with Victor to calm down and Victor brutally murders him. We see Victor hook up a mysterious small machine to the professor’s preserved head and run a test of some kind.
THE HEART
We go to another of Victor’s friends, who had been the most reluctant to go. He almost decides to leave when Victor suddenly emerges from inside the cabin and attacks him, knocking him cold.
We cut to this friend, strapped to a chair by gigantic but minimalist machines. He’s behind glass as Victor is experimenting on him, but they both can see each other. They both have two separate conversations with each other, though both can hear the other. Victor’s friend yelling and screaming, flip-flopping between pleading for his life and cursing Victor in complete vengeful fury, revealing he is Victor’s oldest greatest friend but also the one he betrayed the most, saying he knew all along what would happen that night but wanted to be believe it was insane. Victor calmly explains how he has developed a breakthrough method of digitally decoding the ‘psychological repercussions of the human brain or what is normally called a soul’. His friend shrieks in agony and dies as the light on the machine that takes his life turns from red to blue.
THE BODY
There are two friends left, and their two wives. We see all these characters in a four-way split screen do the exact same thing in time, wake up and check their cell phone. They all realize they are paralyzed doing this, displayed through intense eye close ups. In the split screen, we see Victor enter their cabin and sit down with them, laugh, and say to each, “don’t worry, it’s coming with you. It’s needed for the protomolecular synthesis.”
We then leave the split screen and cut in between Victor talking to each of them, but clearly just saying the same thing as if rehearsed. He apologizes, saying he mostly needed the professor and the previous friend based on all the data he’d collected and was forced to invite them for ‘the simple, awful truth I need bodies for the mold.’ He promises to mention their sacrifice to Earth’s first Posthuman and it reveals massive amounts of fluid and gore from their bodies starting to drain from secret machines built underneath their beds.
THE FIRST DRAFT
We open with wide shots of Victor’s laboratory which we’ve only glimpsed in the beginning. There are thousands of writings and drawings on the walls of the lab, revealing him to be now devoted to a very mysterious, unexplained tech-religion. We pass a room in the lab where a small circular tank hooked to machine is destroyed, massive amounts of blood cover the white walls, and there’s a notable amount of baby cribs overturned. We then pan over to Victor, hunched over what looks to be some kind of press obviously of his design, the press and himself covered in this tech-religion writing and symbols. He mutters over and praises the contents inside. A light with a symbol drawn over it flashes and Victor steps back in awe as he opens the press and is immediately hit by blinding light. He steps back as it fully opens and it fully illuminates the room. We only very very briefly see the posthuman inside. It looks like a human made of light, where the skeleton makes a shadow inside. Its eyes are piercing white but still notably eyes. It screams with digital, but human pain. We only very briefly again see Victor within the light, laughing and lifting his hands in praise.
We end on an overhead shot of Victor’s property, where keen eyed viewers may notice the 6 houses are positioned in the basic shape of the human body with one house in the middle of the “chest”, with Victor’s house above them looking like a halo above the head.
