1. Be My Frankenstein: Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Splice (2009)

Episode Transcript
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Greetings dear listeners and welcome to SciFrights, a film discussion podcast from the interzone where horror meets science fiction.
My name is Liam Dunn and I am a screenwriter, film critic and lifelong science fiction fan.
My name is Dr Lindsay Hallam. I am a senior lecturer in film at the University of East London who specialises in horror cinema.
And we are in fact partners both in life and in crime and we are die-hard film fanatics.

(01:20):
Together we made the film, They Called Me David, a sci-fi horror short shot on Super 8 that premiered at Fright Fest in London in 2021 and has played in genre festivals around the world.
Now what is SciFrights I hear you ask? Well in this podcast we will present a season of episodes based around a specific theme and then discuss how horror and sci-fi are in conversation or in some cases opposition to each other as they approach this theme from their unique perspectives.

(01:46):
In each episode we will explore this theme through two films, one horror and one science fiction, and we will discuss the place of the film within the history of the genre, the way the film employs genre tropes and style and analyse the film's historical context and social commentary.
For our first season we are going back to where it all began with Mary Shelley and her most famous creation Frankenstein.

(02:08):
But since the original story is in the public domain and has launched and inspired countless films over the decades, we thought rather than look at direct adaptations of the story, we have chosen to explore a couple of films that have put their own unique spin on the well-worn tale.
Lindsay, which films have we chosen to discuss this theme?
We've chosen the Andy Warhol produced 3D Schlocker, Flesh for Frankenstein from 1973 and Vincenzo Natali's genetic engineering thriller Splice from 2010.

(02:35):
Exciting stuff, can't wait to get stuck in. Oh and by the way, we are going to spoil the hell out of these films so if you want to watch them beforehand, please go ahead and we will be here when you get back.
So without further ado, welcome to season one of the SciFrights podcast, Mad Science and the Legacy of Frankenstein.

(03:05):
I run a module on horror and science fiction and I tell my students that both of these genres originate from the same place, which is the novel Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley.
It seems like every iteration and variation on these two genres always somehow relates back to what Mary Shelley explores in this novel, starting with this very idea of birth and birth versus creation.

(03:29):
In horror, there's often images linked to birth and a lot of horror is originating from within the family and about family origins and family relationships.
And there's even a theory of the monstrous feminine that Barbara Creed wrote about where a lot of what is coded as monstrous is also coded as maternal and linked to maternal femininity.

(03:52):
And this is different to what you get in science fiction, which is about the representation of creation. So it's not something that's born naturally as we know it.
But it's often you have something that is created through science and technology. That is something that's not from nature or natural birth, but from human means or intelligence.
And a lot of this goes back to when this novel was first written, so it was published in 1818, so not far into the 19th century.

(04:22):
So this was a time of modernity, going into the industrial revolution and kind of the modern world as we know it.
And a lot of the thinking from that time also relates back to the shift that came certainly in the 17th and 18th century with the Enlightenment, which was about looking to reason and individualism rather than tradition.

(04:47):
Also about challenging ideas about tradition and faith and this whole idea that we are beings created by God and thinking more about what we can learn through scientific thought and skepticism,
but also these other technological advances and also advances in what we know about humans. In 1859, you end up getting Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species where he talked about, we were created through the process of evolution rather than the whole idea of the story of Adam and Eve.

(05:23):
So along with these technological advances, you had scientific experimentation and a lot of that scientific experimentation was on bodies and corpses.
So in order to get that information, you had to do these quite grisly things.
Almost like they said, you had to become slightly inhumane in order to gain knowledge of humanity. And you have also around that time, the whole idea of like grave robbing and stories of like Burke and Hare, these famous grave robbers.

(05:52):
But there were also, I think there is still this underlying fear associated with, are we meant to have this knowledge? Are we meant to be almost in a sense playing God?
If we've got rid of God, then we are kind of become, we are now dabbling in God's domain. And this whole idea of things that man was not meant to know.
But yet we were progressing forward with trying to learn those things. And I think all of that, those fears are seen in the Frankenstein story, rather than defying death, it ends up bringing more death.

(06:26):
And also the moral responsibilities that we have to these creations that we make.
There's also a lot of interesting kind of material that comes with just looking at how the novel itself came to be, how Mary Shelley got the idea for the novel.
The storyline emerged from a dream that she had, where she dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he'd made.

(06:51):
And she started telling these tales from this, inspired by the stream, when she was on holiday in Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, who later became her husband.
He wasn't her husband at the time that they went on this holiday. He was actually married to someone else at that time.
She journeyed to Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, her step sister, or half sister, I think, or step sister, Claire Claremont.

(07:22):
And the place that they went to was owned by Lord Byron, who was a well-known poet, but also a very scandalous figure.
And they all were living quite a bohemian lifestyle. They were practicing free love long before that became a thing.
And so while they were all holidaying together, Lord Byron came up with this idea that a competition to see who could write the best horror story.

(07:48):
Also at this chalet in Lake Geneva was John Polidori, who was a doctor, but he ended up writing a short story called The Vampyre, which became one of the first vampire stories.
So from this competition, you have Frankenstein and one of the first vampire stories.
But yet with Frankenstein, you have Mary Shelley, a female author, and she was actually only 19 years old when she wrote the novel.

(08:14):
And she comes from an interesting background. So when you actually look at her family background, her father was a political philosopher, I believe.
And her mother was Mary Wollstonecroft, a very well-known women's activist, early feminist.
But she actually died when Mary Shelley was just 11 days old.

(08:36):
And Shelley herself, during her lifetime, she would lose three children. Her half sister actually ended up committing suicide after knowing that she was illegitimate.
So you have with Mary Shelley and also with a lot of people at that time, birth and death linked together.
Often a birth came with a death or there was a birth very quickly followed by a death.

(08:59):
There's even some really interesting stories that Mary Shelley lost her virginity to Percy Shelley on her mother's grave, which you can still visit in King's Cross.
So again, this whole idea of birth and death and sex and death all being completely kind of intertwined in Mary Shelley's life.
And you have in the story a motherless birth.

(09:21):
So it's almost could relate back to the whole kind of process that we all have to do, which is to kind of disconnect from our mother or gain independence from our mother.
A lot of stories involved the hero losing their parents so they can become their own person.
The character of Victor Frankenstein, who creates the monster, he wants to create, he wants to conquer death.

(09:42):
He wants to do what a mother cannot do, which is create a being that doesn't die.
So it relates also back to this whole idea of improving on humanity through science.
But yet it ricochets back and it ends up producing more death.
So you could say it's somewhat kind of a cautionary tale about what our knowledge can bring.

(10:06):
But then also when you look at the monster itself, you have this first iteration, this idea of the monster being a metaphor that can transform the monster.
And transform kind of psychic and social fears into another form, kind of embodying those fears.
And it's this whole idea that by creating a monster, it's embodying something that maybe readers or viewers don't want to face head on.

(10:32):
And that's what horror and science fiction does.
It tells stories about fantastical things that are standing in for real things.
Yeah, then maybe we don't want to face directly, such as the fact that we're all going to die or unconscious desires and things that we have to repress in our everyday lives.
So the monster in Frankenstein has gone on to be seen as kind of representing and embodying all these different things.

(10:57):
There's this quote from Jack Halberstam, who wrote a book called Skin Shows, which is all about technology and the Gothic.
And he says, the monster in various readings is literature, women's creativity, Mary Shelley herself, the monster is class struggle, the product of industrialization, a representation of the proletariat,
the monster is all social struggle, a specific symbol of the French Revolution, the power of the masses unleashed, the monster is technology, the danger of science without conscience, the autonomous machine.

(11:30):
So so many people have been able to use the framework of the Frankenstein novel in so many ways.
The monster can be seen to represent so many different things.
There's also a link back with the Frankenstein tale to earlier tales and myths.

(11:51):
And the novel Frankenstein actually has a subtitle, which is The Modern Prometheus.
And so that's referencing the character of Prometheus from Greek mythology, who was a Titan who creates humanity at the best of Zeus, Zeus being the king of all the gods.
And he wanted humans to be made in the images of the gods.

(12:15):
And Prometheus creates humans.
He teaches them to hunt and read and heal the sick.
But in kind of deference to the gods, humans must give them offerings.
And Prometheus ends up tricking Zeus into accepting kind of not very good offerings.
And Zeus gets really mad about this when he realized what's happening.

(12:40):
So he decides to keep fire from humanity.
And Prometheus, who actually quite likes humans, he takes fire and gives it to humans.
So he's giving humans a certain this knowledge of how to create fire.
And again, Zeus gets really, really annoyed with Prometheus.
But this time he punishes Prometheus by fixing him to the Rock of Caucasus.

(13:05):
And each day an eagle pecks out his liver.
But because he's immortal, the next day his liver grows back.
So then the eagle then pecks out the liver and devours it again.
So he's kind of sentenced to this eternal torment because of his immortality.
And eventually Hercules releases him.

(13:27):
But it goes all back to this idea that Prometheus is punished for knowledge.
And this whole idea that knowledge brings punishment.
And you can say that's central to what happens in Frankenstein.
Knowledge brings punishment.
Looking into it more, Percy Shelley actually wrote a, well, what's called a closet play,

(13:48):
which is a play that was written, but it was not meant to be performed.
It's meant for you to read it and to imagine in your mind.
And he wrote a play in 1820 called Prometheus Unbound.
So two years after this.
And it's referencing plays written in ancient Greece by Ischolus, written in 5 BC.

(14:09):
That was Prometheus bound and then Prometheus unbound.
So this relationship is back to ancient Greek mythology.
So this whole idea that these tales kind of, yeah, go back as far as you could say,
as humanity has been telling stories.
Just going back to the origins of cinema, which was created in 1895 with the Lumiere brothers.

(14:33):
Within 15 years, you have a cinema version of Frankenstein in 1910.
There was another version in 1915 called Life Without Soul.
And then there was an Italian silent film Il Mostro di Frankenstein from 1921.
So for almost as long as there's been cinema, there's been versions of Frankenstein.

(14:55):
Then in 1931, you've got the universal monster film directed by James Whale.
And then since then, there's been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of variations of Frankenstein.
You can't talk about horror and science fiction, which is what we want to do in this podcast,
without going back to the beginning, which is Frankenstein.
It's really interesting, the whole link to the Greek myths and Prometheus and to the sort of the romantic centre people like the Shelleys and Byron,

(15:22):
the Greek myths would have been like taught to them growing up.
And I think to them Prometheus was kind of a rock star, sort of a figure to them,
someone who defied Zeus and was punished for it.
And I think that's all bleeding into Frankenstein as well as this idea of the Christian God sort of turning.
If you're living through lots of, everyone's having miscarriages and stillbirths or there's a cholera epidemic and these things.

(15:49):
And you'd think God has abandoned us, the whole idea of the creator turning on his creation and wanting to sort of ignore him altogether would ring very true.
As well as the whole idea of the enlightenment and progression of technology,
the whole idea of reanimating a dead corpse or a body made of different parts.
To readers at the time would have not felt outside the realm of possibility.

(16:14):
Like this would be terrifying in that respect, like, oh, somebody could do this tomorrow.
Okay, so we're going to start off with Flesh for Frankenstein, which was produced in 1973.
It's directed and written by Paul Morrissey.
As Liam said before, we're going to spoil the hell out of this film.

(16:37):
If you are interested in watching the film, there is version available online through the Internet Archive.
And there's also excellent Blu-ray versions out there.
It's now part of the Criterion Collection.
There's also a really great version of the film that's available from Vinegar Syndrome.
We have to find the right head for this torso. It has to be of a man who strongly craves women,

(17:07):
who's overriding urges are sensual.
If we succeed in finding such a single-minded man, our chances are very good.
That's a male we create, will fall in love with my female zombie.
What did you say your husband does?

(17:29):
He's a scholar, spends hours in his laboratory.
I really don't know what he does. We lead very separate lives.
They will mate.
And she will bear me the children I want.
They're going to be a true start of a new race entirely created by me.

(17:52):
It's funding only to my bidding.
Where's your husband?
He's busy working. Looks very hard.
No one has come as close as I.
He's standing the secret of life.
You have Baron von Frankenstein played by Udo Kier.

(18:16):
He lives with his family, including his wife, Katrin, who we later find out is also his sister.
They have two children. They live in this castle.
They have workers for them, including a farmhand called Nicholas, played by Joe D'Alessandro,
who is this very viral farmhand who catches the eye of Katrin.

(18:40):
But Frankenstein is more interested in creating a male, what he calls a male zombie with the perfect nasum,
who also has a high libido.
So the male zombie will mate with the female zombie that he's also created and then go on to create a master race.

(19:03):
What is Frankensteinian about this film, other than the title, obviously?
Well, you do have the use of the names.
The main character is called Frankenstein.
You had this idea of creating a being from different parts.
So for Frankenstein in this iteration, he is kind of obsessed with these.

(19:24):
I think he refers to them as like Serbian ideals.
He has this weird thing of creating this perfect being it's almost maybe slightly Nietzschean,
like this kind of ubermensch, also kind of fashy, which we'll probably talk about as well,
finding these particular parts that are for him perfect.
So you have mad science because there is no grounding in any kind of scientific authenticity in this film.

(19:53):
And I think for what is Frankensteinian about this film is that it's actually kind of taking the Frankenstein story
and trying to take it to its absolute extreme.
So it's really kind of pushing certainly these sexual elements,
but yeah, just all these kind of transgressive aspects of the story.

(20:16):
There was this book, Monstrous Progeny, a history of the Frankenstein narratives by Lester D. Friedman and Alison B. Kavey.
And when talking about flesh for Frankenstein, they actually say,
within its frames, a viewer watches acts of incest, voyeurism, male and female full frontal nudity,
blood spurting from severed body parts, decapitation, rape, oral sex, explicit medical procedures,

(20:43):
impaled bodies, exposed organs, hints of child molestation, and enough dead bodies to rival a Tarantino movie.
Even today, flesh for Frankenstein still shocks viewers with its stomach-churning display of bloody organs and dismemberments,
not to mention taboo sexuality.
So all the greatest hits.
Yes, yeah.

(21:04):
So stuff that wasn't in the original novel, but yeah, just pushing it as far as it can go.
So how is the film referencing earlier Frankenstein films and the associated themes of creating life?
What's interesting about this film or what's unique about this film is the lab that you have for Frankenstein's experiments.

(21:33):
It's very different to the lab that you get in the 1931 film where it's all this kind of electricity.
And the lab in that is very related or referencing the lab, the kind of labs that you get in German expressionist films such as Metropolis.
But in Flesh for Frankenstein, there's a lot of these artworks.

(21:56):
In fact, there's a lot of artworks throughout the castle where they're living.
And so for me, it kind of feels like the lab and the experiments, it's almost about creating this work of art rather than this kind of scientific experiment.
So creating a life is like creating an artwork.
It is a period piece, so it's set around the time that the original novel is set.

(22:18):
So it's not updating the stories, which is what the 31 version of Frankenstein does.
It's not set in the early 19th century.
What I think is the link to earlier Frankenstein versions is particularly to the hammer versions of the film.
The first Hammer horror film was Cursed the Frankenstein from 1957.

(22:41):
And the whole thing with what Hammer was doing was remaking a lot of the Universal Monsters films.
So they did their very own version of Dracula and the Mummy and Werewolf films.
But what Hammer was doing was remaking these films in really kind of lurid colour.
And they were really pushing the sex and violence as much as you could for that time.

(23:04):
And so what I think Fresh for Frankenstein is doing is almost in the tradition of what Hammer was doing was kind of pushing them as far as they could go.
And Fresh for Frankenstein is just continuing to push it even further.
And it certainly does.
I also think what's singular about Fresh for Frankenstein, which ends up becoming quite influential,

(23:30):
is that it's also pushing the Frankenstein story into camp and the kind of queerness of the story.
Although I would say you had that in Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel to Frankenstein, also directed by James Whale.
Was a gay filmmaker, although he was in the closet at the time.

(23:52):
But yet a lot has been written about the queerness especially of Bride of Frankenstein and the relationship that you have in that between Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius, who's very, very camp.
And this, and Fresh for Frankenstein's made two years before Rocky Horror Picture Show, which again is even more of a camp than Fresh for Frankenstein is.

(24:14):
So I think Fresh for Frankenstein is quite an important version of the Frankenstein story and kind of the directions that it's pushing it in.
What makes it horror and not science fiction?
The fact that the science in this film has no basis in any kind of scientific fact.
Yeah, this is very much a film that's all about the gore.

(24:42):
You could say it's very much a gore film.
3D gore.
Yes, 3D gore. Yeah, so it was made for 3D and so it's, in some ways it's kind of gimmicky in that way, but it's kind of playing again kind of campiness of it, of using the 3D.
I also think that the fact that it's also pushing the sexuality of the story is something that you don't really get in science fiction films.

(25:10):
Science fiction is often a sexless genre, I think you could say.
There was even a really interesting article by Vivian Sobchak called The Virginity of Astronauts, where she kind of goes into this, the sexlessness that you get with science fiction.
And that certainly is not the case with Fresh for Frankenstein.

(25:32):
And going back to Vivian Sobchak, who's written a lot of great stuff about science fiction, she has a book called Screening Space, the American Science Fiction Film.
She says that one major difference between the genres lies in their sphere of exploration, their emphasis.
The horror film is primarily concerned with the individual in conflict with the society or some extension of himself.
The science fiction film with society and its institutions in conflict with each other or some alien other.

(25:58):
And the arena for horror is usually as small as a minute town, an old castle or an English village, while the arena for the science fiction film is often the large city, the planet earth itself.
And also that horror deals more with moral chaos and science fiction is concerned more with social chaos.
And she also has this one quote that I absolutely love.

(26:19):
If one genre is as large as the human soul, the other is as large as the cosmos.
And so I think, yeah, I love that.
So I think certainly with first for Frankenstein, it is set basically within this really fucked up weird family unit.
And it is on this kind of smaller scale.

(26:41):
And certainly there's issues of morality and there's this disruption and transgression against the moral order happening in this film.
And so what does Andy Warhol have to do with all of this?
So when this film was first released in a lot of places, it was actually titled Andy Warhol's Frankenstein rather than Flesh for Frankenstein.

(27:07):
And the flesh for Frankenstein was made pretty much the same time as or just just before they then went into production on Blood for Dracula.
So they did a Frankenstein and a Dracula.
And yeah, in some places they were released as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and Andy Warhol's Dracula.
But really, Andy Warhol didn't have anything to do with the making of these films.

(27:33):
However, a lot of the people that are involved in the film all kind of originate from within Andy Warhol's social circle,
the place that he had in New York called the factory where a lot of people in like the 60s were hanging out.
And so Andy Warhol is a really significant artist in the 20th century.

(27:58):
He is kind of one of the pioneers of the art movement that is known as pop art.
And a lot of what he was doing was almost redefining what art was.
And his most well-known kind of pieces of art were like he did a painting of a Campbell's soup can.
And he also would do these screen prints and he would do a lot of screen prints of famous stars such as Marilyn Monroe,

(28:25):
most famously, and Elizabeth Taylor.
And so it was kind of a turning away from like abstract expressionism that was popular in the kind of 40s into the 50s,
like Jackson Pollock, which was very abstract.
He was using things that we associate with advertising and popular culture and making that into an artwork.

(28:47):
That was quite radical at the time.
And it also relates back to the fact that Andy Warhol actually got his beginning as an artist painting pictures of shoes for advertisements.
So he actually comes from an advertising background and he was a very good advertiser and marketer.
He became very rich from the art that he did.

(29:08):
And also this idea of screen printing, duplicating, making copies.
This whole idea of repetition, like a kind of mass marketing and mass producing art,
was something that he was a part of as a fact that the place that he had where he worked was called the factory.
And it functioned very much like a factory in that he had people working for him who were mass producing these works of art.

(29:33):
And he was making a lot of money from that.
But also one of the another products that comes from the factory were what he were referred to as his superstars.
So there were people who were hanging out, artists, other artists and musicians and just New York figures were hanging around the factory.

(29:58):
Such as Edie Sedgwick, who was just this very rich heiress who became quite famous.
There's a lot of people that kind of revolved around the factory scene.
You had the band Velvet Underground who released an album that was called Andy Warhol.
Also a lot of dry queens and transgender people were part of this scene and they became superstars such as Candy Darling.

(30:26):
There's the Lou Reed song called Walk on the Wild Side where he makes reference to all the different superstars.
And so a lot of these superstars ended up being part, being filmed.
And so one of the things that would happen at the factory was that people who were there and people visiting there would have a screen test where it would be just this unbroken 13 minute shot kind of a close up of them just unbroken for I think it was about 13 minutes.

(30:53):
Warhol also started to experiment with cinema.
So just as he was kind of redefining what art was, kind of redefining what cinema was.
So there were a lot of films that were made off people kind of hanging out and there were a lot of orgies and things were happening there and some of that was getting filmed.

(31:14):
But also he was making films such as Sleep which is six hours of someone sleeping. There's a film called Empire which is eight hours of just this one shot of the Empire State Building.
So this holiday of like, yeah, you wouldn't think that can you consider that a film, just a shot of the Empire State Building for eight hours.
And these would be screened in the factory and then at other cinemas and things.

(31:37):
I mean, even though he didn't, you know, he never really had any involvement in the film actually Paul Morrissey who's the director. So what was his deal?
Paul Morrissey meets Warhol in 1965 and by that time he was already a filmmaker in his own right.
I think that even may have met at an exhibition of Morrissey's films.
They start collaborating with each other and they make films, most notably a film called Chelsea Girls, which is actually projected onto multiple screens with different soundtracks.

(32:08):
So it's a very early version of kind of multi screen installations that you know are very kind of commonplace now but they were doing that.
And it was during filming a 25 hour film called Four Stars that Morrissey ends up meeting Joe D'Alessandro.
So Joe D'Alessandro plays the character of Nicholas in Flesh of Frankenstein and he was the main actor that shows up in a lot of Morrissey's films, including a trilogy of films.

(32:41):
Flesh made in 1968, Trash made in 1970 and Heat made in 1972.
And in these films, Joe D'Alessandro is essentially playing himself.
He has this very kind of thick, I guess kind of New York, Brooklyn accent, which in Flesh of Frankenstein very much kind of clashes with all the other accents around him, which are very thick European accents.

(33:10):
But the Flesh, Trash and Heat, Joe D'Alessandro is pretty much playing himself.
His characters in all of those films is called Joe.
And these films are very documentary like they're all shot around New York on location.
They're very much seem like fly on the wall following Joe D'Alessandro around.

(33:35):
The film Flesh, the first film is about Joe and his wife has a girlfriend who needs money to buy an abortion.
So Joe goes out and hustles.
He picks up men to make money.
And it's just kind of following him walking around talking to people, picking up Johns and all the things he has to do with them.

(34:01):
And yeah, it's very loose narrative and very, you could say kind of verite style or very realistic.
Yeah, very different to what he ends up doing with his Frankenstein and Dracula.
But what's really weird about Paul Morrissey is that when you look into kind of his political beliefs and things, he's really, really right wing and conservative, which is so strange.

(34:27):
Because he seems completely the opposite to all of the other people that would have been hanging around the factory at this time.
But yet he kind of is able to use Warhol and his stars in a way that's still quite experimental, but it manages to make these films that are quite accessible.

(34:48):
How did this film end up being made in Italy?
And what did you do with the film?
So Morrissey and D'Alessandro went to Italy to meet with these producers, Carlo Ponti and Andrew Brandsburg.
Carlo Ponti is actually a really, really big, well-known producer in Italy.

(35:10):
And they managed to convince Ponti and Brandsburg to give them money to not just make one film, but to make two films.
They each have a budget of $350,000 and they have a schedule of three and a half weeks.
They filmed at Cinecitta, which is the big studio in Italy.

(35:31):
And the film is made with Italian crew, including Carlo Rimbaldi, who does the visual effects in the films.
He actually does a lot of visual effects for Mario Barber and Dario Argento, who are making horror films and Gothic films in Italy in the 60s and 70s.
He also did the visual effects for the film Possession, Andrej Zulawski's Possession.

(35:57):
And he also ends up going to Hollywood and doing the effects for Alien and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in E.T. and June.
But yeah, he comes from Italy, so he's involved in the visual effects.
But because they're making it in Italy, in order to be considered Italian, Italian films and getting certain benefits by law,
what they end up doing is they're releasing the film with a co-director credit from Antonio Margheriti, who was also an Italian director making a lot of Gothic films around this time.

(36:29):
He made a film called Castle of Blood, which is great, The Long Hair of Death.
And they basically just put Margheriti's name in there to get these benefits.
And they ended up being put on trial for continued and aggravated fraud against the state because Margheriti wasn't the director.
Ido Kier says that Margheriti was unset, but he never directed the actors.

(36:55):
He did do some second unit and some of the effects.
So towards the end, when the male zombie destroys himself and he rips his intestines out, the hands that you see are actually Margheriti's.
But yeah, he didn't direct any of the actors themselves.
But the films have a lot in keeping with the Italian Gothic films that were really in fashion, especially in the 1960s.

(37:21):
But with a lot of the Italian Gothic films of the 60s, there usually was the female monster like the vampire that you get in Black Sunday, played by Barbara Steele.
And a lot has been written about how those Italian Gothic films of the 60s were almost about these fears and anxieties about women's independence and the rise of the women's movement and women's liberation.

(37:45):
But there are a couple of Italian Gothic films where you have male protagonists.
And there is this weird kind of undercurrent of necrophilia in several of these films where you have these male characters.
There's a film called The Third Eye, which starts Franco Nero, where he's this basically kind of a mother's mummy's boy.

(38:08):
And he loses his fiancee and then he starts killing women.
And it almost seems like there's a weird necrophiliac thing going on.
There's also the terror of Dr. Hitchcock, which is kind of Frankensteinian.
But there's a necrophilic aspect to that of a man like losing his wife for kind of wanting to drug her, to be with her.

(38:32):
So there is this kind of transgressive sexuality kind of running underneath a lot of these Italian Gothic films that, again, is all pushed to the extreme in Flesh for Frankenstein.
So there are these kind of Italian Gothic elements, but yet bumping up against, you know, this American sensibility that comes from the kind of Warhol scene and the fact that you've got Joe D'Alessandro in there as well.

(38:55):
But it's also really funny and kind of, but not in a sort of, you know, but it is camp, but like it's not in a, it is very knowingly funny is what I would say.
Is this film a comedy?
So the fact that it was made for 3D, I think signals that they were having a bit of a laugh with it all.

(39:17):
And Paul Morrissey says, I saw 3D as the ultimate of all absurdities.
Horror movies themselves are absurd, but 3D itself is totally absurd.
And you do get all these silly kind of moments in the film where they're thrusting like organs at the camera or this bit where they're in the brothel and a lizard out of nowhere kind of drops in.

(39:40):
And there's just the shot where Joe D'Alessandro just picks up the lizard and then just kind of puts it into the camera.
And so there's obviously these shots in there that are made for the 3D camera.
And yeah, it's so obvious again, it becomes quite funny.
And the whole mistaken identity that happens with Frankenstein and Otto taking Sasha's head instead of Nicholas's head because they find him at the brothel.

(40:09):
And this is whole bit where they see Sasha because of the lizard, all the women kind of start screaming and they run out of the brothel and Sasha kind of follows them.
And Frankenstein sees Sasha and with the women and he goes, one man and two women.

(40:30):
Like you just can't believe that such a thing could actually happen.
Necrophilia is fine, but two women and one man weird.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, so it's this whole thing of like mistaken identity and also just the treatment of sexuality in the film.
I mean, it is very, very silly.
There is no actual kind of straightforward sex in this film.

(40:53):
It is all kind of, it was all very perverse, including what I call the armpit scene between Katrin, Frankenstein's kind of sister wife and Nicholas,
who she's employed as a servant in the house, but really he's there to serve her.
So they have these kind of sex scenes, but they're not really sex scenes.

(41:17):
For example, one scene is just her kind of licking his armpit and there's all these exaggerated slurping sounds.
It's like ASMR, but wrong.
Yeah, so like only Nicholas is interested in straight fucking in this film.
Everyone else is kind of interested in something else.

(41:41):
I like just weird shit, something kind of incomprehensible.
Let's not yuck there, yum.
No, okay.
Yeah, I'm not here to kink shame.
No.
And it also makes me think of like John Waters films that were being made around the same time, like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble that were made around the same time,

(42:03):
where in John Waters films, they're all doing kind of weird transgressive things, but it's all kind of played for laughs.
And it almost is this almost juvenile childlike aspect to it all.
It's almost like Frankenstein, even though he's trying to create humans, I don't think he really knows how humans are made in the natural way.

(42:30):
That's amazing.
Yeah, no, he's not a very good doctor.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He's got an honorary doctorate.
And you've got these kids and I don't know how they, if they are actually their biological children, because that would mean that they were the children of a brother and sister, I don't know.
And yeah, you've got these kids all throughout the film just kind of there watching and spying as all this craziness kind of happens around them.

(42:59):
So yeah, I think the film is very funny.
I think you definitely could make a case that this is a comedy.
The film is very farcical. It's kind of like the whole, yeah, the mistaken identity thing.
It's almost like, I think I saw a very similar storyline in an episode of Frazier once.
So I mean, you talk about, yeah, I mean, the whole thing with Frankenstein Udo Kier in this film is that he wants to make a race of zombies of people made of parts that will kind of do his bidding.

(43:30):
And he's all obsessed with the Serbian ideal and perfect nasums and things like that.
And it made me think, wait a minute, is Victor Frankenstein a bit of a fascist?
It is odd that he does seem to be obsessed with this idea of creating this perfect being that fits these particular racial ideals that he has.

(43:55):
And he is more, I mean, we've kind of talked a lot about how his science, there is kind of no basis to his science that comes from anything.
No, he's just some rich guy fucking around and finding out, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's kind of more of an aristocrat than a scientist.
And, you know, the fact that he is seemingly married to his sister, this whole idea of inbred aristocracy seems to be an undercurrent that's happening.

(44:25):
Although if you actually go back to the source novel of Frankenstein in that Viktor Frankenstein, marries Elizabeth, who was found as a child and basically was raised as Viktor's sister.
So there is this weird incestuous undercurrent even in Frankenstein.

(44:47):
They're not biological brother and sister, but they were raised in that way.
And there is this in both fresh for Frankenstein and blood for Dracula, there is this obsession with purity.
In Frankenstein, he's obsessed with kind of this idea of racial purity and in blood for Dracula, he's obsessed with this idea of like sexual purity, the fact that he can only feed on the blood of virgins.

(45:19):
But unfortunately, he ends up in that film going to another castle where a family lives and all the daughters, pretty much all the daughters are also in that film fucking the farm hand played by Joe D'Alessandro.
Who's also a communist.

(45:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, in that film, I think he's a communist, the Joe's character is a communist and he's also really awful.
So I think that maybe that's Morrissey's right wingedness kind of coming into play there.
But yeah, so there's this weird idea is about purity that are part of both of these stories.

(46:05):
And yeah, these incestuous undercurrents that is also kind of very much a part of the Gothic as well.
But yeah, you have the fact that Victor Frankenstein, he is trying to create this perfect being but he's using the peasants and he refers to the peasants as creatures.
But yeah, he's using it, but for them, I guess he's just looking at them as parts, they're not actual human beings, they're just parts that he can use to assemble this perfect thing and this whole idea of a master race and this whole idea of a very strict hierarchy that he is up the top of.

(46:43):
That's certainly kind of very fashy.
And it's also that playing God thing which does come from the original source material of like, well, I can make this better, I can affect this, which is also a fascist thing as well.
But yeah, it's like, well, you, you were born with the perfect nasum, but your leg's weird, so I'll take your head and put it on this body which I've assembled.

(47:05):
So you mentioned a bit about the sexual sort of elements of the film, it's all very, you know, a lot of transgressive stuff going on, very perverse in some places.
So how do you think that fits into the Frankenstein narrative or is it sort of an extrapolation of sort of what was inherent in it while not being absolutely the focus in the original source material?

(47:27):
So it is definitely pushing the sexual elements of the Frankenstein story that we were not completely present in the original story.
But like you were saying before, when Frankenstein, the novel was written, people didn't know the possibilities and what was going to happen with the advancements in technology that maybe you could bring the dead back to life.

(47:53):
So it's this whole idea of the infinite possibilities, I guess, of the human body.
So in some ways, the film is kind of pushing the possibilities of all kind of different forms of sexuality.
There's a really great theorist and philosopher, Patricia MacCormack, who wrote about Flesh for Frankenstein.

(48:23):
And yeah, MacCormack wrote an article about Flesh for Frankenstein called Italian perversions, and she talks about how in the film, she says, established equations of heterosexuality, gender, possible worlds and even objects demarcated in normal ways,
are extended and challenged.
And she talks about the viewer is opened up, presented sensorially with the force of the body unwound like a great visceral ribbon with desire that exceeds hetero, homo or pathological.

(48:54):
And she talks about the notorious scene in the film where Frankenstein kind of lays down on top of his female zombie, and it seems like he's kind of putting his hand inside her, but also maybe that he's pleasuring himself.
So the scene begins with these kind of extreme close ups of the incision that's been made on the female zombies torso and all the stitches.

(49:28):
And he starts cutting open the stitches and it's almost like a strip tease as he's cutting these stitches open and her kind of body opens up.
And the music that's playing in the background of the scene is this kind of tinkly piano almost kind of romantic music playing, his hands kind of in like direct, I guess penetrating her, but you don't know what else is being penetrated.

(49:54):
It's somewhat ambiguous, but it's very, it's very clear that he's almost orgasmic as he's doing what he's doing.
It's really the only time in the film that he shows any form of sexual desire is for the internal organs.

(50:16):
And there's a very famous line that ends this scene where he says,
To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gallbladder.
The whole Frankenstein story is based on this transgression of life and death that that one boundary between life and death is transgressed.

(50:38):
And that one boundary of life and death, the one kind of rule, I guess, of human of humans are that we are born and then we die.
But in Frankenstein, Frankenstein stories, a being is not born and it doesn't die.
So it just kind of makes all boundaries kind of destabilized by this one kind of transgression.

(51:02):
I wonder as well, I mean, I just thought of this that how to explore the transgressiveness of it is why the film is very focused on Dr. Frankenstein and not so much on the creature, right?
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's exploring those that element of crossing those boundaries of a person doing that sort of thing, do you think?

(51:26):
Yeah, I mean, I always go back to the weird childlike nature of it all that it is almost like a child doesn't know how babies are made and what leads to that.
And the characters of I think Frankenstein and also Otto, Otto ends up killing the female zombie because he's trying to do what Frankenstein does and ends up her all her internal organs kind of fall out.

(51:57):
And it's this whole thing of, yeah, he doesn't know what he's doing.
And at one point he kind of almost he pulls down kind of this covering over her genitals kind of looks at it and then puts it back up again.
Like he doesn't even know what it what Jenna told like what, yeah, what to do with it.
The women's, yeah, what female genitalia is for and what it is.

(52:24):
Okay, so that's Flesh for Frankenstein.
So shall we move on to our next film, which is Splice.
So Liam, what is Splice?
Splice is a really terrific sci-fi that was directed by Vincenzo Natali released in 2010.
It starts Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody who play rock star scientists, Clive and Elsa, who caught celebrity with their innovative approaches to genetic engineering.

(52:52):
While working on a bleeding edge hybridization technique for big pharma, Clive and Elsa decide to conduct a secret experiment using human DNA, kind of pushing, they want to push the boundaries of their experimentation.
The result is Dren played by actress Delphine Chaneac, I'm going to mangle that, who's a part human part animal hybrid creature, who's rapid development and evolution far outpaces a scientist's ability to control it.

(53:21):
Dren goes through a sped up process of development, changing form and gaining abilities at one point, even growing gills when exposed to water.
All the while Clive and Elsa take opposing sides as to what to do with their creation.
Elsa wants to study her, Clive wants to destroy her.
As it becomes more and more difficult to hide their experiment, Clive and Elsa still Dren away from the lab to Elsa's childhood farm, where Dren's development goes into overdrive.

(53:48):
She grows wings due to the feeling of freedom from being closer to nature and signposting her desire to be free and to just be out in the wild.
Then she develops feelings for Clive, which suggests that her desire to mate is building Clive all too willing to oblige in one of the more taboo scenes of the film.
Meanwhile, Elsa's own traumatic memories of her mother overtake her from being back in her childhood home and she begins to abuse Dren.

(54:16):
In some part maybe to her jealousy because of her attention to Clive, but also because she starts to retreat back into science as a way to cope with the overwhelming feelings of this creation that she's made.
And the whole film takes a very dark turn at the end when Dren changes gender from female to male and attacks Clive and Elsa.

(54:40):
And then eventually the male Dren rapes Elsa before being killed by her.
And then we flash forward at the end to find Elsa making a new deal with the big farmer company over her new creation because she is now pregnant with Dren's child.
And together Elsa and the company plan to, I think as they say in the film, fire all patents for dates with the research that this child would inspire.

(55:12):
If we don't use human DNA now, someone else will. Regulators and politicians, they tear us to pieces. Human cloning is illegal. This won't be human. Not entirely.
It's coming out. It's not due for months. Slippery.

(55:36):
What was that?
A mistake.
It's empty. Clive? Clive? Clive?

(56:07):
Clive!
What happened? It's alive.
Don't! Don't! Don't! You'll get out! Get out of there. I'm gonna gas it. Wait. In three, two, one. I said don't!

(56:30):
Elsa, this is dangerous! I'm not gonna hurt you.
Nobody can see what we made. It's aging fast. Days within a matter of minutes. What are we supposed to do? Lock her away from the world.
We changed the rules. We crossed the line.

(56:54):
No!
That's the worst that could happen.
So this is not in any way a straight adaptation of Frankenstein, but what is Frankenstein in about this film and how is it referencing Frankenstein films and associated themes?

(57:28):
Well, from the off, the names of the characters Clive and Elsa, Clive being Colin Clive who played Dr. Frankenstein in the original James Whale film and Elsa Lancaster who played the bride of Frankenstein in the sequel, as well as the company that they work for is Newstead, which was Lord Byron's ancestral home.

(57:50):
So I think that's even connecting it to the story of the creation of Frankenstein in the villa, which everybody seems to come back to as well as the original text, don't they?
And also Dren is an artificial organism created from pre-existing flesh, but instead of body parts, it's DNA and genetics.
The scientists are kind of the villains of the piece. Their scientific hubris is what sets everything into motion because they explore where to find out what man is not meant to know by crossing that boundary of science.

(58:29):
So it's the transgression of physical and ethical and social boundaries, but sort of like where we were talking about what was happening in 1818, the way people would have felt at the time.
This is like a 21st century update of those sorts of concerns and themes. And the whole aspect of playing God and the pursuit of science replaced by the pursuit of profits.

(58:50):
So the novel Frankenstein wants to just kind of create life for the sake of it, but in Splices, it's all because of money, because of these companies that are involved in all of this scientific endeavour.
Yeah, Dren is made up of different species instead of body parts. And like the creature who's not some lumbering brute, but a man seeking answers to the question of his own existence, Dren displays emotional and sexual and intellectual intelligence,

(59:14):
but through nonverbal means, she can't speak, but she she uses body language and scrabble tiles and sort of pointing to symbols in order to communicate her feelings.
And I think the story of Frankenstein has influenced a lot of films, especially sci-fi films that don't immediately present as a traditional Frankenstein narrative,
about take elements of its science and themes extrapolate on them, which splice is an obvious example.

(59:35):
But being Canadian, Natali, it's hard not to compare Natali to his countrymen David Cronenberg, but the influences there are clear, I think, the flying, the brood, in my opinion, being obvious touchstones.
And you were talking about before about science fiction being a sexless genre, I think Natali and Cronenberg put paid to that assertion, because they are very much into the sexy sci-fi, lots of bodily orifices and body parts and goo and all kinds of things going on.

(01:00:04):
So the fly, for instance, 1986 scientific accident turns him into this monster in the brood at psychological trauma turning into physical manifestations.
And both are about science progressing unchecked. I mean, Brundle's just in his laboratory with his teleportation machines, like in kind of doing it in secret, a bit like what they do with Dren.

(01:00:26):
And with the brood, it's Oliver Reed, right, with his psychoplasmics and he's just often in his compound doing whatever he likes.
And there's even, you know, Blade Runner features from 82 features genetic engineering as a central force with which the replicants are made.
They're given a four year lifespan so they can be treated as second class citizens and hunted down or retired, as they say, by Blade Runners.

(01:00:53):
So again, that's that sort of turning your back on your own creation sort of thing.
A big one being Gattaca. So a lot of stuff in the late 90s heading into the early 2000s and continued on.
So yeah, Gattaca, which reverses Blade Runner with the genetically engineered being the elite of society.
And those who were born naturally being marked as invalid.

(01:01:15):
So it kind of, I guess, posits like what if the creations take over the society.
And of course, Jurassic Park with its genetic experiments being done for profit, which also forefronts the central Frankenstein theme,
which is voiced by Jeff Goldblum, who also played the fly in the Cronenberg film, where he says your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could.

(01:01:39):
They didn't stop to think if they should, which I think is very central to these these films and to the Frankenstein story as a whole.
So we've kind of mentioned already that there is this transgressive aspect to where this story goes.
But yet, why are you arguing that this film is science fiction and not horror?

(01:02:03):
Well, I do. I do think it's there.
There are horrific elements and you could say that it is both a sci-fi and a horror, but I think it's primarily a sci-fi because it is through the science that we introduced to the central conceit and the driving force of the narrative.
Not only that, but its themes resonate and reflect on the scientific underpinnings of Frankenstein and the films I mentioned earlier.
It's humanity's reach exceeding their grasp, but through the lens of sort of new millennium and the scientific breakthroughs that have occurred since.

(01:02:28):
I think that's the whole idea of humankind going beyond their knowledge and finding sort of monsters and sort of reflections of their own monstrosity, I think are very central to those kind of science fiction stories,
especially if the protagonists or the main characters are scientists themselves.
I think that is what delineates it from just straight horror.

(01:02:50):
So like Frankenstein, it also includes creating your life only for that creation to sort of destroy the world around them, whether that's physically like the physical world or just their relationship.
And at the end, I think that's a very science fiction ending.
The science has continued. They continue with the birth of this new creature for profit, even though it will most likely be a detriment to humanity.

(01:03:11):
Whereas Frankenstein is monster destroyed in the original story to reset the status quo.
This kind of ending is very kind of a hard science fiction ending and very sort of influenced by I think like Twilight Zone and those sorts of like Richard Matheson stories like from like the 60s, I think where they get that influence from.

(01:03:32):
And yeah, and I just, I buy the science more than say In Flesh for Frankenstein.
Oh, for sure. I do actually believe that Elsa and Clive are scientists and that they kind of know what they're doing.
Yeah. But I think like also that if it were a horror, it would be like The Golem or something like that.
I think where you know, if you were to animate some kind of creature, it would be through some sort of ritual or some sort of supernatural instigation rather than through science, which is why I think Splice is much more sci-fi than horror.

(01:04:02):
And on that point, the film does seem to be saying something about all these recent scientific advances in genetic engineering that are happening.
And yeah, how is the film for you dealing with a lot of the kind of ethical implications that are arising with all the possibilities with genetic engineering that are available to us now?

(01:04:26):
Like I said before, a lot of films kind of started being made around the late 90s to do with genetic engineering sort of at the forefront.
And even Natali said that he got the idea of the film when he saw a picture of a mouse with a human ear growing on its back relating to something called the Vacanti mouse created by Charles Vacanti in Massachusetts General Hospital around 96, 97 when these sorts of things were actually kicking off in real life.

(01:04:52):
And this is where the an ear shaped framework was made from cow cartilage and was inserted under the skin of a hairless mouse.
And so the skin of the mouse would kind of sort of wrap around this framework to sort of create a new ear, essentially, and it gained controversy and questions around genetic engineering at the time, even if technically there was no genetic manipulation involved.

(01:05:17):
I mean, they built a thing. I mean, yes, it was made out of like biomaterial and they kind of introduced it into another creature, but it wasn't like they built an ear from scratch just using DNA.
But anyway, and also around 96, there was the case of Dolly the sheep who was, it wasn't the first cloned animal, but it was sort of the big news item that everybody remembers.

(01:05:38):
Dolly was cloned from a mammary cell, which is why she was named after Dolly Parton, loved the scientist's humor.
It proved that a complex organism could be cloned from a cell of a specific organ.
And so that hit the headlines and everybody got all excited.
And Dolly was controversial as the idea of cloning any organism leads to fears of human cloning and its obvious implications of personhood and civil rights.

(01:05:59):
But of, you know, of course, no humans have ever been cloned that we know of outside of the UFO called the Raylians, who I remember popping off about them having a clone.
The human cloning debate then would morph into that around stem cell research ostensibly focused on embryonic stem cells, which can be used to treat injuries, medical conditions, genetic and genetic diseases, because they can help regenerate tissue.

(01:06:26):
So the controversy from that is about, is from anti-abortion and pro-life activists who believe that life begins at conception.
And so the harvesting of embryonic stem cells that in their eyes would be akin to murder. So I don't, there's been sort of not a lot of exploration of that.
I think they've used adult stem cells in research and things.
So I think that's where it all gets all a bit sticky and people get, have all these concerns.

(01:06:50):
So where that is kind of stopping scientific progress in some of those areas.
Those are the sort of the things that were kind of going around in the minds of people in the late 90s, early 2000s, which influenced a lot of these films, things like Gattaca that I mentioned before.
The Island of Dr. Moreau, which was 1997, which was a very ill-fated production with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, which was actually a remake of a 1977 film, which was a HG, was it HG Wells?

(01:07:16):
Yeah.
And it's about a scientist on an island splicing human DNA with animals so you get like a Tiger Man, Kangaroo Boy and what have you.
In 1999, there was Deep Blue Sea, which was about sharks being genetically engineered to cure Alzheimer's as you do.
Then escaping and famously chomping Samuel L. Jackson accident in half.
There's Arnold Schwarzenegger action film The Sixth Day where he gets cloned.

(01:07:41):
I have to think it's all about Arnie comes home one day and sees himself in making dinner for his family and it's like, how did that happen?
Star Wars Episode II, Attack of the Clones in 2002, Star Trek Nemesis, where Picard's clone played by Tom Hardy as the villain.
Splice is more about genetic engineering and taking it that next step, but all these films are kind of more about cloning and about, I mean Resident Evil is kind of about a genetically engineered virus that turns people into monsters.

(01:08:09):
And then you get things like in 2017, there's Okja by Bong Joon Ho, which is similar to Splice in that we have responsibility for the things that we create.
But I think with Splice, as opposed to some of these other films like Deep Blue Sea, Sixth Day, Star Wars, Splice is more about ideas than spectacle.
Whereas a lot of this sort of genetic engineering cloning is used as kind of a jumping off point for action and adventure.

(01:08:36):
I mean, there's the Michael Bay film, The Island, which is about the clones who have grown for rich people for their organs and things, which is all interesting ideas, but then kind of forgotten for the car chasers or the Jedi's fighting CGI critters.
I think Splice is the film that along with maybe something like Gattaca, where they actually kind of want to talk about the ideas and the implications of genetic engineering.

(01:09:01):
And there was also the same year, Never Let Me Go, but yeah, going back to Splice, I mean, when we were watching it just recently in preparation, I remember turning to you and saying how the film really does look like very 2009, 2010.
And I even talked about how is this Indie Sleaze sci-fi. I'm wondering like what you can say about that and the fact that you've got a couple at the centre, rather than just this lone scientist.

(01:09:34):
And how it seems to me to maybe tap into some kind of Gen X or millennial fear of growing up and settling down or, you know, adulting as the term would be.
And the other fact that Elsa and Clive are, they're shown as like really cool. They're kind of the opposite to the kind of science nerd stereotype that you would see like in the Big Bang Theory.

(01:09:57):
Like these are the like cool nerds. That that was also starting to be a thing at that time of like nerd culture becoming the mainstream.
And the fact that they're, isn't their lab called NERD, like, which is also, you know, the name of a band that was around at that time.
Yeah, that's true.
So I don't know if you want to talk about like, how is all this playing out through the fact that you've got Elsa and Clive, a couple like this young cool couple at the centre of it.

(01:10:27):
Yeah, well, I mean, there's like, I think they're on the like they're introduced being on the cover of Wired magazine.
And I think Adrian Brody wears like a suit with a t-shirt and sneakers, you know, so cool.
So late 2000s, cool. And I think even, and you know, and the Sarah Polley's like, you know, whereas she's wearing like the tinted glasses and things like that.

(01:10:50):
So it's like, it's definitely this whole idea of the, of these like, yeah, rock star scientists and kind of positing that perhaps in the not too distant future that these would be the new, you know, the new poster children for popular culture that it wouldn't be that scientific advancements would be so cool.
But if you were to go to the scientific advancements would be so sexy, you'd have all these hot young things out there, splice and DNA.

(01:11:13):
This is also like the all to do with like the commodification of it all, the fact that it's all run by corporations as well.
Yeah. And I think, well, that's part of why Elsa wants to, to go on to the next stage and they won't want to let her do it because, you know, it's straight up immoral and illegal.
But she's just like, well, they can't tell us what to do where we're on the forefront. We're out here where it's like, it's that whole thing of the shades of kind of Mark Zuckerberg sort of, you know, move fast and break things and like, we don't care about what, you know, that's something

(01:11:46):
that we're going to be doing. And the ramifications are something for future us to worry about right now. We're going to just, we're just going to push forward and do these things. And that not acknowledging the danger inherent in what they do and only thinking of themselves and their own design to push boundaries of science just for the mere sake of it.
It's that whole scientific hubris of, of well, they tell me I can't do it. Well, then I'm going to do it. Aren't I? Like that childlike aspect to it. And I think that even relates back to the original Frankenstein, doesn't it? Because he's the victors like studying medicine when he decides to do this thing, right?

(01:12:16):
When he's like, he has the same sort of idea of the all the people, he's, you know, the city fathers or the people in the university telling me can't do these things. So it's like, it means he's got to go and do it. So I think that's very much. Yeah, sort of what would what would young 30 somethings at the forefront of science be doing?
They'd be, they'd be just running forward and not even thinking about the effects of what they're doing and the and the results of it until it's too late.

(01:12:42):
Yeah, I think it is this whole thing of like that they're the fact that you have this couple that they've kind of coming to this crossroads of do they stop being the cool nerds at the cutting edge and do they kind of settle down and have just children the natural way.
Elsa talks a lot about how well, you know, you're not the one that has to have it. And also the fact that she's people keep saying that she likes to control everything. And of course, you know, if you have a child, you don't control anything really like who they are, what they become.

(01:13:19):
That's something you can't control. And it's almost like she's trying to do that. And I think that also then certainly relates back to what we find out about her relationship with her mother as well.
Because there's a conversation where they where Clive wants to have children and Elsa doesn't and they live in this small apartment and it's a whole idea of all we have to give up. We have to give up our life if we actually have kids and get married and start a family like we can't be these rock stars anymore we can't be pushing the boundaries of science but then when they want to do this when she wants to do this experiment really.

(01:13:52):
She uses her own DNA because no one's going to give you give you their DNA and agree to this sort of experiment. And I think she tells Clive that it's like some anonymous donor and he, I don't know if he believes that and just doesn't want to admit that she at one point in the film is like oh no you used your actual DNA and it's like so she's she says she doesn't want to have kids or have this responsibility but she wants.

(01:14:14):
Again she wants that control she wants an experiment and she'll stop at nothing to do it even using her own DNA in order to make that happen.
But then also this whole kind of pressure or question that both Elsa and Clive having this film about having children.
The film actually opens with what looks like a birth and it has you know Elsa and Clive looking into the camera like they're looking at most their newborn baby and they even say thing that you know they say oh perfect it's just perfect and so cute and it's

(01:14:49):
and then you kind of see what what they've made or what's just been born and it's this weird blob creature and so you have Fred and Ginger so at the beginning of the film I think well the film actually opens with the birth of Fred I think.
And then they introduce Fred to Ginger who's already been made and you have one of the first scenes in the film is these two blob creatures meeting each other and kind of imprinting on each other.

(01:15:20):
And yeah so I just wanted to talk about the function of Fred and Ginger in the film because the the tale of Fred and Ginger does not end well.
No it does not and this is sort of I think sort of a subplot that runs through the whole film which is kind of also comments on on the action that we're seeing in the main storyline as well as kind of foreshadowing what comes later on.

(01:15:43):
And because the film sort of begins this is the experiment that they do have permission to do and what what's kind of making them rock stars is that they're developing that I think they're developing our proteins via genetic engineering for an agricultural project I think it's got to do with like.
Growth hormones for cattle or something like that so they have to make to make sort of the best thing out there on the market they genetically engineer these two unique organisms that they call Fred and Ginger and these weird like blobs of flesh.

(01:16:13):
That aren't technically alive I suppose that is the way that they must think about it and their roles kind of incubators as such for these for these patented proteins and they want they basically make a male and a female because they want them to mate and just.
Be able to create more and more of them forever basically or at least until they die and get replaced.
But and that's what sets them off to create this next they want to do the experiment with human DNA.

(01:16:39):
So it opens when we see when the film sort of starts we see Fred and Ginger they're putting a glass case together with a with a petition so they can see each other but they can't get in contact with each other and then they slowly introduce to each other.
And then they're shown to like they slick out these little proboscis that they've got in their mouths I suppose and they kind of wrap around each other and they're like oh they're bonding they're imprinting this is going to be great and they.

(01:17:02):
This is the proof to the company that everything they're doing is brilliant and it's like so we we can we'll be able to get them to mate and it'll be everything will be great.
And so then as they do that they create Dren and do all this secret stuff with her they kind of keep their get their eye goes off the ball as it were on this experiment and when they have to present Fred and Ginger to the board to who are funding all of this.

(01:17:25):
They do the same thing where they bring Fred and Ginger out in a glass box they remove the partitions and they come up to each other and then but then suddenly the spurs come out and they attack each other and viciously destroy one another.
The box breaks and blood flies everywhere and all the people in the front row gets splattered in blood and and gore and it all ends horribly in blood and screaming.

(01:17:46):
And they realize that what what's happened while they've not been observing Fred and Ginger is that Ginger actually turned male.
And they instead of imprinting on each other and becoming lovey dovey is that they they fight for dominance over the possession of the territory of that glass box and kill each other in the process.
When you're playing when you're playing with life.

(01:18:08):
You know it's that you know against that drastic parking of life finding a way like you can't predict what's going to happen evolution doesn't occur in a vacuum.
This comments on what we've been seeing so far but also foreshadows what's going to come later when when Dren becomes male and becomes very territorial and vicious towards her creators.
And it's also interesting that the fact that they totally miss that Ginger has become male because they're so obsessed now with Dren.

(01:18:38):
So again it's this whole thing they've created something and they've almost rejected them because they're more interested in something else.
So again there's the link back to Frankenstein but let's talk about Dren this amazing creation.
Can you say about Dren Dren is actually her.
The reason her name is Dren is because she spells she sees the word nerd on Elsa's shirt which is the name of their company.

(01:19:03):
It stands for Nuclear Exchange Research and Development but she spells it backwards with some scrabble tiles.
So they decide that's what they're going to call her Dren.
She's made from Elsa's DNA of course but also from the DNA of Salamander a kangaroo a bird fish horse and stingray which gives her this unique and strange humanoid appearance.

(01:19:26):
Her legs bend backwards her eyes are on the side of her head.
She has a forked tongue and a tail of the stinger she's completely bald.
It's a great I always think of that great moment when as a child she's reading and she keeps moving her head from side to side because she can't look straight on at things because of the position of her eyes.
She has this kind of rapid growth and development and as she ages and begins to develop the shit as it in ways that Elsa and Clive can't anticipate.

(01:19:53):
So again it's that thing of you can't really control this evolution.
So she at one point they it seems almost like Clive is trying to drown Dren but instead she develops gills and she she ends up being able to breathe underwater.
And then as the film goes on she gets exposed to these new things she starts to have new abilities.

(01:20:18):
So yeah like I said when they go out to the farm she grows wings and then eventually she changes gender and I think there's the story is the script is kind of saying that.
These are these evolutionary developments as she's kind of just her body is just reacting to its biological imperative while Elsa and Clive are trying to are reacting through their own scientific framework and moral framework that we have as human beings.

(01:20:43):
And so as Dren evolves we come in contact with the ethics at play about having creating life and having responsibility towards it and I think the actress Delphine Cheneac just does an amazing job of she does this completely.
She does this completely wordless performance using basically mime and other sort of nonverbal and body language performance that really hammers home sort of the innocence of Dren even if even when Dren starts to do certain things you can't really blame her for what she's doing.

(01:21:17):
I mean at one point she finds a cat and she wants to kind of take care of this cat and Elsa who's being overcome with her own feelings and trauma from her own upbringing she doesn't want her to keep the cat until eventually Dren kills the cat.
Well she also comes back to say okay I forgive you here's the cat back I'm sorry and she just kills the cat out of her own out of madness at her or but it's like it's a horrible thing.

(01:21:44):
And also when they first go to the farm as well the first thing she does is she hunts down a rabbit and kills it and eats it but it's a complete act of joy for her.
I mean you might change your mind individuals may very much change your mind when she changes at the end and what Dren does to Elsa is really vicious but it's like it's always a point made I think by the film that it's an evolutionary process.

(01:22:09):
Dren's just reacting biologically and not morally or intellectually.
And I think that goes back again to Frankenstein because one thing you get from the novel and certainly when I think about the 1931 version is how sympathetic the monster is the creation this being that's been created and what is essentially I guess their parent rejects them

(01:22:38):
or doesn't want anything to do with them or mistreats them and you get that with Dren is that you've, until she changes gender at the end and then I think when Dren becomes a male she or he becomes also very very very monstrous and looks monstrous and doesn't look as human as Dren does before that but yeah

(01:23:07):
leading up to that point throughout the majority of the film I think Dren is immensely sympathetic because she's just been created and yeah she's just discovering what life is and she doesn't know what's happening to her and like each step of her development is something completely new and that she has to kind of deal with so I think yeah

(01:23:33):
the whole idea of the sympathy for the monster for the other certainly goes back to Frankenstein.
The changes that happen to Dren also come with the change in the big change in location that happens later in the film and yeah once it leaves the location of the lab and goes to Elsa's family home or farm.

(01:24:01):
That's when the film takes a real dark turn so what do you think it is about this location change that leads to those darker turns that happen later in the film.
Well I think in the main it's Dren is kind of taken out of the laboratory environment and brought closer to nature and sort of she ends up living in a bar in the barn and it's sort of the boundaries between from the kind of quite a civilized world and the wild begins to thin and she starts to kind of take on sort of come into her power I suppose you could say.

(01:24:41):
So like Clive and Elsa take her out there to hide her from people who've been sniffing around and they might be knowing what's going on.
But it's Elsa's childhood home and so as Dren is sort of evolving developing more and coming into that power Elsa's sort of regressing back to her own traumatic childhood.

(01:25:04):
As she was mistreated by a mother at one point they she shows her childhood room and it's just a bare room with a mattress on the ground and I can't remember the exact line but Clive says something about like oh you know.
Obviously this is time a lot of time has passed and it would have looked a lot different when you were a kid and she's like no it looked about the same.
So it seems that her mother was kind of doing things to also like keeping her as some kind of experimental some kind of specimen and not really treating her in a motherly way.

(01:25:36):
And I think that's kind of a reflection in a way maybe a darker reflection on Mary Shelley's own relationship with her mother who as you said died.
Shelly's mother died 11 days after giving birth to her but she was an established writer and philosopher and feminist.
So that would have been a lot of big shadow to live under for Mary Shelley and she was growing up.

(01:25:58):
I mean I think she succeeded in her own right but in in splice Elsa's mother was in her life but she was abusive to her and she also lived under the constant threat of her own trauma.
So the psychological pressure of being in her childhood home kind of and her developing relationship with Dren brings that forward.
And then but while that while they're in that situation Dren gets a sexual attraction to Clive which you could argue is again that biological imperative and Clive sort of you know you could say he gets seduced by Dren but it's also you know a man being a man like taking advantage of a vulnerable young woman in a way.

(01:26:37):
And but then Elsa kind of targets her in a way that kind of makes it all very Freudian but that's again us putting our framework on that which you could also say that if it were two women or two female animals in a with a male animal in an enclosure the two women would fight for dominance over being the mate of the male.

(01:26:58):
So it's like a nature is very much the nature versus nurture stuff really comes to the fore once they go to the farm because they the experiment kind of gets put out into the field as it were test field tested.
Dren and Clive's logical drive to procreate as well as Elsa and Dren's tribal hierarchy becomes very apparent.
Yeah and I think even Natali said he claimed the producers bristled at the idea of Clive and Dren's sexual encounter saying that quote primarily it was the fact Adrian Verdi's character has sex with the creature that was a deal breaker for a lot of people he said it was in the contract that the scene could not be cut because I was so fearful that it would be even after it was finished it was the

(01:27:37):
raison d'etre of the movie to me not just because it's sensational but because I felt like if we're going to tell a 21st century retelling of Frankenstein we need to push it into the 21st century.
This is a story about life and birth and sex is always going to be part of that equation to dance around it would have been cowardly that's what excited me.
But it's not this sex scene between Clive and Dren that I think is the most transgressive aspect it is towards the end when Dren becomes male and attacks Elsa.

(01:28:02):
Effectively committing incest due to Dren being made of Elsa's DNA.
Funny that both our films have feature incest in one way or another.
It's a shocking scene and I think would put a lot of people off but on subsequent viewings I think it again reinforces that nature versus nurture argument where they kind of become the victim of their own hubris.

(01:28:24):
And to Dren this is nothing unusual in any way say Dren when when they become male they become they do take on this darker drive because it's sort of male drive not the female drive.
Need to be fulfilled but there's no moral framework for Dren there's no church in the wild it's just an impulse.
That all that back half of the film is that all the antiseptics of control of the of the lab gets eroded away as nature comes into and starts taking over.

(01:28:54):
For me it almost feels like it like you say it goes from this place of science but it's going to a family home.
And so for me it also becomes quite gothic about because a lot of gothic again has that incestuous undercurrent to it but also very much about hidden family secrets and it's no longer about science and experimentation it becomes about kind of relationships and desires and especially within the kind of family framework.

(01:29:24):
I also think that what happens you know in the relationship between Elsa and Dren like you mentioned like it is almost like I guess almost regressing into this kind of animal state the fact that she I get it goes back to what was saying before with

(01:29:45):
first for Frankenstein how that transgression between life and death destabilizes all boundaries. I mean Dren is kind of an embodiment of transgression her creation destroys all those previous boundaries and taboos and rules.
But yeah also like Elsa you know she starts to get frustrated that she can't control Dren and at one point she ends up basically punishing her and she ties her up and she strips her and again just stripping taking her like stripping her of her clothing it's almost like trying to dehumanize her

(01:30:18):
and she cuts her like stinger off yeah so it's almost like maiming her yeah and then when she's doing that she's talking into a dictaphone and I think she doesn't refer to her as Dren she refers to her as like Agent 50 or something so it's almost like trying to dehumanize Dren.

(01:30:39):
I guess it is like that rejection of her creation not there's not so much that Dren's taking revenge I guess Dren's just trying to survive and Dren's trying to understand why suddenly things have changed it's such a kind of complex story that the the film is is telling the whole thing with her torch sort of basically

(01:31:01):
torturing and mutilating Dren is also a way for her to coping mechanism to because she wants to get away from the feelings actually so she doesn't want to think of her as a child as her child after she does that Clive like tries to have sex with her with Dren they have a confrontation Elsa and Clive and Elsa's like you tried to fuck her and he's like will you mutilate her and they both kind of go oh yeah we're both done really fucked up things that's the moment where they both realize oh shit.

(01:31:30):
Like we're really horrible and that's when they go back to kind of I don't know what they plan to do but then that's when the kind of the finale kicks off and they really lose control of everything.
Yeah because I think at the one point Clive says you know we changed the rules and after he gets after Elsa interrupts him and and Dren he kind of says I became confused about right and wrong.

(01:31:54):
Yeah and there is that whole thing the scene between Dren and Clive at one point her I think this thing does come back it is going back and it's almost poised over him so I do wonder whether if Elsa hadn't interrupted them whether Dren would have ended up killing Clive after meeting with him.

(01:32:18):
Absolutely. So again this whole thing of like sex and violence and sex and death and all the boundaries and just collapse completely and it's just you know it is all better off like who knows where this is gonna go or what's gonna happen next because it's all it's nothing nothing is as it has been before.

(01:32:40):
And Elsa actually ends up killing Dren after the assault so the female does kill the male in the end after mating.
So it ends up. And the mother just killed the child the mother kills the child as well so that's a complete perversion she doesn't give birth to her but she ends up killing her.
Yeah yeah but the kind of female killing the male after mating it's almost like the natural order of things in a way takes over as well in that respect.

(01:33:06):
Given that the crazy places that this film goes. What was the reaction to the film when it was released critically and commercially.
Well it cost about 30 million to make it made about 27 million at the global box office so unfortunately it fell below breaking even only by the smallest margin but it was a critical darling I think critics pretty much were very favorable to it across the board.

(01:33:36):
I just think it might have been a bit too weird for for Joe popcorn but I think Del Toro being a producer would have helped get it made I think it's very much a kind of film that he would have made or really like you know the kind of films he likes where the the monster is sympathetic or the creature is sympathetic and all of those things so I think he would have hopefully safeguarded it and that's how it got made.

(01:34:00):
Vincenzo Natali let's just celebrate him because he's awesome this was his fourth film and he's always seems to have stayed in the kind of horror and science fiction realm.
Yeah he started out as a storyboard artist working on TV shows and movies so he's worked on Johnny Mnemonic and Ginger Snaps for two very high profile examples.

(01:34:29):
He kind of he did he sort of did sci-fi really early on and then move more towards horror I think his debut feature was cube in 1997 the Indie sci-fi about a group of strangers who worked together to escape a mysterious prison made of interlocking cubes where sort of each character has brings a specialization that can help them through the series of cubes I mean there are there are

(01:34:53):
elements but the central idea is it's kind of a strange dark sci-fi or again kind of a twilight zone sort of thing I think and then in 2002 he did Cypher which I think is a really underrated which stars Jeremy Northam as an office worker in broiled in corporate espionage in the near future has a Philip K Dick William Gibson vibe and Lucy Liu in it as like the femme fatale.

(01:35:16):
Really cool really fun film which I highly recommend and then sort of most notably after that he moved into a lot of TV work with two of our favorites Hannibal and Westworld.
And I think a lot of sort of feature directors moved over to TV you know working in TV you kind of have to create episodes of TV that fit into the world and the style of the show itself.

(01:35:41):
I always thought Natali's episodes he always brought something a little extra like you'd always tell it was him or that it was someone sort of sneaking a few things in under the radar while still staying within the framework of the show and and within the tone of the show I always appreciated the way he was able to do that which made his episodes of Hannibal and Westworld just that little bit extra special in my opinion.

(01:36:02):
Natali right out of the gate was exploring sci-fi from an intellectual and ideas driven space with those films that I mentioned not so much focused like I said on the spectacle but on the theme of resonance and drama.
Splice out of the thru I mean splice cube as well a little bit but I think splice crosses over most into the horror but sci-fi in my opinion remains at the forefront. It would be great to see him return to something like this because I know his other features lately was In the Tall Grass and Haunter.

(01:36:32):
He kind of more just horror films or you know supernatural films. I just think he's got a real great knack for really interesting sci-fi stuff while also making it really entertaining.
Alright so that's splice just before we go we just wanted to quickly make some honorable mentions so some films that we with possibilities of for us to talk about but we ended up choosing flesh for Frankenstein and splice.

(01:37:04):
So yeah let's just quickly give some other recommendations to people if they're kind of looking for some Frankensteinigans for the term that you always use.
If you're looking for some Frankensteinian shenanigans
Frankensteinigans.
Alright Liam what's your first shout out.
I'm sticking to the sci-fi films so one that I want to I mean I just find this very bonkers but it's directed by Roger Corman from 1990 called Frankenstein Unbound you mentioned Percy B Shelley wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound.

(01:37:40):
I'm guessing this is a play on this it's based on a Brian Aldiss novel and it's as John Hurt as a scientist from the future who while creating the ultimate weapon ends up going back in time to 1817 in Switzerland and again it's that we talked a lot about the story behind the story of when Frankenstein the story was developed by Mary Shelley in the villa in Switzerland.

(01:38:09):
With Byron and Percy and Polidori which has almost become as famous as the story of Frankenstein itself like you mentioned the film Gothic and there's a lot of recreations of that and this is sort of one of those but it also wraps sort of suggests that the story of Frankenstein was really going on as well in the background.
We have Raul Julia as Dr. Victor Frankenstein. It's kind of tries to sort of recontextualize the story but it's it's very strange I found a very odd very strange film John Hurt was basically just he has this time traveling car or this car that speaks has like an AI on board that tells him things like kit from Knight Rider and he's just trying to sort of crack on everybody trying to show them his sick car.

(01:38:58):
Well kind of the because he's travelled back in time he's sort of like the world's kind of coming apart at the seams and I think he has to kind of follow through with his sort of the events of the film in order to write everything and get everything back to normal.
It's just an interesting I guess sci-fi like really heavy sci-fi spin on the Frankenstein story, which I don't think quite works but you won't see anything else like it.

(01:39:27):
And yeah so we mentioned that the story about the making or the creation of Frankenstein has you know been the basis for a lot of other films so I just want to just reiterate that Ken Russell's Gothic is awesome.
It's crazy and the way that Ken Russell can only be it's written by Stephen Volk really awesome screenplay and yeah it's you know everyone going at full tilt you know you've got Julian Sands in there rest in peace.

(01:39:58):
Gabriel Byrne, Timothy Spall as John Polidori, Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley and how it is very much about how the creation of this story does end up kind of taking a life of its own and it's almost like the story that she creates kind of becomes embodied in the film.

(01:40:23):
I don't know it's just so awesome and I love it so much and it makes all of the other dramatizations of the same you know kind of background, pale in comparison.
So Gothic was made in 1986 in 1988 there were two films kind of covering the same territory.
There was Haunted Summer with Alice Krieg is playing Mary Shelley and another film called Rowing with the Wind that supposedly has Hugh Grant in it which I've not seen but Haunted Summer is really like just in comparison to Gothic it's so dull.

(01:40:58):
Yeah you just can't compare the two.
And there was also the biopic of Mary Shelley called Mary Shelley that came out in 2018 with Elle Fanning which I haven't seen but yeah I just really want everyone to go watch Gothic because it's awesome.
It's really good.
My other one is another strange one which is that you have to see it to believe it sort of thing and that is from 1995 this time and it's Roger Avery the co-screenwriter of Pulp Fiction.

(01:41:32):
There's a film called Mr Stitch starring Rudger Hauer and Will Wheaton and Ron Perlman where Rutger Hauer is a Frankenstein type character who is stitching together a man made of different body parts who played by so Rutger Hauer is the doctor and Will Wheaton is Mr Stitch or as he is called Lazarus because he's offered the Bible to read and

(01:41:56):
he's himself Lazarus the man who came back from the dead. He is also offered the book of Frankenstein as well so Frankenstein exists within the world of this film.
And so the first half of it is sort of a kind of philosophical discussion between Rutger Hauer and Will Wheaton over the nature of identity and self and what is a man, what is the spirit and I think there's also near people's plays doctor English who's kind of comes in and out to

(01:42:19):
offer sort of support and things like that and then when Lazarus finds out that he's going to be destroyed because he's still just an experiment, he escapes from the facility and then the film kind of becomes this weird
Gonzo action movie comic book type film. So again it is a film of two halves which is quite fitting because it's kind of these two things stitched together to create a new whole but it's just it's very odd and quite funny in parts maybe unintentionally in some ways.

(01:42:49):
But it's I think it's yeah it's it's something that I can't stop thinking about whenever it's such it's so strange and bizarre and I've heard behind the scenes stories of that Roger Avery was having problems with Rutger Hauer who was a producer on the film who was trying to take the film away from him or
was being very demanding and things like that. So the film kind of suffered for that I think in a way but also it was just a very it's just a very strange, strange film but yeah it's got and it's got music by Tomandandy which is great.

(01:43:20):
But yeah it's another one of those films that you really need to see to believe really because it does go to some very very strange places.
For me I wanted to highlight go to back to Italian Gothic territory and Lady Frankenstein came out in 1971. It was directed by Mel Wells. Well that was the pseudonym of a lot of Italian directors around this time would have kind of

(01:43:49):
anglicised names. Looking it up it I think it was the director was actually Aureliano Lupi. So as the title suggests it is has a woman at the centre of it. It is Frankenstein's daughter who is also a doctor herself.
She's been to medical school but it's set in the period the like kind of early 1900s. She comes back to the family home. If I remember correctly it's after her father dies. She has been coming up against some sexism about how could a woman possibly be a doctor.

(01:44:29):
She comes back and she decides to take over her father's work and she also sees this young hunky guy that works for them and kind of has designs on him.
And also her father's best friend who worked with him. He's in love with her and so she kind of thinks hmm what would be great would be to put your brain in that guy's body and create this perfect man.

(01:45:04):
So she is creating her own being kind of making her man, the man of her dreams. But of course it all doesn't go according to plan. But yeah so Lady Frankenstein if you want some more Italian gothic flavour.
I'll do one more and say it's not a film so much as an episode of television and this is the first but not the last time I'm going to mention The X Files I'm sure on this show because it's my favourite show. And in season five they

(01:45:34):
wrote and directed The Postmodern Prometheus which was an episode, a comedy episode where Mulder and Scully goes to a small rural town as they always do to find there's a strange creature stalking the woods
called nicknamed the Great Mutato and they find out that it might be the result of experiments by a genetic engineering or geneticist working on weird genetic experiments in a lab which is basically in a castle on the edge of a cliff.

(01:46:11):
It's shot, it's done in black and white and apes the style of James Wales original film but it has a lot of other weird kooky elements to it but it's because it would have come out around the time of 96, 97 so it was right in the thick of all the Dolly the sheep and the canty mouse stuff so it would have been one of those ripped from the headlines episodes.

(01:46:34):
And then I think the end of the episode it kind of becomes there's something about there's a farmer who's also who's like the father of the scientist. The scientist actually played by the guy who played J.Piederman in Seinfeld, if there are any Seinfeld friends out there.
And I think the father was actually taking the science that the son was doing and actually perfecting it. And he's the sort of the quote unquote father of the Great Mutato who's a man with kind of two faces and he's kind of an experiment that didn't quite work out but it seems to suggest that all the towns focus somehow genetically engineered from barnyard animals.

(01:47:11):
It's a very odd episode but it does if you want to see something that really uses a lot of those Frankenstein references even the look of the old film and everything like that's I mean even the name of the title says it all that's kind of a big one there for me.
And then finally I just wanted to acknowledge all the Frankenstein type films that are being made at the moment so it seems like Frankenstein is coming back into style.

(01:47:39):
And so within just the past year or so there's been poor things which I absolutely love Lisa Frankenstein which is also really fun.
And there's the Bride of Frankenstein remake that's being shot right now directed by a Maggie Gyllenhaal.
But on Shudder there have been two independent films that have come out within the past year or so. The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster that was really quite good.

(01:48:09):
That was an updating of the Frankenstein story set in the projects and you know you've got this young black girl kind of trying to bring her dead brother back to life.
And also another film that I really really loved which is Birth Rebirth directed by Laura Moss.

(01:48:30):
And in that you have a doctor who works in the morgue who starts taking corpses home and she actually keeps getting herself pregnant but then having an abortion and using I guess the stem cells from that

(01:48:52):
to bring these corpses back to life. So this whole idea of updating the technology that keeps happening with kind of Frankensteinian narratives.
So yeah using this idea of like stem cells and things.
And she ends up taking home the corpse of this little girl who's just died and the little girl's mother is actually a nurse at the hospital.

(01:49:14):
She notices this woman doctor is taking things home and yeah so then she realises that one of the corpses that have been taken home is that of her daughter.
And so she now has the possibility of getting her daughter back.
And what's really great about the film is that it is looking at kind of ethical and moral responsibilities and also the difference kind of between like science and medicine.

(01:49:46):
You've got the doctor on one hand and the nurse on the other.
You know the doctor often has this very kind of cold clinical way about them that they don't almost see the person that they're dealing with whereas the nurse is the one that gives that actual kind of loving care.
And so the fact that they're both working together on this experiment which is also one of the nurses daughter.

(01:50:11):
It just really explores some really really interesting things. It's done really well.
There's also some gnarly kind of horror stuff in there.
So yeah and it's not really a film that a lot of people have been talking about but I definitely recommend people seek out birth rebirth.
Well we made it.

(01:50:33):
First episode done and dusted.
I'm feeling pretty good.
No I'm better than good.
I'm feeling great.
How about you Lindsay?
I feel alive.
It's alive.
It is alive. It's alive now.
You can find us on Instagram, Facebook and Letterboxd where we will hopefully have a list of all the films that we discussed and mentioned in this episode.

(01:50:55):
And you can email us at scifrightspodcast@gmail.com.
Let us know what are your favourite Frankenstein or Frankenstein inspired films.
Is there anything we have missed?
Anything you disagree with?
Anything you agree with?
Or you can just drop us a line and let us know how we're doing.
Or to suggest themes for future seasons where all is.

(01:51:16):
And you can find our short film They Called Me David online on Vimeo.
Join us next time on SciFrights when we continue our season on Mad Science movies and the legacy of Frankenstein.
See you then.
Bye bye.

(01:52:30):

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