by Sean Fennell
It was the summer of 1816 and three friends—and possibly lovers—Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron decided to pass the time by competing amongst themselves to see who could write the best ghost story. Over 200 years later, our obsession with the story Mary Shelley wrote that summer remains as fervent as ever. She could have never guessed the stranglehold that her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus would have on the public imagination. Plus, she’d be shocked, to say the least, to see the hundreds of movies that have been made over the years reimagining her tale of reanimation and horror…
Depraved (2019)
While this 2019 feature remains largely under the radar when compared to the rest of the films on our list, there is a lot to love from this modern retelling of the Frankenstein story. Directed by Larry Fessenden, Depraved places the story in the present and makes Dr. Frankenstein stand-in (Henry) a former United States Army medic suffering from debilitating PTSD. Having watched so many of his friends and fellow soldiers succumb to their injuries despite his best efforts, he is now focused on reversing that process and bringing people back from the dead. As you might expect, things progress fine at first before devolving into a fair amount of chaos. What works best about this adaptation is how slowly they show the resurrected man’s progress from a patched-together corpse to a fully realized man.
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