The Frankenstein method: remaking, recycling, and reimagining in Twenty-First Century Hollywood cinema

Abstract

This thesis examines the Frankenstein Method, a tendency in twenty-first century Hollywood adaptation that revisits, recycles, and revises familiar tales through retro-aesthetics, genre hybridity, genre blending, and mash-ups, creating a completed cinematic ‘monster’. In so doing, the films produced using this method suggest something ‘new’ and innovative, where the familiar is refashioned and updated through a challenging of traditional Hollywood storytelling practices. This reimagining and rewriting of orthodox conventions often align with socially progressive discourses, in that familiar narratives are reworked in ways that challenge traditional representations and hierarchies, and in turn undermine existing social hegemonies.

Sustained analysis of case-studies displaying these tendencies reveals a far more complex and multifaceted significance of the Frankenstein Method, where attempts to undermine existing hegemonies are often replaced by a postmodern superficiality grounded in nostalgia, ahistoricity, and liminality; this represents an inevitable submission to the demands of late capitalism. Therefore, contrary to the films’ claim to progressive credentials, the method arguably constructs a more insidious consolidation of the ideological status quo, where the perceived ‘newness’ is in fact something as inert as Frankenstein’s monster itself.

Date of Award	Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Alexander Fisher (Supervisor) & Sian Barber (Supervisor)