Seduced By Shadows
Hollywood has always loved the simplicity of handsome heroes and ugly bad guys, but when it comes to love and romance, the waters quickly get muddied and moral compasses become convoluted. In 2024’s Lisa Frankenstein (SPOILERS AHEAD), a coming-of-age horror/comedy film, a teenager falls in love with a reanimated corpse who upends her life and ultimately gets her buried in a grave of her own. Lisa’s infatuation with her zombie boyfriend allows her to look past his murderous tendencies and missing limbs because her loyalty ultimately earns her a cemetery plot next to his as they walk off into an undead sunset together for all eternity. While it’s a seemingly happy ending, the turbulent twists and turns of the story repeatedly take the moral lowground as Lisa ultimately stoops to the level of her not-so-gentelmanly crush.
Love interests in books, TV, and films are as complex as the real-world relationships on which they are based. Nuanced, messy, and often misunderstood by outsiders, romantic relationships are never without trial. Couples take the bad with the good in their partner’s character, counting on the best traits to outshine the darkness and hoping to overcome personal traumas together as a team. This fragile hopefulness is the crutch on which the “bad boy gone good” stigma rests. As feeble as this is in reality, oftentimes the same hopefulness is amplified in fictional works, portraying fantastical dreams that would never occur in the real world
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Stories like Phantom of the Opera romanticize the violent, tragically villainous man, who commits several atrocities, like arson, deception, and mvrder throughout the story. (SPOILERS AHEAD) The phantom bonds with a young opera singer who has grown up in the theater and his infatuation turns to love as she naively reaches out into darkness. The phantom’s callous heart is softened by Christine’s love and he selflessly relinquishes her to the light instead of consuming her in his own darkness. To that end, the Phantom is ultimately redeemed for his transgressions. This has been called the “Good All Along” principle. Whenever a character seems to be a bad guy but is later revealed to have been secretly good the entire time, it confirms suspicions about the character’s moral compass and lifts the veil on their cleverly hidden integrity.
What is a romantic fictional relationship without a little uncertainty and yearning? Despite the fact that the leading lady’s love interest is an undead baron with literal skeletons in the closet and familiar minions burying their latest conquests, fictional boyfriends always exceed expectations. However, the delusion becomes an unhealthy fixation in more macabre genres, as many protagonists are not only deeply flawed but also lean into their worst traits and behaviors. Toxic characters are romanticized and heralded for their violent, cruel, or dark shortcomings, proving to be the monstrous beings we expect them to be. And yet, against our better judgment, they are always forgiven and their transgressions forgotten.
As visual media like TV and film have shown for centuries, good guys are handsome and bad guys are ugly. Monsters may not always appear monstrous, but in gothic stories, the more elegant and polished the romantic love interest, the more likely he is to be a ravenous, bloodthirsty villain. You can see this with Guillermo Del Toro’s recent Frankenstein, where he decided to shatter this illusion of refined evil by juxtaposing his movie’s main male character’s unsightly appearance with his inherent goodness.
Frankenstein, in its many forms, has long been a figment of societal lore, but the nuance of the monster's being, appearance, and overall meaning has shifted over the centuries. Mary Shelley, author of the original 1818 Frankenstein novel, emphasized the creature’s kindheartedness, showing that society’s rejection is what forced him to become a monster. It’s this empathetic nature that sets the creature apart from other gothic male archetypes, differentiating Frankenstein’s “monster” from the true monsters we see in real life. Her message is what Del Toro emphasizes in the latest rendition of Shelley’s masterpiece.
Columbia professor and horror film critic Eleanor Johnson, believes Del Toro’s Frankenstein pushes back on tired Hollywood villain tropes that emphasize a monster’s ugliness by translating visual repulsion to fear or horror. Unlike the 1931 version, which portrays the creature as memorably grotesque and dehumanized, this time Frankenstein’s monster was cast as a known heartthrob, Jacob Elordi. With such a familiar face, it allows viewers to see the human in the creature, not just as a pure monster. With minimal disfigurement and a human-like range of emotion, we can finally see Frankenstein’s monster as a man instead of a green, bolt-necked aberration with zombified brains, rage issues, and hulking strength.
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Alas, the compassionate, book-reading, otherworldly beauty of an unwanted, mistreated, dark-souled Frankencreature captivated an entire audience of goth lovers. By reversing the expectation of the beautiful bad boy and replacing it with a kindhearted “monster,” Del Toro has given the world the first wholesome “monster” boyfriend.
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Yearning and Longing
Globe and Mail reporter Graham Isador was shocked by the new Frankenstein movie’s juxtaposed characterizations and broken gothic archetypes. “He’s kind of hot,” they said, fangirling over the unexpected attractiveness of an undead, sewn-together monster. The creature’s physical appearance is not what makes him ultimately alluring; it is his captivated fixation, haunting vulnerability, and extraordinarily evolved insightfulness.
Cherishing his romantic opposition, Frankenstein’s creature values life, beauty, and compassion far more than his storybook male predecessors. Rejecting bad-boy tropes and evolving into a somewhat performative male, Frankenstein’s modern monster reveals what makes men monstrous in the first place: Hubris, greed, power, money, and carnal desires. These are all things that Frankenstein’s monster has never and could never possess.
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