Profs & Pints Denver: Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Profs and Pints Denver presents: “Frankie Goes to Hollywood,” on Frankenstein and the 200-year-old history of a monster that just keeps finding new bodies, with Andrew Scahill, an associate professor of film and media at the University of Colorado Denver whose research focuses on horror, monstrosity, and adaptation.

[Doors open at 5 pm and the talk begins at 6:30.]

Frankenstein, like the monster it depicts, is a story that seems designed for recombination. Time and time again it has absorbed another tale into itself and produced viable offspring. 

Consider Edward Scissorhands. That’s Frankenstein plus Pinocchio. Or Weird Science. That’s Frankenstein plus Pygmalion. You can think of The Iron Giant as a mashup of Frankenstein and E.T., or The Incredible Hulk as Frankenstein infused with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The creature changes with every new donor text.

What makes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein such an unusually fertile subject of adaptation? What parts of her story have to survive for us still to recognize the offspring as Frankensteinian, and what parts are fair game to be discarded, replaced, or radically transformed?

Hear such questions tackled by Dr. Andrew Scahill, who long has taught a university course on Frankenstein and its cinematic offspring. 

He’ll trace how filmmakers have dismantled and rebuilt Shelley’s story across horror, science fiction, comedy, superhero movies, children’s films, musicals, and queer cult cinema.

He’ll argue that those efforts followed in her footsteps and, rather than treating adaptation as the process of making a faithful copy, achieved a feat remarkably like Frankenstein’s experiment. They dismantled old parts, joined them with unfamiliar ones, and shocked them into new life. (Advance tickets $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with student ID.)

Image by Canva