From DHD – Sony Pictures Entertainment has preemptively bought a pitch from producer Matt Tolmach and writer Craig Fernandez for a modern day retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s too early yet for details on the storyline, but it’s always nice to see Frankenstein live again.
Craig Fernandez is on a hot streak with literary adaptations – he has the upcoming From Prada to Nada, a Latin spin on Sense and Sensibility for Lionsgate; he just scripted Everything Must Go, a project based on Terry Pratchett’s The Bromeliad Trilogy, and is now working on an adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark, both for Dreamworks Animation; plus he’ll be going out with a script that is a futuristic adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous. Not bad, eh?
Frankenstein description:
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.” A summer evening’s ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine’s room, and a runaway imagination–fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about science, galvanism, and the origins of life–conspired to produce for Marry Shelley this haunting night specter. By morning, it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece, Frankenstein.
Written in 1816 when she was only nineteen, Mary Shelley’s novel of “The Modern Prometheus” chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A frightening creation myth for our own time, Frankenstein remains one of the greatest horror stories ever written and is an undisputed classic of its kind.
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