It’s Alive! Or Is It?
As a new Hollywood version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein comes to the big screen – with a feminist twist – Jake Arnott considers what the 1818 novel can teach us about our AI future

Photo: Pictorial Press
‘As of April 2026,” reads the Wikipedia entry for a list of films featuring Frankenstein’s monster, “a body of 480 known feature films, 243 short films, 103 TV series, and 413 TV episodes feature some version or interpretation of the character Frankenstein’s monster, first created by Mary Shelley in her 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus”.
That’s some body of work.
The latest addition to this deathless corpus is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! starring recent Oscar winner Jessie Buckley as a fiercely feminist version of the monster’s putative consort. Though this bold and wonderfully garish discourse on body autonomy was a spectacular box-office failure, the hunger to add to this list of creative reanimations shows no sign of abating.
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