Tracing the Essence of Frankenstein (2025)
🎨 by Justine Anweiler, Tracing the Essence of Frankenstein (2025)
My energy gets taken by cultural zeitgeists, and when one finds me, I gleefully let it take me. Right now, it’s the Frankenstein press tour.
Last year, around this time, it was the Wicked Press Tour, and before that, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. With the Barbie movie somewhere in between.
I’m not a pop culture junkie, I’m a resonance seeker. I rarely find pure essences, so when I do, they slice through my mental chaos like a guillotine.
They become something that beckons me, and I freefall.
There is an essence in Frankenstein (2025) that has three conduits, passing through time:
🫀(Age 18 in 1816) Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote the novel for a ghost story competition based on a “vivid nightmare about a student horrified by his creation”. Eleven years later, when her husband died, his body was cremated, but the heart would not burn (due to calcification from tuberculosis) – she kept it wrapped in silk in her desk, for 30 years. A defiance of death. She was the first conduit and origin of its story.
🧠 (Age 7 in 1973) Guillermo del Toro, who loved the 1931 film “Frankenstein,” became obsessed at age 7. After finding fame and fortune as a critically acclaimed writer and director, he built an entire house, ‘Bleak House’, to celebrate Shelley’s story and other horror & gothic curiosities. With 12 feature films made, every single one of del Toro’s films has had a thread of Frankenstein woven into it, including Blade II. He was practicing to make Frankenstein. Guillermo was the second conduit, a translator, who felt its essence and let it lead him.
🫁 (Age 27 in 2024) Jacob Elordi, who plays the Creature in Guillermo’s retelling. He waited 10-12hrs in makeup and lost himself to the role. Onset, he stayed in costume, in the corner, pulling 20 hr. days, always watching as the Creature. Saying he has never felt freer and more at home. He was the third conduit and total embodiment.
This is me trying to put into words what I am so consumed by: an essence that has found its hosts. A story universal in its truth, and a story that in this moment - in time - is alive and needed.
I think we are truth-seeking beings, and when we find a profound universal truth, something that seems to unlock a piece of the puzzle of life – we enter a vortex. An aleph. Most people have completely no idea what is happening to them when time becomes a continuum, words seem to flow, creativity becomes water, and form seems formless.
I don’t yet know what art piece will teach us. I am not the teacher or translator for this. My assignment is to tell you we are part of it. It’s hazing of the collective, and we will never return to who we were before it.
May we love the monster in all of us #frankenstein