Death is temporary, I’ll love you forever: Queerness, gender nonconformity, and blood soaked coming-outs in Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

Admittedly, there is something audacious about suggesting that the story of a teenage girl and her undead boyfriend is anything but a straight – albeit macabre – tale. But the gothic and gender and sexual nonconformity have always been intertwined since their bloody beginnings; gothic is a genre the cultivates queerness, and unconventional gender and sexuality are the grave soil that, in turn, nourishes the genre. Written by Diablo Cody and directed by Zelda Williams, Lisa Frankenstein is a true love letter to the gothic, complete with its tropes, its motifs and, yes, its love for gender and sexual fuckery.

If the name Diablo Cody sends a shiver of the ghost of your teenage gay awakening through your spine, it’s likely because she’s the writer of the other iconic lesbian love letter of a horror comedy movie, Jennifer’s Body (2009). Both films take place in the same universe, according to Cody; meaning that it’s only fair to watch Lisa with the context that it’s the sapphic little sister of the big lesbian horror hit of the 00s. Lisa Frankenstein, wrapped up in 80s-nostalgia, is a pseudo-straight love story which, if you peel back its neon-streaked layers, demonstrates an appreciation and deep understanding of lesbian culture, gender nonconformity, the complexity of the trans identity, and – best of all – lots of allusions to gay sex.

Just walk with me on this one.

 

Queer your darlings

As aforementioned, Lisa Frankenstein was written by the legendary Diablo Cody; but it was also directed by Zelda Williams (openly bisexual herself), and stars CW darlings Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse. Newton previously found fame in her debut role as a lesbian on the CW’s Supernatural, while Sprouse’s crowning adult role was Jughead on Riverdale – a show known for its parallels with iconic horror show Twin Peaks, and its familiarity with ‘camping’ horror tropes, leaning into the uncanny, and burning the proverbial manual on conventionality around gender and sexuality. Sprouse’s character, in fact, ends the series in a bisexual ‘quad’ relationship with his three best friends.

All this to say – nobody who worked on this movie is a stranger to the gothic, horror, or queerness.

The subject matter, too, lends itself well to the concept of the complexity of sexuality and gender. It’s no secret that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is riddled with queer allegory – the otherness from the monster, the need for companionship on the part of the doctor, the “homosexual panic” felt by the doctor at the discovery of the hunk of a man he’s created. This idea has famously been subverted before in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), wherein the gender nonconforming Frank-N-Furter feels open, unabashed lust for his creation, Rocky (more on this later, don’t worry).
Another element of the original Frankenstein tale that plays interesting when considering Lisa Frankenstein, is the body dysmorphia/dysphoria felt by the Creature – the revulsion at himself, and feeling constantly as if he doesn’t belong in the monstrous body he finds himself in. These themes are all concepts that the gay and trans community have often related with, and to say Frankenstein is resonant with queer people isn’t revolutionary.

What Lisa Frankenstein does with that idea, though, is nothing short of being just that – revolutionary. Genius, even.

 

Culturally monstrous

As a love letter to gothic and 80s nostalgia, it’s no surprise that Lisa Frankenstein is filled to the brim with pop culture references – many of these having their own allusions to queerness that seem to mirror Lisa’s own identity. In a stunningly shot, surreal black and white film sequence, Lisa Frankenstein pays homage to G.W. Pabst – Lisa’s self-proclaimed favourite director. Notably, Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) is a film that mirrors many of the queer themes in Lisa Frankenstein; the main character, Lulu, is bisexual onscreen, but like Lisa, her queerness is projected in a more broad, cultural sense, led by her rejection of gender archetype and overall uncanny and unabashed nature.

Lisa Frankenstein also pays homage to its horror successors brilliantly, with a satisfying film parallel coming towards the end of the movie, when popular cheerleader Taffy emerges from Lisa’s car, covered in viscera and shell-shocked from having been almost murdered (and witnessing the gory castration of her boyfriend). The scene looks near-identical to one near the end credits of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), when final girl Sally stumbles out into the road after surviving a similarly visceral, horrific bloodbath. Interestingly, this film is also one where the killer, Leatherface, represents a level of gender nonconformity, wearing a mask known as the “pretty woman” which features thick, curly hair and heavy makeup, complete with blue eyeshadow and red lipstick.

I said we’d return to Rocky Horror, and I’m a ghoul of my word. Lisa Frankenstein parallels Rocky Horror just as thoroughly as it does the original story of Frankenstein. Like-for-like in campness and erraticism, Lisa, like Frank-N-Furter, creates for herself her perfect companion – someone strong, handsome, and willing to meet all her needs (even if those needs are murderous). Much like Frank-N-Furter, instead of being repulsed by the Creature a la Victor Frankenstein, she falls in love and lust with her creation, lovingly crafts him into something beautiful, and baptises him in gore. This callback to a thoroughly queer classic isn’t accidental – Lisa Frankenstein even manages to cleverly slip a “damn it, Janet” into the dialogue, as a glowing neon sign that screams ‘we’re doing this on purpose’.

 

Monster in the sheets

Like the aforementioned Rocky Horror, Lisa Frankenstein is a movie packed full of sexual inferences and jokes that, largely, allude to Lisa being queer. The jokes range from subtle (Lisa being a vegetarian in a meat-eating family, playing into a common stereotype), to more outrageous (a salesman selling carpet shampoo and Janet saying that you could “eat off her carpet” – a nod to a crude nickname given to lesbians). Interestingly, there’s a lot of jokes around Taffy’s sexuality as a straight woman, with her being the butt of the joke in the same way queer people often are in straight media. On one such occasion, a joke is made about Taffy “screaming with her legs spread against the wall” [for cheer practice], which Taffy immediately follows up by saying “I’m sure Lisa’s finger’s hurt from all that sewing”, alluding to her having lesbian sex in contrast to her own heterosexual acts.

Aside from the jokes, Lisa Frankenstein is also riddled with ideas around the idea of the relationship between Lisa and the Creature being queer-coded. Following on from the joke about her sewing, Lisa does go on to sew the Creature’s body parts on, this intimate act symbolically doubling as sex in light of that inference. In terms of literal sex, we see Lisa and the Creature actually partake twice – the first time, using a wand vibrator (notably, in this scene the Creature is wearing feminine pyjamas, making the image clearly resemble sapphic intimacy).

The second time Lisa and the Creature have sex, the allusion to queerness is far more overt. In the apotheosis of the film, Lisa asks the Creature to make love to her, after which he admits that he doesn’t have a penis. Whether he never had one or it decayed is left vague, leaving the question of the Creature’s potential transness up to the viewer. In response, Lisa doesn’t miss a beat before replying “you don’t need one of those to be a man” and “we can do other things” – indicating that she’d be willing to have sex with him regardless, and that she never cared about the kind of intimacy she could have with him, but instead loving him as the Creature.
Although she seems happy with the idea of sleeping with him no matter how that might look, the Creature hands her a penis that he cut off just moments before and – yes – gets her to perform a bastardised bottom surgery on him in the ultimate act of queer intimacy.

 

The creator, the Creature, and the closet

The closet as a setting is interesting in the dynamic between the Creature and Lisa – it’s where he lives, the place from which he watches Lisa exist and, sometimes, the place from which he emerges to be her companion. Yet it’s also the place where she hides him, struggling with committing to fully allowing the Creature (and perhaps, herself) to be (literally) out of the closet. This only changes after they have sex for the first time, and Lisa remarks that he must be uncomfortable sleeping there. From then on, he shares her bed with her – implying that she’s finally become open to this kind of intimacy and doesn’t feel the need to shove her feelings (or her lover) away anymore.

The concept of the closet bids us a glorious farewell in the scene where Lisa and the Creature finally have penetrative sex, as yet another surreal Pabst-inspired animation plays that shows both of them riding on a spaceship, ending with them crashing into a moon with a face. This moon appears to be the same one that features on Lisa’s wardrobe door, showing their final departure from both the literal and proverbial closet.

 

Gender graveyard

While Lisa’s queerness is a hot topic of Lisa Frankenstein, there’s something to be said about the Creature’s rejection of gender. Though appearing masculinely, the Creature seems unphased by the idea of femininity – he wears Lisa’s clothes several times throughout the film and, importantly, this isn’t presented as a joke; it's just what he’s wearing, and he seems as comfortable in her pink, floral nightgown as he does in jeans. In the movieland-typical wardrobe montage scene, the Creature wears both typically masculine and feminine clothing – Lisa herself loves him in a very camp, pink flowing bathrobe (a nod, perhaps, to her own fluidity, that she finds him attractive in fully feminine garb). Eventually the outfit he ends up in is an androgynous wardrobe amalgamation – jeans, a blazer, and Violent Femmes shirt; the latter acting as an unsubtle nod to the lesbian butch/femme archetypes that Lisa and the Creature fall neatly into. This is the outfit he remains in until he eventually switches to an outfit that features ostensibly queer rainbow braces.

Taffy’s tanning bed initially serves as a device both inciting and incendiary to ‘other’ Lisa from her conventionally feminine peers, as Taffy tries to encourage Lisa to use it to make herself look better, but only ends up electrocuting her. Yet each time Lisa puts the Creature into the tanning bed and uses it as a conduit to electrocute him back to life, the Creature is the one participating in a subverted version of both beauty practices and the dysphoria found in the Creature in the original Frankenstein, as the tanning bed brings him closer to his true self, reclaiming his body through this act of typically feminine beauty.

Ultimately, in answering the question of whether the Creature is symbolically representing a trans man, a ‘he/him lesbian’, or some other definite flavour of gender nonconformity, I can offer no further insight than this: like Lisa’s sexuality, the Creature’s gender is simply other. He’s a freak, an outcast, and queer in every sense of the word. It’s this that Lisa is attracted to, without fickle concepts like death or gender playing any real part.

 

Discussing the concept of gender and sexuality in Lisa Frankenstein is a tricky thing – on the surface, it can be consumed as a straight, macabre love story. But to those familiar with the gothic, queer history, camp motifs, and the specific ways that lesbians, particularly, view gender, Lisa Frankenstein is as thematically queer as it could be. Jennifer’s Body was a tough act to follow in terms of lesbian horror-comedy media – but Lisa Frankenstein truly feels like a love letter that understands the complex concepts of diverse sexuality and gender and, furthermore, treats them with the reverence and respect they deserve.