WRITER EXCLUSIVE
Lisa Frankenstein writer Diablo Cody mines her teenage years to bring twisted teen lovers to life
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, DIRECTOR Karyn Kusama and BAFTA- and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody disrupted the horror genre with their gory feminist romp Jennifer’s Body. On release, many audiences didn’t quite get the humour and subtext of their revenge fantasy starring Megan Fox. But in the years since, critics have re-evaluated the film as being delightfully subversive and underappreciated.
Now Cody has circled back to the genre with her original screenplay Lisa Frankenstein. Essentially a love letter to her goth youth in the ’80s, Cody’s script fuses together the DNA of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Tim Burton’s oeuvre and a sprinkling of David Lynch’s Wild At Heart.
Cody tells Red Alert that the idea for Lisa Frankenstein was born out of the lockdowns of the pandemic. She had spent years working on the book for the Alanis Morissette musical Jagged Little Pill, and then life crushed their efforts. “The show opened on Broadway in December 2019 and then proceeded to shut down immediately due to the pandemic,” she sighs.
“So I’m sitting at home. I have three kids. At the time, I had a pretty fresh divorce and I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I went into Mary Shelley mode where I was feeling pretty goth. I started to write this script solely to occupy myself and to take my mind off things. I just thought Gen Z needs their Edward Scissorhands.”
The story centres on the semi-tragic tale of teen misfit Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton). After the death of her mother, Lisa’s life spirals when her dad quickly remarries a terrible woman (played by Carla Gugino), who labels her stepdaughter a screw-up. Lisa retreats into her fantasy life, mooning over romantic headstones in the graveyard, until a lightning storm suddenly brings her fantasy man (Cole Sprouse) to morbid life.
Entirely aware that the script would not be an easy sell, Cody found the right collaborator for it when a friend introduced her to up-and-coming filmmaker Zelda Williams, daughter of the late comedian Robin. “I was familiar with her work,” she says. “I had seen things she had directed, like her short films. There was just something about her vibe and her sensibility that I thought, ‘I think this is going to work.‘”
Universal greenlit the film, with Williams making her theatrical directorial debut. “She was ready to go,” Cody says of Willia
