Surely one of horror’s most promising unmade films is David Cronenberg’s Frankenstein. This adaptation was to be a contemporary rethinking of Mary Shelley’s novel featuring a humanised, intelligent creature. Despite an advert in a 1980 issue of Variety, the project never got far into development. To anyone familiar with Cronenberg’s obsession with the body, with its pathologies, decay and fusion with technology, Frankenstein would have been a perfect fit.
It is possible to find traces of that project’s DNA in Cronenberg’s The Fly. His most successful and critically acclaimed film to date, it has become a landmark and inspiration to many modern directors, from Luca Guadagnino to Julia Ducournau and Alex Garland.
