‘Lisa Frankenstein’ Offers Gen Z Its Very Own Undead Boyfriend

Lisa (Kathryn Newton) is a lonely teenage girl in the late 1980s with a crush on the editor of her high school lit mag. But her true love may be standing even closer to her. It’s not her lifelong best friend, or the boy next door – though the boy in question does reside near her suburban home. He’s a long-dead young man from the Victorian era whose grave Lisa tends – not explicitly wishing for him to come back to life, but with enough gothic yearning to entice from the grave during a freak lightning storm. Soon this undead Creature is staggering around Lisa’s well-appointed bedroom, and beneath the mud, gunk, and foul-smelling tears he emits is babyfaced Riverdale actor Cole Sprouse. Gradually, Lisa starts to look beyond the Creature’s novelty and see something desirable underneath.

Lisa Frankenstein is the latest in a long line of movies featuring teenage (or teenage-style) boyfriends who are physically, viscerally dead. These are distinct from ghostly love stories like Ghost or Truly, Madly, Deeply, where a dead man reaches out from the great beyond to demonstrate his love – and usually provide closure to a grieving partner. In undead-boyfriend movies, the protagonists tend to be younger, the hormones are less predictable, and there’s a real and sometimes decaying body to contend with. It’s a way of upping the ante on forbidden love with an urgent clock, though some forms of it are more forbidding (and urgent) than others.

Appropriate to its retro stylings, Lisa Frankenstein revives this trope from a recent late-2000s peak. In addition to its lineage as an undead-boyfriend movie, this is something of a companion piece to the last teen-related horror-comedy from screenwriter Diablo Cody: Jennifer’s Body, which is name-checked in the movie’s trailer. It’s a surprise to anyone who remembers that film bombing back in 2009, but 15 years later, Jennifer’s Body, wherein two best friends are divided by one’s demonic possession, has been reclaimed by millennials and Gen-Z viewers as an incisive, insightful treatise on the teen-girl experience.

Jennifer’s Body doesn’t have an undead boyfriend to contend with; when boys are eaten by a possessed Jennifer (Megan Fox), they don’t come back. In fact, it may be that part of that movie’s initial rejection derived from its release into a cultural context that favored the undead boyfriend and, paradoxically, seemed most interested in monster movies without too much pesky horror. It came out less than a year after Twilight and a few months away from its sequel, New Moon, which codified the love triangle made up of normal girl Bella (Kristen Stewart), pallid vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson), and traditionally alive werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner).

Twilight didn’t invent the sexy vampire, of course. If anything, the book and film series softened Edward beyond vampiric recognition, with key substitutions made to preserve his gaunt but hunky body in something more akin to proper flesh. In this mythology, sunlight no longer causes a vampire to burst into flame; instead, he sparkles like gimmicky doll. Edward’s craving for blood can be sated without killing humans, and his predatory senses are re-attuned to finding Bella particularly alluring. In other words, death gives him a heightened awareness of her specialness, minus all that pesky real-death regret. Poor Jacob never really has a chance, in part because the material never really allows him any strategic advantages of being actually alive, beyond some surface warmth. (If anything, Lautner is the stiff. Zing!) The vampire’s tradeoff, eternal life that must be spent in the shadows, turns into a perfectly good deal. The undead boyfriend becomes an aspirational superman – forbidden fruit in name only.  

Released a few months after the Twilight series wrapped up, Warm Bodies takes a messier look at the undead boyfriend, with Nicholas Hoult as R, a genuine flesh-eating zombie who develops a crush on Julie (Teresa Palmer, who even looks a bit like Kristen Stewart). The film still offers mitigations aplenty to get around the character’s monstrous nature; it turns out, the movie’s zombies only need some love and human connection to get their hearts beating again and dezombify their hollow-eyed existences. It’s a sweeter vision than Twilight’s stalker apologia, yet it also risks turning the undead boyfriend into a minor affliction, with zombiehood no different than shyness or mild social awkwardness.

It’s obviously tempting to treat this potential necrophilia with a light touch, lest it repulse the target audience. Both Warm Bodies and Lisa Frankenstein are superficially reminiscent of the critically reviled 1993 flop My Boyfriend’s Back, in which a lovesick dork (Andrew Lowry) returns from the grave after saving the life of his crush (Traci Lind), determined to take her to the prom. The premise is executed by director Bob Balaban (yes, the character actor) with sketch-comedy goofiness. No one reacts to the gruesome horrors at hand with any immediate shock or wonder (“Honey, this is the father of the boy Johnny murdered at school today”). There’s some fear of Johnny’s undead form, but only after it becomes clear that the he hungers for human flesh (though he doesn’t actually kill to obtain it, and the most outlandish moments of bloody feasting or rotting limbs are mostly in dream sequences).

This makes Lisa Frankenstein an outlier in its willingness and eagerness to actually meet its characters’ undead qualities head on (much like the Jesus and Mary Chain song it expertly deploys at one point as part of its 1989 vibes), combined with a Twilight-like centering of a young woman’s point of view. It shows a lot of the same boldness that has connected younger viewers to Jennifer’s Body: a recognition that monstrous behavior isn’t necessarily something that can be tamed or overcome with the intensity of love, be it platonic or romantic.

If Sprouse’s monster isn’t an especially menacing figure, that’s balanced out by Lisa herself, who despite Newton’s innate likability (and Cody’s facility with a quip) still roils with adolescent strife (“a coming-of-rage story,” the marketing says). Cody clearly believes that the characters confronting these fantastical horrors are as important, if not more so, than the succubus or vampire or undead boyfriend they might meet along the way, and this likely resonates with a generation learning to be more upfront with their individual traumas. Lisa Frankenstein is a loopy horror comedy, yes, with plenty of funny lines and fashion-based sight gags; the Creature made of purloined body parts also does an ’80s-style dress-up montage. But the movie also understands the emotional and physical fragility that these boyfriends’ bodies represent – whether alive, dead, or somewhere in between.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.