For Fans of Mary Shelley

Every adaptation that misreads Frankenstein turns the creature into the villain and misses the whole book. Shelley's creature is eloquent, devastated, and right about almost everything he says. He was made without consent, abandoned without cause, and taught to hate himself by the cruelty of strangers. The monster is the metaphor for anyone society discards. The films that honour this, from Whale's original to Penny Dreadful, are the ones that stick.

From Software's Bloodborne is soaked in the Romantic gothic tradition that Shelley defined. A city of scholars who reached too far into forbidden knowledge. Experiments that warped flesh into something the researchers could no longer recognise as human. A protagonist who sees the truth and is transformed by the act of seeing. Yharnam and Ingolstadt share the same nightmare: that curiosity, unchecked, becomes catastrophe.

Published in 1826, The Last Man is Shelley's other masterpiece, a pandemic novel that follows the sole survivor of a plague that ends humanity. It reads as a grief work for the deaths she had already suffered by her thirties, Percy, Byron, her children, and it imagines apocalypse not as spectacle but as loneliness. Every contemporary pandemic narrative owes something to it. It is overdue for a serious screen adaptation.

Long before scholars named it, Shelley was writing feminist gothic. Frankenstein is partly a rebuke to the Romantic poets around her, brilliant men who took credit and left consequences for others. Victor creates life without any consideration for what that life will experience. The novel keeps asking: who gets to be the author of another being's existence? It is a question that has not stopped being relevant.