Lisa Frankenstein — Love as an (un)living altar to grief

This episode talks about 2024 gothic romance horror comedy delight Lisa Frankenstien and its portrayal of the grieving process through the eyes of Lisa in all her sensitive, emo, goth teen glory. This movie is quirky, and silly, and romantic, and touching and I’m so glad that it exists and that it pays a beautiful tribute to its godmother, Mary Shelley. 

Mental Health is Horrifying is hosted by Candis Green, Registered Psychotherapist and owner of Many Moons Therapy.

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Sources:

Whether you have lost a beloved person or pet, Love Letters For The Dead offers you a space to process, feel, and be with your experience of grief for your dearly departed. Over a two week period, you will receive writing prompts, audio recordings, tarot exercises, and dreamwork rituals delivered to your inbox, along with a place to share memories of and feelings about your dearly departed.

All you need is your heart, a journal, and a tarot or oracle deck.

We begin on the dark moon of August 3.

Early bird pricing is available until July 26. Visit manymoonstherapy.com/finalgirlsclub to learn more and to register.

Order The Horror Concierge: A Mental Health and Horror Tarot Readings + Film Reco

Podcast artwork by Chloe Hurst at Contempomint.

Undergoing the situation: Emotional dwelling is more than empathic understanding by Robert D. Storlow

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death by Irvin D. Yalom

Death Rituals, Ceremonies & Traditions Around the World by Tracey Wallace

Little Hidden Doors: A Guided Journal for Deep Dreamers – A Dream Journal by Naomi Sangreal 

Laurie Anderson’s Farewell to Lou Reed: A Rolling Stone Exclusive by Laurie Anderson

Jennifer's Body & Lisa Frankenstein's Shared Universe Explained: How The Horror Movies Are Connected by Brandon Zachary

For Zelda Williams, Daughter of Robin, a Goth Zombie Comedy Is Cathartic by Melena Ryzik

Mary Shelley’s Haunted Life by Caroline Macon Fleischer

Mary Shelley’s Obsession with the Cemetery by Bess Lovejoy

Mental Health Resources:

Assaulted Women’s Help Line

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Distress Centres of Toronto

Gerstein Crisis Centre

Toronto Rape Crisis Centre / Multicultural Women Against Rape

Victim Services Toronto

Transcript

Welcome ghouls to today’s episode of Mental Health is Horrifying. I’m your Horror Barbie host of darkness — Candis Green— Psychotherapist and all around spooky bitch podcasting from my bat-filled cave in Toronto, Canada. 

Who’s in the mood for a little summer romance? You know, someone you can really talk to you who can really hear you out, and talk to you about the real issues on your mind like your dead mother, and re-animating the dead? But it can be hard to find a quality man these days what with all the dating apps, and swiping and scrolling. It’s so exhausting. Where’s a girl to find her dreamboat these days? Well… have you tried the local cemetery? 

On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about 2024 gothic romance horror comedy delight Lisa Frankenstien. LISTEN… I love this movie. So much. I love Diablo Cody, who wrote it, I love the 80s and its over the top fashion and interior design aesthetic, I love gothic romance, and I LOVE how the grieving process is shown through the eyes of Lisa in all her sensitive, emo, goth teen glory. This movie is quirky, and silly, and romantic, and touching and I’m so glad that it exists and that is pays a beautiful tribute to its godmother, Mary Shelley. 

Okay — so let’s get right into it. Let’s talk about Lisa Frankenstein (2024) and its portrayal of love as a living altar to grief. 

Movie synopsis:

Lisa Swallows is a high school girl grieving the loss of her mother, who was killed by an axe murderer two years earlier. Her father Dale has since married a woman named Janet and Lisa has gained a stepsister, named Taffy. She is largely ignored by her father and mistreated by Janet, and finds solace at her local cemetery. There, she tends to the grave of a man who died in 1837, leaving him flowers, and talking to him regularly. 

Lisa heads to a party with Taffy, who encourages her to socialize with people who are alive. She has an awkward encounter with Michael, her crush, and is drugged by one of his dickhead friends. Her lab partner, Doug, assaults her after isolating her in a bedroom, feigning wanting to take care of her after she had been drugged. Lisa escapes and returns to the cemetery and speaks to her undead boyfriend. The man had been a pianist who fell in love with a woman in his own time before she left him for another man. He was killed after being struck by lightning. A bolt of lightning strikes the grave after Lisa leaves, and the man is brought back to life as a zombie.

The Creature breaks into Lisa’s house. Lisa is at first scared, but then realizes he is the man whose grave she dotes on, and decides to hide him in her closet. The Creature is cannot speak and is all gross.

Lisa claims that a burglar broke in to explain the mess made by the Creature, but Janet claims she is making it up for attention. She threatens to send Lisa to an asylum. The Creature kills Janet and cuts off her ear before the two dump Janet's body in the cemetery. Lisa, a talented seamstress, sews Janet's ear onto the Creature, but discovers that the parts will not work without a current. They use Taffy's tanning bed to revive the ear, which also restores the Creature to a more human appearance and makes him progressively hotter. Lisa lures Doug, the dickhead who assaulted her, to the cemetery so that she can cut off his hand for the Creature. The Creature kills Doug and hides his body with Janet's. The Creature is once again able to play the piano with his newly animated hand, and he and Lisa start to bond.

The police start to investigate Janet's and Doug's disappearances. Lisa is implicated but refuses to cooperate with the investigation. Lisa goes to find Michael, but she finds him in bed with Taffy and is devastated. To avenge her honour, The Creature enters and chops off Michael's penis, then flees to the cemetery. Lisa gives Taffy her mother's rosary and thanks Taffy for her kindness to her throughout the years (even though she was totally sleeping with the guy she had a crush on – rude), before pursuing the Creature into the woods.

Lisa confronts the Creature, who admits he loves her. They leave the cemetery after throwing an officer into a grave. Lisa attaches Michael's penis to the Creature so they can have sex. Afterwards, Lisa convinces the Creature to electrocute her in the tanning bed to avoid being arrested and also so that they can be undead together forever. 

We close on Lisa’s grave in the cemetery, which has been inscribed with "Beloved Wife", and has been struck by lightning. We then see the Creature sitting on a bench, reading aloud Percy Shelley's poem, To Mary. A resurrected Lisa lies in his lap and opens her eyes, looking longingly at her love. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee romance. 

Movie background info:

Lisa Frankenstein is was directed by first time director  Zelda Williams, who is actually the daughter of the late great Robin Williams, may he rest. The film was written by the legendary Diablo Cody who uggghhhh girl wrote such greats as Jennifer’s Body, Juno, and Young Adult. And what’s so great about that is that Cody has stated that Lisa Frankenstein is set in the same fictional universe as Jennifer's Body. Ugh like can I go live there? The film stars Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Henry Eikenberry, Joe Chrest, and spooky queen Carla Gugino from the Mike Flanagan Netflix-verse. 

This movie is a lot of glorious things, but I think it’s especially a sort of love letter to spooky, misfit teenage girls. And that's taking it all the way back to the Gothic century when the true heroine of this story was a spooky teenage girl, Mary Shelley. She is of course the author of Frankenstein, one of the earliest examples of science fiction who I’ll talk more about later.

Even the choice of the name of the movie – Lisa Frankenstein – evokes the iconic 90s brand Lisa Frank, the popular designer of whimsical designs for kids who love technicolour, sunshine, and unicorns. The film caomes wrapped in a pastiche of references from ’80s and ’90s movies she loved, like “Heathers,” “Weird Science,” “Beetlejuice” and “Death Becomes Her.” 

Some of the themes in “Lisa Frankenstein” resonated with Director Zelda Williams’s own life, as a person who experienced shock waves of anguish after her father’s sudden death in 2014. 

For Williams making the movie was its own exercise in grieving, as she and the rest of the moviemakers worried very little about whether or not grief was presented in a palatable way. I mean, the movie deals with grief, death, and the afterlife in an outrageously comically way to the point where they had to tone down how much all the blood spewed from an R to a PG rating. I mean, they kept in the part where they chop off some guy’s penis and sew it on to someone else so I wonder what it looked like when it was rated R… you know? When interviewed about how grief is portrayed in the film, Williams said “I just thought about how we live in a culture that wants so badly for us to move on from traumatic events. What if this young woman had an opportunity to literally embrace grief by loving this dead man?”

A grieving girl 

At its core, Lisa Frankenstein is a movie about a grieving girl. Lisa’s mother was murdered two years prior when an axe murderer broke into the house and Lisa witnesses the whole thing, escapes, and survives. (Uhh is that guy still out there?) Shortly thereafter, Lisa’s father remarries a woman, Janet, who is rather unfeeling towards Lisa and certainly does not embrace her as any kind of daughter of her own. Lisa’s father seems emotionally absent throughout the movie, not listening to what she has to say or taking much of an interest in her life at all. 

And it doesn’t help that Lisa is also known as that spooky girl who hangs out at the cemetery, so she doesn’t have very many friends at all either. I mean – I would want to be friends with a girl like that, but not the kids at this school! This all adds to a sort of lore built around Lisa and her story, with the kids at school treating her mother’s death like some salacious urban legend. 

This all makes it so that Lisa has no one to talk to about and make sense of her mother’s death, which are such critical aspects for processing grief, especially a death as traumtic as this one. So what does Lisa do? Well, she finds comfort in the macabre which is exactly what we’re all doing here right now aren’t we, you spooky ghouls.

One thing I really love about this movie is the way that Lisa’s life parallels that of Mary Shelley, the brilliant author of Frankenstein. Mary’s mother, the eighteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly giving birth to her in 1797. Her father, the writer William Godwin, was so brokenhearted that he found it hard to be around young Mary. When Mary was four years old, her father remarried a woman who was not fond of her and even sent her away at one point. 

As a child, she spent much of her time at her mother’s gravestone, reading her mother’s work as a way of knowing her. It has been said that Mary Shelley’s only real mother was a tombstone.

The Wollstonecraft gravesite was the only place where she felt like herself. Here, she escaped a family that did not understand or embrace her, she studied her mother’s works and engaged in her own process of grieving and self actualization. 

It was also the place she brought the handsome poet Percy Shelley when she wanted to tell him that she had fallen in love with him and also where they are said to have gotten busy for the first time! 

Because grief not an emotion — it’s an experience. While we may traditionally associate grief with the feeling of deep sadness or sorrow, the experience of grief actually contains (often) literally every single known emotion, sometimes several happening at the same time! Grief is paradoxical in that way — in one moment we may be feeling intense anger at the unfairness of it all, and in another may find love and connection to not only our dearly departed, but to a person (or creature) who is able to hold all of it alongside us, making something else out of it entirely.

This is showcased so well throughout the movie, I think especially in the fact that Lisa Frankenstein is a horror comedy. Because like… sometimes grief is funny! And absurd! And sweet. Just as Mary Shelley felt, Lisa Frankenstein shows that love and death are connected. 

Disenfranchised Grief

Our girl Lisa is experiencing a type of grief that’s called disenfranchised. Disenfranchised grief occurs when we have grief that is not acknowledged or accepted by the people in our lives. It’s grief that has no home, no place to go, nowhere to be processed or integrated but luckily for Lisa, just as Mary Shelley did, she finds solace in the macabre, in the cemetery. She is drawn to one grave in particular – that of an unnamed man who seems to have been a bit of a romantic himself. Lisa tends to his grave, leaves him flowers, talks to him, and tells him about her mother. She brings him her mother’s rosary and leaves it with him, asking him to keep it safe. And he listens. She is drawn to the tragic romance of his life, stating “I just don’t think anyone should be forgotten”

*clip 6:36*

Beyond this, why was Lisa drawn to his grave? And like… maybe it has something to do with the fact that a bust of his face is included as part of his gravesite and this dead guy is Cole Sprouse so he’s super hot and she’s a teenage girl so there you go. He’s cute! Who can blame her for falling in love with him?

Mary Shelley learned to write her name by tracking it on her mother’s grave, and we see Lisa do this in the opening credits on the Creature’s grave, as a lovely ode to her. 

She tends to his grave and returns to it for comfort numerous times, including after being drugged and nearly assaulted at a party. In her loneliness and anguish she says “I wish I was with you”... which he takes literally! He’s like okay girl and climbs on out of his grave and shows up at her doorstep all heyyy.

The cemetery, his gravesite, and then tending to him once he becomes uhh reanimated is part of what puts Lisa back together again too. 

Grief is carried and cared for in communities. Ceremony, ritual, and remembrance are so important for this reason as they provide a space to share memories, to see the impact and reach of someone’s life, to visually see and accept death in its physical form, to feel like you are not alone even though death has visited, to figure out how you carry on living without.

Because what is Frankenstein really about? Not wanting death to be the end – needing it to mean something, and needing to make meaning out of the ultimate unknown. The fact that Frankenstein’s monster is assembled from fragments of corpses has a parallel in Mary’s assembly of her own self-identity: in some sense she is like her own creature, without a mother, assembling herself out of dead fragments in the form of the books that stood in as a surrogate mother.

And so Lisa Swallows finds a place for her grief in the connection she has with The Creature and puts him together too, sewing him an ear to listen, a hand to play music, and a penis to give it to her. 

A note on suicide

Okay so SPOILER ALERT (I mean, this whole episode/podcast is one big spoiler) but I wanted to take a moment to address the fact that at the end of the movie, Lisa has The Creature kill her with a tanning bed so that they can be together everlasting. 

In essence, Lisa is committing suicide because the reality of her life is unbearable to her and the only place she feels at home is with the creature and also because she wants to escape law enforcement who is after her for murdering like 2.5 people. 

I want to be very clear that while we’re talking about a horror movie, that feelings of hopelessness and suicidal ideation do occur in our lives. It can sometimes feel scary or even shameful to admit this, but these thoughts I think can sometimes feel like a naturally response to a life that feels like it doesn’t make sense anymore, or is filled with loss or pain. 

And I also want to make it very clear that you, listener, never have to hold those feelings alone or feel like the world would be a better place without you. I encourage you, from the bottom of my heart, to reach out to someone in your life — a friend, family member, colleague, or mental health worker — and tell them how you are feeling, and please know that you are not alone. I have listed a number of mental health resources in the show notes in case you are looking for one.

As far as this movie goes, I’m choosing to view Lisa’s act of joining The Creature in the realm of the undead as a metaphor for an act of desire for and devotion to her dearly departed. Which is a beautiful metaphor – right? AND, how about we explore the better ways to demonstrate your devotion to your dearly departed, like living your life as a love letter to them – shall we?

Love as a living altar

“They kept saying time heals all wounds. But that's a lie, time is the wound.”

I absolutely adore these lines from Lisa. Nothing really heals over time. And if time is the wound – your life becomes a living altar to the ones you have loved and lost. And altars must be tended to.

It’s quite unfortunate that at least in modern North American culture, we live in a place that is quite sanitized and removed from dying, death, and grief. Largely, we don’t want to look at it, be with it, or tend to it. I mean – how many times throughout your life have you been told that you’re an unhinged, perverse weirdo for liking horror movies, true crime, or keeping Halloween decor up in your house year-round? The acknowledgment of death and the macabre makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but for spooky ghouls like us, we turn towards it perhaps as a way of making sense of life’s mystery.

There are many cultures around the world who do this a lot better than we do in North America too.

The Tinguin tribe in the Philippines adorns their departed in their finest clothes, and seats them upright in a chair at the entry of the home. Perhaps Lisa was inspired by them when she had a bedroom fashion show with The Creature, and made sure to pick out the prefect outfit for him.

In Bali, cremation ceremonies are an occasion for celebration of the completion of their most sacred duty to liberate the soul. Lisa does this too, by returning the gift of music back to The Creature by uhhh borrowing a hand for him! 

And in Mexico, grief gets its own holiday — El Dia de los Muertos — a beautiful, annual grief ritual in which family members and friends who have passed are honoured, stories are swapped about them, and the families do everything they can to prevent the second death: that is, when you are forgotten by the living.

The second death – don’t forget about me. How could I ever forget about you? For my dearly departed, my whole life is a tribute and love letter to them. I am still his daughter, and their mother, and her niece. That will never change. It just looks different now. 

Like many religious and spiritual observances around the world, I keep altars for my dearly departed in my home, where I leave them food and offerings and where I talk to them and continue to share my life. Of course you can talk to your dearly departed wherever you are, but I like having a dedicated altar space that feels special and just for them. Here, I also adorn their altars with mementos from their life; an object that meant something to them in recognition of the concept of animism – which is the idea that all objects have a soul and in this case, carry reflections of the soul of the person to which they belonged.

I incorporate death and grief work into my personal dreamwork practice as well. Oneiromancy is the art of prophetic divination from dreams. It encompasses the notion that dreams are nightly messages that to the soul, from Gods, ancestors and the deceased in ancient Greece, Egypt and Babylonia, and by the Romans. And this would often occur in a dream temple, which was a place where people would go to heal through dreaming, in places where the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was often thought to be at its thinnest. Not only that, but here, sometimes people would actually sleep next to the cadavers of the deceased in the hopes that they would be able to receive messages from them. Technically, Lisa does this too because she sleeps next to The Creature’s undead body! 

And while it’s of course beautiful to have loving, peaceful dreams of the dead and receive messages from ancestors and dearly departed, I also wanted to acknowledge that it’s perfectly normal and okay to have nightmares about them too. Dreams generally reflect current problems and emotions that we’re trying to work through, so if you are having nightmares about someone who has died, know that this means that you have some big feelings that your psyche is wanting to work through and make sense of. Even though it might be scary or upsetting, it’s okay to have bad dreams and to feel upset, cry, or feel angry. It isn’t necessarily a reflection that the person you are dreaming about is in pain or suffering, but likely a reflection of your own emotions because that’s what dreams are – picture metaphors for our most salient emotions.

When you have nightmares about your dearly departed, know that it doesn’t have to end there. As part of remembering, recording, and working with your dreams, know that you can do something that’s called dreaming the dream forward. This is a practice that is particularly helpful when working with nightmares, as a way of re-entering the dream at the most upsetting part and imaging a new story, a new way forward, that creates a memory or feeling that makes you feel at ease. 

This is helpful because if helps to alleviate the emotional charge associated that the dream has on the person, and recognizing that dreams are often are unconscious mind’s way of trying to work through a problem, using our conscious imaginations – which are linked to the dreamworld – helps us to imagine a new way forward, a new way of feeling and resourcing, which can be incredibly therapeutic. In therapy this is called re-experiencing.

While I believe there is no solution to grief, I do believe that we can learn to carry it over time. It is a practice, like any other practice we repeat and become proficient at. And I think it’s a love letter too. A devotion, a dedication each day to the one we have loved and lost, sharing our life as tribute to them and maintaining the connection. We can reflect on the relationship – past, present, and move it into the future. 

Most of all – know that you’re not alone in it. Find people – they’re out there I promise – who will delight in sharing your continued relationship with your dearly departed. Talk about them with people who care to listen – share their favourite colour, movie, holiday, and food. Keep them always through your life, your remembrance. 

Love Letters For The Dead Ad:

Whether you have lost a beloved person or pet, Love Letters For The Dead offers you a space to process, feel, and be with your experience of grief for your dearly departed. Over a two week period, you will receive writing prompts, audio recordings, tarot exercises, and dreamwork rituals delivered to your inbox, along with a place to share memories of and feelings about your dearly departed.

All you need is your heart, a journal, and a tarot or oracle deck.

I created this program, because I wish I had something like it when I experienced the death of a loved one.

We begin on the dark moon of August 3.

Early bird pricing is available until July 26. Visit manymoonstherapy.com/finalgirlsclub to learn more and to register. 

Conclusion

When I married my husband, he said that he thought the whole point of getting married is to be with the person that you want to die with. And I couldn’t agree more. And so for the reading at our wedding, we chose this condensed version of the letter Laurie Anderson wrote for the love of her life, the great artist Lou Reed upon his passing. It may seem kind of morbid, but I was so touched by what felt like her perfect encapsulation of the beauty and pain that co-exist when we love, and then lose someone.

I’d like to share that condensed farewell letter with you now — 

Lou and I played music together, became best friends and then soul mates, traveled, listened to and criticized each other's work, studied things together. We made up ridiculous jokes; stopped smoking 20 times; fought; learned to hold our breath underwater; went to Africa; sang opera in elevators; made friends with unlikely people; followed each other on tour when we could; got a sweet piano-playing dog; shared a house that was separate from our own places; protected and loved each other.

Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be – strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together.

I guess there are lots of ways to get married. Some people marry someone they hardly know – which can work out, too. When you marry your best friend of many years, there should be another name for it. But the thing that surprised me about getting married was the way it altered time. And also the way it added a tenderness that was somehow completely new. 

I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

At the moment, I have only the greatest happiness and I am so proud of the way he lived and died, of his incredible power and grace.

I'm sure he will come to me in my dreams and will seem to be alive again. And I am suddenly standing here by myself stunned and grateful. How strange, exciting and miraculous that we can change each other so much, love each other so much through our words and music and our real lives.

Outro:

And that my ghouls is the story of Lisa Frankenstein. Ugh any movie that combines gothic romance, the magic of the 80s, a hot undead guy and a death-positive message about having a relationship with your grief – like sign me all the way up. 

Mental Health is Horrifying is entirely researched, written, edited, and produced by me, Candis Green, Registered (and spooky) Psychotherapist, with artwork by the ghoulishly talented Chloe Hurst. If you like this podcast, please consider rating and reviewing on your preferred listening platform. It really helps the show to reach all the other spooky ghouls out there and I will be eternally grateful – and an eternity is a very long time for a vampire, okay? 

Visit my website manymoonstherapy.com to register for Love Letters For The Dead — a space to go gently into your grief and pay remembrance to your dearly departed. If you live in Ontario and are interested in psychotherapy with me, I offer talk therapy mixed with the magic of tarot, and I also offer dreamwork sessions.  You can follow me on Instagram at @manymoonstherapy and you can also learn more about me and my services through my website manymoonstherapy.com.

OR you can also howl at the moon and I will hear your call.

Bright blessings.