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Virtually every catastrophe of the last two centuries - revolution, rampant industrialism, epidemics, famines, World War I, Nazism, nuclear holocaust, clones, replicants and robots - has been symbolized by Shelley's monster. (Clayton 2016: 84)
For two hundred years, Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818) has inspired other storytellers, notably in the science Action genre, and has had a vast and varied afterlife. Besides such recent sf films as Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2015), in that very same year, Shelley's novel made another comeback via the very peculiar film The Lure. Set against the background of an 1980s nightclub in communist-era Poland, this mermaid musical-cum-horror film blends the sf genre and Frankenstein's influence in a new and innovative way. For its Polish director, Agnieszka Smoczyńska, The Lure is inherently an act of bordercrossing, just as Frankenstein arguably was for Shelley. At face value, both Frankenstein and The Lure seem to reflect a socially accepted distinction between men and women which, moreover, correlates with the distinction between public and private spheres. Yet both texts also thematize the practice of border-crossing as they concern themselves with the production of new, 'unnatural' life-forms - monsters, beings, misfits.
Their monsters are also similar in terms of narrative function. In his seminal formalist study, Morphology of the Folktale (1929), Vladimir Propp presents an elaborate pattern-sequence of thirty-one functions that make up any hero story. Although his theory is geographically, culturally and linguistically confined to a study of a large number of Russian folk tales, the stimulating effect of Propp's ideas is indicated in part by the number of studies they have inspired in other languages and cultures, for example, in the work of Alan Dundes, A.J. Greimas and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his magnum opus, Propp examines how specific narrative functions are divided between a story's characters. As a formalist, Propp believed that all literary works could be understood on their own, outside of context. He designated seven (or eight) different character types, based upon their narrative functions within seven 'spheres of action' (Propp 1971: 80). Within Propp's schema, the figure of the monster as seen in Frankenstein and The Lure would most closely resemble the character type of the Villain since, in the former, the Creature takes revenge upon Frankenstein by killing...