An Explanation

So, what is The Robot Frankenstein? Well, it is a number of things. On the surface, it is an attempt at composing a piece of music that tells the story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But more than that, it is a free-form study of the nature of modern myth.

What follows is an elaborate explanation of how the project came to be. Elaborate, but pretty interesting.

The Children of the Night: Monster Myth and the Seeds of an Idea

Over the course of the last year, my friend Travis Patten and I made a (rather fantastic) vampire movie. A vampire movie, however, where the vampire element is just sort of the icing on the cake. You see, neither of us are especially big fans of vampire mythology. And because of that (or perhaps it was because), neither of us knew much about vampires. But, we knew that there are certain "rules" that a vampire story must have in order to not be called out by the people who actually do know. These rules are basically the foundation of the vampire myth. A vampire movie that gets vampires wrong would be... well, wrong.

So, armed with rental cards and internet access, we decided to brush up on our history of vampire lore and learn what we could about the mythology in order to make our movie. What we learned, interestingly enough, is that there is no such thing as vampire mythology. Every single vampire story makes up its own rules about what they can do, what they can't do, what kills them, what makes them stronger, how long they live, whether a vampire bite kills you or turns you into a vampire, whether they're ridiculously sexy or horrifyingly repulsive, etc.

Eventually we realized something: this wasn't a lack of a mythology, it was simply a different kind of mythology. Our previous concept of modern mythological characters was much more rigid: e.g. Superman gets his strength from the yellow sun and Kryptonite hurts Superman and nothing else is the case. With vampires, however, the rules seemed much less strict: e.g. sunlight kills vampires... or hurts them... or, you know, whatever.

But what was interesting was that no matter how many different ways it was modified or modernized or shlock-ified, it was never beyond recognition as a vampire story. It still retained enough of whatever it considered "vampire"-ness to be a vampire movie, and at the same time added and tweaked things to suit it's own storytelling purposes. It was as though each individual one of these stories were sub-myths created within the greater vampire myth, and as each new sub-myth was created, it modified the vampire "super-myth."

Vampire lore, we learned, is an ever-evolving thing.

And so, when somebody (though, for the life of me, I can't remember who) did a project in our class which highlighted the various shlocky incarnations of the Frankenstein story over the years, I realized that the same was true for Frankenstein. And so, the juices got flowing. An idea was brewing. I just didn't know it yet.

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