Hot on the heels of the first posters for the just-retitled **Dracula Untold comes news of Fox's Frankenstein project starring James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe, with Paul McGuigan directing from a script by** Chronicle**'s Max Landis. In another title change, the film is now called Victor Frankenstein, the better to indicate an origin story and hopefully erase any memory of I, Frankenstein.
This latest take on Mary Shelley’s chilling tale of man’s scientific hubris has McAvoy as the titular doctor and Radcliffe as his assistant Igor, through whose eyes the story will be told. Frankenstein, you’ll recall, is the man who thought it would be smart to build a creature out of dead people, which ultimately led to the screaming and the smashing and the mobs with the torches and property values going down all over the place.
You won't find Igor in Shelley: his origins are in the Universal films, where he's played by Bela Lugosi and spelt 'Ygor'. He starts out in Son Of Frankenstein as a disabled blacksmith, and in Ghost Of Frankenstein has his brain transplanted into the monster. In the popular imagination, Igor is an amalgam of this character and Dwight Frye's hunchbacked henchmen in Frankenstein and The Bride Of Frankenstein (called Fritz in the former and Karl in the latter). Confused? So was Landis, which is presumably why he's tried to unravel the knots.
Mark Gatiss, Jessica Brown Findlay and Andrew Scott are also among Victor Frankenstein's cast, and it's out on October 2 next year.