Warning! May contain spoilers for books I’ll probably never write! Also contains spoilers for a classic 19th-century horror novel.

In Universal’s recent “The Mummy,” they gender-flipped the original and presented us with an immensely powerful female mummy — or at any rate, that’s what I saw in the trailers and TV ads; I didn’t see the movie or read any reviews. (They also had her magical powers be an open threat to the entire world, which is one of the things they did wrong if they want to build a franchise — where do you go from that in a sequel?)

I didn’t see any reason to do that. Yes, ancient Egypt had some powerful queens, but… well, we’ll get into that more if and when I talk about my mummy plans.

If you’re going to gender-swap someone, though, I think it makes more sense for Frankenstein. If you look at the original novel, it’s really about a dysfunctional father/son relationship; the monster is desperate to be accepted and loved by his creator, his father. Some scholars have interpreted this as being about man’s relationship to God, since the monster describes Dr. Frankenstein as his creator, but given that Mary Shelley’s mother died eleven days after Mary’s birth and Mary’s relationship with her father was pretty fraught, I tend to think she was more concerned with parenthood than religion.

And that’s a relationship where gender matters.

So if I’m reinventing the story, I want Dr. Victoria Frankenstein, professor of biophysics at the fictional Queensbury University, to create a monster with the assistance of a Russian grad student named Igor Morozov.

And if you’re creating an artificial being as proof of concept, why give your creation any sex at all? It’s a lot of unnecessary extra work.

So we have a creature desperate for its mother’s love, and it doesn’t want a bride, it just wants an identity — it wants to be male or female or something. It wants its mother to make it a full human, rather than a thing, and Prof. Frankenstein thinks that’s a terrible idea.

The departmental secretary at Queensbury’s bio department, incidentally, is named Beth Harker — gotta set up that crossover potential early on.

Anyway, previous versions have often added a little Oedipal complication, since the monster goes after Frankenstein’s fiancee Elizabeth, but I never really bought into that; I didn’t find Victor’s passion for Elizabeth very convincing. I prefer a Frankenstein who is focused on her work, and not much interested in romance, to the point she hasn’t even noticed that poor Igor has a huge crush on her. Igor, however, is 5’8″ and Victoria is 5’11”, which is a complication. The monster, meanwhile, is almost seven feet tall — I’m going to keep the idea (I’m not sure whether it’s in the original novel or from movies) that the creature is huge because it’s easier to work on larger structures.

Anyway, the creature is created, escapes, discovers people are terrified by its appearance — and then discovers that on the internet no one knows you’re a hideous monster…