Frankenstein Legacy: Michelle Ryan stars in a follow-up to Mary Shelley’s story

Earlier this year, we heard that Paul Dudbridge had directed a “period action thriller” called Fear the Invisible Man. That movie has since secured distribution, but a release date has not yet been announced. Since making Fear the Invisible Man, Dudbridge has moved on to directing another movie inspired by a classic horror tale. His latest film is called Frankenstein: Legacy, and 101 Films International is presenting it to potential distributors.

Starring Michelle Ryan – who will always be known as the Bionic Woman to me, even though she only played the character in 8 episodes of the short-lived 2007 reboot – stars in Frankenstein: Legacy, which is set in England, 1875. A century after Victor Frankenstein’s doomed experiment, his journals have traded hands for decades. Frankenstein’s secrets did not die with him. As graves are torn up and patients disappear from the local asylum, William Browning sets out to find who stole his father’s body and finds horrors close to home as his mother descends into madness.

Here’s a longer synopsis: Frankenstein’s journals are now in the hands of Millicent Browning. In her mid-40s, a gifted scientist, Millicent searches obsessively for a cure for her husband’s degenerative illness. She is devoted to him, to the exclusion of her children, William and Clara, with whom she is cold and harsh. William, our hero, is in his mid-20s. Witty, unconventional for his class, he strains at the bounds of his privileged position, working as a doctor in the local asylum.

When Millicent’s husband dies by suicide she snaps, disappearing into her obsession, poring through the journals for an answer. Taking his body from his grave, she returns him to life – in body but not in soul. She seeks new flesh with which restore him… As William struggles with his father’s death and battles the outdated methods of the asylum’s stuffy superintendent, he forms an unlikely friendship with a working-class nurse, Liza, who has her own reasons for hunting the body snatchers now terrorizing the small town. As murder reaches the asylum, William comes to understand his mother’s descent into madness. He finds what was once his father; now a hideous monster with only flickers of recognition for his son.

Ryan is joined in the cast of Frankenstein: Legacy by Juliet Aubrey (Middlemarch), Philip Martin Brown (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), and Matt Barber (Dracula). Jim Griffin (The Legend of Dead Man’s Gold) wrote the screenplay.

101 Films’ Eoghan Burke provided the following statement to FormatBiz: “Frankenstein remains one of the most recognizable names in horror and we are extremely pleased to have a new take on the familiar narrative. With a strong cast this extremely engrossing thriller is sure to attract audiences around the world keen to have another opportunity to see what happens next when terrifying experiments take an even darker turn.“

Are you interested in Dudbridge’s Fear the Invisible Man and/or Frankenstein: Legacy? Share your thoughts on these films by leaving a comment below.