It seems more or less obligatory that a website so concerned with rehashing the popular films of the 1980s should have an opinion on MTV’s big-budget rehash of Teen Wolf. With that in mind, I sat down the other day to watch the pilot episode, which was… fine, I guess, but not all that interesting, which is why this post is about twelve hours behind schedule. The one aspect worth systematic overthinking is the radical shift in tone from the original franchise to its modern reworking, which is neatly captured by these images:
1985.
2011.
Special effects have come a long way in twenty-five years, right? Except they haven’t. There’s nothing going on in the modern version that’s beyond the capabilities of 1980s technology. Take a look at Ron Perlman in Beauty and the Beast — that’s Rick Baker working in 1987, just two years after the original Teen Wolf came out, and it holds up as well as anything I’ve seen since (unfortunate wrestler-hair aside). No, the crapulence of the original makeup is a conscious choice, designed to highlight the central theme of the movie, to wit, that puberty is gross. The old Teen Wolf movie is fundamentally about being unhappy with the very bodily nature of one’s own developing body. It’s not body horror in the classic sense, where what you are becoming is abominable and terrifying to look on. Rather, the monstrous body is funny looking. Not terrifying but mortifying, embarrassing. Teen Wolf is also about getting past that – realizing that along with funny odors and hair-every-which-where, puberty also maybe gives you some enhanced basketball skills. And maybe members of the opposite sex aren’t as weirded out by your new body as you are yourself. And eventually once you’ve grown up completely, you start shaving and wearing deodorant, and your testosterone-crazed fight-or-flight reflexes calm down a little, and you make out with your childhood friend rather than the unattainable cheerleader type, opting for love and companionate marriage rather than a more juvenile romance based on lust and status. (But that always felt a little tacked on, to be honest: after all, they didn’t call the movie Teen Not-Really-a-Wolf-After-All.)
Hey Chuck Barry! Listen to this!
The new Teen Wolf is very different. By making the wolfman dreamy (or if not exactly dreamy, at least cool looking), they are changing the game rather dramatically.
There’s an interesting scene in the pilot where the titular teenwolf is dancing with his designated love interest, and her proximity causes an uptick in his heart rate which almost triggers his metamorphosis. This is a not-so-subtle metaphor for becoming, uh, conspicuously aroused, which can be a real issue for teenaged guys when they are dancing with girls that they like (or at, you know, any other time of the day or night). It’s really, really, really not a subtle metaphor. His reaction is to run off and take a cold shower.
But heavyhandedness aside, this is interesting. In the original movie, this would have been fodder for the comedy of humiliation. Oh no! SHE’S GOING TO REALIZE THAT I HAVE AN ERECTION! Must… fight… embarrassment! And the important lesson, of course, is that eventually you have to realize that these sexual drives are part of who you are, and if the girl likes you enough she’s not going to mind even a little. But in the darker and edgier Teen Wolf reboot, the threat is not that she’s going to notice — rather, it’s that he’s going to lose control and tear her limb from limb. Taking its (deeply sexist and problematic) cue from the Twilight series, Teen Wolf: The Next Generation suggests that teenaged boys are seething cauldrons of hormonal lust that are always a whisker away from exploding into a whirlwind of passionate, bodice-ripping… well, rape. There’s not a nice or polite way to put it; that’s what the subtext is about. And it’s meant to be sexy, which is kind of gross. (Although do let’s recall that this well-worn fantasy, where the guy loses control due to the woman’s overwhelming sexiness, has but NOTHING to do with the motivations behind actual sex crimes.) It’s also interesting that in the TV show, the hero’s first clue that something is happening to his body is the development of lacrosse-based superpowers. So where Teen Wolf Classic is about learning that puberty has a good side, Teened By The Wolf: The New Class is more about learning that the personality traits that make you a big man on campus also have their ugly side.
And this, by the way, is where the show loses me. Because I find most of the “good side” of the protagonist’s wolfification pretty ugly to begin with — there’s nothing wrong with enhanced senses or physical speed in and of themselves, but he quickly and cheerfully uses his gifts to turn himself into a fratty douche. The character’s name is Scott, but I kept wanting to call him Chad, or possibly just “Broseph.” Who knows, maybe over the course of the series he’ll learn a valuable lesson about not being a hyper-competitive Type-A jagoff all the damn time. Something very much like that does happen in the original, if I recall. But unless that process starts reeeaaal quick, I don’t think I’m sticking around to find out.
Anyway, the similarities between Twilight and Teen Wolf: The Chaddening have led me to determine the following formula for writing paranormal romance. (Did you know that Twilight knockoffs are officially a genre now? Yeah.) It basically works like this:
Step 1: Select a classic movie monster.
Step 2: Put your d!@& Make the monster wicked hawt.
Step 3: Identify one of the the underlying social anxieties represented by the monster, and
Step 4: invert it,
Step 5: in a way that tends to reinforce societal norms of romance.
We’ve already pretty much seen how this works with Teen Wolf 4.0: Live Free or Teen Wolf, right?
Step 1: Werewolf.
Step 2: Hawt werewolf.
Step 3: Forget all the Marxist werewolf class-conflict stuff brilliantly exposed by Shechner here. The big anxiety in this case is lack of control over our own bodily nature. Puberty is gross.
Step 4: But in this case, the Teen Wolf has MORE control over his body, at least most of the time, which is what allows him to become an awesome lacrosse superstar, a ladies man, and an incredible bowler. Because, you know, dogs are so good at all of those things.
Step 5: Getting bit by a wolf in this case has pros and cons. The pros are: being good at sports, loving the ladies, being more assertive and competitive. The cons are — well, the con IS, I should say, that you might lose control over your manful sea of testosterone and do sex at your lady friend. And I’m sure that just like with Twilight, they will find a way for this apparent con to get turned into a pro — having uncontrollable lusts will be okay, as long as it happens within the duly sanctioned confines of marriage, or true love, or going steady, or whatever. (They’ve already floated the idea that there’s just one special girl out there who really gets the hero’s tail a waggin’.) A similar approved outlet will probably be provided for the character’s anger issues and his overdeveloped sense of competition.
Twilight, just for the record, runs thusly. (Oh, and spoilers, I guess.):
Step 1: Vampire.
Step 2: Hawt Vampire.
Step 3: An interesting one. We often hear vampires talked about as a metaphor for sex, or for old-world aristocratic power structures, or disease. But I think it’s instructive to step back — and if nothing else, I’m glad I read Twilight because it provided this perspective — and consider the Dracula story from Mina and Lucy’s point of view. They aren’t doing anything special or wrong at the beginning of the story. Well, maybe Lucy’s a bit of a flirt, but they’re still within the bounds of Victorian propriety. Then along comes this strange, unappealing man, who wants to do horrible things to them. Completely unprovoked! There’s no rhyme or reason to it, all they had to do was be female at the right place and time, and suddenly they’re a target. And yeah, there’s a certain horror to that. I doubt that this accurately reflects modern female anxieties about male attention, and I wouldn’t even really want to bet that it’s an accurate portrayal of the female Victorian mindset. But it’s DEFINITELY something that Victorian men such as Bram Stoker were worried about vis a vis the women they felt responsible for (sisters, daughters, etc.), and there’s still plenty of of that rather specifically patriarchal sentiment floating around in our popular culture today.
Step 4: But in Twilight, of course, the attention of strange monstrous men is entirely benign. Because the Twilight-pires have teh moralz, you see, and possibly teh Jesusez. So all he wants to do is hold your hand, sparkle in the daylight, and whisper sweet platonic nothings into your oh-so-fragile ear. Even though he could tear you apart like a pack of tissues any minute, and is having trouble stopping himself from doing that because he is such a sea of throbbing hormones, you are totally safe. (And of course it’s not like Bella ever gets special attention from a guy she finds desperately unappealing. It’s all hotties crushing on hotties, here in romance land, even if in the end there can only be one.)
Step 5: The crucial difference between this and Dracula, however, is that Edward’s attraction to Bella has nothing to do with her being female at the right place at the right time. Rather, it’s a sign that the heroine is magically predestined to be with her special vampire boo for ever and ever, and a sign that the werewolf third leg of the triangle is magically predestined to be with one of her as-yet-unfertilized ova, which — hey, is there a reason why he didn’t fall preemptively in love with Edward as well? Presumably half of Renesmee’s very special DNA is floating around in his sparkly vampiric sac, no? But I’ve already answered my own question: Jacob doesn’t fall in love with Edward, because that would not reinforce the societal notion of romantic love, and as we’ve established that’s against the rules of paranormal romance.
With this in mind, I offer a few treatments for Twilight and or The Teen Wolf Reloaded style reimaginings of other classic movie monsters. With these in hand, writing the next smash hit paranormal romance novel will be easy! Feel free to help yourself to any of them, just be sure thank me in the author’s note. And if you do end up getting to quit your day job when your magnum opus shoots to the top of the New York Times Bestseller’s list, consider buying an OTI t-shirt.
1) Sexy Teenaged Mummies In Love
I wouldn't kick that out of the sarcophagus for eating crackers!
Unlike the vampire, which is pretty much always sexy, and the werewolf, which is at least animalistic (and therefore kind of sexy in an out-of-control way), the mummy is traditionally depicted as a withered and desiccated near-corpse wrapped from head to foot in bandages. And while those wrappings would have obvious applications for the S&M and/or medical fetish crowd, that’s a few shades bluer than the paranormal romance genre is typically willing to work. Luckily, the Brendan Frasier Mummy franchise presented us with a convenient way out, which is to just have the mummy look like a hot vaguely middle-eastern guy. (Well, South African, but who’s counting?) So yeah, let’s go with that. Since horror mummies are almost invariably aristocrats, our hypothetical Teen Mummy is probably hella rich, which is all to the good — the fact that the Cullen family was disgustingly wealthy was always a powerful argument in favor of Team Edward. The traditional mummy plot, in which a person currently living is a dead ringer for the mummy’s old flame, would also translate nicely into a highschool setting. There is one big problem facing this monster, though, which is that once you take away the Egyptian setting (which, for a set-in-an-American-highschool adaptation, you kiiiiiind of have to), and once you take away the desiccated corpse wrapped in bandages thing (which as we’ve established, is fatally unsexy), there’s not much left TO the mummy mythos. They have ancient Egyptian magic, I guess? They, uh, have curses on their tombs? (A non-starter, unless you do something really contrived where the protagonist ends up getting cursed on a field trip or a summer trip to an archaeological dig.) They cause a rotting sickness that does constitution damage over time? Look, making up new random bulls%!# attributes for your monsters is an important part of the paranormal romance genre, but ideally you want your mythology to have a ratio of no more than 75% random nonsense.* With mummies, you’re looking at 100% random nonsense, and at that point you really have to wonder what if anything you gain by calling your monster a mummy. Still, let’s put it through the mill and see what happens.
Step 1: Mummy.
Step 2: Hawt Mummy.
Step 3: Anxieties, anxieties… Uh. Pillaging the treasures of the orient might have unwholesome consequences? Like I said, updating this one for the modern day becomes kind of a problem.
Step 4: But since we’ve made our bed, fine. The paranormal romance version has to be that pillaging the treasures of the orient actually has awesome consequences, like getting a magical boyfriend/girlfriend in see-through harem pants,
Step 5: who loves only you, and caters to your every whim. And of course despite the harem pants, all the main couple ever indulges in is the occasional chaste kiss.
Already kind of exists because:
First of all, once you’ve run it through the formula, you’re basically looking at I Dream of Jeannie. Second, the classic mummy plot referenced above was colonized by vampires in the later 20th century (showing up prominently, for instance, in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula — although it’s certainly nowhere in Stoker!), and the surprisingly watchable Vampire Diaries has already introduced the plot into the paranormal romance genre. Third, Penny Arcade called this years ago.
Bonus fact: Pills made of ground-up mummies were used for centuries as an aphrodisiac. Which, like…. come on, humanity. Get your act together.
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* The 75% nonsense ratio is scientifically derived from the Twilight series, in which:
• every vampire has their own mutant superpower (nonsense)
• vampires sparkle in the daytime (nonsense)
• newly turned vampires are far stronger than older vampires, due to the amount of human blood still in their system (nonsense)
and, of course,
• vampires drink blood (actual mythology).
By the same token, werewolves in Twilight
• are all Native American (nonsense)
• have a body temperature of roughly 108 degrees Fahrenheit (nonsense)
• instantly recognize and “imprint” on their ideal romantic partners, even if they meet them as infants (ridiculous, creepy nonsense)
but nevertheless,
• are people who turn into wolves (actual mythology)
2) Sexy Teenaged Ghouls In Love
Technically, this is a "Sexy Ghul."
It’s a sign of how much Dungeons and Dragons has penetrated our popular culture that I’m guessing most people, if pressed, would think of a ghoul as a kind of souped up zombie with a paralyzing claw attack. But actually they’re monsters from Arabic mythology that eat the dead. Not to be confused with zombies, which eat the corpses of people they kill – ghouls hang out in graveyards and eat corpses after they’ve been buried. In some of the legends, ghouls take on the physical appearance of the last corpse they ate. And this strikes me as particularly ripe for erotic uhhh, paranormal romantic reapropriation. You can’t have the hottie monster devouring entire corpses — too yucky — and having them look only like the last person they ate is too limited. (What if they accidentally ate an ugly person?) But what if by taking just one bite of deceased flesh, the ghoul has the ability to take on that person’s appearance whenever they want? There are some possibilities there, I think. Imagine a love triangle between the totally ordinary guy (played by Shia Lebouef or Michael Cera, your call), his gorgeous cheerleader ex-girlfriend, and the exotic new girl in town. That’s ex- as in ex-parrot, by the way: she’s passed on, she’s pining for the fjords… and yet, for a girl who’s supposed to be dead, she but keeps on popping up in the oddest places! Then of course the big reveal that apparent undead cheerleader actually IS the new girl, working her ghoulish shape-shifting mojo. This is kinky as hell, of course, and even if you can get past the necrophagia (and wow, there’s a phrase not oft spoken), there are some dodgy consent issues in play here. (If the boy kisses girl 2 only under the impression that she actually is girl 1…) And of course you could turn it up a notch by making it so that girl 1’s personality, memories, and so on DO still exist when the ghoul is wearing that form. I don’t know if you could spin a franchise out of this, but it would make for a good (if messed up) stand-alone novel.
Step 1: Ghoul
Step 2: Hawt Ghoul.
Step 3: The anxiety surrounding ghouls is essentially Cartesian. It’s the difference between our thinking minds and our merely existing bodies. Ghouls themselves can sometimes turn into hyenas (confusing the boundary between rational man and brute beast), and the idea that they eat corpses highlights the disconnect between our living selves and the pile of goop and keratin that will be left when we die. It should be noted that hyenas are carrion animals. Ghouls highlight our anxiety over the fact that, in the long run, we’re all on our way to becoming carrion.
Step 4: The inverse, obviously, is to set up a situation where ghouls allow people to NOT become carrion. So yeah, we’re definitely keeping that idea about the people eaten by the ghoul continuing to exist in some form within the ghoul’s consciousness.
Step 5: Because this story turns out to be so squicky in so many ways, it’s probably the hardest to make conform to our general standards of romance. It does, however, offer a neat way to resolve a love triangle happily for all three parties — well, sort of — without bringing up the dread spectre of polyamory, which is probably an even harder pill for most to swallow than the whole necrophagy thing.
Kind of already exists, because:
The pre-Islamic Arab poet/brigand al-Shanfara (literally, “the guy with thick lips”) boasted of having seduced and married a ghoul that he met in the Wadi Rum. This was probably just a metaphor for his alienation from society, and in any case he does NOT describe her as sexy. And highschools in their modern form did not exist at that time. But still.
Bonus fact: al-Shanfara was friends with another poet, Ta’abbata Sharran, whose name literally means “mischief under his armpits.”
3) Sexy Teenaged Frankensteins In Love
Nothing homoerotic to see here, folks! Just move along.
Generally the sexy monster in these stories needs to be a mysterious outsider. You can’t have the hero or heroine come in knowing that their lab partner is a vampire. But the Frankenstein story isn’t going to work that way. When Shelley was writing, the idea of life created by man rather than by god was existentially horrific in its own right, but this no longer packs quite the same punch. And although the traditional Frankenstein monster is also loathsome to the eye, the paranormal romance version of the monster is going to need to be totally hot. Which means that rather than chasing it with pitchforks, the villagers are going to be doodling hearts around its name in their marble notebooks. For most people, there will be no difference between the monster and a regular dreamboat. This means that you’re going to have to pair the monster up with someone who knows that it’s a monster, which basically means pairing it up with its creator. Dr. Frankenstein (or rather, AP Chemistry student Frankenstein, I guess), can’t find the perfect prom date, she builds him, and it writes itself from there. This one would probably end up having a much more traditional be-careful-what-you-wish-for moral, rather than ending with the kind of wish fulfillment that paranormal romance thrives on. But hey, maybe not. After all, prior to Twilight, vampire stories that traded that heavily on wish fulfillment usually weren’t found outside of fan fiction.
Step 1: Frankenstein Monster.
Step 2: Hawt monster. (And also hawt Dr. Frankenstein — but probably not immediately identifiable as such. If he’s a guy, he wears glasses. If a girl, she has a severe and unflattering hairstyle.)
Step 3: Although I don’t think that people are as creeped out these days by the very idea of artificial life, there are still some weird anxieties about the proper relationship of the artificially created life form to its creator (c.f. I Robot, Splice, that one robot that beat all those people at Jeopardy, etc).
Step 4: Reversing this is really tricky, because you need to make the claim that the relationship of the creation and the creator is NOT problematic — that it is, in fact, the greatest romance the world has ever known. And that’s a hard sell. But hey, no one ever said writing the next paranormal romance blockbuster would be easy! (Except for me. I totally did say exactly that just a couple of pages ago.)
Step 5: One of the big important ideas that we’ve all internalized about romance is that it’s supposed to be a two way street. The guy provides what the girl needs, and the girl provides what the guy needs too. A situation where one of the partners never asks for or needs anything is not an ideal romantic situation: we all want to be needed, not just to need. So I think that’s the way you need to spin it. The doctor character realizes early on that the monster is her ideal partner, but she can’t quite embrace the situation until she realizes, somewhere around the end of the third act, that she herself is also the monster’s ideal partner. This would make for some excellent wish fulfillment, because I don’t think most people are quite comfortable with imagining themselves as anyone else’s idea of perfection.
Already kind of exists, because:
If you’re thinking that you’ve seen the whole “build your own prom date plot” before, it’s because you have, more or less, in Weird Science. And, like, two different episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, at least. And arguably My Fair Lady, sort of. It’s durable.
Bonus fact: This scenario would be an Oedipal nightmare of epic proportions.
4) Sexy Teenaged Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde In Love
There are plenty of sexier Jekyll and Hyde images out there, just not work-safe ones.
This works out to be sort of the mirror image of the Frankenstein plot. This time, instead of building a perfect date, our teen chemistry whiz (we’ll make him a guy this time), is making a perfect version of himself. The obvious way to play this is to make the Jekyll character a dork, and the Hyde version impeccably cool. A slightly bolder and more interesting version would hew closer to Stevenson’s original vision, in which Jekyll isn’t trying to create an alter ego at all, but rather to repress his libidinous (and possibly homosexual) urges. That’s an impulse a lot of teenagers can relate to, I’m sure. One of the nice things about Jekyll/Hyde — well, one of the really problematic and gross things, in fact, but also one of the things that makes it a compelling story, is that Jekyll’s potion does seem to have the effects that he wants it to have, at least at first. He really does purify his “normal” persona. And in the versions where he’s provided with a love interest, she IS captivated by the new and improved Purity!Jekyll — there’s never a sense that completely repressing the Hyde persona was a bad idea in and of itself, even without the unexpected consequences. So translating this into highschool terms, you need a guy who feels like he could get his dream girl to like him if he wasn’t constantly distracted by how much he wants to have sex with her. He doses himself with Hormone-B-Gone, and it works! Not just as in “his urges go away,” but as in “he totally does get the girl.” Again, this plot is inherently kinky verging on creepy, since arguably what our teenaged Jekyll has done is to chemically delay the onset of puberty.
Step 1: Mr. Hyde.
Step 2: Sexy Hyde.
Step 3: Jekyll/Hyde is much less robust than some of the stories we’ve been looking at here. ALL it can really be “about” is mankind’s failed attempt to control the baser urges of its nature.
Step 4: To reverse this, we need a plot where mankind SUCCESSFULLY controls the baser urges of its nature.
Step 5: So we end up with a Jekyll/Hyde plot where eventually there is no Hyde. Rather, Jekyll creates a perfected super-serum that completely eliminates every unworthy human emotion. No bad side effects. Okay, maybe it makes you sparkle in the daylight. This being paranormal romance, I suppose it will have to turn out that lust is not an unworthy emotion (which is skirting pretty far afield from Stevenson’s original vision — but again, all you need is 25%).
Already kind of exists because:
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to working on my own paranormal romance novel, tentatively titled “Sexy Teenaged Shark From Jaws In Love.” Hollywood, here I come!