We have so far explored how the cinema performs the relationship between personhood and the body by means of fictions concerning the brain and its contents. From the “mad brain specialist” of The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936) and the crude disembodied brains of 1950s B movies, to The Matrix (1999), which offers a version of the philosophical fable of the brain in a vat (Chalmers 2005), and further on to the dying tycoon and the ailing elderly whites of Self/less (2015) and Get Out (2017), motion pictures have localized individuality essentially in the brain, and have imagined ways for personal identity to transcend the body's demise by transplanting the brain or its contents into other, typically younger and healthier bodies. Drawing credibility from both science and philosophy, they implicitly follow Roland Puccetti's 1969 conclusion, “Where goes a brain, there goes a person.” At the outset, movies assume that the brain is the somatic limit of the self and consider that the noncerebral physical body is secondary to personal identity. However, the body's role as repository of the brain and as the recipient's interface with the world shapes the hybrid subject's experience, and generates the motives and imbroglios that drive action.

Frankenstein films deserve a special place in the history of such fictions. At a general level, this is because “Frankenstein” designates “an authentic modern cultural myth” (Marcus 2002, 190).