Here is the modern monster teenage love story formula along with how it is used with other monsters. Check it out in Overthinking It. This is definitely a gem.
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.
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.
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)
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