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Shape-shifters in film and literature

Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is widely accepted as a high watermark of strangeness. The story of a man who wakes up one morning and discovers he is an insect is uniquely baffling and creepy. So much so that it’s easy to forget that the central ideas of the tale have always been with us.

For as long as there have been stories, characters have been changing their form. They were shape-shifting even before the formation of Greek and Roman mythology – and they’ve continued to do so right up to the days of X-Men, Harry Potter and Twilight.

If Kafka’s leading man Gregor Samsa was surprised to wake up as an insect, he probably had nothing on Lot’s wife when the Old Testament matriarch was turned into a pillar of salt – the poor woman’s punishment for trying to sneak a glimpse at the city of Sodom in the first book of the Bible.

Shape-shifting is a mainstay of the ancient world. There were so many legends about shape-shifting that the Roman poet Ovid was able to gather more than 250 of them for his epic poem Metamorphosis. There he described humans turning into animals, animals into humans (and mushrooms!), as well as changes of sex and colour.

But even though he wrote a huge epic poem about shape-shifters, Ovid didn’t catalogue every kind of change. It took another Roman author called Petronius to kickstart another rich tradition. He told one of the earliest surviving stories about werewolves – and so helped introduce a special kind of nocturnal horror. People have been howling at the moon and turning into wolves ever since, with Harry Potter’s beloved teacher Professor Lupin only being one of the most notable recent examples.

Jennifer Lawrence plays shape changer Mystique in X-Men
Shape-shifting blood suckers didn't appear in popular literature until the 18th century, but since then they’ve been making up for lost time.

Pest Control

A comic twist on Kafka, in which a pest controller finds himself in a sticky situation.

And where werewolves prowl, vampires follow. Eventually. The shape-shifting blood suckers didn’t appear in popular literature until the 18th century, but since then they’ve been making up for lost time. The most famous vampire remains novelist Bram Stoker’s Dracula – but there have been countless film adaptations and variations like Interview With A Vampire, Twilight, and Nosferatu – not to forget all the Hammer Horror films starring Christopher Lee as the shadowy count.

The Roman Petronius told one of the earliest surviving stories about werewolves. People have been howling at the moon and turning into wolves ever since.

Talking of bat-men, meanwhile, no summary like this one would be complete without reference to superheroes and villains. From Spiderman to Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, shape-shifters have whizzed, powwed and kazzammed through countless comics and films.

As well as being excellent bad guys and even better bad guy blasters, shape-changers are also very good for pranks. No less a writer than Shakespeare understood how well this joke can work when he put an ass’s head on a not-so-bright weaver called Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s been making people laugh ever since from all those fairytale frogs turning into princes and vice-versa up to Nymphadra Tonks’s hilariously altering hair in Harry Potter – via the army that gets turned into pigs in the 1980s costume classic, Willow. To say nothing of Gregor Samsa himself.

Which brings us back to Metamorphosis. In a sense, this is just one story in a long ongoing tradition. You might even be tempted to bring in the old cliché: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Except, of course, the other important thing to remember about change is that it always makes a difference. And that’s a big part of the reason it’s always been such a rich source of variety and novelty. After all, waking up as an insect would still confuse the heck out of most of us…

A brilliant, new, darkly comic adaptation of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis is part of this year's Dangerous Visions. Listen here.