[Article] Nina West's LISA FRANKENSTEIN

I am a Lisa Frank fan. I have been since I was a little girl. There’s nothing in the universe that can convince me that color doesn’t make everything better because it does. I’m also a horror fan. I love horror movies, haunts, spooky stuff that goes bump in the night, and pretty much my whole life has been a mixture of these two things. Some people don’t get it. They look at me and think “she’s not spooky” or “she doesn’t look goth” or “she’s too colorful to like scary stuff”. And you know what, they’re wrong. Luckily there are some people who get it, and today I had the absolute pleasure of talking to one of them.

Nina West (you might know her from a little show called RuPaul’s Drag Race) is an American drag queen, actor, singer, comedian, and philanthropist. She is also the person who is about to drop a new video that speaks to my soul like no other music video ever has. On Friday, October 11 Nina will release LISA FRANKENSTEIN a full-on technicolor dream that answers the burning question “what if The Monster and The Bride had a daughter…in the ’90s …who was fun and loved color and was popular and was going through puberty?” Don’t look at me like that, you know you’ve asked yourself that once or twice.

Nina has always loved Lisa Frank. When he was a young boy in school, he’d see the girls with their notebooks and trapper keepers and wish he could carry them, but unfortunately, that wasn’t a “socially acceptable” thing to do, so his love of Lisa Frank stayed buried…until it crawled up out of its grave and Lisa Frankenstein was born! The concept was totally Nina’s but the design was done by her incredibly talented friend, Christian Cimoroni (@ccimoroni) and made by Christian and Patrick Howell. The finished look stayed true to the original concept because she was so in love with the character she created.

The video was filmed in Nina’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and this is one of the things that makes it a truly magical experience. Nina loves Columbus, and the city loves her right back! All the locations were in the city, and everyone was super open and accommodating. All the people in the video are someone Nina knows. Her friends and her drag family came out and threw down and you can tell they are all having the best time! In fact, the cheerleaders we get to see crawling through the graveyard, that’s Nina’s drag mom and drag daughters! Also joining her on the track is Bobby Moynihan, who gives us a killer intro and interlude!

When I asked her about future crossovers, she said she’d love to expand the universe of the classic monster’s children, but of course, it would be done differently than it has been before. She wants to take it to a whole new level, bigger, better, brighter, and 100% more queer!

The LISA FRANKENSTEIN video drops today, and since I’ve already watched it about 100 times, I can honestly say that if you’re one of the people who wants to join her squad of “dayglow freaks”, you can come right over here and sit with me, and we’ll be spooky and colorful together and celebrate a rainbow Halloween!