Lisa Frankenstein's most chaotic scene was a lot gorier: 'That room looked like Carrie, originally'

Warning: This post contains spoilers from Lisa Frankenstein.

Yep, Zelda Williams’ killer directorial feature debut Lisa Frankenstein concludes with an axe to the penis. 

From Jennifer’s Body and Juno writer Diablo Cody, the horror comedy features a natural but equally-shocking plot progression: Kathryn Newton’s teenage misfit Lisa discovers that her popular stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano) has been hitting the sack with her crush. Upset, she storms into his bedroom to confront them when Cole Sprouse’s the Creature, the Victorian-era corpse she resurrected at the start of the film, follows suit — axe in hand, with the intent to claim the very alive teenage boy’s penis as his own after managing to compile body parts from Lisa's classmates and devilish stepmother (the fabulous Carla Gugino) for his own undead body. 

The penis lands in a trashcan, the sheets are soaked with blood, and a traumatized Taffy is screaming bloody murder as her sister tries to calm her and leads her out of her now very-dead crush’s house. “It was always what the screenplay was building to,” Cody tells EW of the “chaotic” scene. “She takes a hand from the man who assaulted her, an ear from the woman who refused to listen to her, and at the end, something else from a guy who betrayed her, at least in her mind. It made sense to me."

According to Williams, the original sequence was a lot gorier. “We heavily reduced the blood when we got the directive to make it PG-13,” she says. “That room looked like Carrie, originally.” Still, she considers the final, uh, cut, a win. “We got PG-13 and there’s still a dick being chopped off, so I can’t complain. It was a fine line but we found it.” And the intimacy coordinator, though not required on set, had an absolute field day. While Williams specified that the prosthetic would never actually be attached to an actor's body, miscommunication led to a coordinator showing up that day. “She ended up just sitting with me and laughing while we threw [the prosthetic penis] back and forth.”

Newton calls the moment Lisa’s breakdown point. “I was reading it from an emotional place, and I didn't think about the absurdity of what we were doing,” she says. “To me, it felt like we were making the most rational decision as these characters. When I saw it in the trailer for the first time, I had no idea that my face could make that face. I didn’t know it was going to be so hilarious. Remember how loud I was screaming, Cole? I was really loud, and then I saw it in the trailer, and I immediately thought to myself, Oh, no. Why did I do that? But I think [the scene] needed it. It had to be ridiculous and absurd.”

The big sequence actually marked Sprouse’s very first day on set and the first scene he filmed as the nonverbal Creature. “I remember being like, this is going to freak him out,” Newton recalls, turning to her costar. “But it didn't freak you out at all.” I mean, has she forgotten that Jughead Jones has practically seen it all? “I just came off of seven years of Riverdale camp, so at that point I was like, all right, what have we got?” Sprouse quips. “It’s very memorable. It was my favorite scene when I read it.”

For Williams, the scene was a filmmaking dream come to life. “I've always wanted to make a movie that reminded me of the moment I got to enjoy House of Wax [in theaters] on opening weekend," she says. "During Paris Hilton’s death, everyone in the theater started laughing and cheering, not because this is a person getting injured, but big funny death scenes in movies are such a great experience in the theater. Thankfully during the test screening, we saw that happen with the big death. I hope people get to have that [experience] in the theater.”

Lisa Frankenstein and that big chop is in theaters now.

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