There's a Mary Shelley body swap story? Wow, living and learning. Such an interesting finding. How well does it stands up given its an early entry in the genre and by a very established classic author? Does it live up to the expectations set by the name of such an influential figure in pop culture and her other iconic work? Is it more like a horror take on the body swap? Does it feature orientalism (I hope not, but I will be more surprised if it doesn't at this point)? I'm very interested in hearing your thoughts about this, your body swap posts have been all so great, and I find fascinating bringing up these older body swap media before it became more commonplace in fiction, stuck to a default format and became a stock episode plot in tv. Can you see weird roads not taken and different structures and themes that didn't stick in the body swaps that came before the genre settled in its more familiar form to modern audiences? Especially because the impression I've been having from your posts is that the more recent body swap media has been actively trying to switch up the formula and get more creative with the premise (introducing things like the intermitent time swap as you pointed out before). It seems we're in the era of body swap experimentalism.
This ask is like catnip for me so thank you for sending this bone my way. Yes! So it's highly disputed over what's the first body swap story ever written, but what people generally agree on is that Mary Shelly's Transformation (1831) is among the earliest body swap stories we know of. I was hoping that in checking out the earliest body swap story (from an extremely notable author no less) that I could pin point who started the orientalism mystic plot device trend. To my surprise, I was greeted with ableism instead.
Mary Shelly's Transformation is about a man named Guido agreeing to swap bodies with an unnamed "misshapen creature", but then the creature attempts to steal Guido's life for himself- causing Guido to have to track the creature down and kill him to get his body and life back. Summaries like wikipedia will keep calling the unnamed antagonist "a creature" but Shelley's writing is direct. The story calls him a dwarf, but I will be calling him a little person.
"Surely never such had existed before- a misshapen dwarf, with squinting eyes, distorted features, and body deformed, till it became a horror to behold"
The horror of the story is swapping bodies with "a monster" and having to hunt down a creature who has your handsome face and "perfect proportions" while everyone looks at you with disgust and disdain. The little person is magical (can control the weather and made them swap bodies), but for no specified orientalist foreign reason. It's a non-stop ableist read that relies on the reader's disgust for little people in order for the horror to function. All the more reason for disabled writers to come in to this genre and make something awesome here some day.
Transformation (1831) isn't a Mary Shelly masterpiece by any means but it has the ingredients for what makes a body swap narrative compelling. It's also a vital read to contextualize body swap media history in this time that I'm calling the Speculative Era.
Early body swap stories from the 1800s-1970s were basically noodling with the concept and having fun with out of the box stories and scenarios. They were not strictly comedy as we popularly perceive this genre to be. We have Mary Shelly's horror story Transformation (1831), the more science fiction but comedic Arthur Conan Doyle's The Great Keinplatz Experiment (1894), the time traveling intermittent existential middle grade body swap of Charlotte Sometimes (1969), and Thomas Anstey Guthrie's "male Freaky Friday" Vice Versa (1882). But stories from this time also meandered a lot. There wasn't quite a point to the shenanigans. And many of them struggled with what would be a compelling finale to this kind of conflict.
Out of these, Vice Versa as a family father son swap resonated the most with several cross media adaptations. While not directly inspired by Vice Versa- this eventually lead to the Turnabout (1931) novel by Thorne Smith. Which is about a husband and wife swapping bodies. This too had many subsequent adaptations and directly inspired Mary Rodgers to create Freaky Friday. Freaky Friday is commonly remembered as a story about empathy- but since the beginning it was also about self discovery. The book explores how a daughter is able to see what others think of her when she's pretending to be her mom. We owe a lot of the body swap narrative's relevance to Rodgers' brilliant writing, because she took the shenanigan heavy antics of the genre and injected more pathos into the swap.
The 70s Disney movie adaptation of Freaky Friday launched The Body Swap Boom of the 80s to 90s.
These films attempted to capitalize on 70s Freaky Friday's success by saturating the genre with male leads, raunchier jokes, and lots of ~totally hilarious~ misogyny and racism. 70s Freaky Friday is a charming enough film but it still had some narrative structure that needed refining. These other films just wanted to make "Disney unapproved" jokes instead. Some of these films were trying to strengthen the comedy of the body swap formula, but they didn't crack the code quite yet. People got sick of this genre's oversaturation with very little emotional pay off from it. Disney's 2nd reboot of Freaky Friday in the 90s doesn't receive much fan fare from how tired this genre was by then.
Disney tries rebooting Freaky Friday for the 3rd time in 2003. They took all the best ingredients from the original book, the 70s and 90s adaptation, along with the need to modernize the story as women's roles in society had drastically changed since then. All the mechanics of the genre were refined into a solid formula. 2003 Freaky Friday is tightly written and an instant hit because of it. Its quality transcends how tired people were of the genre. Freaky Friday was just that excellent on its own.
And with success comes the usual attempts at imitation, though I think this time- creatives had to relent that 2003 Freaky Friday had a deserved grip on the genre. By now, the body swap genre is synonymous with Freaky Friday. It's a Boy Girl Thing has echoes of the Body Swap Boom's desire to "do Freaky Friday but raunchier jokes" energy, but who fondly remembers that movie? Nobody could follow up on the Disney hit, and most people who tried underestimated how tightly written 2003 Freaky Friday was.
There's already some needed experimentation in this time, since "we can't just do Freaky Friday again, the best one already exists". So we have the reboot of Exchange Students (1982), a very typical boy girl swap, coming back with Switching: Goodbye Me (2007). This time the cast system is better fleshed out and the girl gets a terminal illness that plunges the two leads into confronting death and grief. DCOM's The Swap does an extremely solid job in a boy girl swap, borrowing a lot from Freaky Friday's formula. It's the only film I've found to have matched 2003 Freaky Friday's efficient pace and writing.
But now we have to experiment much further to stand out. And so we enter the body swap's Post Modern Era:
and what an exciting time that is! Now that we know how a standard body swap functions, it's time to play again.
While there's plenty of body swap comedies still, there's also that speculation era's genre mixing returning again. In any genre study, a satire marks the genre's maturation. To mark that for body swaps, we have Freaky (2020), a horror slasher comedy that makes fun of the tropes in both body swaps and horror. Inside Mari (starts in 2012) is a dysphoric body horror deconstruction of the genre, challenging and subverting its tropes masterfully.
But what marks the strongest change in popular culture is the film Your Name (2016). Directly inspired by Inside Mari (and many other Japanese body swaps), Your Name became an international sensation. The anime film challenged the tone, mechanics and worldbuilding possible for body swaps. It didn't really matter that Your Name didn't deliver on themes and characterization, the appeal was in its innovations.
2025 might just be the new boom for the body swap. But now it's in an experimental flavor! We see a return to 1 perspective body swaps through I'm not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang (2025), and an expansion into group swaps through Freakier Friday (2025). Then there's Ngozi Ukazu's Flip (2025), which is an interracial twist to the boy girl swap. It's What's Inside (2024) takes a "internet anonymity" approach on body swaps with a distinctly unique tone. It's What Inside says "yes I'm confusing, and that's the point". Which says a lot about how far this genre has come while also returning full circle. Because technically, the genre has traveled back to its horror roots (Mary Shelley) multiple times by now.
Comics like In Fair Verona (2024) by Val Wise and When I arrived at the Castle (2019) by E.M Carroll explore the body horror and violation aspect of the genre. In Fair Verona pulls influence from Inside Mari, while When I Arrived at the Castle share similarities with Transformation by Mary Shelley. Notably, these comics are made by queer creators. Pixar's short Out (2020) features a gay man as a lead in a body swap. A first for the genre that I know of in film.
This new era is filled with hits and misses. People Collide (2023) by Isle McElroy, is a queer attempt at critiquing the husband and wife swap. But it falls flat at trying to challenge the genre. Many body swap stories now share characteristics with the speculative era. They're trying to explore what's possible outside of the Freaky Friday formula. And when they don't understand what makes Freaky Friday work so well, their experimentations only end up demonstrating why we stick to those conventions in the first place- instead of truly innovating on them.
Freaky Friday took 4 tries to strike gold, and it had to be really clever to get there. The benefit we have today compared to the writers from the Speculative Era is that we have Freaky Friday to show us what the standard conventions look like. "Know the rules before you break them" is a common saying. But boy does it ring true for the body swap.
