The Metamorphosis in popular culture

Film

There are numerous film versions of the story, including:

• A 1975 television film by Jan Němec.^[1]
• A 1977 animated short film by Caroline Leaf.^[2]
• A 1987 television film by Jim Goddard.
• A 1993 short film by Carlos Atanes.^[3]
• A 1999 feature film by David Kalla.
• A 2002 feature film by Valery Fokin.^[4]
• A 2004 short film by Fran Estévez.^[5]
• A 2012 feature film by Chris Swanton.
• A 2013 short film by Pencho.^[6]
• A 2017 Sinhala feature film Swaroopa by Dharmasena Pathiraja.^[7]

Print

• Jacob M. Appel's Scouting for the Reaper contains a telling of the novella in which a rabbi attempts to arrange a "proper Jewish burial" for Gregor.^[8]
• Lance Olsen's book, Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka, retells Kafka's novella from the points of view of those inside his family and out.
• American cartoonist Robert Crumb drew a comic adaptation of the novella, which is included in the 1993 book Introducing Kafka, an illustrated biography of Kafka also known as Kafka for Beginners, R. Crumb's Kafka, or simply Kafka.
• American comic artist Peter Kuper illustrated a graphic-novel version, first published by the Crown Publishing Group in 2003.^[9]
• Marc Estrin's debut surrealist novel, Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (2002),^[10] "resurrects Kafka's half-cockroach Gregor character"^[11] vis-à-vis the world between 1915 and 1945.
• East Press published a manga version of the story in 2008 as part of their Manga de Dokuha line.^[12]
• The Meowmorphosis was released in 2011 by Quirk Books as part of the Quirk Classics series; a 'mash-up' retelling by Coleridge Cook, where Gregor Samsa wakes up as an adorable kitten, instead of a hideous insect.^[13]
• A sequel Samsa in Love was written as a short story by Haruki Murakami in his 2017 book Men Without Women. It features Gregor Samsa, who had turned back into a human, and his encounter with a hunchbacked locksmith apprentice.

Stage and opera

• Steven Berkoff performed a stage adaptation in 1969. Berkoff's text was also used for the libretto to Brian Howard's 1983 opera Metamorphosis.^[14] In 1989 Berkoff directed a Broadway production of a play, adapted by Berkoff, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and René Auberjonois that opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.^[15]
• Another stage adaptation was performed in 2006 as a co-production between the Icelandic company Vesturport and the Lyric Hammersmith, adapted and directed by Gísli Örn Garðarsson and David Farr, with a music soundtrack performed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.^[16] It was also performed at the Sydney Theatre Company as part of a world tour in 2009^[17] and returned to the Lyric Hammersmith in January 2013, starring Garðarsson as Gregor Samsa.

Music

• in 1988, Philip Glass composed and performed a five movement arrangement called Metamorphosis. It refers to and was inspired by Kafka's novel and has been used for recorded readings and stage performances of the material.
• in 2004, American Christian metal band, Showbread, released a song entitled "Sampsa Meets Kafka" off of their album No Sir, Nihilism Is Not Practical. The only lyrics to the song are "Gregor starved to death, No one dies of loneliness." The misspelling of Samsa is intentional.

Radio

• A radio drama, combining Metamorphosis with Dr. Seuss performed by David Rakoff and Jonathan Goldstein and produced by Jonathan Goldstein and Mira Burt-Wintonick with Cristal Duhaime, was broadcast in 2008, on CBC Radio One's program Wiretap in 2008.^[18] In 2012, it was broadcast on This American Life^[19]
• In 2006, BBC Radio 4 adapted the novella for radio with the story being read by actor Benedict Cumberbatch.^[20]