How does one attempt to discuss Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus? It seems almost impossible to review the foundation on which all modern horror and science fiction is built — a text whose meanings scholars, academics, and students still argue over two hundred years after its publication — much less a film adaption.
Each successive cinematic attempt at capturing the quintessence and essential themes of the book provides a fresh lens through which to explore the preoccupations and anxieties of a given age. After all, the monster has haunted cinema for almost a century, and delighted and frightened theatre audiences in author Mary Shelley’s own lifetime. Comparing these different visual adaptations in the Frankenstein canon, then, provides precious little insight to Guillermo del Toro’s new envisioning with its depiction of generational trauma — increasingly a defining theme of modern genre storytelling.
The weaving of this theme into the DNA of the story required significant changes to the source material, giving Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) an abusive father (Charles Dance). This abuse then continues in how he treats his newly birthed creation. In an interview, del Toro revealed the film would have been a far different beast had he been able to helm it twenty years ago. It would have been a story of his relationship with his father. Now, as a parent himself, its scope has become more generational and explores the cyclical nature of trauma when left unresolved.
To say that Frankenstein means a lot to del Toro would be an understatement. Along with Pinocchio, it’s one of two foundational texts not only of his oeuvre, but of his psyche, his very existence as a human being. This film adaptation represents a culmination of his career, a dream project made manifest. No other filmmaker with such reverence for the source material and its genius creator has ever before had the budget, scope, and confidence to invent their own version.
From its very inception, del Toro set out to evoke the spirit of Mary Shelley as through séance, divining her intent and infusing it with his own ambitions and ideas, becoming a co-creator across history. If the book was, in part, a manifesto of the Romantic ideals which Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his contemporaries, the tragic Keats, and the firebrand Lord Byron aspired to, del Toro has perhaps come closer than any filmmaker to capturing this spirit.
But how do we position such a film in the contemporary canon, risk averse and overstuffed with nostalgia as it is? Horror and sci-fi are far too reductive as terms to examine and analyse it. A gothic opera comes closer, but in defining it at all we’re faced with the literary legacy that continues to coalesce around the source material. What is Frankenstein actually about? Some posit it’s a discourse between, and an attempt to reconcile, science and the spiritual. How can God alone create life, and what does it mean for mortal man to make a being in his own image instead? Feminist theory reveals a tale of a world where men circumvent the need for women and become themselves the sole creator of new life: men begetting men begetting men. And this is to say nothing of more contemporary readings, in which the treatment and othering of the creature cuts close to the experiences of marginalised people. As a trans reader and viewer, this writer has felt a strong kinship to the creature, while discussions of bodily autonomy, the presumed ownership of parents, and not fitting physically or emotionally in society have become the key themes through which they experience the story. But Mary Shelley’s novel isn’t a single issue narrative, and therefore defies a single interpretation.
As Victor Frankenstein says himself in del Toro’s adaptation, “Some of what I will tell you is fact. Some is not. But it is all true.” Every interpretation is simultaneously fact and not, but all offer truth. The quote also reveals the extent to which Frankenstein is an ongoing story, being told and retold in our collective consciousness, and how far, like the creature from its creator, the story has stepped away from the source material. Stop and consider Frankenstein, the creature’s visage, key set pieces, lines of dialogue. How many have you seen firsthand, how much from osmosis? And how much of this has come from a movie, or a reference in another movie or documentary? Then consider that a description of Victor’s lab, such a staple of all visual adaptions, is entirely absent from the original book.
But this mutability of the text isn’t a new phenomenon. The story has existed in a state of constant regeneration since it was first published anonymously in 1818. Shelley herself significantly revised the story for the third version published in 1831 (coincidentally a century before Boris Karloff brought the creature to life so vividly on screen). If you’ve read the novel, it’s likely to have been this version. Here she makes a number of intriguing changes to the text, including to Victor’s education. His fascinations with alchemy and Renaissance scientists develops through lack of proper guidance, and the interest in science, which had been part of his family background, disappears. Crucially, he’s also given more of a conscience and his language becomes more explicitly religious — for example, referring to his ‘guardian angel’.
So, from the first to the third version, Shelley makes Victor more sympathetic, and less overtly blasphemous — fundamental changes to the story by her own hand that tone down any elements considered disturbing, radical, or challenging. In other words, a reduction of the Romantic ideas from the original text. Some have viewed these changes as damage control on Shelley’s part, counteracting misreadings of her novel, while they may only reflect her own life and loss after becoming a widow and losing all her children, or simply self-preservation at a time when England’s political climate was becoming more conservative. It’s also worth stating that a person changes significantly over the course of their twenties, as Shelley had done between these versions. Perhaps, she only evolved the book in line with her own development.
This tradition continues with del Toro, and his reverence as of a man handling holy relics. After all, he does have an entire room in his house dedicated to Frankenstein. His changes weren’t made to create a more profitable or popular end product, but to better reflect the times, our current political climate, and thereby come closer to the quintessence of the book than any film has come before. The fact that del Toro is himself an outsider cannot be overstated, as a Mexican immigrant working in the American film system. Since championing immigrants during his speech while receiving his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019, the country has become even more divisive and hostile to immigrants. Data claims that between 33,300 and 37,500 Mexicans have been repatriated or deported since Trump’s January 2025 inauguration.
Ideas of the outsider evolve with social changes as surely as do stories. Mary Shelley became a social pariah and scandalised her father after eloping with the aforementioned poet while his first wife still lived. Her father, in turn, cut off contact, aside from hounding Percy Shelley for money he felt was his due. The pair fled to Europe with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, eventually encountering the even more scandalous Lord Byron.
Purely for the purpose of this article, Byron’s claim to fame was in suggesting the group — completed by his young physician John Polidori — write ghost stories to while away the near apocalyptic weather that settled over Geneva in the summer of 1816. Although seeds for the story had been gathered beforehand, not least the name ‘Frankenstein’ itself, the spark that would birth Mary Shelley’s most significant work began during that night. It’s a story that’s taken on its own mythology, in many ways eclipsing the book itself.
Here’s where facts overlap fiction. Some fact, some not. All true. Shelley’s own account of the genesis of the idea — the waking nightmare in which she beheld the creature — are believed to be made up, apocryphal, told after the fact to better suit the story. Perhaps she even believed it herself in time. It shows how Shelley herself saw the monster not only changed in her own lifetime, as the subsequent rewrites reveal, but also highlights several key dilemmas at the heart of the story. Who is the real monster and, perhaps more interestingly, what does the monster’s ‘true’ identity represent?
The answer to the first should come as no surprise. Despite anger from right-wing commentators and has-been celebrities tarring newer iterations as ‘woke’ for portraying the monster as the victim, the book has always granted a pathos to the creature — certainly it was codified in the mythology as far back as 1931. Karloff’s tender naïveté in the scene with the little girl and the lake remains shocking and heartbreaking today, precisely because of pathos and how he’s framed not as a monster, but as a victim of circumstance and a neglectful maker. Del Toro goes further, having Victor’s own brother state unambiguously that he is the monster.
Which brings us to the second question. Much has been made of slavery and racialisation within the novel, or post-colonial readings exploring the master-and-slave dynamic of Victor and his creation. If, as the title suggests, the creature represents mastery over the arcane, a dominance over what had been God’s domain, then do we dismiss all other interpretations, overt or otherwise? Indeed, critic George Levine has argued that the creature has become ‘a metaphor for our own cultural crises’ which, Dr Siv Jansson from the University of Greenwich says, can be seen in news items about ‘Frankenstein food’. ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, meanwhile, has become shorthand for anything with a patchwork construction, pulled from different sources, when Victor’s creation is made with scientific precision and intentionality. It was, after all, meant to be a new Adam.
So, what does the monster (Jacob Elordi) represent in the 2025 adaptation? During pre-production, del Toro was insistent the monster should be beautiful. Note that word. Not sympathetic, not easy to identify with, but beautiful. Del Toro will be the first to admit it was an entirely collaborative process and he, as director, simply directed a group of skilled artisans to achieve the same vision. Creature designs were produced by Mike Hill — described by del Toro as a Frankenstein ‘groupie’ — while the costumes were designed by Kate Hawley, and the make-up and prosthetics were applied to Elordi by a talented team. The end result is made beautiful by the uncanny blue skin like marble statuary come to life, gentle scars like kintsugi across its body, and the smooth lines, embodied by Elordi’s proportions, dancer’s grace, and expressiveness. All of it is elevated almost to the angelic with Alexandre Desplat’s stirring, romantic score.
Whether it’s being beaten or shamed by Victor, the monster here is an unwanted child. One who can’t live up to the impossible standards of a narcissistic, overbearing parent. As the story progresses and Victor attempts to rid himself of his creation, it becomes instead a source of shame and regret, of fallen pride and folly, and he adopts a pragmatic relationship with the memory as might an addict with the vice they’ve beaten, excising himself from all scientific ambition. Del Toro gives the monster a level of agency rarely seen in other cinematic versions, without compromising its need to defend itself, its rage towards its tormentor, or its existential crisis.
Half the film (departing from the three perspective, story-within-a-story structure of the source material) is told from Victor’s viewpoint where we see his own traumatic background, the beatings from his father and the tragic death of his mother, the creation of the monster, and his attempt to destroy it. Then, reunited with the monster in the Arctic, we hear its side of the story. Only with the full weight of the monster’s journey and inner world can Victor truly see his creation, claim him as his son, and beg its forgiveness. Del Toro’s intention in deviating so far from the source material with this ending was to “renew the pact between the novel and the modern world where we are in urgent shortage of forgiveness and acceptance”. Creature and creator together, then, represent the necessity of forgiveness and acceptance to overcome trauma, and interrupt the trauma cycle so healing can begin.
The ending with the monster bathed in bright sunlight is also an echo, seen in del Toro’s previous film, 2022’s stop motion adaptation of Pinocchio, and his 1992 feature debut, Cronos. We’re witnessing del Toro conversing with himself across thirty years’ worth of film, a culmination of key themes and images from his entire oeuvre. By his own admission, Frankenstein as a film represents a closing chapter of his career, and the start of something new. The line from Lord Byron that finishes the film shares as much about the story we’ve just witnessed as del Toro’s own journey as an artist: “And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on”. Perhaps this is the truest of all interpretations of the text, offering a meditation on humanity, on trauma, the pain of being alive, yet the determination of continuing on and the hope for a new day.
But, despite this, has del Toro betrayed the key themes and message of the source material by so radically changing the ending? The answer, like interpretation of the text more broadly, will depend on the reader. The film’s existence doesn’t diminish the source material, nor does it position itself as the definitive version. Throughout the press tour supporting the film’s release, del Toro has spoken candidly about his admiration for Shelley, for Karloff’s performance, remaining as reverent as before he wrote and directed his own contribution to the canon.
The folly is thinking of Frankenstein (2025) as an adaptation. It’s metafiction that, like the creature itself, is made up of different parts with autobiography sitting alongside themes of generational trauma, a manifesto on the magic of filmmaking, and grappling with issues of the other and who gets to tell their own stories. As the film itself also makes plain, the past can’t be excised, it cannot be ignored or run from, it must be accepted for what it is. Creature outlives creator, and Shelley’s work will continue to echo through the ages and inspire new interpretations, adding new pages to the story we’re all collectively telling. And, no matter how false or factual, all will offer truth.
Frankenstein is on Netflix now
