Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) answers all these questions—it is hyperaware of them—and in style. “No coarse stitching—hair-thin scars,” says Victor to the Medical Disciplinary Tribunal. And later, on the snow-clad battlefield, he says, “scale will make the work easier,” hence the Creature’s size. Later still, the Creature will pick up a bulky army greatcoat, to protect himself against the mountain cold, giving him a lumbering silhouette. Clearly, del Toro has been thinking about his adaptation—“how to make it mine, make it new”—for a very long time. Frankenstein is the film toward which, it now seems clear, the Mexican filmmaker’s entire professional career has been pointing. From Cronos (1993), via Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004), to—most directly—Pinocchio (2022). And not just his professional career: he has often recalled that he has been devoted to Mary Shelley’s story since the age of seven (when first he saw the Boris Karloff version, in Guadalajara, and the monster morphed into his good shepherd), and in a more grown-up way since the age of eleven (when first he read the novel, in a supermarket paperback). Del Toro has proved himself, over the years, to be deeply fascinated by gothic literature, cabinets of curiosities, anatomical illustrations and models, antiquarian tomes, Romantic art, fairy tales, the heritage of horror cinema since Doctors Caligari and Rotwang . . . dreamscapes, nightmares, dark designs, and above all, breathing new life into age-old stories, just as Victor Frankenstein gives new life to old tissue, only with happier results. One of del Toro’s specialities: retelling the old story, this time from the point of view of “the other.” “Monsters personify the best of humanity,” he has said, “people the worst.” These are cautionary tales, even if they don’t need to be approached with too much caution. In other words, just the right credentials to tackle Mary Shelley’s unruly text.

Del Toro much prefers the 1818 edition to the tidied-up 1831 one—precisely because, he has said, it is so “insatiably curious,” so voracious, less constrained by literary convention. More of an open text, written by someone who was exceptionally well-read. And an urgent one, too, as if Mary—through writing—was finding out about herself, as an adolescent girl on a chaotic personal journey. “She poured all her anxieties about the world into that edition”—about revolution, war, the slave trade, industrialization, masculinist science, Romantic overreaching, the conflict between an ethic of care and an ethic of control, and much else besides.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein also contains elements of his own autobiography. It is more up-front about fathers and sons than any previous version, and is full of the Roman Catholic imagery of the director’s youth: the guardian angel/dark angel; the huge cathedral-sized circular windows that recur; a cruciform operating table; a laboratory that reminds convent girl Elizabeth of martyrdom paintings; a strong emphasis on confession and absolution, death and resurrection; a discussion about original sin and “our creator’s breath.” Del Toro has called it “my autobiographical movie—both as a father and a son,” as well as “the most Catholic film I’ve ever made.” Which is saying something. Mary and Percy Shelley, in their anarchist phase, would not have approved. The film has the Creature, once he gets the hang of what words mean and how they can be used, learning language through his reading of the book of Genesis (he’s fascinated by “a man named Adam and a woman named Eve”), of Milton’s Paradise Lost (he identifies with the abandonment of the Son), and of Percy Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” (1818) (for the roots of Victor’s overreaching, and the dangers of self-aggrandizement). And the film presents the Creature as “Beautiful!”—not a thing of scars and stitches, skewers and power points. Part of Victor’s tragedy is that he is trying to create perfection. His Creature is uncoordinated, asymmetrical, elongated; different parts of his face and body are aging at different rates; he copies his creator’s body movements like a grown-up baby. “Everything is new to him,” del Toro has noted. In the novel, the result of Victor’s experiments is called “creature,” “being,” “dæmon,” and occasionally “monster”: onstage, on-screen, and in popular culture, up to now he has nearly always been “monster.” Nodding toward this, del Toro’s film opens like a monster movie, with a roaring superhuman thing appearing out of the ice—and then transforms into a latter-day romantic melodrama. By the end, the “monster” has become a kind of hero, more than just a victim, a hero who has a much clearer moral sense than his creator.

This Frankenstein is not a costume drama (like Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) but a melodrama, with all the ornate over-the-toppery that implies, matching the youthful ripeness of Mary Shelley’s prose. Overall, the film aims to be, in the director’s words, “beautiful, sumptuous, and operatic—like Old Hollywood.” Victor behaves like a banyan-clad rock musician, “performing” his gory dissection of the soldier’s body accompanied by soothing dance music. Elizabeth—and Victor’s mother, Claire—dress in fantastical, painterly mid-Victorian clothes (carefully color-coded), often with a ghostly veil. On the wall of the laboratory is a large tondo of Medusa—another misunderstood monster of mythology, as misunderstood by “the boys” as the outspoken Elizabeth. A very subtle touch: the mature Victor likes to wear his mother’s red gloves all the time, even in bed. As well as the outsize sets—the Arctic ship built in a parking lot in Toronto; the circular lecture theater; the blood-soaked laboratory, complete with basement vault and rooftop spire; the rustic cottage—there are 112 locations, including country houses all over Scotland and England. Mary Shelley had particularly fond memories of her childhood holidays in Scotland.

So this Frankenstein isn’t a horror movie, or a science-fiction epic, or an example of heritage cinema. It is a sumptuous “family melodrama.” Karloff may be the best monster—he’s indelibly inscribed in popular culture—but now it is the Creature’s turn . . . The last third of the film, and the most poignant, is called “The Creature’s Tale.” Del Toro was tempted to call the final section of his story “Fathers and Sons” but sensibly stayed with “The Creature’s Tale,” which comes to the same thing.

One big change is the historical period—advanced from the original publication date of 1818 to 1855–57, with the rise of photography, the arms trade, industrialization, the carnage of the battlefields of the Crimean War—and a steampunk aesthetic for the laboratory. Another is the way in which Mary Shelley’s text is refracted by del Toro through a succession of references to the history of horror films, and especially earlier screen versions of Frankenstein: Universal (the selection of cadavers; the tower laboratory—which explodes; the creation scene; the wooden mill gears); Hammer (the monster on the ice; the “Victorian” setting; the open-minded heroine; the body parts); and even B movies. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) contains the immortal line “I know you have a civil tongue in your head—I sewed it there myself.” So when del Toro’s Victor is particularly exasperated, he says to the Creature: “Your heart is pure? I assure you it isn’t. I should know. I put it there.” But, and it’s an important but, as Professor Krempe wisely observes at the disciplinary hearing, “this is . . . not a carnival act.” Guillermo del Toro is singing the old song again—and he knows, intimately, how it has been sung before. Many, many times. IMDb lists over one hundred—and those are just the ones with the F word in the title. Del Toro also knows that Mary Shelley was reading Faust that summer she started work on Frankenstein: so he has added a Faustian bargain to the plot—with Herr Heinrich Harlander, the funder of Victor’s research project, warning “I may ask you a favor in return,” which he does, with tragic consequences.

The film ends with a quotation from the third canto of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he was writing throughout that Frankenstein summer. After watching the rough cut with del Toro in spring 2025, I wondered whether it might end with Mary Shelley’s epigraph (from Paradise Lost) to the 1818 first edition. “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?” Adam is angrily challenging his Creator. But having reflected on the finished film, and its concluding images, I’m certain that the Byron works much better. Past the forests, past the mountains, past the frozen horizons, the Creature has finally forgiven his creator—“Rest now, Father”—and is ready to face the sun: to face the life he has been given, and accept it.