by Martina Vajdová

Few novels have been adapted and misinterpreted as extensively as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose mad scientist and his creation have inhabited the cultural imagination for over two centuries. Director Guillermo del Toro has long been vocal about his love for Shelley’s novel, stating: “It’s the most important book of my life, so you know if I get to it, whenever I get to it, it will be the right way.”¹ In October 2025, a Netflix production of Frankenstein directed by Guillermo del Toro was released in theatres. He has since given many interviews in which he has discussed the importance of Shelley’s story to his life’s philosophy and averred his fidelity to the spirit of her novel.² However, the film presents a challenge to viewers familiar with the original story since, as this article illustrates, del Toro fails to capture the complexity and nuance that govern Shelley’s novel.

In recent years, it has become an increasingly popular reading of the novel that, while Frankenstein is the name of the scientist rather than the Creature, Victor Frankenstein is the story’s real monster. This simplistic view seems to be shared by del Toro himself. It appears as though the director has retained a polarized understanding of good and evil from his formative years, when he first became acquainted with the story and began to identify himself with the Creature. He describes Frankenstein’s creation as his “Messiah” and “shepherd,”³ who helped him accept his self-proclaimed weirdness. He elucidates: “Monsters tell you, look, it’s okay to be you. … It’s okay to be imperfect. You can forgive yourself for that.”⁴ And yet, in a departure from Shelley’s novel, del Toro’s Creature is anything but imperfect, depicted instead as an innocent victim; all negative traits are reserved for his creator.

Indeed, in del Toro’s film, both the eponymous hero and his creation are more akin to one-dimensional Dickensian caricatures than the morally complex figures of Shelley’s Gothic tale. Del Toro reframes Shelley’s adolescent protagonist as a middle-aged, milk-drinking murderer, thus stripping him of the youthful naivety present in the novel. Yet another change that makes del Toro’s Frankenstein significantly less sympathetic is the horrific abuse to which he subjects the Creature: Victor beats, burns and verbally abuses his creation before setting fire to his abode and leaving him inside to die.⁵ In contrast, Shelley’s Byronic hero is morally ambivalent. His obsessive pursuit and self-imposed isolation are emblematic of the Romantic myth of the solitary genius. This is abandoned by del Toro, who instead has Victor assisted by his brother, Elizabeth and her uncle (yet their complicity is never addressed in the film). Shelley’s Victor falls victim to his unchecked ambition and, due to his inability to face the consequences of his actions, becomes “the author of unalterable evils.”⁶ In the film, however, scenes that pose a moral dilemma—Justine’s trial, the Creature’s demand for a female companion—are removed from the narrative and with them the ethical tensions that underpin the source material. In her discussion of Julius Caesar, Ann Radcliffe praises Shakespeare’s ability “to touch the accordant springs of sympathy by small circumstances,” objecting to reducing its titular character to the simple assertion “Caesar was a tyrant.”⁷ Similarly, while Shelley creates circumstances that elicit sympathy for her protagonist, del Toro perverts this complexity by having William Frankenstein declare to Victor, “You are the monster.”⁸

The second half of the film covers the Creature’s tale, in which del Toro succeeds in emulating the novel’s poignant narrative. That being said, he still eliminates important portions of the story, including the Creature’s cold-blooded murder of Frankenstein’s younger brother, William. Moreover, while in the novel, both Victor and Justine Moritz are framed for murders committed by the Creature, in del Toro’s adaptation, it is the Creature who is repeatedly falsely accused of grisly crimes. Del Toro retains the Creature’s tendency to kill only in self-defence for the remainder of the film to ensure that the viewer does not waver in their sympathies, whereas in the novel, the reader is challenged to sympathise with him notwithstanding his transformation into a serial killer. Furthermore, this alteration depletes the story of the motif of revenge. While the Creature ultimately still pursues Victor in a cat-and-mouse chase, he does not systematically eliminate the people closest to Victor, inflicting upon his maker a punishment worse than death. This is rendered impossible because del Toro’s Victor does not care about anyone but himself, while Shelley’s protagonist bemoans that “there was always scope for fear, so long as any thing I loved remained behind.”⁹

The daughter of two renowned Enlightenment thinkers, Shelley incorporated the theories of the movement into her seminal work. John Locke’s theory of tabula rasa posits that human beings are born as a blank slate and it is through experience and education that their character is ultimately shaped.¹⁰ Jean-Jacques Rousseau similarly argued that people are born intrinsically good and society has the power to corrupt them.¹¹ Shelley’s Creature is a striking example of this philosophy: initially good-natured, it is only once he is repeatedly rejected by those around him that he commits heinous crimes. As he tells Frankenstein during their confrontation, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”¹² This statement closely echoes Victor’s: “I had begun life with benevolent intentions, and thirsted for the moment when I should put them in practice, and make myself useful to my fellow-beings. Now all was blasted: … I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt.”¹³ That being said, unlike his creation, Frankenstein’s moral corruption does not stem from external factors. Born into a life of privilege and brought up in a loving family, he confides in Walton that “no creature could have more tender parents than mine,”¹⁴ which helps to account for his inability to sympathise with his creation’s suffering. Moreover, Victor himself struggles to pinpoint a specific event in his life that would account for his downfall, attributing it to “ignoble and almost forgotten sources.”¹⁵ Victor, as a Romantic hero, seems to possess an innate genius, whereas the Creature embodies the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers. Therefore, by portraying the Creature as inherently good and Frankenstein as inherently bad, del Toro deprives the story of one of its core themes—the nature versus nurture debate—and instead transforms Shelley’s philosophical novel into a psychoanalytic melodrama.

In the novel, Victor’s reason for defying death has very little to do with his mother’s passing; he merely considers it a bad “omen”¹⁶ that was to foreshadow his future misfortunes. In the film, however, Victor’s faults can be traced back exclusively to his abusive father and the untimely loss of his mother. As he tells Captain Anderson: “It all started with him. My father. And my mother.”¹⁷ The film is replete with overt Freudian imagery, most notably in young Victor’s competition with his father for his mother’s attention. It is the failure of his cold, physician father to save his mother’s life that sets Frankenstein on the path to defeating death. Moreover, del Toro’s decision to cast the same actress as both Victor’s deceased mother and Elizabeth makes Victor’s romantic pursuit of the latter distinctly Oedipal. Additionally, Victor is symbolically castrated when he loses his leg following his desertion of the Creature. Many times in interviews, del Toro admits to projecting his issues with his father onto the film.¹⁸ While the theme of parental neglect is indisputably present in Shelley’s story, generational trauma is absent from it. Indeed, this exploration of breaking the cycle of abuse is more closely allied with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights than Frankenstein. Blaming Victor’s hubris on parental issues is therefore a gross oversimplification of Shelley’s original vision.

Since del Toro claims that his “conscientious study” of Ann Radcliffe is “fused” into his adaptation,¹⁹ it is conceivable that he might have read her essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” Drawing on Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime and beautiful, Radcliffe defines the distinction between terror and horror as “so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.” In other words, she perceives horror as inferior, as its paralyzing effect closes the imagination, whereas terror utilizes “uncertainty and obscurity” to open the senses to the sublime.²⁰ Radcliffe uses Milton’s imagery as an example of achieving this obscurity, “for it is not distinctly pictured forth, but is seen in glimpses through obscuring shades,” thus forcing the imagination to fill in the rest.²¹

Shelley employs the same method when revealing the Creature to her characters. Walton and his crew first encounter him from a great distance and only for a split second, “a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature;”²² in Radcliffe’s words, “the great outlines only appearing.”²³ This greatly excites the imagination of the crew aboard the ship. Similarly, Victor first glimpses the Creature’s “yellow eye” and a single motion of his limbs. Shelley’s technique of revealing the Creature to Frankenstein is almost chiaroscuro-like: Victor first beholds his creation “by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light,”²⁴ and later encounters him “by the light of the moon,”²⁵ or when a “flash of lightning illuminated”²⁶ him. He is repeatedly on edge, anticipating the enemy who is following him hidden from his sight, and it is this suspense that arouses the senses to far more anxiety than finally beholding the Creature.

Conversely, del Toro recasts Shelley’s narrative in favour of spectacle. While the film similarly begins with the ship crew’s encounter with the Creature, what ensues is strikingly different: an epic fight sequence in which the Creature embarks on a graphic killing spree more reminiscent of an action film than a Gothic novel. Additionally, while in the novel Frankenstein refuses to share with Walton the secret to reanimating the dead, further emphasizing his regret over his past actions, the film departs from this for the sake of an over-the-top montage of abject imagery and special effects, as Victor uses all sorts of fantastical instruments to imbue his creation with life. Del Toro’s abundant use of computer-generated imagery at times borders on the grotesque, most notably when Victor animates a torso in front of an auditorium. The director clearly favours horror over terror, indulging in extensive use of blood, gore, and body horror.

Del Toro’s proclivity for telling instead of showing further undermines the nuance of Shelley’s novel. Apart from the superficial “You are the monster”²⁷ line, repeated references to Frankenstein as a “monster”²⁸ and “father,”²⁹ and to the Creature as his “son,”³⁰ permeate the film. The need to spell out something that the viewer should be able to grasp between the lines suggests that the director does not trust his audience to make those connections themselves. Moreover, references, such as those to Milton’s Paradise Lost or the myth of Prometheus are surface-level. The character of Harlander is seemingly added to compensate for del Toro’s inability to successfully incorporate the novel’s themes, instead spoon-feeding them to the viewer through one-liners such as “Can you contain your fire, Prometheus?”³¹ or “I will be the eagle that feasts on your liver!”³² 

Finally, Radcliffe’s critique of Dryden’s alteration of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “by which he has not only lessened the interest by encumbering the plot, but has absolutely disfigured the character of Miranda,”³³ recalls del Toro’s treatment of Elizabeth. The director’s penchant for the Beauty and the Beast trope is easy to spot in this film, reducing Elizabeth to a love interest for not one, but three male characters. Solidifying his status as a deranged villain, it is Victor, not the Creature, who kills Elizabeth when she steps in the way of a bullet. Although Elizabeth deems her sacrifice worth it, it is ultimately meaningless because the Creature is immortal. Instead of revising her character by giving her more agency, her role is reduced to floundering in pretty dresses and fixing a broken man.

While del Toro opts for a sentimental ending, Shelley’s novel is anything but sentimental. Whereas her story concludes with the Creature “lost in darkness and distance,”³⁴ the final shot of del Toro’s film shows a close-up on the Creature’s countenance illuminated by sunlight, symbolizing his newfound will to live. The final exchange between the scientist and his creation borders on emotional treacle. “Forgive me, my son,” Frankenstein pronounces. “Victor, I forgive you,” responds the Creature. Finally, he entreats his creation to live.³⁵ In contrast, Shelley offers no forgiveness, withholding any sense of consolation from her reader. Frankenstein dies without fulfilling his oath to destroy his creation, while the Creature loses the one thing that still gave his life meaning—pursuing his creator across the globe—and promises to kill himself. Whether he actually does so is left deliberately ambiguous. Del Toro seemingly changes Shelley’s bleak ending into a more hopeful one in order to work through his personal issues.

The film commits one final betrayal of Shelley when it ends with a quote from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “Thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”³⁶ This line could easily be replaced by a far more fitting quote from Shelley’s novel with essentially the same meaning: “Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”³⁷ Another controversial choice is having the Creature quote Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” before Shelley herself. More than an homage to Mary Shelley’s work, then, the film seems to be a testament to Del Toro’s love for Romantic luminaries such as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But what he fails to understand is that Mary Shelley’s novel seeks to critique those very Romantics, as is evident from her revisions to the novel’s 1831 edition,³⁸ with her disillusionment with the movement culminating in The Last Man.

In an interview, when asked whether he identifies with the titular character or his creation, del Toro immediately answers the latter. However, it is hard to overlook his resemblance to Frankenstein: both men had high ambitions that resulted in something that perhaps ought not to have been created. Del Toro’s self-insert fantasy does a great disservice to Shelley’s original vision, sacrificing her uncomfortable ambiguity for a spectacle bereft of substance, and thus further distorting a novel whose premise and author have already been misunderstood for centuries. As Radcliffe contends, “they must be men of very cold imaginations … with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise.”³⁹ The director‘s assertion that “it’s not the book, but it’s the spirit of the book”⁴⁰ is therefore largely unsubstantiated.

Bibliography:

CBS Sunday Morning. “Extended Interview: Guillermo del Toro.” YouTube, 26 October 2025, Video, 18:36, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEv5dwhVbhc.

del Toro, Guillermo, dir. Frankenstein. 2025; Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2025. Streaming film.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Hazleton, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1999.

Lussier, Germain. “Guillermo Del Toro Speaks on the Set of ‘Mama’ – The State of Horror, Overextending Himself, Battling the MPAA, Frankenstein and Much More.” SlashFilm. October 24, 2012. https://www.slashfilm.com/523497/guillermo-del-toro-speaks-on-the-set-of-mama-the-state-of-horror-overextending-himself-battling-the-mpaa-frankenstein-and-much-more/.

Mellor, Anne K. “Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach.” In Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, edited by J. Paul Hunter, 160–66. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine 16, no. 1 (1826): 145–52.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. New York: Penguin Classics, 2018.

Waterstones. “Ten Minutes with Guillermo del Toro.” YouTube, 6 November 2025, Video, 10:07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA6GwwZndfI.

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Notes:

1. Germain Lussier, “Guillermo Del Toro Speaks on the Set of ‘Mama’ – The State of Horror, Overextending Himself, Battling the MPAA, Frankenstein and Much More,” SlashFilm, October 24, 2012, https://www.slashfilm.com/523497/guillermo-del-toro-speaks-on-the-set-of-mama-the-state-of-horror-overextending-himself-battling-the-mpaa-frankenstein-and-much-more/. ↩︎
2. Waterstones, “Ten Minutes with Guillermo del Toro,” YouTube, November 6, 2025, video, 10:07, at 1:45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA6GwwZndfI. ↩︎
3. CBS Sunday Morning, “Extended Interview: Guillermo del Toro,” YouTube, October 26, 2025, video, 18:36, at 5:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEv5dwhVbhc. ↩︎
4. CBS Sunday Morning, “Extended Interview: Guillermo del Toro,” at 7:44. ↩︎
5. Guillermo del Toro, dir., Frankenstein (2025; Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2025), streaming film, 1:18:53. ↩︎
6. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (New York: Penguin Classics, 2018), 81-2. ↩︎
7. Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine 16, no. 1 (1826): 146. ↩︎
8. del Toro, Frankenstein, 2:06:21. ↩︎
9. Shelley, Frankenstein, 83. ↩︎
10. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Jim Manis (Hazleton, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1999), 87. ↩︎
11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 237. ↩︎
12. Shelley, Frankenstein, 90-1. ↩︎
13. Shelley, Frankenstein, 82. ↩︎
14. Shelley, Frankenstein, 24. ↩︎
15. Shelley, Frankenstein, 27. ↩︎
16. Shelley, Frankenstein, 31. ↩︎
17. del Toro, Frankenstein, 9:33. ↩︎
18. CBS Sunday Morning, “Extended Interview: Guillermo del Toro,” 2:21. ↩︎
19. Waterstones, “Ten Minutes with Guillermo del Toro,” 1:00. ↩︎
20. Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” 150. ↩︎
21. Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” 150. ↩︎
22. Shelley, Frankenstein, 15. ↩︎
23. Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” 150. ↩︎
24. Shelley, Frankenstein, 45. ↩︎
25. Shelley, Frankenstein, 161. ↩︎
26. Shelley, Frankenstein, 64. ↩︎
27. del Toro, Frankenstein, 2:06:21. ↩︎
28. del Toro, Frankenstein, 1:20:57. ↩︎
29. del Toro, Frankenstein, 2:18:01. ↩︎
30. del Toro, Frankenstein, 2:16:26. ↩︎
31. del Toro, Frankenstein, 27:13. ↩︎
32. del Toro, Frankenstein, 59:10. ↩︎
33. Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” 152. ↩︎
34. Shelley, Frankenstein, 216. ↩︎
35. del Toro, Frankenstein, 2:16:59. ↩︎
36. del Toro, Frankenstein, 2:18:13. ↩︎
37. Shelley, Frankenstein, 90. ↩︎
38. Anne K. Mellor, “Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach,” in Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 160. ↩︎
39. Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” 150. ↩︎
40. Waterstones, “Ten Minutes with Guillermo del Toro,” 1:45. ↩︎