From Gothic Horror to Blockbuster: Del Toro’s Vision of Frankenstein

Frankenstein is one of the few adaptations of the novel done with talent and thought.
Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation joins a rare line of attempts to remain faithful to Mary Shelley’s original novel while reflecting the filmmaker’s cinematic world.

Mary Shelley’s literary masterpiece Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818) combines English Gothic and Romantic literature of the 19th century with the beginnings of science fiction.
Dark elements of Gothic horror are linked with a romantic mythical confrontation between creator and creation and framed by speculative reflections on the responsibility of a scientist entrusted with godlike powers.

The nameless creature in Shelley’s novel rebels against the god who created him and against his kind.
He is born pure, gradually develops human sensitivities, acquires language, and later even cultural knowledge.
Shelley wrote the novel in an epistolary structure using fictional letters, where Captain Robert Walton reports the testimony of scientist Victor Frankenstein, which itself includes the creature’s testimony.
Multiple perspectives serve the complex philosophical discussion Shelley offers to readers.

Between the first cinematic adaptation produced by Edison Studios in 1910 and del Toro’s new film Frankenstein, hundreds of films featuring the creature have been made.
The vast majority of these adaptations were far from Shelley’s original creature and plot.
The common association of the name “Frankenstein” with the monster rather than Victor Frankenstein, the scientist, highlights this gap.

Universal’s first film (1931) was not a direct adaptation of Shelley.
It adapted Frankenstein: A Graveyard Adventure (1927) by British playwright Peggy Webling, who loosely reworked Shelley’s story.
In the play, the monster was portrayed as a “rough bully with a child’s desire for acceptance and pleasure,” much closer to most cinematic portrayals and in contrast to Shelley’s tragic and complex creature.
Of hundreds of adaptations, only two attempts preserved fidelity to Shelley’s creature and plot.

The first was Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), an ambitious adaptation that stayed faithful until the last quarter of the story. The second was Hallmark’s Frankenstein (2004) miniseries, fully aligned with the book’s plot but lacking vitality.
Del Toro’s version joins these as a cinematic adaptation that retains many elements of Shelley’s book while trying to reflect the director’s sensibilities and thoughts.

Despite being one of the few adaptations showing thought and talent, it still has gaps between aspiration and execution, partly due to underdeveloped ideas and partly to the influence of contemporary popular culture (Frankenstein with Wolverine like healing and superhuman strength), some likely influenced by the production platform Netflix.
The film begins similarly to the frame story in the novel.
A Danish ship is trapped in the Arctic ice.

Captain Anderson commands his crew to free the ship and continue their journey.
Victor Frankenstein finds refuge among them while fleeing the creature pursuing him.
The film is divided into two distinct parts: Victor’s testimony and the creature’s testimony, preserving an important literary element while replacing letters with more direct testimony.
The basic plot should be familiar even to those who have not read Shelley’s book but encountered fragments in previous adaptations.

Victor’s childhood desire to overcome death, tied to his mother’s death, drives him.
His medical studies confront conservative views of scientific limitations. Here, opposition is linked not to a conservative lecturer but to Victor’s father, Baron Leopold Frankenstein, a renowned physician.
The film also includes a female character as the object of Victor’s love.
The object of these feelings is Elizabeth Harlander, a clever and enthusiastic entomologist engaged to Victor’s younger brother William.

Central to the plot is a triangle where the dynamic between Victor and the creature is defined by their shared relation to Elizabeth.
Del Toro belongs to a unique group of directors whose films continue to reflect their love for childhood monsters, including Tim Burton, Joe Dante, and Peter Jackson.
Reflections of Shelley’s Frankenstein appear in del Toro’s works from his debut Cronos (1992), later in The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and the acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).

It is not surprising that del Toro has pursued a Frankenstein project for nearly 20 years.
There is thematic continuity with two of his previous works.
The Shape of Water (2017), del Toro’s Oscar winning film, explored a woman’s love for a sensitive amphibian monster inspired by Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).
Similarly, Frankenstein has a romantic plotline connecting a woman and the creature, a significant departure from Shelley’s original.

This is plausible when the creature is not a zombie level entity but a tall, handsome version with defined muscles and long hair.
However, the woman monster connection is not sufficiently developed plot wise, unlike The Shape of Water, which allows gradual and established development of the relationship.
The film also links war and the scientist’s moral distortion, which was not in Shelley’s original.

Elizabeth’s uncle, a weapons merchant, finances Victor’s experiments. His funding comes from war profits, and the bodies Victor uses are soldiers who died on the battlefield, an idea the film abandons after the creature’s creation.
The film explores intergenerational trauma and humiliation.
The true monster is Baron Leopold Frankenstein, and the father son relationship is mirrored in Victor’s treatment of the creature.

There is also an Oedipal dynamic between young Victor and his mother, Baroness Claire Frankenstein, represented by the same actress playing Elizabeth.
Using the same actress explains Victor’s distorted desire for her.
Moving the story to mid 19th century, half a century after Shelley’s book, allows del Toro to integrate cameras and shooting actions into the diegetic world, reflexively representing Gothic elements as in his earlier Crimson Peak (2015).