In the two centuries since the novel “Frankenstein” was published, film adaptation after film adaptation has morphed Mary Shelley’s creature into a monster fit for a haunted house attraction — brutish and green. Audience expectations, like scar tissue that has built up over time, are now divorced from Shelley’s vision, so much so that many think of “Frankenstein” as purely a horror story. It is not.
A new adaptation by Guillermo del Toro, which arrives on Netflix this weekend, must contend not just with the novel but with its cultural mutation. How will Mr. del Toro reconcile the creature Shelley created and the monster it has become?
The novel is awash in the grand and tempestuous emotions you’d expect to find in Gothic works, that Romantic impulse that has heroes swooning, overcome with fevers repeatedly and exclaiming, “How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!” It is not exactly the prose, the pace, the vibe we now associate with horror. Yet the horrors of “Frankenstein” are multiple. There is the more obvious physical horror of the creature — “a mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch” — and the violent deaths that eventually follow once it confronts its maker. Harder to grasp and to film are the horrors of parental neglect and abuse that constitute the novel’s beating heart.
The mutation of the creature began with the 1931 film directed by James Whale, which established what we typically picture as Frankenstein’s creation — he has a square head and bolts at the side of the neck — and rendered the creature mostly mute. In an early scene, Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant mistakenly steals a brain labeled “abnormal” from a lab for use in the doctor’s creation. Thus, the creature in the film is marked as tainted from the beginning. It cannot speak properly, it cannot think properly, it cannot function properly in society. In the film’s telling, it can never be anything other than a monster that must be destroyed.
But though Whale’s “Frankenstein” takes tremendous liberties, some of the novel’s awful loneliness, its ruminations on family and trauma, endure. Shelley’s novel establishes the agonizing harm caused to the creature when Victor Frankenstein abandons him. The Whale film, though inviting audiences to gasp in horror, is truly notable because the sad eyes of Boris Karloff capture the creature’s wounded pathos. In an interview, Karloff said his character was a “lumbering, helpless creature” and trapped “in a strange and hostile world.” Misery, the creature explains in Shelley’s novel, has made him a “fiend”; Karloff leaned into that air of misery.
Later adaptations, however, chipped away at the remaining humanity of the creature and focused more on all the blood and guts they could get away with. Beginning in 1957 and all through the following two decades, Hammer Film Productions released a series of movies in which a brilliant scientist repeatedly assembles a creature that erupts into mindless violence. Later films often strayed farther and farther afield. In “Flesh for Frankenstein” (1973), the doctor seeks to create a perfect pair of human specimens and breed a flawless race; “Frankenstein Unbound” (1990) has a time travel element and “Victor Frankenstein” (2015) casts the creature in a minor role, with the film structured as a buddy movie between the doctor and his assistant. Now, by and large, audiences don’t expect to see a creature who thinks and yearns for himself; they are acculturated to a lumbering, gruesome monster.
Before seeing Mr. del Toro’s new film, I read reviews that characterize his movie as a “gentler take,” with “no horror or suspense whatsoever, just magical dismemberments under golden hues and glittering harps on the soundtrack.” Overall, there seemed to be much fretting about how this film might be more plum historical drama than hideous body horror.
But when questioned about whether his adaptation had scary scenes, Mr. del Toro responded that his film is not a “horror movie” but more of an “emotional story,” in the spirit of Shelley’s novel. He labeled “Frankenstein” “the quintessential teenage book,” a description that is strangely fitting. In part, the novel is a meditation on contentious relationships; a story of parent and child clashing, parting and finding each other again. It exists as gloomy Gothic horror, a family drama of Oedipal proportions, a primordial science fiction narrative. It is all these things at once.
Does that mean Mr. del Toro’s “Frankenstein” has become all feelings and no blood?
Like the creature, the film is a patchwork. It firmly evokes the glory days of Hammer Films with its saturated colors, bursts of red, implausible costumes and steampunk technology. It nods back to Shelley by retaining the creature’s keen intelligence — this monster reads “Ozymandias” — and telling the story in flashback. Jacob Elordi’s appearance as the creature is also much more human than many previous versions, though he remains extremely tall, with multiple scars. Yet the film is another mutation, a movie that transforms characters and situations dramatically, much like Whale did back in 1931. It makes Elizabeth, Dr. Frankenstein’s bride-to-be, the fiancée of his younger brother. It introduces a new character, Harlander, who seems to exist simply because Christoph Waltz is a great actor.
In the end, how much faithfulness does a film owe to its source material? My favorite film featuring the creature is not an adaptation of the novel. “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973) is set in a small town in Spain. It follows a girl who watches Whale’s “Frankenstein” and drifts into a fantasy world where the violence of the post-Spanish Civil War mixes with the flickering images of the silver screen. It’s a movie about the journey from childhood to adulthood, parents and children, monsters and men. It understands a certain soulful quality inherent in the novel. Which is to say, I believe you can stray far from the lines in a book and still find the heart of it.
“Frankenstein” has been mined for pieces by many directors. Their attempts to bring the creature to life have often failed, much like Victor Frankenstein’s journey was doomed. Yet art is the quest for meaning. Frankenstein’s many iterations, whether cheesy exploitation or deeply philosophical, weave together a tapestry of our collective anxieties through the decades. The mutations are inevitable, for we are human.
Although Mr. del Toro’s film ends with a quote — “The heart will break and yet brokenly live on.” — from Lord Byron, the revenant that continues to haunt us, in all its forms, belongs to Mary Shelley. The creature is alive, eternally morphing upon the silver screen, waiting to acquire a new shape.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of the novel “The Bewitching” and many other books. She has won the Locus, British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards.
Source photographs by Netflix, and Giulio Gonella/Getty Images
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Bringing Frankenstein’s Monster Back to Life appeared first on New York Times.
