The 2025 Netflix remake of Frankenstein, by Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, was one of the most anticipated works of horror in the history of the giant streaming platform. Known for the vividness and originality of his visual imagination, del Toro would seem to be the perfect director for horror, so his decision to take on one of the central narratives in the history of horror was understandably a major event. And, certainly in the visual realm, the adaptation did not disappoint. Nominated for no less than nine Academy Awards, including such major categories as Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography (Dan Laustsen), Frankenstein won three Oscars in visual categories: Makeup and Hairstyling (Mike Hill, Jordan Samuel, and Cliona Furey), Production Design (Tamara Deverell and Shane Vieau), and Costume Design (Kate Hawley).
Del Toro’s most important contribution to the history of Frankenstein stories might be the attention to visual detail that he lavishes on this film. In this sense, while there are a number of recognizable images, del Toro’s film largely ignores earlier Frankenstein films (especially James Whale’s foundational films of 1931 and 1935) and develops a visual style of its own. For one thing, the overall look of del Toro’s film is more modern and less dark than that of James Whale’s classic films, shifting the visual atmosphere a bit away from horror and more toward science fiction. Del Toro achieves this effect partly by shifting the setting of the main action from 1818 (or so) to the 1850s, placing it in a Victorian world that is reaching toward modernity and thus beyond the early-nineteenth-century setting of the original novel. And, of course, it reaches even farther beyond the world of Whale’s films, which go for a more Gothic look that reaches back toward the Middle Ages. The sleeker and more modern design of del Toro’s film relative to Whale’s films is perhaps most distinctive in the look of the Creature himself. The scarred, misshapen Creature of Whale, complete with visible stitches and other signs of construction, is a far cry from the smooth and elegant Creature of del Toro, whose smooth seams are still visible but are free of stitches and look more decorative than scarred, more artistic than medical, making the Creature look more sculpted than patched together from body parts. The Creature as a whole, in fact, looks more like a science fiction alien than a Gothic monster. At the same time, del Toro’s Creature is much more intelligent and articulate than Whale’s, lacking that famous bad brain and resembling more the hyper-intelligent Creature of Shelley’s novel. This new Creature also goes beyond the clumsiness of Karloff’s version and much more toward the athleticism of Shelley’s original, even if he lacks the superhuman size of Shelley’s version.
Del Toro has mentioned that he was trying to create a “beautiful monster,” and he mentions in one interview[1] that one move that was key to that project was his vision of Victor as part poet, part artist, and part scientist, so that his creation is very much seen as a poetic and artistic one, as well as a scientific one. Ironically, in this same interview, del Toro has also listed the 1939 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights (which he notes was the first movie he ever saw in a theater as a kid) as an important influence on his film, citing the mystery and internal rage of Sir Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of Heathcliff as an important inspiration for his figuration of Victor. In particular, he notes how the film versions of both Wuthering Heights and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) are infused with the spirit of Romanticism. Largely through Olivier’s performance. And he indicates that he sought to endow his Frankenstein with much of this same Romantic spirit.
The Frame Narrative
Beyond the visuals, del Toro’s Frankenstein also introduces some important changes in the plot dynamics of the story. Del Toro’s Frankenstein has a three-part structure, beginning with a frame narrative in which Victor Frankenstein has pursued his Creature into the far north, where they are both eventually picked up by a ship that is struggling on an exploratory expedition to try to sail to the North Pole. Both Victor and the Creature tell their stories to the ship’s captain, who records them, thus supplying the bulk of the narrative. To this extent, the structure of the film is very similar to that of Shelley’s novel, though del Toro has moved the setting of the frame narrative forward to 1857[2], as opposed to the frame narrative, which is presumably set close to the 1818 publication of the novel. In addition, while Shelley’s sea captain is the British Captain Robert Walton, del Toro’s is one Captain Anderson (played by Lars Mikkelsen) of the Royal Danish Navy.
This shift in time and nationality in the frame narrative has only a secondary effect on the main narrative of the film, but it is still an important one that helps to emphasis the key role of the frame narrative in the critique of colonialism embedded in Shelley’s original novel[3]. In terms of the change in time period, Shelley’s North Pole expedition occurs at a time when such expeditions had been discussed but never formally attempted, leaving them in the realm of science fiction. This fact also helps to set up the rather obvious parallel between Victor and Walton in that both become examples of scientific overreach driven by extreme personal hubris. Indeed, in Shelley’s day the parallels between geographic exploration and scientific research appeared more obvious than they might today. Meanwhile, Shelley’s idea that explorers might attempt to sail to the North Pole makes sense, as many people at the time thought that the North Pole was, in fact, surrounded by water and could be reached that way. Shelley’s assumption that British explorers might be on the forefront also makes sense, given the global prominence of the British navy. Indeed, the British had been interested in potential exploration of the Arctic for some time, as summarized in British official Jon Barrow’s book A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic, published in 1818, the same year as Shelley’s Frankenstein.
As Karen Piper notes, Mary Shelley would have been well aware of this interest in Arctic exploration at the time she wrote Frankenstein. Piper also argues that awareness of the indigenous population of Greenland and other Arctic regions fed into speculation about the sorts of people who were being discovered by the British in their explorations around the world. In fact, Piper, argues,
in Frankenstein, the creature himself came to represent these inhabitants of the North, as well as the threat of their arrival in England if increased communication were to occur. Just as [explorer] John Sackhouse had once arrived as a stowaway on British shores, so Frankenstein’s creature is a stranger who must be incorporated in—or rejected from—European culture. In the novel, the “birth” of the creature in Europe could be said to represent cultural fears of the invasion of the “primitive” in “civilized” society, or the arrival of the colonized, in search of revenge, on the shores of the colonizer. (63)
In any case, it is clear that colonization raised a number of questions about what it means to be human and who qualifies as human. In her novel, Shelley addresses these questions in a way that speaks to the concerns of her readers in 1818. And she sometimes makes this concern quite overt, as when she has her Creature describe his self-education (surreptitiously following the education of the girl Safie) as including the acquisition of
a cursory knowledge of history and a view of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth. I heard of the slothful Asiatics, of the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians, of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early Romans—of their subsequent degenerating—of the decline of that mighty empire, of chivalry, Christianity, and kings. I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants.
Koegler notes that “Frankenstein was published amidst fervent, continuing debates about what it means to be human—debates driven by colonial explorations, conquests, and encounters, a thriving empiricism, and by the clashes between abolitionists and pro-slavery agitators.” In this context, the Creature’s sympathy for colonized indigenous populations is, of course, understandable once it is recognized that he, like Shakespeare’s Caliban (perhaps the most famous human-like “monster” in English literature prior to Shelley’s novel) is, in fact, a sort of allegorical stand-in for such peoples[4]. And Shelley’s concerns in this sense remain very much relevant today, if in modified form. Thus, Koegler argues that the treatment of the monster in Frankenstein “does much to show the injurious impacts of racial(ised) othering and white supremacy.” By moving the action to 1857, del Toro maintains the basic texture of the nineteenth century but updates these concerns about colonialism in ways that will be more familiar to his modern audience. The first major expedition to try to sail to the North Pole was undertaken by British naval officer William Edward Parry relatively soon afterward, in 1827. That attempt failed, of course, given that it was actually impossible to sail to the North Pole, which existed (and still exists, but now barely, thanks to global climate change) on a bed of solid ice. One thing that had changed by 1857, thus altering the context of del Toro’s film, was the fact that multiple attempts (all unsuccessful) had been made to reach the Pole by this point, making the idea seem somewhat less fantastical, if still a bit far-fetched. Most of these failed expeditions were British, so that sailing to the North Pole had, by 1857, become a reminder that the reach of the British Empire might be limited, after all.
The most spectacular example of British failures in Arctic exploration occurred in 1845, in the doomed expedition led by Captain Sir John Franklin aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The two ships became icebound in what is now Northern Canada and, in April 1848, were eventually abandoned as hopelessly trapped in ice, after more than a year of attempts to dislodge them. By this time, two dozen men, including Franklin himself, had died. The survivors, now led by Franklin’s second-in-command, Francis Crozier, and Erebus’s captain, James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland but subsequently disappeared, presumably having perished in the harsh Arctic climate. Many rumors surrounded this disappearance, though, including reports that the men had resorted to cannibalism in an attempt to survive, as well as stories possible interventions by supernatural forces, making the entire episode a potential source of material for horror. Indeed, the fate of the Franklin expedition was a primary inspiration for Dan Simmons’ 2007 horror novel The Terror, which itself served as a basis for the first season of the streaming series The Terror (2018), though subsequent seasons of that series are based on entirely different and unrelated events.
After these early British failures, many of the subsequent attempts to reach the North Pole were spearheaded by Scandinavian explorers, whose growing prominence in Arctic exploration suggested that Britain’s global dominance was far from complete. In addition, Scandinavians had been present in Greenland for hundreds of years, leaving the giant Arctic island under Danish control by 1814. Among key attempts to reach the Pole was the Norwegian Fram expedition of Fridtjof Nansen in 1893–1896, which was one of the last (failed) attempts to reach the Pole by ship. Ultimately, the first undisputed direct sighting of the Pole occurred when the Italian-built Norwegian airship Norge (captained by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen) flew over the Pole on May 12, 1926.
Shifting the frame narrative of Frankenstein to 1857 thus infuses the film with a greater sense of imperial anxiety and impending crisis, especially for Great Britain, which remains very much at the center of this narrative, despite the fact that almost all of it occurs in continental Europe, while the Frankensteins are nominally Swiss. But Shelley, of course, was British, as are the actors who play most of the main roles in this film (and speak in British accents throughout). Indeed, even Isaac gives Victor a British accent, despite the fact that the actor (like the director) is of Hispanic descent. And Britain, of course, experienced its greatest colonial crisis since the American Revolution in 1857 with the advent of the so-called Indian Mutiny (known in India as the “Indian Rebellion” or the “Indian War of Independence”). In this event, large numbers of Indian soldiers serving in the private armies of the East India Company (which had been the leading power in India for roughly 100 years rebelled against their British masters. Meanwhile, despite the fact that Indian brutality and violence during the Mutiny would become one of the favorite motifs of sensationalist British popular culture for decades to come, the British response was far from romantic or merely literary. The armies of the East India Company put down the rebellion with overwhelming force and spectacular violence—favorite punishments for captured rebels included hangings and beheadings, as well as strapping prisoners across the mouths of cannon, which were then fired, blowing the hapless victims to bits. Perhaps more importantly, the rebellion (and the Company’s response to the rebellion) led the British government to remove control of India from the Company and to assume direct colonial rule in 1858. Eventually, Queen Victoria officially took the title of “Empress of India” in 1876.
Given the circumstances under which direct British government rule in India was initiated, it should come as no surprise that that rule remained largely militaristic in nature until the end of the nineteenth century or that British rule remained highly autocratic throughout the remainder of the colonial era. Meanwhile, the Indian War of Independence had a profound effect on the British psyche, spurring a wave of racist hatred against Indians and inserting a huge wedge of doubt into the formerly confident British vision that their empire would likely last forever. The rebellion also exerted a powerful effect on British literature, which saw an outpouring of lurid fictional accounts of the event that became a virtual genre unto itself[5]. Indeed, India loomed large in British fiction for the next century, with this fiction often being informed by a strong sense of anxiety over Indian resistance to British rule.
Del Toro’s decision to shift the action of his adaptation to 1857 makes the concerns with issues of colonialism and imperialism that were already present in Shelley’s novel at least a bit more visible to modern viewers by placing his film in the context of such well-known events as the Indian war of Independence. Indeed, read through the Indian War of Independence, it is much easier to see the entire Frankenstein story as an allegory of colonial conquest and resistance than it was in the original novel. In either case, though, Victor is certainly driven by the same scientific and technological thirst for knowledge that had made it possible for Britain to establish dominion over its empire in the first place. Victor’s subsequent abuse of his Creature then becomes an allegory of the repression and mistreatment of Britain’s colonial subjects, while the Creature himself becomes an allegorical representative of rebellion against colonial authority[6].
Victor’s Tale
One of the most interesting aspects of Frankenstein was the casting of the major parts, though even castings that were not much discussed were still quite interesting. For example, Oscar Isaac seems a solid and reliable choice for Victor Frankenstein, given his numerous outstanding performances in films from the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) to Dune: Part One (2021). Most relevant, though, is the fact that he had earlier played the role of Nathan Bateman, a tech mogul who plays the role of a Frankensteinian mad scientist in developing artificially intelligent androids in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), so that his casting directly invites comparisons between Garland’s film and del Toro’s as cinematic versions of the Frankenstein story.
Perhaps the most important thing that del Toro adds to Victor’s story is a Freudian element that establishes a clear motivation for his interest in creating artificial life. This element makes Victor’s parents crucial to the story. The Baron Frankenstein (played with suitable menace by Charles Dance) is a stern, overbearing, downright abusive father, who happens also to be one of Europe’s leading physicians. He attempts to train Victor also to be a physician but in a way that seems designed to reinforce the father’s sense of his own greatness, rather than his son’s. This version of Victor’s father is a new one, designed to enhance the Freudian resonances of the film. Meanwhile, just as Isaac had previously played a Victor Frankenstein figure, del Toro cast British actor Charles Dance in the role of Victor’s father, supplying another link to the past Frankenstein films due to the fact that this actor had also been cast as the Victor’s father in the film Victor Frankenstein (2015). To complete the Oedipal triangle, Victor’s mother Claire is a loving, even doting mother, who has an extremely close bond with Victor before dying in childbirth with his younger brother William. When Victor is shocked that his father, such a figure of medical prowess, could not save his mother, the Baron simply shrugs it off. “No one can conquer death,” he says. From this point forward, of course, young Victor devotes himself to gaining the scientific knowledge necessary to prove his father wrong by learning to conquer death, after all. But there is a clear implication here that Victor hopes thereby to defeat and replace his father, making way for a restored relationship with his mother, even if in an indirect way.
It is, of course, appropriate to build this Freudian framework into the Frankenstein story even if such a gloss was not available to Shelley at the time of her original narrative. In this case, del Toro directly links Freud’s famous theory of the Oedipal Triangle to the important theory of sublimation (which Freud began developing in 1897, explored more fully in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905 and significantly expanded upon in his 1910 work Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood). In this theory of sublimation, Freud begins with the argument that human societies place significant restrictions on the unrestrained pursuit of natural sexual impulses. In response, humans seek other ways to release the energies that drive these impulses, diverting those energies into productive and socially acceptible forms such as artistic creation and scientific inquiry, both of which are driven by passion and both of which can deliver considerable rewards. In the case of del Toro’s film, it is quite clear that Victor is sublimating his desire for his mother and his desire to defeat his father into his scientific research, which is designed both to outdo his illustrious father and to overcome the death that too away his mother.
The casting of Claire is also particularly interesting and again draws upon the past experience of the actor involved. British actress Mia Goth had no previous experience in Frankenstein films, but she did have considerable experience in horror film, including her spectacular performances as the lead characters in all three films of Ti West’s “X Trilogy” (the 2022 films X and Pearl, as well as the 2024 film Maxxxine (2024), the other films in West’s “X Trilogy.”[7] Her performances in these films, along with those in other recent horror films, such as Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool (2023), had already made her one of the reigning queens of horror film by the time she was cast in Frankenstein. Goth is particular impressive in West’s film X, in which she plays two different characters who are in some ways different versions of the same character, but from different generations.As a result, what is perhaps especially relevant to her casting in Frankenstein is that she also plays a dual role as Victor’s mother and as Elizabeth Harlander, the young woman who serves as the adult Victor’s main love interest in this film, quite clearly indicating the way that Victor, even in adulthood is still fixated on his mother and attempting to find a replacement for her.
In this sense, Elizabeth Harlander replaces the Elizabeth who is the fiancée (and often wife) of Victor in many versions of the Frankenstein story, including Shelley’s original, in which she is murdered by the Creature on the night of her wedding with Victor to get revenge for Victor’s destruction of the partly finished Bride he was making for Victor. In del Toro’s film, Victor’s desire for Elizabeth is again thwarted, but this time because she is the fiancée of Victor’s younger brother William, making her unavailable to Victor. To make matters worse, Elizabether also clearly sympathizes with the Creature, with suggestions that she might even be attracted to him, driving Victor’s jealousy further and providing an additional explanation for Victor’s cruel treatment of the Creature. Goth’s two characters thus play an important role in driving the plot of del Toro’s film—and especially in enhancing the Freudian subplot. Unfortunately, though, the film provides relatively few opportunities for Goth to exercise her considerable acting skills, and one could argue that a weakness of the film is that it misses the opportunity to update the Frankenstein story to provide a stronger feminine presence in this story that did, after all, originate with a female author[8].
The character of Elizabethe Harlander is also crucial to the plot of del Toro’s Frankenstein in that she is the daughter of Heinrich Herlander (Christophe Waltz), a wealthy weapons manufacturer who provides the funding to support Victor’s research. The addition of Herlander (who does not appear in earlier versions of the story, including Shelley’s) adds a key element to the plot of del Toro’s film. For one thing, it adds a note of realism by reminding us that advanced scientific research is actually quite expensive and cannot be done simply by a mad scientist in his basement. It needs extensive government or corporate support, which Herlander in this case provides. The fact that Herlander has made his money as a merchant of death, meanwhile, adds a more ominous note to this point, reminding us how much of the financial support for modern science has, in fact, gone into the development of more and more advanced weaponry. And, of course, Herlander here provides that support not out of a devotion to the pursuit of knowledge but out of a selfish hope that Frankenstein can somehow transplant Herlander’s brain into the body of the Creature he is building in order to allow the industrialist to escape his own syphilis-riddled body. At the same time, Herlander’s status as an arms manufacturer suggests that he might also hope to weaponize Victor’s research and therefore increase his own profits. And Waltz, again, was perfectly cast for the role, given that he is a distinguished Oscar-winning actor who first became widely known to global audiences for his roles as despicable villains, including as the Jew-hunting Nazi Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) and as the slave trader King Schultz in Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012).
The shift of setting to the 1850s is again important because Shelley’s novel is set in a time just after the Napoleonic Wars and thus at a time of relative peace in Europe. The 1850s, though, were a bit more turbulent. After a wave of ultimately failed revolutions in 1848, Europe was still adjusting to the new modern reality in which wealthy capitalists such as Herlander held the real power, while traditional aristocrats such as the Frankensteins were rapidly losing the power and prestige they had held comfortably in the Middle Ages and had been clinging to ever since the rise of capitalism began to make them obsolete, especially in an eighteenth century that was capped by the defeat of the monarchy in the aristocrat-led French Revolution. And, of course, there was also the rebellion in India. Still, Europe itself was relatively peaceful during the 1850s, even as a bloody and destructive civil war in China became perhaps the bloodiest conflict in human history. However, Britain’s colonial ambitions led them into a number of conflicts during the decade, even if none occurred in Western Europe, where the action of del Toro’s Frankenstein primarily takes place. For one thing, those ambitions included China, which led Britain to become involved (along with France) in the Second Opium War of 1856–1860, in which a European victory forced the Qing Dynasty to open China to the opium trade. The British had also been involved in an alliance against the Russian empire on the fringes of Europe in the Crimean War of 1853–1856, in which casualties were much higher than in the Opium War.
In del Toro’s film, Frankenstein constructs his Creature from the corpses of soldiers killed in “the war,” which would presumably be the Crimean War. The specifics are unimportant and the film leaves details vague—just as it blurs the boundaries between Frankenstein’s German Swiss origins and his status as the protagonist of a British narrative. The details matter little because del Toro is attempting to make points about broad historical trends and not specific historical events. And, of course, these details remain relevant today. Consider, for example, Larry Fessenden’s excellent 2017 modernized Frankenstein film Depraved, in which the Creature is constructed by a scientist who learned his techniques from his work as a battlefield medic in the American war in Afghanistan. A detailed discussion of that film can be found here.
Among other things, shifting the action of Frankenstein to 1857 diminishes the shadow of the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars (ended only in 1815) that hovers over Shelley’s Frankenstein. England’s Romantics were themselves notoriously ambivalent about the Revolution, at first embracing it rather enthusiastically[9] and then looking upon it with more suspicion after Britain went to war with postrevolutionary France, leading to a general anti-revolutionary fervor in England. Meanwhile, the Romantics also became less enthusiastic partly because they began to recognize that the French Revolution was closely associated with the capitalist modernization that the Romantics saw as dehumanizing and as counter to the unrestrained pursuit of passion that they saw as central to their project.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is even more complex than Romanticism in general, in that it seems ambivalent toward the French Revolution but is also ambivalent toward Romanticism itself, which was already past its peak in both popularity and productivity by 1818. By the time of the publication of the revised version of Frankenstein of 1823 (the first to list Mary Shelley as the author), John Keats and Percy Shelley were dead, and Lord Byron would be dead a year later. Thus, while Shelley’s novel delivers a strong critique of the hubris of the emerging field of science, which brought humans into so many realms once thought the preserve of God, it is also suspicious of the possible abuses that could occur if an individual genius were to pursue his passions without check, in the Romantic mode. Indeed, in many ways, Shelley’s Creature is as much a Romantic hero as is Victor, and del Toro builds on this notion by making the Creature a decidedly Romantic, Byronic figure, though with lots of more modern flourishes, including the Freudian ones. In both cases, though, the Romantic hero is as much an object of critique as celebration.
The Creature’s Tale
The Freudian aspect of Victor’s tale in del Toro’s Frankenstein is extended into the story of the Creature, which begins with a depiction of its creation (with slightly updated scientific equipment) that echoes most previous versions of the technical details of the story. The Creature begins as an essentially blank slate, like a human infant, and Victor proceeds to attempt to educate his “child” by treating it very much as his own father created him. He is, in short, impatient, demanding, and downright abusive. In Victor’s case, though, the abuse goes even farther, as he eventually decides to destroy the Creature (going beyond the abuse of the Creature in Shelley’s novel, which consists mostly in abandonment). However, unlike the bad-brained monster of Whale’s films (but somewhat like the Creature of Shelley’s novel), del Toro’s Creature is quite intelligent and does eventually become quite educated (though much of that education is self-acquired after his escape from Victor’s attempt to kill him).
Victor then begins to treat the Creature very much as his father had treated him, attempting to train the newly made artificial human in a way that molds him in his “father’s” image but then abusing him when the training doesn’t go as planned. This mistreatment makes the Creature very much a figure of sympathy, which is extended through the film in other instances of mistreatment and in del Toro’s decision to make the Creature less murderously vindictive than he is in Shelley’s novel. When Victor then decides to murder the Creature by blowing up his lab with the Creature chained inside, the dynamics of the film completely shift, making the Creature much more the center of our sympathies and emphasizing Victor as the damaged individual that his upbringing has produced. Eventually, then, the family drama is extended when, with the Creature on the run, William prepares to marry Elizabeth back at the castle. The Creature asks Victor to make a companion for him as well, so that she can he “can be monsters together.” When Victor scoffs at the idea, the Creature attacks him. Elizabeth intercedes, and Victor tries to shoot the Creature but shoots Elizabeth instead. William is badly hurt in the ensuing fracas, leading William to make a final proclamation that sums up the responses of generations of audiences and critics: “You are the monster,” he tells Victor.
Much has been made, of course, of the visual design of del Toro’s Creature, which greatly enhances the notion that he is not the monster here. In this sense, the part of the Creature is played by young heart throb Jacob Elordi, whose movie star good looks aid greatly in establishing the “beautiful” nature of the Creature, despite all the special makeup. Indeed, coming off his performances in the HBO series Euphoria (2019–) and as Elvis Presley in the 2023 film Priscilla, Elordi might have seemed an unlikely choice to play a monster that has generally been portrayed as quite physically unattractive.Del Toro, however, had a very different conception of the look of the monster, In addition, he has lauded Elordi’s range as an actor, noting that Elordi’s considerable acting talents allowed him effectively to portray the wide range of stages through which the Creature passes in the film, evolving essentially from an innocent and trusting infant to a bitter, cynical, rage-filled avenger. And, of course, director Emerald Fennell understood Elordi’s talents well, having worked with him in the 2023 film Saltburn. Fennell also clearly appreciated his turnas a Byronic figure in Frankenstein, subsequently casting him as Heathcliff in her own 2026 remake of Wuthering Heights.
At the end of Shelley’s novel, the Creature announces his planned suicide, thus presumably bringing his torment to an end. Del Toro opts for a more positive—and even sentimental—ending. As he nears death, Victor asks for and receives forgiveness from the Creature, acknowledging him as “my son” at last. “Rest now, Father,” the Creature responds to his dying creator, suggesting that their reconciliation has enabled a situation in which “perhaps, now, we can both be human.” Victor dies, and Captain Anderson orders his men to allow the Creature to leave the ship unimpeded. In gratitude, the Creature then uses his immense strength to free Anderson’s ship from the ice. With Victor lying dead, the Creature lives on, trudging away alone into the frozen emptiness and the setting sun, in many ways making the Creature more a Romantic hero than is his maker, his eventual destination and fate unknown. Indeed, to emphasize this point, a final on-screen epigraph reads, “And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on,” taken from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a classic poem published in four parts between 1812 and 1818, thus completing its publication in the same year as the initial publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. One of Byron’s most important works, this poem perhaps did more than any other work to establish the notion of the Byronic hero.
Finally, it is worth noting that the ending of del Toro’s Frankenstein is less reminiscent of the ending of the typical horror film than of a classic Western, its lone, rather Byronic hero riding away into the sunset[10]. This ending thus again places the film within a context that might be more familiar to its modern audiences than is the context of Shelley’s novel. As much as anything, though, this ending and the film as a whole provide ample evidence of the seemingly limitless malleability of the Frankenstein story, a malleability that surely arises from the fact that the story is really about capitalist modernization itself, which was still emerging as the dominant historical narrative in Shelley’s time and still remains dominant in our own.
Works Cited
Booker, M. Keith. Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel. University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Booker, M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. “Frankenstein in Baghdad, or the Postmodern Prometheus.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol.32, no. 3, 2022, pp. 388–403.
Booker, M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. Ti West’s X Trilogy: Horror, Culture, and the American Dream. University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming.
Germaná, Monica. “The Arctic in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein Reveals More about Empire than about Monsters.” The Conversation, 23 October 2025, https://theconversation.com/the-arctic-in-guillermo-del-toros-frankenstein-reveals-more-about-empire-than-about-monsters-268032. Accessed 24 May 2026.
Gordon, Jane Anna, and Elizabeth Jennerwein. “Revolutionary Responsibility: Mothering a Monster.” In Creolizing Frankenstein, edited by Michael R. Paradiso-Michau, Rowman and Littlefield, 2023, pp. 65–82.
Koegler, C., (2020) “Posthumanism and Colonial Discourse: Nineteenth Century Literature and Twenty-First Century Critique”, Open Library of Humanities, vol. 6, no. 2, 2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.613.
Piper, Karen. “Inuit Diasporas: Frankenstein and the Inuit in England.” Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism, vol. 13, issue 1, 2007, pp. 63-75.
Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Notes
[1] This interview is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPO1hI0kiDc.
[2] It is not clear when the Creature was actually animated, however.
[3] For another discussion of the issue of colonialism as treated in del Toro’s version of the frame narrative, see Germanà.
[4] See, for example, Gordon and Jennerwein, who note the ways in which the Creature “parallels” Frantz Fanon’s famous description of colonized peoples in The Wretched of the Earth” (72).
[5] See, for example, Jenny Sharpe for an account of British representations of the “Mutiny” in the second half of the nineteenth century, Sharpe emphasizes the lurid and sensationalist nature of these representations, as in their seeming obsession with (greatly exaggerated) stories of the rape of British women by Indian men during the rebellion. Also see my chapter on literature related to the mutiny in my book Colonial Power, Colonial Texts.
[6] For an interesting use of the Frankenstein story as an allegory of the impact of American global power on Iraq, See Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2014). For such an allegorical reading of this novel, see Booker and Daraiseh (Frankenstein in Baghdad).
[7] For a full discussion of this trilogy, see Booker and Daraiseh (X Trilogy).
[8] This enhanced feminine presence is, of course, the central project of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a 2026 remake of Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein with a decidedly feminist postmodern twist. A detailed discussion of that film can be found here.
[9] One of the most ardent defenses of the French Revolution was written by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, when she responded to Edmund Burke’s famous denunciation of the revolution in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right, Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
[10] In this sense, it is worth noting that one of the more interesting reincarnations of the Frankenstein narrative occurs in the novel In the Distance (2017) by Hernán Diaz, in which the figure of the Creature becomes an immigrant attempting to make his way across the frontier of the American West.