No sense in burying the lede: I love Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein movie.

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It does what good adaptations do: it honors the original, embracing enough of it to be recognizable and familiar while offering enough variation to create surprise and wonder.

I probably wouldn’t have seen it, as I’m generally not a fan of “monster movies,” but I heard that people were surprised by the monster’s humanity. (I’m not sure how many people actually were surprised, but there was a lot of “tell me you haven’t read the book without telling me you haven’t read the book” energy out there.) So I decided I’d see the movie.

First, though, I wanted to reread Shelley’s Frankenstein. I ended up enjoying it even more than I had when I’d read it in an undergraduate Children’s Lit class at UCI some decades ago.

For that class, I wrote an essay about the book, which I called “The Correct Misinterpretation”¹. I argued that the general belief that the monster’s name was Frankenstein was a productive misunderstanding.

I was probably riffing on an insight in Harold Bloom’s “Afterword,” which I must have read because it appears in the version we’d used in the class. Bloom writes,

“Frankenstein,” to most of us, is the name of a monster rather than of a monster’s creator, for the common reader and the common viewer have worked together, in their apparent confusion, to create a myth soundly based on a central duality in Mrs. Shelley’s novel.

I used Freud’s concept of the unheimlich² — a word that we translate as “uncanny,” but that embeds the notion of home and familiarity as foundational to the disquiet caused by the uncanny — to get at that “central duality,” focusing primarily on the way Shelley treats family in her novel. 

And since so many were saying that GDT focused on parts of the book that the other movies didn’t, I decided it might be worth watching one of those other movies. There are a lot to choose from — Wikipedia lists over 400 feature films (and that doesn’t include short films or TV episodes) — but  I settled on James Whale’s version,³ starring Boris Karloff, as it’s probably the most well-known of them. (I later learned that Whale’s film, along with the book, deeply influenced del Toro’s lifelong obsession with the story.)

I don’t think I’d seen that version before, and I was surprised by how much ambiguity surrounded the creature. For one thing, Karloff’s performance provided a deep pathos. Such expressive eyes! Importantly, the creature suffered long before it did anything we might consider monstrous — it suffered fear at a new, confused existence; it suffered abuse, especially (but not solely) at the hands of Frankenstein’s assistant, Fritz (whom I’d have assumed was named Igor… lol); it suffered constant attacks and even attempts to destroy it.

And yet, the act that rouses the village to rage is not really a monstrous act, but one of innocence, curiosity, and ignorance.

I was also surprised that Whale’s Frankenstein, while it may suffer from a plot hole or two, is beautifully shot — indeed, as del Toro says in his Fresh Air interview, the movie is “very modern.”

Del Toro’s Frankenstein draws on these sources (and, I’m sure, many others; he considers Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein to be an “exquisite sequel”) and creates something beautiful, tragic, yet somehow affirming.

I don’t want to spoil anything, so won’t go much deeper; part of the joy of the film, for me, was seeing what del Toro chose to echo from the novel, and what he chose to change. There are significant changes! But del Toro manages to honor both Shelley’s vision and his own.

If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you get right to it. It’s really amazing. You can find it on Netflix — though I wish I’d caught it in its limited run in theaters. (It played at a theater in my neighborhood, but I didn’t learn about it until just after its last showing…)

I guess I’ll add one thing: discourse around the novel and previous movies, at least the discourse I’ve seen, often centers around the question, Who is the real monster — the creature, or the creator? Del Toro does address this, but it seems clear to me that he understands that it’s not the most important question Shelley’s story raises. And that understanding leads, I think, to much more interesting answers.