I just watched Guillermo del Toro's 2025 two-and-a-half hour take on Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein on Netflix. This year has been a great one for movies, and del Toro's Frankenstein continues that trend.
Just about everyone knows something about this story, even if their main source of reference are the series of movies and remakes that were made in the 20th and 21st centuries, beginning in 1910 with Thomas Edison's 16-minute silent film . Movie-making, of course, was primitive then, even in the one-hour talkie that really got the ball rolling in 1931, and these early Frankenstein movies almost seem cartoonish and comical. (There even was a 1948 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein movie.) After the first two talkies -- Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) -- there was a very mixed resemblance to Shelley's novel in the thousand or so feature films, shorts, and TV appearances of Frankenstein's creation that followed, and to add insult to injury Mary Shelley's 75,000-word narrative has often been called a novella. (I was President of the Science Fiction Writers of America 1998-2001, and SFWA has long defined a novella as 17,500-40,000 words).
The 2025 movie is masterfully filmed, making the movie both far more frightening and tender, at the same and different times, than any of the predecessors I've seen. At times, the so-called monster seems more intensely human than most of the people around him, including the man who created him, and that makes his (the monster's) tale all the more memorable. Although del Toro's movie has some differences with Shelley's novel, most notably in the ending, it feels as if Shelley was a consultant in the making of this movie.
One of the most impressive and important characteristics of Frankenstein's creation in Shelley's novel are the creation's nearly superpowers. The exact reason for this is never quite explained, and the same is the case for the 2025 movie. I'd always assumed it was the lightning, which not only jolted the stitched-together body parts into life, but literally energized the cells in the creation's body (actually, I really don't like calling him a monster) into a kind of durability verging on indestructibility. I'm not sure if anyone else has made this point, but looked at in this way, Frankenstein's creation may well have inspired the creation of Superman. Chances are the Jewish Golem inspired both.
The other aspect I really liked about the movie was the way it depicted the kindness and affinity Frankenstein's creation had for animals. In Mary Shelley's novel he's an avowed vegetarian, and in del Toro's movie he's gentle with the creatures around him (unless they're wolves who are attacking him or the blind man). The lesson here is that although he was created artificially (though the body parts and the lightning are certainly natural) he is indisputably a bonafide part of the greater natural world, maybe more so than his creator and his creator's (our) ilk. We humans have to work hard at being a reliable citizen of the natural world.
And that may be the ultimate upshot of the novel and this movie, consistent with what has been remarked upon by readers and viewers for two centuries: the monster in this story -- if there is a monster -- is the creator not the creation.
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Dedicated to the late Lisa Nocks, my student in the MA in Media Studies program at the New School for Social Research, then my teaching assistant at Fordham University, who wrote her Master's thesis on Frankenstein and a variety of articles on the subject including Frankenstein: in a Better Light.
Penny Dreadful, which debuted on Showtime last night, was quite good!
