{"id":64743,"date":"2026-03-04T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=64743"},"modified":"2026-03-03T18:26:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T00:26:53","slug":"frankensteins-hideous-progeny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/frankensteins-hideous-progeny\/","title":{"rendered":"Frankenstein\u2019s Hideous Progeny"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dr. Victor Frankenstein is dying, while his monstrous creation looks on. Lobbing the last of many insults at Mary Shelley\u2019s 1818 novel, director Guillermo del Toro invents a deathbed rapprochement for his new film, Frankenstein<\/em> (2025). \u201cForgive me, my son,\u201d implores Victor. And the creature, weeping, absolves his father: \u201cPerhaps now, we can both be human.\u201d Nothing resembling this scene occurs in Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em>, where the bitter enmity dividing the main characters remains chillingly unresolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a good reason for that: in the novel, both Victor and his creature have committed unforgivable acts. The creature has killed Victor\u2019s very young brother, William; his dearest friend, Henry Clerval; and his bride, Elizabeth Lavenza (which causes Victor\u2019s father, Alphonse, to die of a broken heart). And Victor set all of this carnage in motion by abandoning his creature on the very day he brought it to life, and then, three years later, reneging on his agreement to build a female mate for it\u2014breaking a promise made in response to the creature\u2019s heartrending plea: \u201cOh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bafflingly, not one of these plot points appears in del Toro\u2019s adaptation of Frankenstein<\/em>, a film that never attempts to address the novel\u2019s most wrenching question: What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world, from whom all other humans flee in terror and disgust? That question then opens onto the agonizing philosophical dilemma that torments creator and creature alike: Does Victor have a moral obligation to atone for his abandonment?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy vices,\u201d the creature tells Victor, \u201care the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal.\u201d At first, Victor sympathizes, deciding that \u201cthe justice due both to him and my fellow-creatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request.\u201d But as he works on the second creature, he wonders: Does he instead have a moral obligation to refuse the creature\u2019s demand, on the grounds that a second creature \u201cmight become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness\u201d? Victor\u2019s uncertainty yields the novel\u2019s terrifying insight: procreation has no guarantees\u2014and in that respect the creature is no different from any child born on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Del Toro is, of course, not the first to excise these questions from the novel. Of the major adaptations of Frankenstein<\/em>\u2014by James Whale, Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh\u2014only Branagh\u2019s attempts to address the second creature conundrum. (Whale offloads it onto a second film that bears no relation to anything Mary Shelley wrote.) But omitting the female creature plot is but the most visible instance of the violence del Toro wreaks on Shelley\u2019s writing, very little of which survives in the screenplay. Beyond modifications to the novel\u2019s plot, del Toro overwrites Shelley\u2019s language with Lord Byron\u2019s and concludes the film with a line from \u201cChilde Harold\u2019s Pilgrimage,\u201d decontextualized and turned Celine Dion\u2013saccharine: \u201cAnd thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.\u201d It is an infuriating reenactment of literary history: Shelley published Frankenstein<\/em> anonymously, and the novel was widely presumed to have been written by her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, its story too shocking to have come from a woman\u2019s pen. The author\u2019s name did not appear on the cover until the publication of the second edition in 1823, and Shelley would be excluded from Romantic literature\u2019s all-male canons until late in the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA text is like a house; you have to move in,\u201d del Toro told Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Magazine<\/em>. Now del Toro has moved into the house Shelley built\u2014so long believed to be one she, as a woman, couldn\u2019t <\/em>have built\u2014and has proceeded to demolish the entire East Wing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n Related readings <\/div>\n \n \n
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\n How to Botch a Horror-Feminist Sequel in Seven Depressing Steps: \u201cAlien: Romulus\u201d<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Eleanor <\/a>\n \n Eleanor Johnson <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Let us offer an analogy for this version of Frankenstein. <\/em>Imagine an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings <\/em>that includes neither Aragorn nor Saruman. Also, in this version Boromir lives and winds up marrying Galadriel after her husband, Celeborn, dies in battle. The film ends with Elrond and Gandalf forgiving a repentant and reformed Sauron, and introduces a new character, a syphilitic arms dealer who wants his brain to be downloaded into a palantir. Oh, and the eagles fly the ring to Mount Doom, thereby putting that perennial question to rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We suspect that most LOTR<\/em> fans would consider this an adaptation that mangles Tolkien\u2019s work beyond all recognition. \u201cThese aren\u2019t adaptations,\u201d people would say. \u201cThey\u2019re travesties.\u201d And that\u2019s what we think of del Toro\u2019s many deviations from his source material. We could enumerate all the aspects of his travesty, in the spirit of Mark Twain\u2019s account of the literary offenses of James Fenimore Cooper. But we\u2019ll confine ourselves to the ones suggesting that del Toro, for all his long-professed love of the novel, is either indifferent to or unaware of a great deal of what Mary Shelley accomplished\u2014and invited her readers to imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides, del Toro\u2019s adaptation raises a larger question, about all<\/em> the many, many adaptations of Frankenstein<\/em> over more than two centuries. The novel wasn\u2019t even taken seriously as \u201cliterature\u201d until the 1970s. Why, we wonder, has this novel been, for so long, the most widely and wildly and (usually) mistakenly adapted work of fiction in the history of literature since the first draft of Gilgamesh<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Most of del Toro\u2019s deviations are attempts to streamline the plot and to impart a sumptuous visuality to Victor\u2019s tortured ambitions. Set principally in Edinburgh and Vaduz, del Toro\u2019s Frankenstein <\/em>relocates Shelley\u2019s 1818 novel from the late 1790s to 1857, a post-Enlightenment moment that allows the director to feature the Crimean War\u2019s corpse-rich battlefields and to obliquely reference \u201ctwo revolts and a fire\u201d on a faraway plantation that destroys Victor\u2019s maternal family\u2019s fortune. It also takes the audience on a whirlwind tour of mid-19th-century innovations, from daguerreotypes and ambrotypes to a French porcelain urinal that \u201cchimes to a man\u2019s stream\u201d to anachronistic blasts of dynamite (invented in 1867). A North Pole-bound Danish Captain Anderson stands in for Shelley\u2019s English Captain Walton; and an angel investor named Heinrich Harlander\u2014that syphilitic arms dealer mentioned earlier\u2014takes the place of Victor\u2019s optimistic, loyal friend, Henry Clerval. Harlander\u2019s extravagantly gowned niece Elizabeth modernizes Victor\u2019s doomed fianc\u00e9e, Elizabeth; del Toro imagines her as a spirited scientist preposterously enamored of the creature despite her engagement to Victor\u2019s brother, William. A state-of-the-art cadaver laboratory updates the \u201cworkshop of filthy creation\u201d where Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein assembles his creature. Victor\u2019s father, a surgeon rather than a Swiss syndic, dies soon after Victor\u2019s mother\u2019s death instead of perishing from grief after the creature murders Elizabeth\u2014a murder, incidentally, that the film attributes to Victor himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Del Toro\u2019s changes afford considerable entertainment. They are also far less thought-provoking than the source material the movie pretends to honor. Del Toro obscures Shelley\u2019s knowledge of prevailing Romanticist aesthetic theories of the sublime and the beautiful; he sidelines her knowledge of political theory and medical and scientific debates\u2014most importantly, her familiarity with the debate between vitalists (who believed that life entails a divine spark or \u00e9lan vital<\/em>) and materialists (who believed that no such things exist, and that we are simply highly organized matter). Short-circuiting the questions about knowledge and responsibility that electrify Shelley\u2019s novel, del Toro decidedly does not offer his audience a film of ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, the director provides a glorious jumble of medico-surgical spectacles that lay bare the intricacies of human physiology. In spirited but empty scenes, Victor battles his detractors in the Royal College of Medicine; the creature, meanwhile, discusses theology and free will with the blind man who teaches him to read the Bible and Paradise Lost<\/em>. In a nod to Rousseau, Victor chains the creature\u2019s wrists mere hours after his birth. Herr Harlander dubs Victor \u201cPrometheus\u201d and the creature-in-progress \u201cour new Adam,\u201d gesturing toward the venerable creation stories that were Shelley\u2019s touchstones in the work she titled Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus<\/em>, whose epigraph she drew from Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in the end, these are all empty signifiers: del Toro, despite his evident love for the creature, erases precisely the traits that have made him an object of fascination for two centuries of readers. The film\u2019s tagline, which is also a line of its dialogue, is \u201conly monsters play God,\u201d but the novel doesn\u2019t allow for such moral simplicity\u2014and the creature knows it. \u201cRemember,\u201d he tells Victor, \u201cthat I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.\u201d Shelley\u2019s creature has in fact read Paradise Lost<\/em> and sees himself as an adaptation of it, a mashup of Adam and Satan. It is an excruciating form of self-knowledge, and the creature knows that<\/em> too, and tells Victor his \u201csorrow only increased with knowledge.\u201d This film simply abandons the very specific humanity\u2014and the complex morality\u2014of Shelley\u2019s original creature. It is as if del Toro has duplicated Victor\u2019s abandonment of his new-made being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Del Toro\u2019s changes afford considerable entertainment. They are also far less thought-provoking than the source material the movie pretends to honor.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open,\u201d wrote Shelley in the chilling description of the creature\u2019s birth, \u201cit breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.\u201d Yet this horrifying human birth is obliterated by del Toro\u2019s cinematic visuals. \u201cIt is finished,\u201d declaims Victor as he mounts his inanimate creation on a massive cruciform platform, its posture reminiscent of Cristo Redentor in Rio de Janeiro, arms outstretched as Victor awaits a life-giving strike of lightning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More worrisome than this scene\u2019s departure from Shelley\u2019s text is that del Toro styles his creature as a Christlike martyr. Jacob Elordi\u2019s ghostly blue loincloth-swathed figure may evoke a canon of perfect and imperfect male bodies in art\u2014from Leonardo\u2019s Vitruvian Man<\/em> and Blake\u2019s Nebuchadnezzar<\/em> to Tarzan and the Terminator\u2014but foremost the body of Christ. Palms bloodied as though by stigmata and side gashed by a wound into which Elizabeth places her hand, del Toro\u2019s creature even battles wolves preying on innocent sheep. He is immortal, secure in a divinely ordained fate and shielded from the bitter lessons Shelley\u2019s creature learns about human cruelty. Opting for heavily foreshadowed martyrdom, del Toro thus abandons the chance to dramatize how \u201cthe fallen angel becomes a malignant devil\u201d or to explore the profound implications of Shelley\u2019s creature\u2019s utterance, \u201cI am malicious because I am miserable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But del Toro\u2019s creature isn\u2019t even malicious. He is born, startlingly, with the power of speech, and expresses himself in mostly bellows, screams, and unsubtle sentences (\u201cNot something<\/em>. Someone. You made someone,\u201d he admonishes Victor). But Shelley imagined her creature as an autodidact whose miraculous acquisition of the liberal arts endows him with heartrending eloquence that fails to stir the sympathies of his negligent parent. Victor, himself the beneficiary of an Edenic childhood, has no excuse for abandoning or failing to empathize with his creature. In contrast, del Toro positions Victor as the victim of an ill-tempered father\u2019s abuse, providing a bog-standard intergenerational-trauma justification for Victor\u2019s violent behavior toward his own offspring. The movie creature then adopts that justification for himself: \u201cYou thought me a monster. Now I return the favor. \u2026 Victor, you only listen when I hurt you,\u201d he growls, breaking Victor\u2019s nose as though justice could be found in physical disfigurement. Like Christ on the cross, del Toro\u2019s creature cries out to a father who has forsaken him, and, following two quasi-resurrections (\u201cHow long did I die for?\u201d he wonders, rising after receiving would-be fatal gunshot wounds), travels along a path of sin, atonement, forgiveness, and redemption. New Testament thus overwrites Old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, the film lacks the moral complexity with which Shelley challenges readers. In the novel, after the creature kills young William, he frames the maidservant Justine Moritz for William\u2019s murder on the grounds that she is \u201cone of those whose smiles are bestowed on all but me.\u201d Victor knows the creature is the murderer but passively and appallingly acquiesces. Shelley\u2019s deeply sympathetic creature is also, unnervingly, an incel. A reader might\u2014just might\u2014excuse the creature\u2019s murder of William as a form of revenge against Victor for his abandonment, but his decision to frame Justine is indefensible. When Victor considers that a second, female creature might delight in murder and wretchedness, he is not wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n Related readings <\/div>\n \n \n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Guy Horror: “Rosemary\u2019s Baby” and Coercive Control<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Eleanor <\/a>\n \n Eleanor Johnson <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n

All that said, we offer two caveats. Caveat one: We\u2019re literature professors, but not the kind who go around saying \u201cThe book was so much better than the movie\u201d or \u201cThey didn\u2019t even get this one thing right.\u201d Okay, we\u2019re saying that now, but we don\u2019t say it all the time. Adaptations are gonna adapt, in culture as in nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, both Peter Jackson\u2019s and Ralph Bakshi\u2019s (half-realized) adaptations of LOTR<\/em> wisely dropped the Tom Bombadil interlude from Tolkien\u2019s original. And there are brilliant adaptations whose variations from the source material manage not merely to remain true to the spirit of the text but even to enrich it: for example, Denis Villeneuve\u2019s Arrival<\/em> (by changing the daughter\u2019s cause of death from a climbing accident to a degenerative disease, thereby complicating the protagonist\u2019s\u2014and the film\u2019s\u2014convoluted sense of temporality) and Alex Garland\u2019s Annihilation<\/em> (by doubling its doppelg\u00e4ngers and leaning into the novel\u2019s treatment of biological adaptation and mutation). Perhaps it is important that these texts\u2019 authors, Ted Chiang and Jeff VanderMeer, respectively, worked on those scripts, whereas Mary Shelley cannot be consulted except by Ouija?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of us (Michael) has a brilliant graduate student, Morgan Hamill, whose dissertation chapter on adaptation argues that Annihilation<\/em> is effectively a metameditation on textual adaptation, and that the best kinds of adaptations can be thought of as doppelg\u00e4ngers. So we\u2019re okay with people taking liberties with texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there are liberties, and then there are liberties. Del Toro\u2019s Victor involves himself with the creature as soon as he comes to life, enduring postpartum fatigue from devoting countless hours to his care and education; and the creature has companions and a love interest who engage him in conversation. These elements alone make the film a landmark in the history of adaptations that totally miss the point of their source material. Indeed, since Shelley\u2019s creature is in many ways a doppelg\u00e4nger of Victor, del Toro\u2019s adaptation even manages to evade the novel\u2019s exploration of doppelg\u00e4ngers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Caveat two: To return to the broader question, what compels artists to take egregious liberties with a text that\u2014in our professional opinion\u2014offers a perfectly good backstory for Victor Frankenstein, and fascinating subplots that explore extraordinary human depravity and corruption alongside extraordinary human love and generosity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost every adaptation of Frankenstein<\/em>\u2014from the first stage version in 1823 through James Whale\u2019s iconic 1931 film and its numerous cinematic progeny\u2014renders the creature as intellectually disabled, unable to appeal eloquently to Victor for some measure of justice. And most versions cut out Captain Robert Walton altogether, declining Shelley\u2019s invitation to compare a legitimate form of human ambition (polar exploration and the search for a Northwest Passage) with something far more dangerous: Victor\u2019s discovery of how to \u201cendue inanimate matter with life,\u201d a breathtaking feat that we have yet to achieve, two hundred years after Shelley penned her novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the film (rightly) hailed as the most faithful of the adaptations, Branagh\u2019s 1994 version, takes indefensible liberties with Justine\u2019s story and (more importantly) with the building of the female creature. The creature frames Justine for William\u2019s murder, but then she is hanged by a mob. In the novel, by contrast, she is tried and convicted in a court of law\u2014on the basis of her false confession, coerced from her by a priest who threatens her with damnation. Shelley\u2019s depiction of an orphaned, innocent young woman sentenced to death by the representatives of law and religion \u2026 gone. And then, the film adds insult to injury: Victor grafts her head onto the body of his murdered fianc\u00e9e, Elizabeth, and the creature demands that this atrocity become his wife. Why? Would anyone perform comparable surgery on Pride and Prejudice<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We appreciate del Toro\u2019s epic ambitions for a film composed of undeniably beautiful spectacles. Adaptations are mutations, and sometimes they don\u2019t have much of the DNA of their parents. But all the same, we are hoping that someday a film will do justice to Frankenstein<\/em>\u2014to its treatment of science, of friendship, of generosity, of depravity and corruption, and, perhaps most of all, to its complex sense of justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world? Del Toro doesn’t answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":64759,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[70,36,205,20,1434,46],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1759],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-64743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-fantasy","tag-film","tag-horror","tag-literature","tag-netflix","tag-science-fiction","section-film"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFrankenstein\u2019s Hideous Progeny - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world? Del Toro doesn't answer. What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world? 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Del Toro doesn't answer. What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world? 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