what pop culture got wrong, and Del Toro got it right – DW – 11/10/2025

For more than two centuries, British Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been known as the monster that doesn’t die – endlessly revived, patched up and sent staggering back into culture. The basic parable is perennial: a talented but shortsighted scientist plays God, creating life from reanimated body parts. Horrified by his own creation, he abandons it, and the rejected “creature” becomes the monster society fears it to be.

Frankenstein’s monstrous costume proved flexible enough to survive every type of lens, from the cult 1930s monster films starring Brit Boris Karloff to sitcoms and children’s cartoons. These productions shaped most of what the public thinks they know about the character, which differs from his original characteristics chronicled in Shelley’s 1818 novel.

Already Frankensteinfrom director Guillermo del Toro, starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, available on Netflix, is more faithful to Shelley than most film versions of her monstrous myth: sympathy for the creature is foregrounded and the warning against man pretending to be God is the central theme. But there are still gaps between Frankenstein the novel and its popular representations.

How Hollywood Reprogrammed the Monster

As those who know the story know, Frankenstein is not the name of the monster, but of the scientist who brings him to life – Victor Frankenstein. In the original novel, Victor is not a “doctor” or a baron in a castle, but a dogged student of “natural philosophy”.

In Shelley’s version, the creature is not the grumbling brute reprogrammed by the films either, but an articulate autodidact who teaches himself English and moral philosophy after finding a copy of the epic poem book. Paradise Lostby John Milton.

The most iconic elements of Frankenstein’s story, namely the resurrection with lightning (with Victor Frankenstein shouting “He’s alive!!!”), the green skin, the screws in the neck, the clumsy walk, are later inventions of the stage and screen.

Most of them can be traced back to two Universal monster films directed by James Whale, Frankenstein (1931) e The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), starring the inimitable Boris Karloff as the shambling brute and Elsa Lanchester as his reluctant companion. Whale’s films established the look, sound, and laboratory theatricality that everyone still expects from a Frankenstein film.

The Many Lives of Frankenstein

Over the centuries, since Shelley’s novel published anonymously as Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheusthe creature has undergone infinite reinterpretations.

The British Hammer Films gave us a series of Technicolor remakes of the Frankenstein story, from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) until Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), which portrayed the creature as more tragic than terrifying and the megalomaniacal Baron Frankenstein (usually played by Peter Cushing) as the true villain.

Parallel to horror films came satires and parodies. There’s slapstick comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948); the extravagant

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), with Tim Curry as Dr. Frank N. Furter, and Young Frankenstein (1974), by Mel Brooks, a nonstop string of jokes that manages to be both affectionate and irreverent in its treatment of the monster canon.

On TV, the sitcom gained prominence in the 1960s The Monstersfrom CBS, which transformed Frankenstein’s creature into Herman Munster, a kindly if bumbling suburban father.

Already in the cartoon franchise Hotel TransylvaniaShelley’s monster had already become “Frank,” a cuddly sidekick, turning existential angst into family entertainment.

Ironically, some of the films that come closest to Shelley’s original work are not billed as Frankenstein films. In Moscow (1986), by David Cronenberg, in which a scientist becomes the monster himself, is a graphic and bloody representation of Shelley’s warning against scientific excesses. Edward Scissorhands (1990), by Tim Burton, focuses on the excluded creature, evoking the novel’s themes of empathy and abandonment. AND Poor Creatures (2023), by Yorgos Lanthimos, recasts the myth through a feminist lens, with a reanimated woman (Emma Stone, in an Oscar-winning performance) claiming agency, echoing the influence of Shelley’s mother, feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft.

Recovering Shelley’s Creature

Del Toro’s Frankenstein falls squarely into the lineage of filmmakers trying to restore Mary Shelley’s original intent. Faithful in spirit if not in every detail, his version returns to the story’s roots: not a tale of horror, but of creation, rejection, and moral responsibility.

It is not surprising that the director of Hellboy (2004) e The Shape of Water (2017) be on the side of the monster. His two-and-a-half-hour epic foregrounds the novel’s essential sympathy for the creature, treating him not as an abomination but as a sentient being born into a world that cannot accept him.

Thematically, Del Toro aligns with Shelley’s concerns: the danger of unbridled creation, the arrogance of human dominance, and the profound loneliness of the excluded. Like Shelley, he reads the tragedy as a story of abandonment, of a father who cannot love what he created. Not surprisingly, Victor Frankenstein played by Oscar Isaac has his own issues with his father, transmitting this trauma to his unholy creation.

Jacob Elordi delivers a revealing performance as a kind and innocent creature who comes to understand the darker side of humanity. Del Toro does not fail to pay homage to previous adaptations, with references to the creative scientist’s outbursts of madness.

In practice, Del Toro’s Frankenstein does not reinvent the myth, but revives its moral core in an era taken over by artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and algorithmic decisions. By stripping away the exaggerated narrative of monstrous creation, he returns to Shelley’s central question: what happens when human ambition and technical progress trump empathy?