Cultural critic Nina Auerbach once quipped that every age gets the vampire story it needs. The same, it turns out, might be true for our Frankenstein stories. Although Frankenstein began as a very particular work of fiction, it has taken on the features of mythology, reworked for different adaptations in film, stage dramas, cartoons, and even opera, often with nothing but a slight thread tying it to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. In our own confused and unraveling age, we have two wildly different variations on the theme that reveal divergent mediations on the monstrous: Frankenstein (directed by Guillermo del Toro) and The Bride! (directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal).
Guillermo del Toro has spent much of his career playing in the shadows of dark fairy tales, investing monsters with sensitivity in movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, insisting that even our scariest stories tell us something about our capacity for courage, honesty, or love. He brings that sensibility to Frankenstein’s story. This adaptation is less a faithful return to Shelley’s source material than it is a riff on and rebuttal to the classic 1931 film directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. Gone are the neck bolts, square haircut, and sunken eyes that Karloff made synonymous with Frankenstein. In del Toro’s vision, Dr. Frankenstein’s creature (played by Jacob Elordi), not a monster, is lithe and tender, curious and meek—a mute artist seeking language to express his wonder at the world he so desperately wants to join and is so mercilessly denied.
For all his sensitivity, this creature has the qualities of a superhero. Frankenstein’s monster has always been invested with more-than-human strength. In Shelley’s novel he can survive in harsher conditions and on less food, run and climb faster than an ordinary man. In the Karloff film, he is a lumbering, if sensitive, brute who doesn’t know his own strength, often killing more out of carelessness than malice. In del Toro’s version, the creature is preternaturally strong—he can dislodge a massive ship from a glacier with his bare hands, for instance—and he cannot be killed, no matter how many times he is shot, chopped, sliced, or bludgeoned, which happens so often I felt like I had wandered into a hyperrealistic video game.
