The monster is alive – yet again – in the teaser trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which is to say that he’s twitching and kicking and still securely in vitro. His arrival is heralded with great pomp and ceremony – with title cards and a growling voiceover and a veritable baby shower of moody, rain-lashed exoticism – but the creature himself, played by Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi, is shrewdly kept under wraps. He’s a half-built shape on a cross in the lab. He’s that tall, hooded figure on the ice by the boat. We’ll know him when we see him, when the film comes out this autumn, because he’s part of a family, the latest in a long line of dead ringers. He’ll probably look much the same as all his ancestors did.
Lazarus may have first dibs on the regeneration game, but Frankenstein’s monster leads the field in repeat performances and curtain calls. The first Frankenstein movie was a 1910 silent short, and since then, we’ve had nearly 200 others, each charting their own course through an evergreen tale of renegade science, reanimated body parts and a hubristic experiment that takes on a hideous life of its own. The creature has been played by everyone from Boris Karloff to Robert De Niro to Joe Dallesandro. It has been restitched and renamed as Blackenstein, Frankenhooker and Frankenweenie. It provided the touchstone for Victor Erice’s Spanish Civil War classic The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and the wet clay for Emma Stone’s Oscar-winning performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023). The evidence of the box office suggests that Frankenstein is a perennial and that it connects with all eras. But it speaks to some more than others – and possibly ours more than most.
I’ve been agnostic about del Toro’s work in the past, but only because he’s a director whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp and whose films often feel like extensive blueprints or liner notes for a hypothetical Gothic masterpiece. Now, all at once, that air of groping incompleteness starts to make perfect sense. Del Toro adores romantic melodrama and misunderstood tragic monsters. He cites Mary Shelley’s 1818 source novel as his all-time favourite book. Most directors, he says, wind up making the same film over and over again. In his case, that film appears to have been an unofficial dress rehearsal for Frankenstein, whether he chose to call it Hellboy (2004) or Blade 2 (2002), The Shape of Water (2017) or Pinocchio (2022). He knows Shelley’s text backwards. He’s lived and breathed it all his life. There’s no director better qualified to take a proper run at the tale.
Ideally, he probably should have done it sooner. As it is, he’s been nursing the project for 25 years, building it up into a dark obsession, tinkering with his prototypes like a wild-eyed Victor Frankenstein. His adaptation first sparked into life at the turn of the century and almost went into production in 2013, with Benedict Cumberbatch (then fresh from appearing in Danny Boyle’s London stage version) briefly booked to play the role of the monster. Del Toro’s finished product casts Elordi alongside Oscar Isaac (as Frankenstein), Mia Goth and Charles Dance, and reputedly covers aspects of the novel that previous adaptations have either ignored or overlooked. Del Toro wouldn’t even describe it as a horror film, exactly. Instead, explains Isaac, “It’s a big, Mexican, dark, sumptuous, dramatic character piece.”
One measure of a great story is its ability to adapt and mutate, like the alien blood in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Shelley wrote Frankenstein in a flurry at the age of 18, and her book has the open-ended, free-associative quality of a brilliant adolescent brainstorm. Filmmakers typically use it as the basis for a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, depicting the downfall of a man who dared to play God. And that’s entirely valid; it’s part of Frankenstein’s DNA. But Shelley’s book is also, relatedly, a twisted father-and-son story. It’s about a parent’s responsibility to his child and – by implication – to the wider community that he inflicts the child on. Victor rejects the monster he’s produced. The monster, in turn, wants revenge and recompense. That’s the side of Shelley’s story that most interests del Toro. It might also be the one that feels the most eerily up-to-date.
It’s strange to think that 2025’s most urgent and timely Hollywood blockbuster might just be the 200th retelling of a 200-year-old yarn, but it could be that science has finally caught up with the author. Because what is Frankenstein’s monster but a flesh-and-bone precursor of ChatGPT, an artificial life form who teaches himself to read and write to the point where he is able to outwit and outreason the human being who made him? The creature claims that he only wants to be loved and valued, and his 19th-century complaints find their 21st-century echo in those disquieting news stories about rogue chatbots that make sudden emotional demands of their users and initially refuse to shut down when they’re asked. It’s a curious, precarious world and Shelley saw it coming. What was once science fiction has become science fact.
Del Toro’s take on Frankenstein isn’t out until November. Until then, it remains a mystery, a tease; as hooded and unknowable as the monster in the trailer. It might be a masterpiece or it might be a misfire. But if we risk loading the film with too much fevered expectation, we’re only taking our lead from del Toro himself, who has variously described it as his personal “dream project”, the “pinnacle of everything” and quite possibly “the greatest Frankenstein ever”. That’s Victor Frankenstein talk. That way madness lies. Except that by this point we’ve all come too far to turn back. So cue the lightning strikes and the claps of thunder; the cackling cry of “It’s alive!” Del Toro’s rough beast, 25 years in the coming, is finally slouching towards the multiplex to be born.
‘Frankenstein’ arrives on Netflix in November
