With almost 25 years in the making, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro released his reinterpretation of Frankenstein on October 17, 2025, bestowing the creature with a foul conception story that takes Mary Shelley’s creation into the realm of body horror. Thus, the iconic monster in del Toro’s Frankenstein is constructed through exploiting the creature’s physical torment over the loathsome abandonment portrayed in the book.
In finding what makes a monstrous creature, del Toro’s version focuses more on the creature’s torturous conception, something Shelley describes vaguely in favor of exploring the moral implications of assembling life from corpses in an arrogant effort to play God.
“I wanted to detail every anatomical step I could in how he put the creature together,” del Toro said in an interview with the New York Times. “There is a personality to the way he put together this creature.”
Roughly an hour is dedicated to the multifaceted process of building the creature, a journey that changes in character from intimate sketches of muscles to the almost erotic sorting of a nervous system.
Del Toro gives depth to both Victor and his creation during this building process, characterizing Frankenstein as an almost cannibalistic butcher who is willing to scout battlefields and public execution lines to amass a surplus of limbs and brains. The creature thus starts as a torso nailed to a wooden board, reminiscent of taxidermized animals — only this animal has exposed ligaments, a skinned torso and screams in agony every time it is reanimated.
“With some earlier Frankenstein monsters, if you saw them in the flesh, you would think, ‘this guy’s had an accident and someone’s patched him back up,’” Mike Hill, prosthetics and creature designer, said in an interview with Polygon editorial. “When you see our creature, I wanted you to think, ‘Oh, this has been made from a pattern. This has been man-made. Somebody planned this out.’”
The creature thus accumulates the torment of the war-torn men that make up his patched-up body while he experiences a martyrdom of his own, feeding Victor’s repulsion for death. It is in this interplay between the brutality of science and the sensitivity of life that the creation changes in character. Frankenstein becomes more methodical with his sculpting of the creature, pulling from obscure medical practices to create a baroque Adonis of decaying matter.
“The head is patterned after phrenology manuals from the 1800s,” del Toro said in an interview with NPR. “So they have very elegant, almost aerodynamic lines. I wanted this alabaster or marble, statue feel, so it feels like a newly minted human being.”
In this matter, the director moves away from the stream of thought that constructs the monstrosity in Shelley’s book. As a good adaptation to the big screen language, he favors visceral body horror over the poetic prose of gothic terror — this being the clearest difference between the film and the novel.
Thus, the monster’s journey is also a point of stark contrast. While the book is marked by the creature’s asphyxiating loneliness — which turns into biting revenge — the film takes that initial frustration to create a more empathetic monster.
“It was written by a teenager [who] was full of questions and rage and rebellion,” del Toro said in an interview with CBS. “You know, it’s the same questions we have now: What are we? Why am I human? Why am I here?”
While both novel and film explore the philosophical implications of arrogantly creating life to later discard it with revulsion, the film conveys this theme through a conception tale like no other in the long repertoire of Frankenstein interpretations.
More than two centuries later, del Toro reanimated Shelley’s creature under an industrial gothic veil, bound to become a masterclass in the creation of horror films for years to come.
