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“A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” – Victor Frankenstein as written by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, 1818
Prelude
Immortality is only a curse for those who refuse to live.
The Titan god Prometheus knew the consequences of his actions when he defied Zeus not once but twice in service of his creations, and suffered an eternity anyway. As told by Apollodorus and Ovid, Prometheus formed man from earth and water, breathed life into him, delivered him meat from the gods’ table and fire to cook it, and, according to Aeschylus, all the natural arts and sciences necessary to survive. And for this love of man, for this life lived, Prometheus was bound to Mount Caucasus, sentenced to spend his immortal life in torment.
Each day, an eagle would eat Prometheus’s liver, which regenerated each night. “Prometheus bound to a rock, his liver eaten by an eagle.” Crayon manner print by Lucien after P.T. Leclerc, approximately 1796. Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
But what are we to make of a being so bold as to know the consequences of eternal punishment and still choose to create and nurture a living soul? And how do we make sense of his invocation by later literature, such as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the title of which suggests that Victor Frankenstein himself is this friend of his creation while the text confirms the opposite? How do we understand the Promethean urge to create and nourish life in a story in which the creator abdicates his responsibility to his noble offspring?
Perhaps we might think that Victor is a failed Prometheus of the modern era, or perhaps the benevolent creature is the story’s Titan god. Perhaps, even, we might resolve that the true Prometheus of the novel is not in it at all.
Part I: Vaughn’s Tale
In Mary Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein relates his tale of ambition, hubris, and regret—without ever truly believing he is capable of any of them—to the explorer Captain Robert Walton, who records this story for his sister. Walton writes that Frankenstein told him of his youth and studies, his sister who would be his future wife, and his restlessness with a life that kept him well-provided and happy.
With all his earthly needs met, Victor sought to invent immortality, allegedly recounting that around thirteen years old, he decided that “wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!” This ambitious, self-aggrandizing, non-Promethean endeavor would guide his studies, gradually becoming an obsession not only with the glory he would receive for achieving immortality, but with the reverence he would receive for achieving divinity as well. Ultimately Victor makes a creature, imbues it with life, and lives to regret it as the creature embraces the humanity Victor himself squandered in pursuit of the perverse divine.
Or at least that’s how I read it.1
And I was quite shocked when I did, honestly. I had never read Frankenstein before this summer, when I picked it up in anticipation of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation released in cinemas this October. I thought I knew the story simply by virtue of living in modern American society. I’d seen Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), so I knew the creature was a monster capable of thought and choreographed numbers. I knew his skin was green, his hair was black, and he had the abnormal brain of a criminal. These are things you pick up almost by osmosis in American culture. It’s all around us, rubber stamped with love from Hollywood right there on the VHS box.
But then I read the book that starts on an expedition to the North Pole, and like young Victor, I became voracious with a need to understand how it all went so wrong; or rather, so right.
As a scholar of popular culture I’ve always had a kind of guiding principle: Classical Reception. This approach concerns the ways in which the ancient Mediterranean has been invoked in post-classical culture, much in the way of those questions about Prometheus above. We can take this approach beyond the Mediterranean to think about culture as an ever-evolving, adapting, and growing thing. We can look at the life cycle of cultural icons, ideas, and phenomena over decades, centuries, or millennia to better understand how those cultural pasts are interwoven with the cultural present, even as the present still retains its autonomy as a product of its contemporary state. This reception approach, whether tethered to or unbound from the Classics, has been the cornerstone of my thought processes as I grew as an American studies scholar.
When I read Frankenstein for the first time and realized that somewhere along the line this classic piece of literature had been so drastically altered in the public imagination I was loosely familiar with, I became insatiable. I watched J. Searle Dawley’s Frankenstein (1910), James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters (1998), Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023), and Guillermo del Toro’s newest addition to the canon, Frankenstein (2025). While these are only eight of perhaps hundreds of adaptations on stage, page, and screen, what struck me across all of these invocations of Shelley’s story, itself was an invocation of so many other cultural works, was the brazenness of every director in attempting the Promethean feat that Victor had so famously regretted in every iteration.
These directors built their own creatures with cultural patchworks sewn together at invisible seams and imbued them with lives of their own to go forth and procreate. They adapted, interpreted, added, subtracted, and breathed new life into these works of art that are built upon millennia of cultural icons, ideas, and phenomena. When Shelley wrote the line, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me,” I wonder if she knew that she was as ambitious as young Victor, or perhaps as determined as Prometheus. Was she imagining a future populated by her immortal creature and all its many descendants?
In creating their own adaptations of Shelley’s work, each filmmaker has peeled back the layers and dissected the original text to extract only the parts they wanted for the body of their new creation. Some took only the bones, others the veins, and few the muscle, but most took the soul, as each iteration of the story is indebted to the immortal soul Shelley first recorded in 1818.
Part II: The Directors’ Tales
Frankenstein yearns to live, and artists playing the role of creator have resurrected it over and over across two centuries, beginning with its its first staged production in 1823.2 But have the creators of each new iteration followed Mary Shelley’s Promethean lead, nurturing a beloved creation, or have they followed Victor’s, embracing their ambition above their creation’s well-being?
Edison Studios, owned by American Prometheus Thomas Edison himself, gave us the first known film adaptation of Frankenstein in 1910, a 13-minute silent short directed by J. Searle Dawley that truncates the story to the creation of life, the creature’s longing for love from his creator, and his abrupt disappearance. Dawley’s version tackles the challenge that James Whale would later address more fully in his 1931 adaptation: making literal the moments of creation Shelley merely implied. By leaving the process of gathering and assembling body parts and the method of giving life vague in her text, Shelley left the twisted task of filling in those blanks to the imaginations of her audience—and to these future creators, operating in a medium created decades after her death.
Despite the studio owner’s own innovations with electricity, Dawley envisions an alchemist’s method for the birth of Frankenstein’s creature, featuring chemicals, billowing smoke, and a body and bones formed in thin air. It is not until Whale’s 1931 film that we get the far more iconic and electric visual language that I was so familiar with without ever having seen Whale’s work.
In Whale’s feature film version, with a 71-minute run time, we have a fuller plot but one which still deviates significantly from Shelley’s original source. Here, Walton and his Arctic framing device do not exist, and Frankenstein isolates himself to give life to the creature with the help of his lab assistant who tortures the creation. In self-defense, the creature commits two murders, and by accident, a third, prompting Frankenstein to lead an angry mob to kill the hapless creature.
As the creator and source of a new species in the image of Shelley’s, Whale introduces the visual language and story beats that would reverberate for half a century through sequels, derivatives, and parodies like Brooks’s 1974 Young Frankenstein. Whale’s version, written by Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Farogoh, invented the criminal brain, the laboratory, the lightning, the hunchbacked assistant, and, as the first version with sound, both Colin Clive’s dramatic cry of “it’s alive!” by Colin Clive and, in a significant departure from Shelley’s text, the creature’s now-iconic grunts, delivered flawlessly by Boris Karloff.3
Whale’s Frankenstein became a source itself for a new medium and era, spawning a cultural tradition largely independent from Shelley’s novel yet intertwined with and indebted to it.
Terence Fisher’s 1957 The Curse of Frankenstein, the first in the British Hammer films series, similarly takes inspiration from the soul of Shelley’s novel while establishing its own identity. This version uses a narrative framing device akin to Walton’s in Shelley’s novel, and here, as in the book, there is a question of whether any of the story ever happened at all, or whether the creature was simply a metaphor by way of layered narrators, corrupted memory, and relayed story telling. In this version, as he awaits execution, Frankenstein relates to a priest that he and an assistant created a creature whom Frankenstein then encouraged to do his violent bidding—including killing his potentially pregnant mistress.
Even as it adapts Shelley’s text, Fisher’s version perpetuates Whale’s earlier addition of a corrupted brain, insinuating that if the brain were “normal”, the monster would not be prone to violence. In suggesting that the science of resurrection itself is sound, this implication verges on the obscene, justifying Frankenstein’s non-Promethean ambition and owing his failure simply to circumstance, suggesting not that his crime was playing God, but rather playing God so poorly.
Many versions and interpretations found life throughout the 20th century, their creators choosing to stitch together various parts of the text, Whale’s reimagined story and visual language, and the Hammer films’ psychologically thrilling tradition. At the end of the 20th century, however, we were gifted with a new version marred by its creator’s brazen ambition.
In his 1994 adaptation Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Kenneth Branagh accomplishes a complex and unlikely feat that only Victor could rival: giving life to a garish operatic monster.
Branagh’s adaptation demonstrates the power of a director’s vision. Where screenwriter Frank Darabont (and Shelley) whispered, Branagh went hoarse screaming into a bull-horn.4 The result of this tonal dissonance is, unfortunately, a chaotic film but perhaps one that best resembles Victor Frankenstein’s own mind, plagued by melodramatic excesses of emotion, imagining himself as a living God or a destroyer of worlds—but never as a man.
While hewing closer to Shelley’s story than many earlier adaptations, Branagh’s version emphasizes certain tones in the text and takes liberties as a result. For instance, Victor’s timeline is reimaged, suggesting that his obsession was not with begetting an entire species that would look on him as a creator, but rather with conquering death in vengeance for his mother’s passing during childbirth with his brother. This emphasis makes his goals seem almost righteous, born from a place of love for another rather than the ego suggested in the novel. Victor’s righteous anger at the loss of his mother also informs Branagh’s choice for the creature’s birth: electrified amniotic fluid collected from women in labor. These elements, as well as the reintroduction of Walton’s framing, make for an emotional, operatic structure that is emboldened by a loud, chaotic, dramatic tone throughout the film.
While Branagh deigned to name the film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein even as he added significantly to the source text, his approach to the film truly captures the ambition of Shelley’s Victor, and the resulting creature is certainly yearning to be understood. And while Branagh’s addition to the canon is somewhat controversial, one filmmaker saw the vision in the script and even in the chaos, borrowing from it and many other lives of Shelley’s species to enhance the soul of his own creation.
Part III: The Creature’s Tale
As a product of all the cultural works he has consumed, himself an amalgamation of millennia of cultural ideas, iconography, and phenomena, Guillermo del Toro scavenged all that came before to construct and give life to his own beloved creature in perhaps the most Promethean endeavor yet.
Del Toro has said many times that Frankenstein was a project he dreamed of producing. As a young child, he saw Whale’s film, and that same voraciousness that captivated Shelley’s Victor (and me) gripped him.5 The question of what it is to be human, the power of forgiveness, and the different iterations of the story changing across decades and directors enchanted him. He honed his craft, waiting for the moment that lightning would strike and he could bring his own version to life.
Del Toro’s film is a unique opportunity for a cultural analyst, one in which so many of the descendants of the source text are present and pronounced within a larger text that remains the singular product of the director’s vision. With a profound love for Shelley’s novel, del Toro uses her text as the circulatory system of his film, the natural battery that his Victor (Oscar Isaac) discovers as the key to regeneration and immortality. He embraces Walton in the prologue and epilogue, stages a dialogue between Victor and his creation (Jacob Elordi), and offers the creation the most sympathetic narrative of any filmic adaptation.
For instance, del Toro includes my favorite section of the novel, which Branagh grazes over and Mel Brooks parodies with an uncredited role by Gene Hackman. When the creature is in his infancy, he takes refuge in the store area of a cottage where he can observe an older blind man and his young family over many months. He not only learns language from the family, he learns love, and, crucially, learns to return it by providing for them as they sleep each night. He gathers wood for their fire, builds a pen for their sheep, and protects them, embracing the title they bestow upon him—“Spirit of the Forest”—when they offer gratitude for his invisible help. Although he did not create the family, he certainly risks his safety to care for them and ultimately endures punishment for doing so, much like the Titan god Prometheus.
These scenes of the creature’s first autonomous choices outside of those required for survival are the heart of the novel and del Toro’s adaptation. The creature’s instincts here are diametrically opposed to Victor’s. Where Victor’s drive to conquer death leads him to treat the dead as a renewable resource, excess human tissue and bones as insignificant as rain water, the creature recognizes the inherent beauty in the family’s existence. Where Victor rejects his role as a creator, the creature seeks out and embraces the role of provider. Del Toro’s creature has a profound soul, an enduring empathy, and a desire to love and be loved in ways that best resemble the beautiful being Shelley imagined two centuries ago.
Yet del Toro’s vision is not completely derived from Shelley’s novel; it is also augmented by the many cultural resurrections in the centuries since its publication. From Whale, del Toro takes the vision. The secluded laboratory in a gothic tower, the battery cells and lightning, and the palpably-crazed energy of the creator as he nears success all pay homage to the original source that awakened del Toro’s soul when Colin Clive cried “It’s alive!” The director breathes new life into these images with a carefully constructed color palette, intricate set designs, and meticulously detailed costumes and props, recreating Whale’s aesthetic as filtered through del Toro’s signature style.
From Branagh’s adaptation he embraces the operatic framing. Del Toro’s film is an emotional, romantic epic, dripping in layers of thoughtful touches that some have read as “overstuffed and unwieldy.” But this criticism misses the point. As a patchwork of the lives of the story that came before, del Toro’s film has the loud personality of Branagh’s brazen opera, the chaotic energy of Branagh’s Victor—and his obsession with birth.
As a child, del Toro’s Victor is mistreated by his father (Charles Dance) and adored by his mother (Mia Goth) who, like Branagh’s, dies in labor with his brother. Her death drives Victor’s obsession to conquer death, but her pregnancy, as exemplified by his ivory anatomical figurine of a pregnant woman, drives his obsession with creating life. While these subtexts are evident in the novel, it’s fascinating to see these two later versions develop them as central to Victor’s character. Shelley’s Frankenstein yearned to be a divine creator, but Branagh’s and even more so del Toro’s seem to have the twin goals of creating life and removing the potential dangers of childbirth. Frankenstein’s obsession with the creation of life, however, is purely about the creation itself. Victor finds the Promethean task of providing for his creation unappealing, ironically echoing his father’s parenting style rather than his mother’s.
The righteous fury over losing his mother is not in Shelley’s novel, but it has become a key feature of these two modern renditions of Victor, replacing his original hubris. This shift seems to complicate Victor, centering him as the misunderstood monster poisoned by grief, while also suggesting that the creature’s turn from innate kindness to violent vengeance is perfectly understood as the byproduct of living with the prejudices of man.
Del Toro picked through the muscles and souls of these earlier iterations for the perfect parts to tell the story he wanted to tell. He painstakingly stitched together a beautiful new creature indebted to the past but so fully born in the present. These earlier versions—and more, including other descendants of Whale’s creation and the Hammer films—exist within del Toro’s creature, pumping life, meaning, and interpretation through the veins built by Shelley. Each iteration of the story is an essential piece of the corpus of Frankenstein in our modern public imagination, an amalgamation of philosophies, visuals, and interpretations stitched into a perfect, immortal cultural behemoth.
To complement the film’s debut on the streaming service in November, Netflix released a behind the scenes look at its development called Frankenstein: The Anatomy Lesson. In this “making of” film, del Toro says that he lived with Shelley’s creature all his life, but wanted to make him his. He crafted the film with specific artists in mind, from cast to crew, to bring his vision to life. Yet Elordi recounts that that the director’s vision was constantly evolving: “The idea on set he had every day was that the movie will reject what it doesn’t want and it will keep what it wants.”
Del Toro was never under the illusion that he could guide the film in a direction it did not want to go. While Whale reinvented Shelley’s tale entirely, Fisher laced his version with vague intrigue, and Branagh dominated his film severely, del Toro listened to his creation as it was born. Instead of restraining it as Victor does his own creature, del Toro embraced it, honoring the many constituent parts lending their souls and structures to his newest addition to Shelley’s immortal species.
Finale
Cultural reception studies ask us to think of culture as a living being, a creature with a life as old as earth and water. Artists, writers, filmmakers, creators of all sorts mix these foundational elements together to beget new species that procreate and fill generations with stories, characters, and immortal ideas. And our task, as cultural historians, is to make sense of those lineages present in our cultural imagination.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein offers an exemplary lens into the life cycle of one of the oldest stories in recorded mythologies: that of the creator and his progeny. The dilemma the creator faces is whether to nurture his creation, as Prometheus, or neglect it, as Victor, because whether he regrets it or not—it’s alive.
Lobby card for James Whale’s Frankenstein, 1931, Universal Studios, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- I read Mary Shelley’s 1831 version in which Victor’s faults are largely in his attempt to play God, as opposed to the 1818 version in which his primary fault seems to be in his choice to neglect the creature post-birth. While this neglect is in both, some argue that the later version offers a more sympathetic character in Victor – a position I find difficult to stomach.
- Richard Brinsley Peake, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, 1823. https://english.unl.edu/sbehrendt/texts/Presumption/presump.htm
- While Whale’s film was supremely influential for future filmic versions of the character including in its own canonical universe, perhaps the most interesting descendant of this film is Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters – itself an adaptation of the novel Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram. In this 1998 film about the end of Whale’s fascinating life, Whale (Ian McKellen) attempts to make a monster of his gardener Clay (Brendan Fraser) while reflecting on his complicated life and works. Through McKellen’s exceptional performance and Condon’s own adaptation of a novel using Shelley’s work as a meta-narrative framing his analysis of Whale’s film, Gods and Monsters augments the Frankenstein tradition born from Whale’s work. By exploring the director’s life as an openly gay man in 1930s Hollywood and how his apparent PTSD from service in World War I impacted his filmmaking style, Gods and Monsters added significant layers to Whale’s 1931 film that I did not pick up on. For instance, Condon’s film interprets the campy humor in the horror as a way of processing the horrors Whale saw in World War I, offering a lens on the film that deepens the sympathies of Whale’s creature and grounds the film even more firmly in its early 20th century context.
- The resulting film is something Darabont called “the best script I ever wrote and the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” “The director who hates Kenneth Branagh with a passion: ‘The worst movie I’ve ever seen’” Far Out Magazine, January 21, 2025, https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/director-who-hates-kenneth-branagh-with-passion/ Accessed November 29, 2025.
- ”Guillermo del Toro on ‘Frankenstein’s’ Epic Scale and the Film’s Message of Forgiveness: ‘It’s the One We Don’t Hear Often Enough’” Variety, November 7, 2025. https://variety.com/2025/film/news/guillermo-del-toro-frankenstein-epic-scale-forgiveness-message-1236571521/. Accessed November 29, 2025.