BARS Blog

In this post, we welcome Dr Jodie Marley back to the BARS blog to discuss a handful of approaches to Guillermo del Toro’s recent adaptation of Frankenstein, starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, and Mia Goth. If you would like to write for the ‘Romanticism Now’ blog series, or any other series on the blog, please email Amy Wilcockson (comms officer) and Chloe Wilcox (comms fellow) at britishassociationromantic@gmail.com.

(Contains spoilers for the 2025 Frankenstein film)

Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein adaptation received mixed reactions in my Romanticist circles. Rather than detail my personal response to the film, I hope to introduce several themes I’ve observed in del Toro’s adaptation process. This piece thus represents some initial ways to approach the film’s engagement with Mary Shelley and her novel, and some starting points for further criticism.

1. Guillermo del Toro’s Oeuvre

Perhaps the most telling key to Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein film is his self-identification with Mary Shelley, both detailing his own childhood trauma and describing William Godwin as a difficult father (Loughrey, ‘How Guillermo del Toro…’). Many of del Toro’s films focus on early-life trauma, adapted from his own lived experiences (Balanzategni 2015, 76-7). Frankenstein is characteristic of the director’s past work, with Victor’s turbulent upbringing by an abusive father (a departure from Shelley). Yet Victor’s mother, in Shelley’s and del Toro’s versions, is a model for his relationships with women. Shelley’s novel opens as Elizabeth takes on his mother’s role looking after the Frankenstein family, and later, Victor dreams about kissing his dead mother/Elizabeth, (2018, 27, 37).

Elizabeth, in the novel, only meets the Creature once (2018, 149). In del Toro’s film, she represents a formative influence, alternately acting as a mentor figure and romantic interest. Elizabeth’s relationship with the Creature in the film is truer to her relationship with Victor in the novel. This may be partly due to her engagement to Victor’s brother in the 2025 adaptation. This is another source of familial tension absent from Shelley, which further isolates Victor in the film.

Elizabeth’s romantic association with the Creature is never fully realised. She represents the latest in del Toro’s tradition of pairing socially ostracised women with kind-hearted, though outwardly ‘monstrous’ men. Frankenstein often feels like a spiritual remake of del Toro’s earlier Shape of Water (2017), where a mute cleaner, Elisa, falls for a water-tank-imprisoned amphibian man at a secret research facility. Elisa, like Elizabeth, teaches the man she cares for how to communicate. Both women are, ultimately, doomed by their relationships with monster-men. An early, less tragic example of this del Toro trope is the relationship between the eponymous demon Hellboy and telekinetic Liz in both the 2004 film and its 2008 sequel. In Hellboy II, Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) plays on a background television during one of the couple’s arguments (Ward 2014,12).

 Perhaps these women’s similar names are coincidental. Del Toro’s consistent reference to Frankenstein and its adaptations as inspiration for his films, however, is certain. Shaw details the impact of Whale’s 1930s films on the director, who also required his Cronos (1993) crew to watch 1957’s Curse of Frankenstein before shooting (Shaw 2013, 35-8). Considering the above context, 2025’s Frankenstein may not be del Toro’s first adaptation of Shelley’s novel.

• Gender and Doubles

Doubling is prevalent in Shelley’s novel. The Creature is a double of Victor, and Elizabeth is the double of Victor’s mother. Del Toro expands the novel’s feminine doubling, with Mia Goth assuming the roles of both Victor’s mother and Elizabeth. Goth appears in facial prosthetics and a dark wig to ‘double’ Oscar Isaac, who plays her son.

Perhaps the most unexpected doubling of the 2025 adaptation is Elizabeth as a representation of Mary Shelley herself. Del Toro’s film gives Elizabeth scientific interests, like Shelley (Groom 2018, xx; Smith 2016, 71). Shelley’s early description of the character as a ‘summer insect’ becomes Elizabeth’s interest in the study of insects (2018, 21). This is visually codified by beetle-shaped jewellery and a patterned green dress evoking a beetle exoskeleton on the front and the spinal nerve points on Frankenstein’s galvanisation diagram at the back. The film’s Scottish setting, which only appears briefly in the novel, has several significances for the period. It situates the film in the aftermath of the Scottish Enlightenment’s scientific advancements in Edinburgh (Broadie and Smith 2019, 6). A gallows scene wherein Victor assesses the condemned’s bodies for his project, evokes the city’s trend of bodysnatching, and the grave-robbing of Edinburgh’s Burke and Hare (Smith 2016,78-9). Finally, it recalls Shelley’s time growing up in the country (2018, Appendix A [1831], 173).

Elizabeth, as Shelley’s double, represents an idealised (and fictional) Romantic-era female polymath. She, as the Creature’s true ‘mother’, doubles Shelley’s pop cultural status as the ‘mother’ of science fiction and the Gothic, and thus of Frankenstein’s reception history.

• The Latin American Gothic

Whilst prevalent in contemporary literary and film studies, the Latin American Gothic has received less critical engagement in Romantic scholarship. One may, indeed, question the relevancy of this area of study to a film set in Europe like Shelley’s novel. Yet to situate Frankenstein in its Latin American context as an adaptation by one of the most historically successful Mexican filmmakers, is to open a rich new critical context little explored to date in Romantic studies.

Shelley’s novel references the colonisation of Mexico via Volney’s Ruins of Empires (2018, 36, 87). Frankenstein, as a staple Gothic text, is referenced across Latin American Gothic criticism (2018, 97, 238; 2020; 5, 73-4, 112, 115). Another key study, Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture: The Americas, opens with discussion of del Toro’s Cronos (Edwards and Vasconcelos 2016, 1).

Del Toro is a proud Mexican filmmaker, who cast actors with Latin American roots for two of his three Frankenstein protagonists: Oscar Isaac (Cuban Guatemalan) and Mia Goth (Brazilian Canadian). Isaac explained del Toro’s casting Latin American actors in main roles as a deliberate choice (Pappademas, ‘How Oscar Isaac Made Frankenstein New Again’). The political implications of the casting in 2025’s US political context may be summarised with Isaac’s statement on the film’s production: ‘immigrants, baby, we get the job done!’ (Quoted in Lumba, ‘Oscar Isaac Hail[s] Immigrants During Gotham Awards Acceptance Speech’).

Del Toro’s adaptation presents a Victor Frankenstein of colour building a (literally) stark-white Creature. This dynamic itself presents another doubling effect, mirroring the film’s production: a Latin American process of rebuilding and retelling a European story. Del Toro stitches together the pieces of past Frankensteins, from Whale to Hellboy, to create an adaptation faithful to his own unique vision.

Dr Jodie Marley

Dr Jodie Marley (she/her) is an early-career scholar and was recently a 2025 Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She publishes on Romantic receptions, national Romanticisms, the crossover of literature and the visual arts, spiritual cultures, and gender and sexuality. Her monograph William Blake’s Mysticism was published by Palgrave in January 2026.

References

• Jessica Balanzategui, ‘The Child Transformed by Monsters: The Monstrous Beauty of Childhood Trauma’ in The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro, ed. John W. Morehead (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2015), 76-92.
• Alexander Broadie and Craig Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
• Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz (eds), Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2018).
• Justin D. Edwards and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos (eds), Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture: The Americas (New York: Routledge, 2016).
• Antonio Alcalá González and Ilse Bussing López (eds), Doubles and Hybrids in Latin American Gothic (New York: Routledge, 2020).
• Clarice Loughrey, ‘How Guillermo del Toro, Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi made the horror movie of the year’, The Independent, 4^th November 2025 https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/frankenstein-netflix-interview-jacob-elordi-b2857243.html?lid=slvt6yftj4mw
• Frederick Marvin Lumba, ‘Oscar Isaac Hail[s] Immigrants During Gotham Awards Acceptance Speech: “We Get the Job Done”’, International Business Times, 2^nd December 2025 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/isaac-guatemalan-one-many-immigrants-working-hollywood-1759624
• Alex Pappademas, ‘How Oscar Isaac Made Frankenstein New Again’, GQ, 10^th November 2025 https://www.gq.com/story/oscar-isaac-gq-cover-story-interview-men-of-the-year-2025
• Deborah Shaw, The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo Del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, ed. Nick Groom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Andrew Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
• Glenn Ward, ‘“There Is No Such Thing”: Del Toro’s Metafictional Monster Rally’ in The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, ed. Davies et al (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 11-28.