Credit...Photo illustration by Hannah Whitaker

In Guillermo del Toro’s new version, the answer lies in how deeply it explores the relationship between creator and created.

• Oct. 31, 2025

It is, perhaps, the most famous origin story in literature, and it begins with blood-red snow falling from the sky. The year 1816 brought forth freakish weather set off by the explosion of a volcano in Indonesia. Blizzards battered New England in June. Rivers swelled and filled with the bodies of drowned animals. Crops failed, hay rotted, typhus raged. In Paris, the pamphleteers warned of the end of the world.

In Switzerland, near Lake Geneva, heavy summer rains forced a group of friends to huddle indoors at the Villa Diodati. To amuse themselves, they competed to see who could come up with the most terrifying tale. Their little circle had been named “the league of incest” by the British press, not entirely without reason. Among their ranks was “mad, bad” Lord Byron, who was said to have gotten a touch too close to a half sister. Also in residence: the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and a young woman who was decidedly not the very pregnant Mrs. Shelley. This pale girl of 18 with a bright blaze of hair and a new baby in her arms (Percy’s) was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

The Villa Diodati still stands, looking like a slice of wedding cake among the tall trees. It appears to bear no mark of its history, of the evening Mary reported a curious waking dream: “I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”

Out of that initial vision emerged “Frankenstein,” the tale of a young scientist intent upon discovering the secret of life. He collects body parts from the charnel houses, stitches them together and by mysterious means animates his creation. Mary filled 11 notebooks with a strong, slanted hand that races down the page, the words tipping so close to the line that they look driven by a strong wind. It is a book full of rain, full of the storms and electricity in the air — the theories of galvanism, the stirrings of the abolitionist movement — all of which its young author followed keenly.

The novel is made up of three autobiographies, each one nested in another, like a set of Russian dolls — of the sea explorer Robert Walton, the scientist Victor Frankenstein and Victor’s creature. We begin at sea, with Robert, who has embarked on an expedition to the North Pole when he comes across Victor, battered and close to death. He has been hunting and trying to kill his creature, who has turned deadly.

It is the creature’s account, his eloquence, that lies at the heart of the book. His story begins with the very kindling of his consciousness — we encounter, perhaps for the first time in literature, the memoir of an infant. He narrates how his senses were, at first, deliriously muddled, how he came to identify them, to name cold and pain. He realizes he is alone, and he cries. Abandoned, he wanders. He finds a place to conceal himself, where he can spy on a family. Watching them, he is comforted; he learns to speak, to read. He understands what he is.

He tracks down his maker, pleads for a companion, some creature like him, to ease his loneliness. Victor agrees to make him a mate, but he feels a sudden revulsion and tears the female monster’s body to pieces. Mad with grief, the creature destroys nearly every person Victor loves. At the end of the novel, Victor dies on the ship. The creature comes aboard, mourns him and wanders away, to prepare his own pyre.

“Frankenstein” is a book about the mystery of creation — but what accounts for its own, this strange and desolate work of the imagination? Mary herself addressed this question in the introduction to the 1831 edition; how did she, a teenage girl who never had a day of formal schooling, “dilate upon so very hideous an idea”? And what accounts for its longevity? Byron and Percy Shelley feel like relics, but Mary’s work is still read, recast, passionately debated. Reportedly the most assigned college text in the United States, “Frankenstein” has been hailed as revolutionary and reactionary, feminist and drearily misogynist. It is interpreted as thinly veiled autobiography, a warning against scientific hubris, a critique of the French Revolution. It has been described as a book about fathers and sons but also might be read as the keenest expression of a daughter’s longing for her mother.

The creature appears in at least 400 films, and this season brings another, “Frankenstein,” from Guillermo del Toro, the Oscar-winning director of “The Shape of Water.” It is the movie he has been trying to make his entire career. “My Everest,” he calls it. “Every movie I’ve done is the training wheels for this one.”

“Frankenstein” is a story famous for its depiction of the anxiety of creation, but its endurance comes from its own vibrating strangeness, the swivel of its sympathy between creator and creature, father and son. To bring Mary Shelley’s monster back to life, some 200 years later, del Toro had to plumb the past — hers and his own. “It’s like mudlarking in the Thames,” he told me. “Everything that is worth finding is at the bottom. There is a dense layer of tarlike mud in which she has buried her mother, feeling despised by her father, hated by her stepmother, all these things are there.” Shelley has her scientist animate the scraps of corpses to show us what we already know and pointedly avoid: how the dead walk among us and ghosts can edge out the living, how we struggle to emerge from the long, obliterating shadows of our origins.

The first time I met Mary Shelley, she was wearing a crisp white nightgown, with her bright hair brushed back over her brow. She was sitting at her desk — pen lifted, midthought — in waxen reverie, as del Toro knelt before her to delicately adjust the pillow beneath her bare feet.

This life-size silicone statue of Shelley occupies a large room on the second floor of a home in Santa Monica, Calif., that del Toro uses to store and display a vast collection of sculptures, specimens and props from his films. He calls it Bleak House, and like Dickens’s original, it is “delightfully irregular,” full of wandering little arteries of passageways and hidden rooms, stuffed with skeletons, Pinocchio puppets, family portraits (del Toro as a child, pretending to drink his sister’s blood), 13 separate libraries (e.g., fairy tales, forensics, horror), models of babies floating serenely in jars.

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Guillermo del Toro at Bleak House, home to his vast collection of sculptures, specimens and props from his films.Credit...Ilona Szwarc for The New York Times

On the wall is a framed paint brush that once belonged to James Whale, who directed the classic “Frankenstein” (1931), starring Boris Karloff, responsible for the monster in our minds — the bolts in the neck, the animal way of moving, the muteness. There is a life-size statue of Karloff himself, sitting shirtless in a barber chair, having his makeup applied, while drinking a cup of tea, a small stain of black lipstick on the rim.

Del Toro saw the 1931 film as a monster-mad child, and when Karloff’s face filled the screen, he was transfixed. “That is my Jesus,”* *he thought. *“*That is my patron saint.” He saw himself in the creature’s innocence and awkwardness and ill-fitting suit; he saw the Catholic martyrs in the heavy-lidded eyes rolling back, as if in ecstasy.

Much has been written about how that particular production itself brought together a group of outsiders, how they might have encoded their own alienation into the film — many of them were immigrants, the director was gay and Karloff himself concealed his Anglo-Indian ancestry. Del Toro, too, felt like an outsider. He was bullied mercilessly for growing up blond and wispy, “like little Lord Fauntleroy,” in Guadalajara, Mexico. The monsters he obsessively drew sanctified imperfection, offered some respite from oppressive “mandatory beauty.” They made it acceptable to be hairy, to have crooked teeth, to feel a bit shy, to disappoint.

“I think that ‘Frankenstein’ is maybe the first moment in which we recognize ourselves in the monster,” del Toro told me. “The monstrous and the demonic and terrifying narratives prior to ‘Frankenstein’ were mostly outside forces coming after us. Most of them had a Judeo-Christian sense of good and evil: We were good; the things that were coming after us were evil.”

We were sitting in the illustration library, talking across the cleared corner of a table, the other half laden with papers, props, figurines, an empty vitrine. He fiddled with a small skull as we spoke. In person, he is gentle and gregarious in his customary black hoodie and the circular, wire-rimmed glasses that seem to magnify his huge blue eyes. He is prone to enveloping hugs, to clapping you on the shoulder with such verve that you will drop everything you are holding, to crying while watching his own films. His sets are said to be joyful places. There are no secrets, says Oscar Isaac, who plays Victor Frankenstein in the new film. “I like it!” del Toro will roar when a shot pleases him; if not, merrily, “That was shit!”

When we met, in late summer, he was finalizing the cut of the film. Although deeply influenced by James Whale’s interpretation, his own version returns the story to its roots, to Villa Diodati. There are three editions of the novel: the 1818 version (published anonymously in three volumes, albeit heavily edited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who tried to “elevate” the language), the 1823 version (published under Mary Shelley’s name and edited by her father; for a time the most commonly read edition), the 1831 version (edited by Mary Shelley in light of public criticism and tamed into lifelessness; avoid).

Del Toro’s interest, however, lies in another document. It is the manuscript he is most drawn to, the original text that Mary began writing as an 18-year-old — the “most impulsive and the least ‘organized’” of the bunch, he calls it. It is the purest distillation of her voice and intentions, before she added the heavy allusions to “Paradise Lost” that mark the published editions. “What I love is the way a teenager asks questions,” he said. “I don’t need John Milton superimposed upon that.” Who else but a teenager could pose the creature’s questions with such raw fury and need: “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?”

Del Toro takes considerable liberties with the plot — his creature is immortal; he introduces a love triangle, of sorts. It’s the spirit of the text that interests him, not fidelity. “A text is like a house; you have to move in,” del Toro told me. “What I can do is have the same urgency from my own questions that she had. And use the same questions to interrogate my own biography, which is that I’m the son of a man that tried to learn to be a father, and I tried to learn to be a father.”

The film explains Victor’s cruelty by giving him a cruel father of his own, a doctor who spits his son’s name with contempt and whips his face for making mistakes at his lessons. When Victor’s mother dies in childbirth, he holds his father responsible for not saving her. His scientific ambition is competitive, to bring life forth where his father failed.

In the novel, Victor is repelled by the creature’s ugliness — the “shriveled complexion, and straight black lips.” But del Toro, who got his start doing monster makeup, wanted to make the creature beautiful. Played by Jacob Elordi, who studied infant development and Butoh movement for the role, his motions are languid. Like a baby, he is entranced by his own hands; when tied up, he plays with his chains. His skin is not the brutal patchwork of sutures, as often depicted, in the 1994 Kenneth Branagh version, for example, but reminiscent of cracked porcelain, almost kintsugi — the Japanese art of pottery repair, in which gold or silver lacquer is used to accentuate the breaks.

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Credit...Ken Woroner/Netflix

In the film, Victor is dazzled by his creation. He flings open the shutters and lets light fall on the creature’s body; he demonstrates how to take in its warmth. “Sun, sun!” Victor cries (although it very well could be “Son, son”). It is only later that he will grow frustrated with the creature. It won’t learn fast enough; it whimpers. Victor will mock and taunt him, beat him. But not yet; in that first meeting, he touches his creature with wonder.

Until now, del Toro’s films have hewed to a tidy moral calculus. The villain is invariably the beautiful man in the nice suit, the one with the sharp part in his hair and the shiny boots. He torments the vulnerable within reach — his wife, children, subordinates — but his threat looms larger; we are led to look at how the desire to contain fear or conceal weakness can become an impulse toward power and control. Del Toro’s heroes are virtuous, bruised, misunderstood — innocents who possess little language and a great spiritual power.

But in “Frankenstein,” we feel the effort to embody both father and son more completely, to sympathize with them. In his own life, del Toro told me, “I was so busy being a son, I did not realize I was a father.” (He has two daughters, in their 20s.) Victor is endowed with a tragic back story and somewhat exonerated; the creature is given a taste for violence and lightly indicted. This is the complexity of the original text speaking through the film; in the novel, the creature describes his pleasure in killing a child. “We can’t deny the rage of the creature,” del Toro said. “In the past, I would have made him superior to human beings.”

Instead, the film has Victor and his creature double and overlap; they invite the question: Who is the monster?

The walls of Bleak House are painted a dark, internal shade of red — earthy, with a touch of rust. The color follows you — it’s the color of the binding of del Toro’s childhood encyclopedias and the ink in his journals. It finds an echo upstairs, in Mary Shelley’s neatly combed russet hair. When he showed me the room in which he writes — warm and dim and pulsing with the gentle rumbling of a recorded storm — I teased him: “This is a womb. You have returned to the womb.”

“You can really bloom here,” he responded happily, turning a little figurine on a shelf to display it at a more becoming angle. “Like a hydroponic plant.”

When del Toro was a child, his father won the lottery. The family moved into a bright white, very modern mansion, but he spent as much time as he could with his great-aunts in a wonderfully old and spooky home, full of sighing ghosts and visitations. He had waking dreams of goatlike creatures emerging from the wardrobe (he would recreate the scene in “Pan’s Labyrinth”). The great-aunts fussed over and tormented him in turn; one put bottle caps in his shoes, telling him that suffering was a fast-track to penance, which came to a stop only when his mother discovered his bloody socks. His father was perplexed by his introverted, bookish son and seemed to prefer the company of his older, athletic brother. But his mother was a soul mate of a kind — “a bit of witch.” They wrote poetry together, and she taught him to read tarot.

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A statue owned by del Toro of Boris Karloff, who played Frankenstein’s creature in the 1931 film, on set in his makeup chair.Credit...Ilona Szwarc for The New York Times

She was a woman of great imagination and intuition, but “her life was made of regret,” del Toro told me. Her own mother had died giving birth to her. Her father remarried but never recovered. He made his wife a saint and prayed to her. He was never fully sober again. How could the daughter not regard herself as the instrument of his loss? She lived in tentative possession of her own life, which had taken her mother’s. She could not step out of the shadow of her mother, nor could she fight it. Her own motherhood was fraught — she suffered stillbirths and miscarriages, terrible experiences that del Toro recalls learning about as a child.

Listening to him, I had the odd feeling of already knowing this history even though I had not heard it before. He is a filmmaker who nurtures recurring motifs: twisted trees, underground caverns, damaged eyes, enchanted books. Above all there is the figure of a woman who dies in childbirth. A woman in a nightgown who stands up suddenly and is bleeding; babies who are born wrong or too soon. There is an obsessive attentiveness to the precariousness of birth.

“Mary and I have a shorter gap spiritually than you think,” del Toro says. For whose story is this but Mary Shelley’s? Her own mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the principal forerunners of modern feminism and an iconoclast in her time, who spoke and loved freely. She sickened quickly after giving birth to Mary. She could not pass the placenta. A doctor was sent for; he reached into her body and pulled it out, piece by agonizing piece. (Impossible not to link those torn pieces of flesh to Victor assembling his creature.) Puppies were brought to latch at her breasts to draw the milk away for fear it was infected. She died when Mary was not 10 days old.

Her husband, the political philosopher William Godwin, bereft, raised the girl in the shadow of her illustrious mother. He taught her to read, the story goes, by tracing the letters in her mother’s headstone. Mary’s own years bearing children were marked by tragic loss. By age 21, she had married Percy Shelley, borne three children and lost two of them. “Dream that my little baby came to life again,” Mary wrote in her journal in 1815 after losing her first child; “that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day.”

Curiously, there are no mothers in “Frankenstein.” The creature is born out of a man’s scientific ambition, not a woman’s body. The family the creature spies on is missing a mother as well; so is Victor’s betrothed. I have never understood this dogged slaughter of mothers in Shelley’s fiction (motherless characters are common in her subsequent books as well), until del Toro told me of his own mother’s story, how she was blotted out by her mother’s ghost. Absence is more powerful than presence, he explained to me. “Presence is fleeting. Absence is eternal.”

The figure of the dead mother is deep in our DNA, almost a precondition for narrative. Every culture produces ghosts in their own image to reflect their own fears and taboos. But she is found everywhere — a ghost representing a woman who died in childbirth: the Japanese ubume, soaked in blood from the waist down, or the churail, as she is known in India, with her backward turned feet and long unkempt hair, said to lurk at crossroads and burial grounds and (horrifyingly to me as a small child) near toilets. Or consider the missing mothers in fairy tales and children’s literature.

I used to think of the missing mother as precondition for story because only when she — with her penchant for safety and order — was banished could the adventure begin. The opposite might be true: The story coalesces around her lack — preserves it; the adventure leads not away but toward her radiant absence.

How do you depict such absence in film? How can we see that the missing mother saturates everything she has left behind? In del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” Victor’s mother is introduced to us wearing a trailing red veil. When she goes into labor, she reaches for her son with a bloody hand, marking him. After her death, red creeps into his costumes — specifically in his red leather gloves — everything he touches, we see, is stained with her loss. In del Toro’s films, the urge to narrate is always knotted together with a maternal body that holds life and death. In his telling, every story is, at its heart, the story of return.

What makes a monster? Every new version of “Frankenstein” must answer this question for itself. In “Presumption! or the Fate of Frankenstein,” the 1823 play that made the story famous (the novel itself sold poorly), the creature is blue-skinned and wild-eyed. Before he even steps onstage, his unnatural creation has been commented upon — Victor is said to be raising the devil. As soon as he bounds onstage, he is perceived as murderous and powerful, snapping his creator’s sword in two. It’s a softer creature we encounter in the Karloff film, but his monstrosity is also inborn. The doctor’s bumbling assistant breaks into a university classroom and steals the wrong brain — an abnormal, criminal brain — to complete the creature.

In the novel itself, the monster is not born but made — by Victor’s revulsion, his abandonment, his refusal to care for that which he has created. Victor himself experiences brief and awful flashes of guilt. Mary makes a transitive verb out of the word “compassionate.” Listening to the creature’s account, Victor registers that “his words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.”

There are many wounded and hurt children in literature — Dickens’s orphans, Nabokov’s nymphets — but none speaks so clearly, makes their accusations as forcefully as the creature. “Hear my tale,” he insists when at last face to face with his creator. His plaint feels like the basis of so much modern memoir — hear what I have endured. There is an implicit faith in the act of giving one’s testimony, the hope that finding the precise language for pain (“How can I move thee?” the creature asks) might bring forth redress. What feels almost unbearable in his account, even now, is not the injustice he reports, but his need for his creator despite it all. “I am thy creature,” he says. “You my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing?”

Destroy me, the creature says, but hear me first, “and then, if you can and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.” Victor, in turn, curses those hands; he cries out for relief from the sight of this “detested form.” And the creature reaches out to cover Victor’s eyes with his own hands, to spare his creator the sight of himself — “Thus I relieve thee, my creator,” he says, “thus I take from thee a sight which you abhor.” His tale is the story of the unrequited love of the child for the parent — the shame of dependency; the bottomless, almost perplexing willingness to forgive.

Percy Shelley made the fewest edits to this section. It is mostly Mary, alone on the page — that strong, sloping hand. It is the closest, I think, that we can come to hearing her real voice. She is a writer easy to speak for, easy to claim, because she remains so difficult to find. As a child, she reportedly hid behind the sofa when company came, to eavesdrop (much like her creature). The “cold chaste moon” in Percy’s poetry supposedly refers to her, as if her natural tendency was to reflect, not make her own light. As a writer she hid expertly, too, behind the overlapping testimonies of the characters in this book, through whom she titrated the details of her life.

Her journals, especially in her later years, are laconic. The later entries read as if she were trying to erase herself in real time, as if baffled to find herself alive. For she outlived everyone, starting with her mother. Her half sister overdosed on laudanum. Percy’s first wife drowned herself. Percy drowned too, in a sailing accident, not six years into their marriage. Byron died shortly after, of fever in Greece. Only one of her four children survived into adulthood, and he, famously dull. She wrote in her journal, “Seule avec mes tristes souvenirs” (Alone with my sad memories).

There is a mystery in those journals that has long preoccupied scholars. Mary was in the habit of noting daily activities: “1st March Nurse the baby, read ‘Corinne,’ and work.” What does it mean when she indicates that she “worked”? “Work” is noted as distinct from “writing” or “translating,” which she specified explicitly. It is unlikely to refer to housework, because housework would not occur in bursts and then vanish for long periods as “work” does. “Work” erupts unpredictably, at moments when the Shelleys were scrambling for money but also when they could afford a maid; “work” happened in company and did not require solitude, unlike writing, which did. Comparing these dates with Mary’s biography, the historian Nora Crook offered a theory. “Work” might mean “sewing,” for its dates correspond with pregnancies, when layettes and maternity clothes would need to be made, and with other points when clothes needed to be replaced, when worn out or ruined after breastfeeding. “Work,” Crook noticed, corresponded with times of grief, too — when new mourning clothes had to be stitched.

Every work of art is, in some way, about its own creation. Del Toro has always been confused about why the creature’s body had to be made of scraps of corpses. If Victor was so brilliant and could animate flesh, why couldn’t he reanimate an intact body? But this was Shelley’s “work,” in every sense, the piecing and patching together of parts, of sewing the clothes that might bear a body through new life and death, of weaving a story capacious enough to contain her prodigious self-education, the pain of losing her children, her mother’s absence, her father’s abandonment, the exhilaration of thinking alongside her husband and friends. She draws together these strands into unity, stitching them a story of loneliness, vengeance and the possibilities for repair.

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Del Toro in one of the 13 libraries at Bleak House.Credit...Ilona Szwarc for The New York Times

Her sure hands pull the plot very taut at the end. In the final scenes, as creature and creator hunt each other across the Arctic, what does the creature do but leave food for Victor — he nourishes his tormentor. Mary Shelley, let us recall, dedicated this novel to the father who had rejected her for running away with Percy Shelley; the father who sent her stepsister to school but kept her home; the father she would support financially for the rest of his life.

At the end of the novel, the creature is profoundly alone, mourning his creator, preparing to die himself. He evokes Mary Shelley on the stage of her own life, littered with the bodies of her children, her half sister, her husband. She wondered if, in conjuring such loss and loneliness, she had prophesied her own; it might be one explanation for her retreat from the intensity of the imaginative world of “Frankenstein,” why nothing she wrote could match it. “The novel ends up in a really bleak romantic existentialism. And I wanted to end with Frankenstein accepting the son, with the Catholic idea that forgiveness liberates everybody,” del Toro told me, and then put his own spin on a Borges quote: “To forgive is the greatest of gifts or the most violent of punishments.” In the film, there is an embrace, a moment of mutual recognition — and yet something ambiguous lingers.

After walking away, into the sun, del Toro’s creature bows his head — a moment signaling acceptance of his fate, I think. But I wonder if he is remembering, as we are, the morning of his birth, when his creator showed him the same sun, showed him how to take its warmth, those few, fleeting days when he was the source of only wonderment and pride. There is fresh pain in store, none keener than remembering yourself beloved. Is it the cruelty that makes the monster or is it the longing?

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Photo illustration: Prop stylist: Heather Greene. Source photographs: Everett Collection; Niday Picture Library/Alamy; TCD/Prod DB/Alamy.

Parul Sehgal is a critic at large for The Times.

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