What’s Past is Prologue: Understanding Frankenstein's “Monster”
Nina Nelson ’28
I recently watched Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025), a film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. It stars Jacob Elordi as The Creature, a monster created from various body parts harvested from stolen corpses, and Oscar Isaac as his creator, the experimental scientist Victor Frankenstein. Beyond its breathtaking symbolism, cinematography, and use of colors, the movie provided a refreshing and realistic take on not only the tragic figure of The Creature but the circumstances that led to its unfortunate creation.
In its first minutes of life, the unnamed creature is portrayed as strikingly childlike. Although possessing the body of an adult man, we see the creature discover its own hands, get scared by the sunlight, and attempt to touch an open flame. Like a baby, it relies on its creator, Victor Frankenstein, for essentially everything. Yet, almost instantaneously, Victor chains the creature up and leaves someone intellectually akin to a newborn by itself.
As time goes on, The Creature struggles to develop mentally. The Creature not only acts like a child, but it actually becomes like a son to the otherwise childless Victor, and we see a cycle of generational paternal neglect renewed. We watch a frustrated Victor grow increasingly resentful and violent towards the creature– the same creature that never asked to be created and was brought to life simply to satisfy Victor's morbid curiosity. Victor beats the creature and punishes it for not being able to speak. While this treatment is abhorrent, Del Toro quickly instills sympathy in the audience, showing us Victor's early life with a neglectful and abusive father violently suppressive of any other interests besides medicine. We watch a young Victor get repeatedly hit by his father for forgetting medical terms, and see that he was left absolutely no room to discover his passions independently. Naturally, Victor himself develops his own obsession with proving his medical and scientific capabilities, eventually leading him to give life to The Creature. As Victor admits shortly after his father’s death, his driving goal is to “surpass my father in vision and in reach.”
But because Victor’s father is dead, this goal is an impossible standard. What does it mean for Victor to surpass his father if his father is not there to validate Victor’s achievement? Victor is left to his own devices to determine if he will ever be enough and evidently doesn’t know when to stop.
It is only after the creature escapes the “care” of Victor that we see him progress both physically and intellectually. Finally free from Victor’s abuse and neglect, he learns to speak, read, and have control over his body. The film invites us to look past The Creature’s surface level grotesqueness and instead examine the factors that shaped it. Indeed, The Creature itself eventually begins to understand those factors, turning on its maker with anger, resentment, and violence. As the events of this story unfolds, a question is posed – to what extent is it ever really possible to escape the shackles of your upbringing?