Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) has long stood as a warning against humanity’s desire to play God. Yet Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 adaptation transforms Shelley’s Gothic anxiety into something far more intimate — a meditation on empathy, corporeality, and the moral obligations of creation. Across his body of work, from Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) to The Shape of Water (2017), del Toro has dismantled the boundary between the beautiful and the grotesque, revealing monsters as mirrors of human fragility.
From Gothic cautionary tale to ethical intimacy
His Frankenstein continues this trajectory, reframing horror as tenderness and tragedy as moral revelation. In doing so, del Toro aligns with recent feminist interpretations of monster romance that reimagine such narratives as metaphors for “women embracing the ugliness that society rejects”, according to one X (formerly Twitter) user. By placing empathy at the heart of monstrosity, he replaces Shelley’s cautionary myth of divine punishment with an ethical vision of compassion and reciprocity.
Shelley’s Creature, eloquent yet reviled, exemplifies the loneliness of moral consciousness in an unfeeling world. Feminist readers have drawn parallels between his rejection and women’s experiences of devaluation, observing that “women understand being abused and humiliated” and therefore identify with the monstrous (Anonymous, 2025a).
Del Toro visualises this empathy through his recurring motif of the connection between woman and monster. In The Shape of Water, Elisa’s love for the Amphibian Man transforms social taboo into redemption; similarly, in Frankenstein, Elizabeth’s (played by Mia Goth) first encounter with the Creature (played by Jacob Elordi) becomes an act of salvation yet also maternal.
The scene where Elizabeth discovers the Creature chained beneath Victor’s estate exemplifies this; the soft flicker of candlelight falls on his patchwork skin as she kneels and whispers, “Who hurt you?” This moment reverses the flow of empathy in the narrative: the human woman recognises the humanity within the monster. Through this, del Toro redefines the central relationship. As the film progresses, Victor (played by Oscar Isaac) grows increasingly inhuman in his isolation and ambition, while the Creature, through suffering and compassion, becomes more human. Humanity, del Toro insists, is not a matter of form or intellect but of emotional reciprocity.
The feminine gaze and the emotional economy
This imbalance between creator and creation resonates with Social Exchange Theory (SET), which posits that relationships are evaluated based on the balance of rewards and costs. Victor seeks the ultimate rewards — power, recognition, immortality — defeating the impossible – death and yet refuses the emotional costs of responsibility, empathy, and care. The Creature, conversely, bears all the costs — suffering, vulnerability, and yearning — while gaining no reward. Del Toro visualises this emotional transaction in the laboratory sequence at 00:15:00, when Victor stands amid cold blue light and mechanical apparatus.
The camera moves in slow, deliberate circles around him, isolating his silhouette from the pulsing wires and the inanimate body on the table. This sterile environment, where electricity becomes a substitute for intimacy, visualises the failed exchange: Victor’s knowledge yields power and human logic but drains empathy. Creation becomes an emotional economy devoid of reciprocity — an act of control rather than care.
This imbalance is reflected in del Toro’s cinematic gaze. Rejecting the voyeurism of what Mulvey (1975) termed the “male gaze,” del Toro employs a “feminine gaze” that prioritises tenderness and identification. His close-ups of the Creature’s glassy eyes and bandaged body transform the monstrosity into a vessel of emotional truth. Online critic @joelmillerrs (2025) describes how women “long for kindness, morality, and goodness” and can see these virtues even in the monstrous.
Del Toro translates this sentiment visually. In one still shot from the Creature’s escape, the Creature instinctively feeds a deer a small berry, one side of his face illuminated. At the same time, the other disappears into shadow — a metaphor for divided humanity. In contrast, Victor’s later scenes are dominated by metallic hues and harsh light, where he observes his creation with moral detachment. Through this shift in lighting and framing, del Toro turns empathy itself into cinematic language: the warm gaze of understanding becomes the film’s proper illumination.
Corporeality, faith, and redemption in Del Toro`s Frankenstein
The connection between empathy and corporeality deepens through del Toro’s theological imagery. One X user observed that Frankenstein’s Creature mirrors Christ through his side wound, symbolising a counterfeit incarnation of divine creation. Del Toro magnifies this symbolism by grounding divinity in the body itself. Early into the movie, Victor discovers that “the key to life lies in the spine and nerves”, establishing the spine as a sacred conduit between flesh and spirit. Later, Elizabeth’s wedding dress, designed with vertebrae-like patterns (visible around 01:40:00), transforms costume into a theological metaphor: love and death are sewn together. By intertwining physiology and spirituality, del Toro turns creation into an act of emotional and theological exchange.
This fusion of the sacred and the sensual also reflects the film’s cinematic heritage. Letterboxd (2025) identifies Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975), Casanova (Fellini, 1976), The Duellists (Scott, 1977), The Devils (Russell, 1971), and Amadeus (Forman, 1984) as del Toro’s principal influences. Each of these films examines the intersection of beauty, corruption, and moral decay — concerns that permeate Frankenstein. Around 01:15:00, the opulent ballroom scene, with its candlelit symmetry and rich colour palette, recalls the visual precision of Barry Lyndon, while its emotional emptiness evokes Victor’s moral decay.
The religious hysteria and erotic grotesqueness of The Devils echo through the churchyard resurrection scene (00:18:00), where science and blasphemy converge. The decadent genius of Amadeus haunts Victor’s creative spiral, culminating at the moment at 01:55:00 when he gazes at his dying creation, realising that he has forged his own spiritual ruin. Del Toro’s aesthetic choices thus serve the same moral structure underpinning Shelley’s novel: beauty and monstrosity, knowledge and empathy, are inseparable forces in the human condition.
This synthesis of feminist empathy, psychological exchange, and theological inversion culminates in del Toro’s portrayal of redemption through compassion. As in Pan’s Labyrinth, where innocence redeems brutality, and The Shape of Water, where love transcends species, Frankenstein locates salvation in understanding. In the final act (02:05:00), as the Creature cradles Victor’s body beside the frozen lake, the scene unfolds in near silence.
The light fades from cold blue to warm amber as the Creature whispers, “You could have loved me.” The spine motif reappears subtly in the background, faintly glowing — the symbol of life, empathy, and connection. Here, del Toro completes the emotional transaction that defines the film: the Creature, who once bore all the costs of creation, offers the reward of forgiveness. Through his compassion, the imbalance between maker and made is finally reconciled.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein thus unites feminist empathy, psychological theory, and religious imagery into one cohesive moral anatomy. His adaptation transforms Shelley’s Gothic horror into an ethical examination of emotional economy, demonstrating that love, like creation, comes at a price.
Social Exchange Theory clarifies what del Toro renders in light and motion: relationships fail when rewards are pursued without accepting the costs of vulnerability. Through the feminine gaze, del Toro dignifies the monstrous; through religious inversion, he sanctifies suffering; and through empathy, he restores meaning to creation itself. In the end, the Creature’s humanity becomes del Toro’s final revelation — that the most actual horror lies not in what we make, but in our failure to love what we make.
References:
xAnonymous (2025a). Frankenstein is sparking a surge in people seeking female monster-human romance, X (formerly Twitter), November 8.
Anonymous (2025b) @joelmillerrs: Women long for kindness, morality, and goodness…, X (formerly Twitter), 8 November.
Ascent, S. (2025). The story of Frankenstein also portrays man’s Promethean attempt to mimic God, X (formerly Twitter), 9 November.
Letterboxd (2025) Five films that influenced Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein [Instagram Story], 10 November.
Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16 (3), pp. 6–18.
SenniWrites (2025). Social Exchange Theory, TikTok, 10 November.
Shelley, M. (1818) Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones.
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