Eagerly anticipated and decades in the making, the new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” from lifelong monster superfan Guillermo del Toro easily soared to the top of Netflix last Friday, after an abbreviated theatrical release. Racking up more than 29 million views by the end of the weekend, it was the streaming service’s top English-language movie in 72 countries, and the numbers suggest serious rewatch energy. It’s easy to see why: This newest iteration of the gothic 19th-century tale matches its broad embrace of genres — horror, romance, science fiction and a hero’s journey — with del Toro’s obsessive craft and near-religious devotion to the source material; the result is a sweeping epic that’s also a tragic and thoroughly human story of parents and children, memory and regret.
People’s surprise at their own thirst for del Toro’s Creature is itself surprising. We are talking about “Frankenstein,” a story that entered the world in 1818, brimming with psychosexual intrigue and outright kink appeal.
What most people seem to be focusing on, though, is how hot Frankenstein’s monster is. Which, to be fair, there is no serious debate about.
As played by Jacob Elordi of “Euphoria,” “Saltburn,” and “Priscilla,” Frankenstein’s Creature has the sharp-featured, otherworldly beauty of David Bowie, the brooding goth intensity of Nick Cave, the style of a Helmut Lang runway model, the height of a good-sized tree, and viewers are responding with bewildered lust. Among this weekend’s headlines: “Netflix’s new Frankenstein is . . . hot?” (Slate), “Jacob Elordi is Frankenstein’s monster. And he’s kind of hot” (CNN) and “Frankenstein’s monster has never been hotter (or more sympathetic)” (Polygon). There’s a TikTok of Elordi as the Creature, naked but for a conspicuously bulging set of bandages, set to Taylor Swift’s “Wood”; another pairs scenes of the Creature and his maker, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) with George Michael’s “Father Figure.” Everyone is thoroughly gagged and not bothering to conceal their lust behind any intellectual pretense.
And you know what? Good for them.
That said, people’s surprise at their own thirst for del Toro’s Creature is itself surprising. We are talking about “Frankenstein,” a story that entered the world in 1818, brimming with psychosexual intrigue and outright kink appeal. It’s got everything: love triangles! queer desire! incestuous undertones! domination and submission! purity and sin! so much flesh! And come on — have we already forgotten that just last year people were being exactly this weird about walking out of Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” harboring an unsettling attraction to the decaying, centuries-old baddie Orlok? At this moment, amid this chaos, having the hots for Frankenstein’s monster doesn’t even crack the top-20 most embarrassing things about you. Joining ICE? Shameful. Informing on your neighbors? Immoral. Using ChatGPT to write your holiday letters? Disgraceful. Horny for one of literature’s most tragic figures? Welcome to the internet.
del Toro’s Creature is an undeniably striking departure from the blocky, lead-footed monster originated in 1931 by Boris Karloff, which went on to become the monster’s Hollywood template. When we meet Victor Frankenstein as an adult, preening and grandstanding during his own disciplinary hearing, there’s no reason to assume he’ll create something beautiful; his purpose-built prototypes are meant to show the mechanics of life after death, but their flayed-open backs and gasping mouths are far too crude to convince the normies of Edinburgh’s medical community that there is merit to Frankenstein’s all-consuming obsession.
(Ken Woroner/Netflix) Mia Goth as Lady Elizabeth Harlander and Jacob Elordi as The Creature in “Frankenstein”
At this moment, amid this chaos, having the hots for Frankenstein’s monster doesn’t even crack the top-20 most embarrassing things about you.
Speaking this week at the Portland Art Museum’s Tomorrow Theater with “Frankenstein”‘s Head of Concept Design Guy Davis and VFX Supervisor Dennis Berard, del Toro wanted to make something clear: His Creature “isn’t eye candy. He’s eye protein.” Indeed, the film emphasizes the sheer amount of labor that goes into building a man: obsessive, single-minded work that finds Victor scavenging corpses from a frozen battlefield, struggling to saw cleanly through bone, mixing and matching parts of half-dismantled bodies in his lab and, at day’s end, stuffing canvas sacks with jumbles of discarded heads and limbs and heaving them down a curving marble chute to the sea below.
But the result is riveting. Pale as milk (Frankenstein’s beverage of choice) and gleaming like alabaster, the Creature is smooth and sculpted; rather than being laddered with heavy stitches, its epidermal patchwork instead resembles kintsugi, the Japanese tradition of piecing together broken ceramics with gold-lacquered seams. As in Mary Shelley’s book, Victor painstakingly sources the components of his modern Prometheus; unlike hers, del Toro’s Frankenstein isn’t repelled by his creation but in awe of it: capturing their first meeting, the camera circles Frankenstein’s blood-red bedchamber as the stunned doctor and his newborn creature take each other in, each mirroring the other’s movements until they are in sync.
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But the Creature’s beauty is also its tragedy. Victor is so enamored of his creation, so bowled over by his own ability to play god, that he finds himself treating it with the same impatience and intolerance that his own father (Charles Dance, still unparalleled in playing taskmasters unable to hide their disappointment in their progeny) treated him when he was a child. All the parts are assembled correctly, but Victor quickly becomes frustrated with the Creature’s seemingly stalled ability to speak, think and reason.
“If Frankenstein’s monster isn’t ugly, it’s not Frankenstein’s monster,” complains the BBC’s Nicholas Barber, one of the few critics speaking out against the Creature’s snackification. In his piece, titled “Why Jacob Elordi’s hunky Frankenstein’s monster is wrong,” Barber declares that del Toro “might well have missed the whole point of the classic book and the iconic creature at its heart.” Endowing Elordi’s creature with such monstrous pulchritude, he contends, makes the film a “muddle.”
(Ken Woroner/Netflix) Jacob Elordi as The Creature in “Frankenstein”
This makes me think that perhaps Barber’s allegiance to Frankenstein originalism has caused him to overlook that Elordi’s sexy beast is far from the first on the scene. The sheer number of Frankenstein adaptations, riffs and remixes have made dishy characterizations of the monster a pop-culture staple. The modern antecedents of Elordi’s soulful, long-haired Creature include the scorned, vengeful John Clare (Rory Kinnear) of the Showtime series “Penny Dreadful;” the cleft-chinned, Fabio-esque monster essayed by Aaron Eckhart in 2014’s graphic-novel adaptation “I, Frankenstein;” the toothsome Luke Goss of 2004’s Hallmark Channel (yes, really) miniseries; the Frankensteinian subplot of 2013’s “American Horror Story: Coven” that featured Kyle Spencer (Evan Peters), as an undead, all-American assemblage of frat boy corpses; and Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, in a pitched battle of hotness, who alternated the roles of creator and creature in Danny Boyle’s 2011 stage adaptation.
Nevertheless, audiences for del Toro’s “Frankenstein” seem to get that Elordi’s looks don’t structurally change the narrative trajectory. Victor doesn’t reject his creation for being physically repellent; he spurns it due to his own inability to teach what he wants it to know. He’s repulsed less by the Creature’s appearance than by the way it replicates his own memories of parental rejection, and it’s not disgust but guilt that overtakes him when he recognizes that he neither considered nor planned for what came after his scientific triumph. And the fact that the woman he loves — Elizabeth (Mia Goth), his brother’s amateur-entomologist fiancée — is instantly attuned to the Creature’s need to be loved sends Victor into a destructive, self-defeating rage that leaves his own body mangled and helpless. The more beauty others see in his Creature, the more the formerly swaggering, dynamic Victor resents its creation.
Barber looks at Elordi’s Creature and sees the man, but the tragedy of Frankenstein’s creature is that once it’s out in the world, it is alienated not because it’s ugly but because it’s unfamiliar. This is one reason the new “Frankenstein” feels simultaneously eternal and timely: An inability to look beyond difference is a guarantee of seeing monsters at every turn. Perhaps our hot monsters have a higher purpose, reminding us that embracing the unfamiliar helps to keep us human.
