My Frankenstein, My Self: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025)

Frankenstein. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Perf. Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, Charles Dance. Netflix, 2025. Adaptations often function as complex systems, difficult to disentangle from their many influences, but attempting to unpack filmmaker Guillermo del Toro from his own cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein seems an unimaginable endeavour. Long before the production and release of his October 2025 film, del Toro defined himself as spiritually connected to, and perhaps even constituted by, the classic tale. At age seven, after Catholic mass on a Sunday afternoon, he first watched James Whale’s 1931 classic film starring Boris Karloff, an experience he characterizes as profoundly religious, causing him to adopt the creature as personal avatar and messiah (Fresh Air). Frankenstein, in its many forms, fundamentally altered him from that dramatic turning point, guiding both his life and later his filmmaking. If ‘All art is self-portraiture’, as del Toro begins his introduction to The New Annotated Frankenstein (2017), then his films can be understood as recurring reinterpretations of Frankenstein, which he admits to being present and pervasive in all of his movies (Fresh Air).