.jpg "Frankenstein (2025)")
There have been many versions of Frankenstein on the silver screen, including one of the very first films ever made. This movie did not come out in time for me to review it last year, so I saved it for this year. Now, while this is the first time I have reviewed this, I did watch it back in November. So I really can't count tonight's re-watch as a first-time view.
Frankenstein suffers the same issues as Dracula, in that the novel is rarely portrayed with fidelity on the silver screen, and what most people think of as the story has a lot more to do with the Universal Studios versions from the 1930s and 1940s. That's fine; those movies are classics for a reason, but they are not the story on the page.
Frankenstein (2025)
Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 take is not 100% faithful to the novel, but it comes very, very close. I am inclined to rank this and Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the two best efforts to put Shelley's story on screen. It has occurred to me that a Frankenstein marathon is in order at some point.
Oscar Isaac stars as Victor Frankenstein here, with Jacob Elordi as the Creature. Mia Goth plays both Elizabeth and Victor’s mother, Claire, and Christoph Waltz plays Heinrich Harlander, the arms maker who puts up the money for Victor’s experiments. Harlander is one of del Toro’s more substantial inclusions; he is a wealthy man with his own reasons for wanting to make inroads on death. He is not part of the novel, but that is fine, really.
Waltz is good, as you would expect. He does not have to resort to rants or chewing scenery to make his mark. In Harlander, he has a chance to be charming and intelligent while also being deeply unsettling and vaguely amusing. One gets the sense right away that he is not bankrolling Victor out of any particular faith in the progress of science.
Where del Toro makes his biggest change is with Victor. The original is obsessive and irresponsible enough, but del Toro takes his arrogance and cruelty a step further. Isaac’s version is brilliant and driven, yet damaged by his father and the loss of his mother, and he seems to think that gives him license for all he does. There is an ego to the project as much as a desire to vanquish death.
Which leaves Jacob Elordi’s Creature as the film’s emotional core. Elordi is excellent in the part. What you see at first is something almost childlike, taking in the world through imitation and sensation. But he grows into a creation that is articulate and self-aware, as Shelley intended. Film versions have a habit of losing that; they make the monster out to be stupid when he should be reasoning, reading, and fully comprehending what Victor has made of him.
Del Toro seems to grasp that the real tragedy is not the accidental making of a monster, but rather that Victor has made a person and then shirks his responsibility for him. That is the heart of the novel and why the adaptation works for me.
You will find the Arctic framing device intact, with the narrative set against Captain Anderson’s expedition in the frozen north. It is not exactly as Shelley wrote it, but it has more of the structure and spirit than the typical fare of lightning and torch-wielding villagers.
Then there are the visuals. From the laboratories and machinery to the costumes and bodies, it is all gorgeous, with the kind of beauty mixed with decay that del Toro excels at. Victor’s work is impressive but grotesque.
It is a horror story, to be sure, but not the Creature who is the monster. Victor is. Or at least he creates the conditions for disaster and acts as if it were done to him. The Creature is capable of terrible things, but there is more to it than that.
I was fond of the movie when I saw it in November and even more so the second time around. Being aware of where del Toro has departed from Shelley allows one to see the purpose behind it. It is not a perfect adaptation; perhaps we never will get one. But this one knows the novel, and that is worth something.
.jpg "The Bride! (2026)")
Ok. I want to start out by saying I really loved what this movie was trying to do. I am not 100% sure it always succeeded in doing what it wanted. No worries; the best bits overwhelmed the weaker parts.
This one doesn't fit my theme either, but like last night it was my wife's choice. She sits through these with me, and I have to sit through things like Hot Frosty around Christmas. ETA: I have been informed I will be watching "Christmas at the Zoo" sometime next month.
This movie opens with narration by Mary Shelley. That is quite appropriate, really, and a nice callback to the very original Bride of Frankenstein, and even a little bit of Young Frankenstein. Much like Elsa Lanchester, Jessie Buckley plays both Mary Shelley and the Bride. She also plays Ida, the woman who is reanimated into the Bride. Christian Bale, in his usual chameleon-like display, plays Frankenstein's monster. It was directed and written by Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Mary Shelley provides the opening narration for The Bride! which is a fitting touch, and in its own way a nice nod to the original Bride of Frankenstein where we were treated to Mary, Percy and Lord Byron talking shop over her story. Jessie Buckley is on hand as both Mary Shelley and the Bride. In fact, she appears as three related people: Shelley, Ida, and the resurrected woman who will be the Bride. Christian Bale is in fine chameleon form as Frank, or what you would now call the monster, while Maggie Gyllenhaal has put her stamp on the project as writer and director.
The premise is simple enough. Take the old mythology of Bride of Frankenstein and put it in 1930s Chicago. Frank is in need of company, and he goes to Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to have a creature created for him. They happen upon Ida, a young woman who was murdered by a mobster, brought back to life.
Gyllenhaal poses the obvious question with this: what if the Bride had a movie of her own? What if she were allowed to determine her own identity? In so doing, she makes this less of a straight adaptation and more of a rejoinder to the whole Frankenstein tradition.
Buckley is outstanding. She is not grateful to be put back together, nor will she take it for granted that Frank is her soulmate by virtue of having made her. Her Bride is damaged and sexual, funny and angry, unpredictable and very much alive in spite of herself. She has strong opinions on the matter.
As for Bale’s Frank, you can see the line of descent from Boris Karloff’s Monster far more clearly than in Jacob Elordi’s Creature. He is a lonely, scarred man, weary of being hunted, and the film is well aware that he is carrying decades of cinematic history on his shoulders.
Then there is the setting. 1930s Chicago brings with it a host of gangsters, the press, radical politics, and a city in flux for these two outsiders. The synopsis touts a combustible romance and a cultural movement, and in a way the film is as excessive as that description implies. It can be a weakness at times, but also a strength.
There are scenes where The Bride! seems to be straining to be a Gothic horror, a gangster film, a screwball romance, and a feminist take on Frankenstein all at once. Not every bit of it lands. But I would prefer to see Gyllenhaal go after something with such ambition rather than another serviceable retelling of the monster making for a windmill.
Buckley is what keeps it all in order. She gives the part an identity of its own, quite unlike Lanchester’s character, and that is the point. James Whale gave the Creature a companion when he asked for one; Gyllenhaal wants to know what that companion has to say about it. As it happens, quite a lot.
I like the notion of Buckley playing Mary Shelley too, alongside Ida and the Bride. It draws a line between the author and the women made and remade by others. After Hollywood has been at it for two centuries with their versions of Frankenstein, it is only right the Bride should push back. A clever idea.
Hollywood has "dug up" and remade Mary Shelley so many times.
Don’t get me wrong, not everything in the movie works. The tonal changes are sudden, and at points the characters have to make room for the film’s arguments. I would have liked to have seen it let Frank and the Bride just be for a while.
But when it does work, it is very good. And it is not trying to usurp the original Bride of Frankenstein, which would be a fool’s errand. It is having an argument with it. Far more compelling.
A case of two Frankensteins
It was a happy accident to put these on one after the other; in doing so, you see how they handle the same mythology from opposite ends.
Then there is Guillermo del Toro, who has no trouble going backward. He makes a point of returning to Mary Shelley and the Arctic setting, giving the Creature the intelligence and emotional depth he is due. It is a reminder that the tragedy is Victor's for not owning up to the life he has made.
Maggie Gyllenhaal moves in the other direction. She is concerned with a movie invention, not something from Shelley, and wants to know what transpires once the laboratory is left behind. What if the Bride is not done for? What if she has her own wants and is under no compulsion to love the one who put her together?
One film is about what Frankenstein was, the other about its potential. I have an appreciation for both. Coming off Dracula 2025, it is a relief to be with filmmakers who actually care why these old monsters are worth our time. Gyllenhaal and del Toro, even in their different takes, respect their source material much more than Luc Besson.
Mary Shelly, Feminism and Horror
Of course, before there was Boris Karloff, before there was the Universal monster, and long before Hollywood decided that every Frankenstein story needed a castle full of electrical equipment, there was Mary Shelley. In the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin joined Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where a challenge to write ghost stories ultimately gave us Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Published in 1818, the novel has never really left us.
What I find remarkable is not simply that Shelley was a young woman writing horror in the early nineteenth century, though that is remarkable enough. It is that she understood something about horror that we are still exploring today. The frightening part of Frankenstein isn't merely the reanimated flesh or the unnatural creation of life. It is what happens when someone creates a living being and refuses to take responsibility for it. Victor Frankenstein's greatest sin is not necessarily that he creates a monster or even his hubris, but that he abandons his creation and then refuses to face the consequences.
It is also worth remembering that some of the foundational works of horror were written by women. Mary Shelley helped establish the traditions of both Gothic horror and science fiction, long before those genres acquired their modern names. She wrote about death, obsession, murder, unnatural creation, and the destruction of families, and she did so without sacrificing the emotional and philosophical questions that make the story endure. More than two hundred years later, we are still finding new ways to tell her story. That is a legacy few writers, regardless of genre, can claim.
The Bride of Mary Shelley
There is another connection between Shelley's original novel and both versions of The Bride of Frankenstein that I find especially interesting. In the novel, Victor begins creating a female companion for his Creature but ultimately destroys her before she can come to life. He fears what she might do, whether she would accept the Creature, and what might happen if the two could reproduce. In James Whale's 1935 film, the Bride comes to life, but things don't work out as her creators intended. She takes one look at the Creature and wants nothing to do with him.
There is something wonderfully tragic about that moment. Both Victor and the Creature imagine a female companion who will fulfill their expectations, but neither has considered that she might have expectations of her own. The film gives her very little screen time and even less opportunity to express herself, but her rejection of the Creature becomes the emotional climax of the story. A woman created to be someone's companion chooses otherwise, and everything falls apart.
Now jump ahead ninety-one years to Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! (2026). Here, the Bride is no longer simply a companion created for the Creature. She was a woman named Ida before her death, and when Dr. Euphronius brings her back to life at Frank's request, she becomes something neither of them could have anticipated. She is angry, confused, passionate, violent, and determined to discover who she is. Frank wants someone to love him, and as the two develop a relationship, the Bride is not particularly interested in being defined by his desires. She has her own identity to discover, her own desires, and a whole lot of rage.
What I find fascinating is how the three versions build upon one another. In Shelley's novel, the female Creature is denied existence because Victor fears what she might become. In Whale's film, she appears only briefly, but she is allowed to reject the role assigned to her. In Gyllenhaal's film, she finally becomes the central character, and she is every bit as monstrous, complicated, and unpredictable as the men around her. She isn't a perfect heroine, nor does the film ask us to excuse everything she does. She is a monster, after all. But she is also a person, and that is an important distinction. She is a monster of her own choosing.
I also love the casting connections. Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley in the opening of the 1935 film and the Bride herself. Gyllenhaal takes that idea even further by having Jessie Buckley play Mary Shelley, Ida, and the Bride, with Shelley's restless spirit becoming part of the story itself. Whether you like Gyllenhaal's interpretation or not (and I do), that is a clever way to connect the author to her creation. The woman who wrote the original story is quite literally demanding to be heard through the woman the story has so often left silent.
And perhaps that is what I find most interesting about these films. The horror isn't simply that someone has brought the dead back to life. It is that these creations have their own thoughts, feelings, desires, and wills. The people responsible for creating them seem genuinely surprised when they don't behave as expected.
Mary Shelley was exploring these questions in 1818, and here we are in 2026, still finding new things to say about them. I think that speaks rather well of her original idea.
All from a teenage girl who was challenged to write about monsters.
Or as Mary says in the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. "Why shouldn't I write of monsters?"
NIGHT SHIFT and Jackson Connections
I am not sure where the kind of mad science we see in Frankenstein would find a home in Jackson. The Mauvaiseterre has more than its share of witches, psychics, demons, and ghosts without anyone building from spare parts.
The premise, however, is right at home there. All it takes is a death and someone who will not let it stand. In Jackson, any effort to reverse it would be of a magical order: a parent stumbles upon an antiquated rite, a witch makes an exception to the rules for raising the dead, or a psychic is certain the lost one is within reach.
Perhaps it succeeds. That is when the horror sets in. Not from any malice in the returned, but because death has altered them in ways no one comprehends. You could make that work anywhere. The spectacle is in the making of life; the story is in having to answer for it.
I mean. That is what I have done with Elowen Hale, but chronologically speaking, she isn't born until 2005 or so. So that is still 20 years in the future as far as my Jackson is concerned.
October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 27
First Time Views: 17
.jpg "The Initiation (1984)")
.jpg "Ænigma (1987)")
.png "The Stuff (1985)")
.jpg "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)")
