Over two centuries apart, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Guillermo del Toro’s recent adaptation tell the same story of love and grief.
I first read Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in 2021. It was my senior year of high school, and I was in the midst of applying to college. At the time, I had never moved, had kept the same friends for years and was perturbed by the idea of attending college. I had experienced loss in 2018 and was unfamiliar with a major change that wasn’t associated with grief and struggled to understand my relationship with it.
“Frankenstein,” and the portrayal of Victor Frankenstein’s grief, pushed me to confront how I dealt with and viewed my own grieving.
Following the death of his mother, Victor said, “Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity … My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our course with the rest.”
Grief is unexplainable and differs based on the person and experience. Although the five-stage theory of grief has been debunked as a psychological fact, it can be used to understand and explain the complexities of grief.
Victor loses his mother and becomes a man driven by anger and resentment toward the gods for taking her away. In grief, he becomes stuck in a bargaining stage, and when faced with the impossible result of his solution, the Creature, he falls back into anger and denial.
Victor becomes the modern Prometheus, the man who defies the gods to create life, yet, for the rest of the book, the young scientist cannot seem to escape the vexations of grief and death, most of which is largely caused by his ultimate solution.
“Frankenstein” helped me quantify my own grief from losing a family member. Shelley’s portrayal showed me that without intentionally spending time in it, it could take me over. It showed me that by staying in isolation, I might lead myself to madness. Even when another death in my life occurred suddenly, I knew not to run, but to stay in it until I understood and was ready to accept it.
Shelley’s depiction of Victor’s grief offered me both comfort and warning, so when Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” movie adaptation was confirmed in 2023, I anxiously waited in hopes it would live up to my expectations.
Toro’s “Frankenstein” is everything an adaptation should be. It stays true to the core themes of Shelley’s work while weaving in new meanings that expand the source material. It also revised an aspect of the original story that failed to resonate with me, the Creature’s ultimate desire for a romantic companion.
I consider myself largely unconcerned with romantic relationships, and throughout my life, I have felt much less motivated by them than I see in others. In both the book and the movie, the Creature and Victor hunt each other across continents. In the book, the Creature’s motivation for this, initially, is to ask Victor to create a female to accompany him in his exile.
To me, this request always felt askew in the greater story. The Creature had just observed the cottagers as a family and developed a paternal bond with the patriarch of the family. He knew “all the various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual bonds,” yet he desired only a companion.
Toro’s “Frankenstein” revisioned the Creature’s want, not just for romantic companionship, but for any companionship at all. Without “friends and relations,” the Creature had no concept of his origin and this loneliness drove him to seek vengeance in the same way it drove Victor to madness. The Creature grieved what he did not have: love in any form, romantic or otherwise.
In the book, I understood the Creature’s desire for a romantic partner on a conceptual level, but in the movie, I felt his longing for any companionship heart-wrenching, horrifying and painfully realistic. Although I have friends and family who love me and a comfortable sense of self, Toro’s Creature portrayed something much larger: a basic and innate desire for community and understanding.
While Shelley’s tale forced me to confront my own relationship with grief, Toro’s rekindled my faith in love.
“Frankenstein” (1818) and “Frankenstein” (2025) ultimately tell the same tale; Victor is consumed with grief in the same way the Creature is consumed by his lack of companionship. Grief and love will always be intertwined in the human experience and the need to connect will always exist, even in the face of despair.
Alexandra Hopkins is a senior studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note the views expressed in this column do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk to Alexandra? Email her at ah875121@ohio.edu.
