Frankenstein ~ Lost in Adaptation

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Okay, hear me out. The monster makes it very clear that he considers Victor Frankenstein to be his father. Not a very good father, but his father nonetheless. So, if he has any name, it probably would be Frankenstein. And it's been fine to call him that this entire time.

[00:00:24]Hello my beautiful watchers and welcome to Lost in Adaptation, the internet review show dedicated to unraveling what the heck happened to literature when it gets turned into films. Frankenstein was originally published in 1818 with the title Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. The ore is interesting. You don't get many O's in titles these days, do you? Quite a few ands, but not many O's. and a lot of the stage adaptations of Frankenstein followed suit. But I guess at some point in history, someone said, "For [ __ ] sake, just pick a title." Anyways, it was written by a very young, very talented British lady by the name of Mary Shel when she was a mere 18 years old. There's a lot of law surrounding the writing of this book.

[00:01:03]Mary Shel, her future husband Percy, and her stepsister were all staying at her stepsister's lover's house, a British poet called Lord Byron, who at the time was super famous because, I guess in the 19th century, poets were like [ __ ] rock stars or something. Apparently, the weather was catastrophically severe that year, trapping them inside Byron's estate for at least a month, during which time, Lord Byron hosted a short story writing competition, and Mary submitted what would eventually become Frankenstein. The drunk history guys seemed pretty confident that Mary and Lord Byron were also participating in polyamorous orgies with her future husband and stepsister, but uh I I've not been able to verify that with any credible sources. I I think that might just be horny wishful thinking. Despite being more commonly associated with the horror genre in modern times, Mary Shel's Frankenstein and/or the modern Prometheus is credited with being one of the earliest, if not the very first example of science fiction. That is to say, a book whose premise revolves around or plot is driven by a currently non-existent science and serves as an exploration of the possible consequences of said science being put into practice.

[00:02:08]There are earlier examples of things that would arguably fit better with the tropes that we currently associate with the science fiction genre because they have [ __ ] space aliens in them, but they almost all involve religious or magical elements as well or were straight up absurdist. Okay, so because this is one of those weird cases of pretty much none of the adaptations getting the plot spoton, I'm going to do a quick run through of what actually happened in this book. If you've heard it all before, feel free to skip ahead.

[00:02:36]>> Alive.

[00:02:39]Summarized to the extreme, Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus is the story of a young Swiss man called Victor Frankenstein who goes to study science at university becomes extremely gifted at chemistry and has the bright idea that he could use his sick lab skills to create a living thing. He succeeds but has a complete meltdown when he realizes that despite trying to make it sexy, his creature is ugly as sin. So immediately abandons it and tries to go back to his life as if nothing ever happened.

[00:03:06]However, after the mysterious death of his little brother, he sees his creation walking down the street and is filled with the guilty certainty that it killed him to get back at Victor for being a neglectful piece of [ __ ] He doesn't feel bad enough to come forward and tell anyone about what he did, even as one of his best childhood friends, Justine, is framed and executed for his brother's murder, but you know, he feels kind of bad. The only thing I can possibly say in his defense here is he probably wasn't expecting the prosecution to be quite so overtly unfair. The police report was basically, "When we found the child's necklace in the suspect's possession, she was extremely confused, which obviously proves that she's guilty." Then when we locked her in a dark, damp cell for a week and said we weren't going to let her out or feed her until she confessed, she eventually confessed. So, case closed, string her up. Anyways, that's a massive bummer.

[00:03:55]But at his late mother and aging father's request, Victor agrees to get engaged to his adopted sister, Elizabeth.

[00:04:03]Let's try not to dwell on that just yet because he then comes face to face with his monster who insists on filling him in on its part of the story and tells him about how after it was abandoned, it had to learn how speech, reading, and fire worked through trial and error and by watching a peasant family called the Daces from various hiding spots within their house and on their farm, which is kind of scary. Any and all attempts to integrate itself into society had resulted in people throwing rocks and/or bullets at the poor thing. This unfortunately eventually included its beloved Delacy family. The grandfather was chill because he was blind, but everyone else immediately freaked out as soon as they saw it. Which is uh why you should never form parasocial relationships, kids. So, because everyone betrayed fed up with this world, it gives up and goes to find its daddy and happens to bump into Victor's little brother, deciding to choke the little brother to death on general principle. It then got so annoyed at the sight of a sleeping Justine because it knew a beautiful woman like her would never be into something like it, it decides to frame her for the murder, which is some upsettingly incel logic to act on their monster boy. Anyways, now it wants Victor to build us an equally freaky looking companion so they can run off and be visually off-putting together. And if he doesn't, it's going to kill everyone that Frankenstein knows and loves. Frankenstein begins to comply, but then has huge second thoughts about the entire thing on the grounds that one monster has already been bad enough, and two might commit twice as many murders per year, or worse, might have a bunch of monster babies together and take over the world someday. So, he destroys everything he's made so far, which really pisses off the existing monster. His creation then makes good on its promise and proceeds to kill all of Frankenstein's friends and family, including his sister fianceé, on their wedding night. An enraged Frankenstein tries to chase it down and kill it. But the monster, being faster, stronger, and honestly possibly smarter than him at this point, stays ahead of him the entire way up to the northern tundra and even leaves sassy messages written on rocks to annoy him.

[00:06:03]Victor eventually dies of cold exhaustion and just being kind of [ __ ] up in general emotionally. The monster then kind of regrets doing all of these evil things and rides an iceberg off into the night, never to be seen again.

[00:06:14]The book begins and ends with a framing device that really has nothing to do with Frankenstein or his monster. In order to get to the main story, you have to read several letters from a Captain Robert Walton to his sister. Walton appears to be a young man dissatisfied with his life, so is attempting to explore the unknown regions of the north with a ship, but they keep getting trapped in ice. I got the impression Walton was also just kind of lonely and for some inexplicable reason looking for friendship in the middle of an icy wasteland. He certainly imprints pretty hard on Frankenstein. As soon as he finds him half frozen to death, within like a letter or two, Walton is singing Victor's praises like he's the coolest [ __ ] person he's ever met. What's funny about this framing device is it means the entire book is these letters to his sister, including Frankenstein dictating his entire story to him and the story that the monster told to Frankenstein. And at one point, the plot gets honestly pretty distracted with a long convoluted backstory for the Dacy family that involved multinational love, betrayal, and racist profiling. Which means that at some point in the middle of this book, what you're reading is a conversation between the Deacies that's been overheard by the monster that's been retold to Frankenstein, who is recounting it all perfectly from memory to Captain Walton, who has written it all down word for word and sent it to his sister. Keep in mind that Mary Shel was 18. This was her first book, and she was coming up with ideas that no one had ever written down before. It's probably okay if it's a little convoluted in places. Anyways, with his last breath, Frankenstein makes Captain Walton promise to finish his quest for revenge and kill the monster for him, but then when the monster shows up like an hour later, he doesn't. After the creation runs off into the black knight, Walton realizes that he is being just as nuts as Frankenstein by leading his entire crew to certain death just to do something that no one has ever done before and agrees they can all go home.

[00:08:08]So, the first half of the book concentrates on the dangers of unchecked ambition as Frankenstein's hubus leads him to delve into science that mankind was probably not supposed to know. The second half humanizes his unnamed creation, then covers its tragic descent into being a monster because everyone treats it as one until it snaps. Both parts combined force the reader to confront how much they blame the monster for its horrific acts and how responsible Frankenstein is for his creation's actions. My personal sympathy for the big guy dried up somewhat after his first intentional child murder, although I can recognize what a shitty hand he was dealt. But uh Frankenstein can straight up go stick an instrument of life right up his self-centered [ __ ] Just as a side note, it's very funny to me how every time they met, Victor is immediately prepared to throw hands with a creature that could very obviously squash him like a bug anytime it wants to. The unearned white male confidence is strong with that one. He's exactly the kind of guy who would have a podcast. So, if you've not read the book, that probably sounded pretty weird, right? A lot of stuff that isn't very well known in the Frankenstein law.

[00:09:10]So, what happened? What influenced the world so profoundly it usurped almost every aspect of the original book in people's common knowledge of the story.

[00:09:19]>> Alive.

[00:09:20]It's alive.

[00:09:22]>> As I mentioned in my last video, the 1931 Universal Pictures Frankenstein movie isn't a direct adaptation of the book. It's an adaptation of the 1927 play Frankenstein, an adventure in the Macabb written by Peggy Webbling, which was partly an original story, but also heavily influenced by the 1823 play Presumption or the fate of Frankenstein.

[00:09:43]So, it's an adaption of a reimagining of an adaption. So, as you can imagine, this many Xeroxes later, there really isn't a lot of the book left in it. It's barely the same concept. A person called Frankenstein makes a monster out of dead body parts and [ __ ] goes downhill from there. That's basically it. They don't even get Frankenstein's full name right.

[00:10:02]He's now Henry Frankenstein and his best friend Henry is now Victor because apparently they thought Victor was too aggressive a name for the lead. The early 20th century was a weird time. A huge and immediately apparent difference in the fundamental nature of the story is the creation's intellectual development or lack thereof. The monster of the book started life as a childlike creature that didn't understand anything, but learned how to be a fully functioning adult human very quickly through a combination of trial and error and observation. By the time he meets up with Frankenstein again, he's fully able to talk. In fact, it's hard to shut him up sometimes when he gets into the swing of it. In this film, he never makes it past the childlike non-verbal stage, communicating in grunts and snulls and displaying an infantile wonder at the world around him from start to finish, adding additional tragedy to the destruction of what is a fundamentally innocent creature who only committed atrocities out of a naive lack of understanding of consequences. Like, he does still do a child killing, but he doesn't mean to. He just doesn't understand that children don't float just because flowers do. The physical look of Frankenstein is so offbook and unique to this film, it was successfully copyrighted by Universal Pictures, despite Mary Shel's novel being in the public domain. Specifically, the big sloping forehead, the flat top haircut, and the bolts in the neck. Oh, and another surprising not from the book edition, stitches. Yeah, the word doesn't even appear in the book, not once. And Frankenstein describes his monster's physical appearance very clearly, confirming the creation was hard to look at, but not mentioning anything about there being big exterior threats. This is kind of [ __ ] up, but Victor apparently intentionally only used hot dead people to make him, but the end result was still kind of nasty.

[00:11:45]Its skin was kind of nasty, you know, because it was from a dead person and too tightly stretched over its face muscles. Its lips were a black straight line and its eyes were a dull yellow, which is the bit that seemed to really upset Victor. Bro just wasn't a fan of the color yellow. I guess exactly how Victor Frankenstein built his creature is super vague in universe because Frankenstein himself is telling this part of the story and skipping over some of the nastier parts of the process out of a sense of shame over his actions.

[00:12:12]Presumably IRL because it was the 19th century and Shel knew no one would publish a graphically gory book.

[00:12:18]Chemistry is brought up a lot more than anything else, though, suggesting it was some sort of elixia transfusion that slowly awakened life within the body.

[00:12:25]But that is visually dull. So now it's a lightning strike, baby. It's not good mad science, unless it's going zapz zap buzz, [ __ ] A lot of the choices in this film make so much more sense when you know that the story went through multiple evolutions of onstage incarnations before coming to screen.

[00:12:42]Bubbling chemicals could only be visually interesting for so long, but a sudden electrotechnic display, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. The subtleties of the book's monster's ugliness, how all of its individually sexy body parts don't come together to make something appealing and in fact create such an uncanny valley feeling of dread in the average person. It's immediately terrifying to look upon. Would be really, really difficult to get across on a medium-sized quite distant stage.

[00:13:09]But do you know what is easy to see from the cheap seats? a freakishly huge guy with giant stitches all over his body.

[00:13:15]Henry Frankenstein is also a very different kind of person to Victor.

[00:13:19]Rather than waiting until his creation had killed his entire family and his fianceé to be driven mad with rage, he saves time by starting the story already pretty unhinged, babbling about how he'd show everyone his true genius and acting generally maniacal. The film adds Fritz being sent to steal a brain from a laboratory and screwing it up by accidentally destroying it on the way out and having to grab a criminal brain instead. I don't know if this was intended to explain the monster's eventual violent behavior at the end. If so, it kind of steps on its own point a little bit. The rest of the film seems to be trying to make a point about how if you treat someone like a monster based on things they can't control, they will eventually turn on you and act the way you've treated them. But this one scene seems to suggest that he just had a bad criminal poo brain the whole time and eventually trying to throttle Frankenstein was inevitable. Victor's once fairly harmless, somewhat infeebled father is now an eccentric baron ruling over a town in Switzerland like it's medieval times. I think his title was mentioned in the book, but he was originally more respected as a magistrate than aristocrat. The film actually ends not on Henry or his monster, but this [ __ ] guy flirting with his maids. The only thing I can think of that's even remotely like the book is his creation taking a swing at his fiance on their wedding day, but it's arguable if that was even the creature's intention. And either by chance or by mercy, he doesn't finish the job. The ending is changed, so Henry is injured by his creation, but alive.

[00:14:41]But the monster is burned to death in a windmill by an angry mob, pissed off about the child that he accidentally drowned. Overall, well, this film is a classic for a reason. Aside from being groundbreaking in horror themed atmospheric cinema, Boris Caroff gave a genuinely impressive performance as a mute but very emotional character. But these are all things that give it value as a film but have very little to do with the book. I mean, it shares some themes and morals with the novel regarding rejection, loneliness, and what makes someone a monster. But I feel like the book leans more into asking what responsibilities would a creator have to his creation and how responsible is he for their actions? While the film just seems to be more about don't [ __ ] do it. DON'T DON'T DO IT, YOU CRAZY [ __ ] Don't play God. Just listen to your weird eccentric aristocratic father and shut up and get married and don't do it. So, yes, this film has very little in common with the book, and it didn't come up with most of the tropes that it's famous for, but it is probably always going to be what you think of when you think of Frankenstein, which meant there was an opening for a more book accurate version of the story, one that for some reason no one appeared to take advantage of for about 60 years.

[00:15:49]But, uh, then along came Kenneth Brer.

[00:15:54]>> Alive, it's alive.

[00:15:58]So, in recent times, Kenneth Brer and book adaptations have been a dangerous combination, ranging from inaccurate but entertaining to inaccurate and enraging.

[00:16:07]However, his want to direct and star in his own version of a popular book is actually a pretty old habit, dating at least as far back as 1994 when he decided to play Hot Frankenstein. I mean, hot Franken I mean hot Franken I Franken Daddy. I guess he called in some favors because the entire cast is pretty impressive. Robert Dairo as the monster, Helena Bottom Carter as Elizabeth, and Ian Holm as the Baron Frankenstein. And I am genuinely shocked to announce this is by a huge margin the most accurate film adaptation of Mary Shel's all the modern Prometheus I've been able to find so far. They got all of the following almost spoton. The expedition to the North Pole framing device is included, although Captain Walton is inexplicably American. Victor's parents adopting a random pretty girl. They happen to find like the cat distribution system but with 19th century orphans. An ambitious young Victor having the bright idea to animate new life into old corpses. But as soon as he succeeds in doing so, he decides it was an entirely stupid idea and taking a nap. Then freaking out when he sees his creations standing over him in the bedroom. The monster he created discovering that people universally have a rather negative reaction to seeing him and wandering off into the wilderness.

[00:17:21]Victor's best friend, Henry, nursing him back to health after the stress of all that science wiped him out. The monster coming across a pleasant peasant farming family to observe and learn speech and reading from, and discovering that he has Frankenstein's journal with a helpful explanation of what he is and where he came from in his pocketses, helping out around the farm, which his new friends assume means he's a kind of forest spirit. Though this happy codependence comes crashing down when they finally see him, which sends him into his rage era, and he burns their vacated house down, then goes to find his bad dad. Unfortunately for everyone, he runs into Victor's younger brother and mks him just to make a point, and a family servant and friends, gets blamed for it and executed. He then lures Frankenstein into the cold wilderness to have a chat, and demands he make him a girlfriend in exchange for him not killing everyone else in his life.

[00:18:10]Frankenstein has his second thoughts regarding making a horrific Barbie for his monstrous Ken. And said monstrous Ken responds by killing Elizabeth on their wedding day. Frankenstein ends up following him all the way to the icy north where he meets Captain Walton before promptly dying. And the monster decides that he's done with mankind and floats away on an iceberg. And Captain Walton learns his valuable lesson from this and turns his ship around. So this is comparatively pretty good, but it's not all in alignment with the book. And it's one of those occasions where the general loyalty makes the deviation stand out all the more clearly. A notable example is Frankenstein's motivation for pursuing his science seems to be a lot more anti-death as opposed to being pro the creation of new life. His mother's passing had an emotional impact on him in both versions. But the books Frankenstein never had a well someone had better cure this whole death thing because this is some [ __ ] moment. It was always more about the ambition of being able to do a science so impressive it was basically playing guard. The idea of bringing a specific person back to life wasn't the obvious goal. The idea was to make something entirely new. The death cure theme continues into the film's climax when Victor tries to bring Elizabeth back to life after the monster kills her. She then, for some reason, appears to feel torn between him and the monster, despite never having met the monster before he literally ripped her heart out and sets herself on fire rather than make a decision. Kind of like my girlfriend choosing where to eat tonight. Am I Am I right, fellas? Take that, my imaginary girlfriend. Also speaking of Elizabeth Suag, I mean the parents setting up the adopted siblings to get married someday is from the book, but they at least went out of their way to refer to them as cousins, not brother and sister, which is better on the incest scale. But in this film, they just [ __ ] lean into the brother sister thing.

[00:20:06]>> How do brothers and sisters say goodbye?

[00:20:11]Kenneth, bro, you can't post that [ __ ] on the main, dude. In addition to being a Yank now, Captain Walton also appears to be less of a wideeyed, happygolucky explorer who constantly writes to his sister and just kind of needs a friend type and more like a generic sea captain to guy. Ah, look at him. He's He's so tough.

[00:20:31]Gruff Captain Man. Interestingly, this film takes away some of Victor Frankenstein's achievements by having him inherit a lot of the reanimation science already completed by one of his university tutors, who is then killed by a 19th century antivaxer, which which also contributes to Frankenstein's I guess I should cure death motivation.

[00:20:50]What's really [ __ ] up about this was this was the '9s, so it genuinely wasn't a commentary on modern society. It really was just the silliest thing the writers could think of for a person to get violent over 200 years ago. That is how far we've regressed as a society. It's also worth noting that they told the story chronologically, going back and forth between Victor and the monster instead of covering all of Frankenstein's section and then all of the creations, but that honestly makes a lot more sense in a movie format. Another clearly intentional and very interesting choice was their decision to try to redeem Frankenstein, bending over backwards to recontextualize everything to make him a lot more blameless. He didn't immediately abandon his monster. He genuinely thought he'd accidentally killed him. Then he was just acting in panic when he was jump scared in the bedroom. Even more significantly, he was way, way less responsible for Justine's death, as he didn't see his monster skulking around and realize it was the murderer until after she was already dead. She was also killed super fast by a spontaneous angry lynch mob instead of a slow trial with multiple opportunities for him to come forward and acknowledge that he knew more than he was letting on. Frank and Daddy tried his best to intervene, but he couldn't get past the crowd. There was nothing he could have done. In regards to the monster, on the other hand, the film does not pull any punches about what an absolute piece of [ __ ] it became towards the end of the story, leaning into the sadistic cruelty of killing Victor's innocent family members to punish him. I have to admit, despite its relative accuracy to the book, I didn't super really enjoy this movie all that much. There's just an uncomfortable awkwardness to it that comes about, I think, from a series of very odd directorial choices. Like there's this one scene where a half- naked Kenneth Brer is trying to help a fully naked Robert Dairo stand up while they're both absolutely soaked in what the movie makes abundantly clear is harvested human amniotic fluid. And it just goes on for a wild amount of time.

[00:22:51]Then Victor evidently has the bright idea to hold it up by wrapping it up in dangling chains, then accidentally throws a switch that yanks it up into the air and brains it with a falling pulley. And he's like, "Whoops, I killed it." But he doesn't [ __ ] check. He just leaves it suspended there and goes off to have a cry. And the worst part is this is established to be going on in a rented attic space. So, I I'm just sitting here watching this unintentionally hilarious scene play out and imagining the poor family who lives below him who are currently watching a sarcophagus's amount of afterbirth drip through their ceiling and rain onto their family dinner. Oh, and then there's this really weird moment of nondiioetic narration from one of Frankenstein's teachers, I think, scolding him for not realizing that using criminal body parts would make a criminal monster. But that kind of thing never happens until this point and never happens again. It's just this one moment of a head turning up to say, "I told you so." To cap it all off, Victor then comes running out with a [ __ ] massive ax that he apparently just had lying around because evidently his first instinct was to just go ham on the [ __ ] monster with it. Oh, and this isn't as egregious, but Dairo Monster grabs Frankenstein's coat as he's running out of the house, and that appears to be all that he wears for the rest of the movie. But the collar is popped and I couldn't stop laughing at popped collar monster every time he was on screen. And this is admittedly a personal dislike, but I found this film just in general kind of nasty. It leans way too heavily into the blood and gore aspect and the aforementioned [ __ ] like rolling around in afterbirth for an uncomfortable amount of time. And it certainly didn't help that the ADR and sound effect matching in this movie are just bad. They did a bad job with that.

[00:24:41]Overall, this movie kind of suffers from the classic Kenneth Brana style over substance style of direction. I I don't mean that as a 100% bad thing. I say it as someone who has freely admitted to enjoying his films, but it's definitely a hallmark of his work. It's a shame because in this case, the lack of substance could have been compensated for by the quality of the story he was drawing from. But both the book's plot and the talent of the all-star cast gets buried figuratively and literally sometimes under the excessive reliance on gore exploitation and the weird directing. I feel like maybe it's holding the record for most accurate mainstream adaptation by default more than anything else. The other films just had more of their own creative vision.

[00:25:23]Speaking of which, I mean, we got to talk about the GMO del Toro version, right?

[00:25:29]>> Alive.

[00:25:31]It's alive.

[00:25:33]>> Because this was a Del Toro movie, I'm pretty confident none of us went in expecting a lot of book adapting in this book adaption. We expected an entertaining, emotional movie that would make us question who is the monster and who is the man and force a high percentage of us to admit to ourselves that we definitely wanted to [ __ ] the monster. And El Toro did not disappoint in any of these expectations. Bro said, "I'll see your sexy Frankenstein Brer and raise you a sexy creation." And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Not the monster [ __ ] part. that's between you and your Uzi Jesus summoning card. I mean, his approach to adaptations, I never get the impression that he doesn't respect the source material he works with. He just has his own unique vision for everything. And you can tell from the books he picks, he's not just trying to take advantage of name recognition or anything like that. My dislike of his Pinocchio movie was less about it not following the book and more about his interpretation of Pinocchio making me want to [ __ ] my pants in abstract terror. Anyways, the vibe this time around appears to be leaning into the generational trauma and parental abuse aspect even harder than usual. I mean, you don't hire Charles Dance to play a good father. So, as soon as I saw him in the role of Victor's dad, I had an idea of where they were going with this one.

[00:26:40]And indeed, the film spends a good 10 minutes establishing that Victor's childhood was traumatic as [ __ ] filled with physical and mental abuse. And as is tragically so often the way with these things, he instinctively passes his abuse onto his own pseudo child as soon as he gets the chance. He no longer abandons his creation at its birth. In fact, he seems to almost be embracing his role as a father for about 30 seconds or so, then he chains him up in the basement. As the movie progresses, Frankenstein becomes more and more physically and emotionally abusive towards his creation as it fails to meet the impossibly high standards he set for it for mental development, eventually deciding to just erase his mistake altogether and burn the entire thing down. Not for nothing, but in this version, apparently, if you strap a battery into just the right place on a body, you can bring any cadaavver or even bits of a cadaavver back to life, which raises the question as to why Frankenstein needed a ludicrous amount of corpses to create his creature. Just that's that's too many corpses. Oscar Issacs plays Victor as a hyperactive, antisocial, eccentric that kind of reminded me of Robert Downey Jr.'s take on Sherlock Holmes. As a result of all of these collective changes, Frankenstein's half of the story is a non-starter adaptation-wise. He has completely different motivations, a completely different personality, and a completely different process. The monsters part of the story has more in common with the book, but with a [ __ ] ton of extra violence added in. It's actually hilarious how often the poor bastard gets shot in this film.

[00:28:30]He also gets blown up twice, fist fights a bunch of wolves to death, and beats up a ship. So, yeah, it's it's a tad more savage than Shel's vision. In addition to the rejection and loneliness that he suffers from all humans, the monster is also having to deal with a Deadpool level of healing powers that stop him from being able to end his own life despite being suicidally depressed. I should mention that the original book version of him was confirmed to not be bulletproof as a panic shot from a rando almost killed him. But like I said, there's still more of the book in his half of the story. After he parts ways with Victor, he spends some time spying on a family of farmers and learning to speak and read from them, befriending the blind grandpa while the others are away, only to be chased off when they return, stripping him of his last hope for acceptance. Though little asterisk in this version, his disappointment with his first and only friend in the world being torn away from him is also because the old man is literally torn apart by wolves. He then seeks out Frankenstein to demand he build him a girlfriend. And when that almost immediately doesn't work out, he leads his shitty father on a long chase to the far north, where Vic eventually dies. The book's framing device also technically exists in this film, but the ship appears to be a military ironclad now, and the captain is an old, grizzled veteran obsessed with completing vague orders from his country to sail to the top of the world, as opposed to a young idealistic explorer trying to personally achieve something with his life. The idea of him learning from Frankenstein's mistakes and not chasing an obsession to complete destruction is not completely abandoned, but it hits differently in this context.

[00:30:03]Possibly facing a court marshal for disobeying orders is more of an understandable motivation than risking everyone's lives simply because he feared not making it into the history books. This film's take on Elizabeth was honestly kind of bizarre. the same actress plays her and Victor's mother.

[00:30:19]And I'm not entirely sure what in the Edipus complex Del Toro was trying to say there, but uh Victor also drinks a lot of milk. I'm not sure if that's like part of it, but yeah, he drinks a lot of milk. Anyways, in this telling, Elizabeth is also engaged to Victor's now adult brother, Robert, instead of Victor. She kind of has a lovehate sexually charged relationship with her future brother-in-law that es and flows depending on how big of a piece of [ __ ] he's being at the time. But by the end, the person that she's ultimately most into is clearly the monster. Again, shocking no one considering who's behind this film. This version also follows in the 1994 film's footsteps in that Victor's motivation appears to be way more anti-death due to the loss of his mother than wanting to create something entirely new. To this end, they also add a rich benefactor, who turns out to be facilitating Frankenstein's work in the hopes that it will save him from a slow death from syphilis. However, it went in the exact opposite direction to the 1994 film regarding who to make more sympathetic. Frankenstein is, as mentioned, an even more overtly terrible person and father than usual, but they do a lot to absolve the monster of blame. and without infantilizing him like the 1931 movie. Every person the monster kills was arguably self-defense and the two premeditated murders that he committed in the book are either accidental or straight up Frankenstein's doing now. Amusingly, they drop in a line about the classic stitches look or lack thereof.

[00:31:45]>> You may observe the hair thin scars. No coarse stitching needed by my own technique.

[00:31:51]>> But I don't know. He's still obviously a patchwork person. And let's not forget that the vibe in the book was Victor had tried to make him beautiful but just ended up making him look deeply off-putting. Jacob Alli is just a conventionally attractive man in Goautier's makeup. There's a typical Del Toro optimism to the end of the story that absolutely wasn't there in the book. In an effective, if a tad on then piece of abused child wish fulfillment, Frankenstein and his creation make peace with each other right before his death.

[00:32:19]Victor straight up apologizes for mistreating him and gives him some positive life advice. Then the monster helps the sailors escape and appears to gain an element of peace about his own existence as he feels the sunrise on his face. It's Frankenstein that ends well or as well as it can with so many people dead. So yeah, as an adaptation, it's not even trying. As a film, it's fine. I think my personal biggest issue with it is Del Toro already nailed the whole the man was the monster and the monster was a person and people were kind of into him thing in the shape of water. I can't help but compare these two films, and The Shape of Water is just better. Final thoughts. Like I said, the 1931 film looms so large over everything Frankenstein related. It may not have been the origin of many of its own iconic moments, but it sure as [ __ ] was the thing that seared them into mankind's collective memory forever more. In his book about all the different Frankenstein adaptations throughout the years, Steven Fry often referred to them as either pre-Colafian or postcolofian, which is just perfect.

[00:33:20]That film is a little bit in every film that came after it. 1994 is obviously the clear winner in terms of films that clawed their way back closer to the book, but Dairo's stitchcovered face is undeniable proof of the postcolofian influence. Every Frankenstein movie just uses the book as a jumping off point to tell whatever story the filmmaker wants, which is a state you usually come to after there's been at least one really good book accurate adaptation that no one else wants to contend with.

[00:33:48]Frankenstein just somehow skipped that part. Thank you for joining me, my beautiful watchers. If you know of an independent or just lesserk known film that does more justice to the book, by all means, let me know in the comments.

[00:34:00]Check out my Patreon page for more exclusive Dom content. and I hope you'll tune in next time and tells him about how it was.

[00:34:09]So basically because everyone decides to choke the poor little brother but Walter that went badly can recognize what a shitty hand he was dealt and honestly Franken figuratively and literally under the excessive reliance on gorloation.

[00:34:27]both the book's plot and the we got to talk about the Gmail gel galtoro g I'm going to double check just cuz I'm bad at pronouncing things towards the book but oh I spelled dairo really weird there proof of the postc colian in influence check out my patreon page for more exclusive Dawn content Don who the [ __ ] is Don my brain was panicking cuz I said doodoo and I was trying not to F.F.