It was in this unexpected global disruption that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
Mary, born in 1797, married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly when she was just eighteen years old, while he was twenty-three, shortly after the suicide of his first wife. It should be noted, however, that they had been carrying on an illicit relationship since she was sixteen… They were both close friends with the infamous (and also a poet) Lord George Gordon Byron – one might call the last of the classical libertines – and together the troupe decided to vacation from the year’s dreary summer in England in Geneva, Switzerland. How to escape the cold in the isles? Somewhere farther north and much colder, it seems.
Their Swiss getaway was marked by some quite understandable “staying in” and, by all accounts, a considerable and frequent use and abuse of opium, as the elites of the day were wont to do. No doubt that was Lord Byron’s idea… But even the joys of the poppy and certainly a prodigious consumption of alcohol could not stave off the maddening boredom of keeping oneself indoors during a winter that seemed never-ending, and so the story goes it was Byron himself who proposed a contest: who among them could write the scariest story?
Naturally, Mary, ever the precocious sort if we are to believe our historical accounting, demanded that the boys shouldn’t have all the fun – she could hold her own with the written word, after all – and that she be allowed to participate. Whilst many of the narratives that were birthed from this melee of the macabre are thought to be lost to time, one has most definitely withstood those ravages to be one of the most iconic tales ever told. We are told that Mary Shelley won that competition hands down, and the results were her novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. It was published two years later, in 1818, but it was born in The Year Without a Summer. It is curious to think that one of the most enduring portraits in horror ever conceived may not have ever existed, had it not been for an island self-destructing half a world away.
Shelley’s work about a man who sought to make a man in his own image, “without reckoning upon God,” as Edward Van Sloan says in the warning he delivers at the outset of the classic Universal film, is just that: a relatively straightforward commentary on the consequences of human beings messing with things they do not understand. James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) takes much the same tack, casting Dr. Victor Frankenstein (renamed Henry, one assumes in an attempt to make his character friendlier to American audiences) as a man consumed with the idea of creating life, but unaware of the disasters that await such a discovery. Though the Monster – referred to as the Creature in the novel – is portrayed in a sensitive and empathetic light by the great Boris Karloff, Frankenstein himself is not cast as a villain either in this adaptation. It is, in many ways, framed as a Shakespearean tragedy of sorts. A morality tale centered on the teetering balance between science and mysteries unknown. Guillermo Del Toro is having none of that nonsense in his film.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025), produced for Netflix, is a passion project for the Mexican-born director. He has mentioned in numerous interviews that Pinocchio (2023) and Frankenstein are two of his most beloved stories, and he has now directed adaptations of both! While the former is a mixture of live action and animation, this newest film is about as signature of the director’s style as one can be. Much like his masterworks Crimson Peak (2015) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Del Toro brings to the screen a dense, heady blend of obsessive characters, gothic romanticism, and sudden bursts of stark, brutal violence. And, much like many of his other films, Frankenstein (2025) features a theme, albeit perhaps more hidden than previous outings, of the dangers of fascism.
It’s present in nearly every movie helmed by the director, in one way or another. The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) are both set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, in which the Republicans of the Second Spanish Republic fought to maintain their government against an insurrection of the fascist Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco. By the end, the Nationalists had won, and Franco became the dictator of Spain until his death in 1975. The power of his dictatorship ended with him, and Spain has been a democracy ever since. Hellboy (2004) deals directly with the Nazis (and, of course, some occult shenanigans, because you can’t have the Third Reich without that!), while even Nightmare Alley (2021) is set against the onset of World War II, and The Shape of Water (2017) deals with the authoritarian machinations of the CIA. Even Del Toro’s debut effort Cronos (1993) showcases the villains as members of a nefarious corporate entity out to steal the secrets of life eternal for their unfathomably rich CEO. As we all know, fascist states are uniformly deeply in bed with capitalist interests.
In each of these films, the protagonists are universally at the bottom rung of the social ladder. In both The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) once again, they are literally children who cannot hope to begin to grapple with the forces set against them. In Hellboy (2004), it is a demon who fits in so poorly that he even sands down his horns in an attempt to appear more human. Our hero in The Shape of Water (2017) is a mute custodian, and in Cronos (1993) an old man who only wants to manage his run-down antiques shop. Even in Crimson Peak (2015), Edith may be the daughter of a wealthy construction magnate, but she has literally everything ripped away from her, only to be manipulated and assaulted by the remnants of the old guard European aristocracy. The theme is clear and simple: fascism is a powerful force for evil, but it only takes the least of us to stand against it.
In Frankenstein (2025), however, the themes of fascism are a bit less surface level. At first blush, the main thrust of the film appears to be more a tale of the relationships between fathers and sons. This is backed up by statements from star Oscar Isaac about how, on set, he and Guillermo Del Toro only every conversed in Spanish – an astonishing notion regarding the production of a film set completely in 19th Century Europe. Regarding the dynamic between paternal figures and their offspring in traditional Latin families, especially that of the classic concept of machismo, this rings very true. Victor and his father have a contentious report to say the least. Hell, it’s downright abusive. And that interplay is passed down to Victor’s creation, as he routinely belittles James Elordi’s Creature for not living up to his unreasonable and nigh unto inconceivable expectations. But the parallels go deeper… down the very foundations of fascist ideology and methods. The first clues to this thematic center begin with Del Toro’s resetting of the timeline. Originally set contemporarily in 1816 by Mary Shelley, the director moves the action to the middle of the century, exactly forty years later.
The Crimean War between Great Britain, allied with France and the Ottoman Empire, and Czarist Russia began in the year 1853, and lasted until 1856. The majority of Frankenstein (2025) takes place exactly in this period, specifically in 1855, and culminates, like Shelley’s novel, in the barren wastes of the Arctic in 1857. At a glance, the reason for this seems obvious. The Crimean War claimed the lives of nearly 600,000 people (both combatants and civilians), with over 400,000 of those being on the Russian side of the conflict. The movie makes quite a point of showing Victor Frankenstein using the bodies of combat casualties as the source for body parts. But if the presence of war was all that was needed for the script, that does not explain the change in setting. At the time of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Great Britain had only just exited two separate global conflagrations – The War of 1812 against the United States, and the Napoleonic Wars that culminated in 1815 with Napoleon’s defeat by the Duke of Ellington at Waterloo. So, with such historical conflicts available, why shift the time period? The answer, in the opinion of this author, lies in the geopolitical reasons the Crimean War happened in the first place.
The war began on October 16, 1853, and was spurred by disputes over the human rights of the Catholic and Orthodox Christian minority populations of Palestine. Yes, you read that correctly. Palestine. The Czar of Russia had demanded sovereignty (diplomatically termed “protection”) of Orthodox citizens there, and when refused by the other continental powers, invaded. The Ottoman Empire declared war, and by March of 1854, Great Britain and France followed suit with their Turkish allies. Historically, the war is seen as another watershed moment for European powers. It shouldn’t be lost on us that, in addition to the involvement of Palestine, the conflict concerns another Russian aggression. It is called the Crimean War, after all, and the continuing fight in Ukraine cannot be ignored.
Their ultimate defeat served to the Russian government as evidence that they needed to modernize their fighting forces, and an industrial arms race began in earnest – something that would be echoed nearly one hundred years later in the form of the Cold War. The political nature of the war was also a portent of World War I, where minor diplomatic squabbles snowballed into the largest clash of arms the world had ever seen at that time.
The futility and senselessness of the war is echoed quite plainly by Elizabeth in Del Toro’s film, when she challenges Victor on the ideals of rich and powerful men that send their underprivileged brothers, sons, and fathers to die on far away, frozen battlefields. Not much later in the picture, we see the Baron Frankenstein trudging through the snowbound muck, amidst bodies blasted and torn apart by bullets, bayonets, and shrapnel, looking enthusiastically for pieces to stitch together to make his mad dream a reality. It is not simply that he is poaching the war dead for their body parts, but that he is doing it with victims of this war. A war not of democratic ideals, like the War of 1812, or to stave off the imperial ambitions of a demagogue like Napoleon, but a war of arbitrary lines drawn on maps, overseen by fat cats and bureaucrats from the comfort of their beds. And now that these soldiers have died on the altar of greed and wanton cruelty, he seeks to victimize them once again to satisfy the further ambitions of the rich and disaffected. Their lives mean nothing to those in power, they are simply a means to a cold, calculated end. Even their desiccated remains are not safe. It is quite simply the template of Fascism 101.
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The metaphor reaches beyond the setting of the Crimean War. In fact, the parallels of Russian Imperialism – once again involving both Ukraine and Palestine – extend even to the familial dynamic of Victor Frankenstein, his father, and his brother William. The Baron is surrounded since his childhood by forces that manipulate and drive his ambitions without thought or care for others, extending to his relationship with Christoph Waltz’s Heinrich Hollander – a character absent from Shelley’s novel – who is not only conspicuously German, but a corporate magnate who made his fortune in the manufacture of arms and ammunition, and becomes the doctor’s benefactor.
Charles Dance plays Victor’s father, a hard and condescending man who routinely abuses him in childhood. The aforementioned Latin machismo dynamic notwithstanding, Del Toro also seems to be using the character to highlight the apparent differences in race between the two men. Baron Frankenstein’s narrations early in the film make a point to mention, not once, but a number of times that his father hated him and his mother for their black hair and darker complexions. His father is light skinned, with light hair, and only married his mother for her land and money. Likewise, his younger brother William, whom their father lavishes with gifts and affection, is blond and fair. Meanwhile, Victor not only has curled dark hair, but his facial features are sharper and angular. While this can be easily attributed to the casting of Oscar Isaac – after all, that’s just how he looks – one cannot help but notice that, in the context of the film, he exhibits characteristics common to ethnically European Jews, while his father and brother are explicitly blond-haired and blue-eyed. They are Aryan.
The connection to Victor’s treatment at the hands of his father, and the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews in the Holocaust is hard to escape. Furthermore, just as sons are apt to repeat the cycles of abuse experienced at the hands of their fathers, so has the government of Israel visited the horrors of genocide upon the Palestinian people. Victor’s treatment of the Creature, with no rhyme, reason, or even ultimately remorse, follows the same path. He laughs at Elizabeth when she pleads for the humanity of the Creature, just the same as the IDF and Benjamin Netanyahu have characterized the tens of thousands they have murdered in Gaza as terrorists.
Fascism comes in many disguises. It presents itself as friend, family, and foe. Always it is for the benefit of the ruling class at the expense of the working class it depends upon. It cannot be reasoned with and it cannot be lived with. It ruins everything it touches, and it’s only aim is the destruction of others for its own benefit. Guillermo Del Toro has created in his version of Frankenstein (2025) a portrait of life struggling against death, and freedom struggling against tyranny. The only light at the end of it all is the death of Victor, and the isolation of the Creature in the frozen wastes. A warning that authoritarianism only consumes.
The Creature is once again a character that is on the farthest bottom of social structure. When he is born he cannot even speak to his creator. He becomes a person only by the love and friendship of a poor family, caring for each other. He experiences pain, heartbreak, love, and art. His forgiveness of his father in Victor’s final moments is not only a personal triumph, but a plea for all humanity, and his final act is saving those whom he has no obligation to help. An act of pure humanitarianism. It is something we can all learn from in times such as these, when the wolf of fascism is at the door. Caring for others in spite of your pain, and the wrongs done to you.
Freedom is yours, if you take it.
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