{"id":280339,"date":"2025-11-12T21:18:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T21:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/280339\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T21:18:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T21:18:07","slug":"the-scariest-scene-in-frankenstein-isnt-about-the-creature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/280339\/","title":{"rendered":"The scariest scene in Frankenstein isn’t about the Creature"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s no secret that Guillermo del Toro\u2019s Frankenstein is sympathetic to its Creature<\/a> (Jacob Elordi). The filmmaker\u2019s entire career has been defined by an empathic view of monsters, which also means that\u2014as spelled out in the film<\/a>\u2018s tagline, \u201cOnly monsters play god\u201d\u2014this film needs to find empathy with the monstrous Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). It\u2019s through that empathy, that dive into the psyche of the man who would be Prometheus, that Frankenstein arrives at its most frightening scene. And the Creature is barely part of it.<\/p>\n

To reach this level of understanding with regards to Victor\u2019s life, del Toro spends time outlining his backstory, including the early death of his mother and the cruelty of his overbearing father (Charles Dance). Frankenstein observes Victor\u2019s rise as an enfant terrible in the European medical community, and witnesses his horrifying pitch to the Royal Society in London. Like a tech bro breathlessly pitching an app, he bills himself as a revolutionary, and receives nothing but scorn for his breakthroughs.<\/p>\n

Then he meets Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a character invented specifically for this film, who enthusiastically volunteers to be Frankenstein\u2019s patron. Brought to life by Waltz\u2019s charisma and energy, Harlander promises Victor \u201canything you want or need,\u201d including a spacious lab in Scotland and infinite financial resources. He is the angel investor who promises to change Victor\u2019s destiny, shaking his hand and intoning five devilish words: \u201cA bargain has been struck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harlander reaches Frankenstein because his niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is set to marry Victor\u2019s brother William (Felix Kammerer), and he pitches himself as someone who\u2019s simply interested in giving talented people the space and freedom to change the world. He believes in Victor\u2019s work\u2014believes that Victor is not crazy, just overenthusiastic and a bit rough around the edges as a pitch man. Sure, he makes his money selling weapons across wartorn 19th-century Europe, but that\u2019s not important. What\u2019s important is what he can do, in a benevolent and unrestrained way, for Victor\u2019s life\u2019s work. It\u2019s the perfect marriage of art and commerce\u2026until it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the most frightening scene in Frankenstein. With his lab outfitted and his prospective new \u201cAdam\u201d built from spare human parts, Victor is ready to harness lightning from the heavens and give life to his creation\u2014before Harlander stops him in his tracks. Victor\u2019s investor, it turns out, is slowly dying of syphilis, and he wants out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI cannot face such a vulgar demise,\u201d Harlander says as he details the progression of his disease, then reveals the other half of his dark bargain. In exchange for his time, money, and vast logistical support, he would like Victor to place his brain in the \u201cperfect body\u201d of the Creature. He doesn\u2019t just hope to be cured of syphilis. He hopes he can live forever.<\/p>\n

In this scene, Harlander\u2019s narrative purpose becomes clear. The horror of Victor\u2019s reaction is both deeply relatable and, like so much of Frankenstein, timeless and timely all at once. Of course this was the deal. Of course Harlander wasn\u2019t simply betting on a once-in-a-generation mind. Victor\u2019s drive, his madness over his project, was a tool to be used by a capitalist the whole time, and as Victor\u2019s face sinks, we sink with him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The monstrous nature of Victor Frankenstein is never in doubt. That\u2019s why the story opens with a desperate, stammering Victor in the Arctic, fully aware of his sins and the price he will soon pay for them. Whatever his past, whatever good intentions he hoped to harness in the beginning, it has all been consumed by his desperate drive to create a masterwork that will change the world. He is damned, which is clear from the moment he first appears.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But in this damnation, del Toro finds a parallel between Victor\u2019s drive to create and his own. Frankenstein is a life\u2019s work for him, just as Victor\u2019s pursuits have consumed his entire adulthood (and much of his childhood). Anyone who\u2019s carried a torch that long knows the danger of that passion\u2014the sense of tunnel vision, of the rest of the world falling away. Carry that torch long enough and it will burn you, simply because you\u2019ve grown accustomed to the heat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Guillermo del Toro, who has no shortage of dream projects he\u2019s fought years to realize, has clearly felt this before, and Victor is his cautionary tale. He understands the Hollywood machine, and the reality that in order to make something grand and lavish, you\u2019re going to have to cozy up to the money in the room. This is a filmmaker whose first Hollywood venture was Mimic, a dark dance with the Weinstein brothers that led to him disowning the final release. He\u2019s a filmmaker who had a Lovecraftian epic starring Tom Cruise ready to go just before Universal pulled the plug; who, even after the Oscar-winning smash that was The Shape of Water, still had to go out, hat in hand, to find financing for his future endeavors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Guillermo del Toro has, without question, looked into the face of a Henrich Harlander before with horror in his eyes. The stakes might not have been quite as high\u2014no Weinstein brain in Jacob Elordi\u2019s body\u2014but he knows the feeling. He also knows that he\u2019s releasing his dream project through Netflix, a company with more than its fair share of creative compromises for the sake of the bottom line to its name. \u201cThe theatrical experience is very important. I believe in it,\u201d del Toro told Variety<\/a> while focusing on just one of these compromises. \u201cBut if the choice is between being able to make the movie and have portions of the release be theatrical and portions be streaming or not make the movie, that\u2019s an easy decision to make.\u201d He got to make his epic, but what did it cost him?<\/p>\n

The filmmaker\u2019s empathy for the mad scientist, for a man so blinded by ambition that he cannot see the consequences of his creation, is both staggering and frightening. Living in a capitalist hellscape\u2014particularly at a time when lucrative tax write-offs, corporate mergers, and generative AI have hamstrung creators left and right\u2014means that artists everywhere have had this dark deal dangled in front of us. What would we sacrifice for the ultimate validation, for the chance to make our wildest dreams come true? How many of our principles would fall away if someone promised to sign a check for just the right amount? We can\u2019t know for sure until it happens to us.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the most frightening thing about Frankenstein. Even after Harlander loses his mind and falls to his death, Victor presses on, ignoring yet another stain on his psyche because his creation is all he has left. He was already damned, but now he\u2019s complicit in his damnation. Frankenstein, at its core, is a film about how we could be complicit in ours, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s no secret that Guillermo del Toro\u2019s Frankenstein is sympathetic to its Creature (Jacob Elordi). The filmmaker\u2019s entire…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-280339","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}