Before Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac in Guillermo del Toro’s new Netflix adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale, connects his Creature to his apparatus to give him the spark of life, he looks at an ivory miniature of a pregnant woman, an artifact from his childhood, then over at his creation, and nods in satisfaction. The Creature, still inert, matches his long-held idea of how his new human might appear. What Victor wakes up to in the morning, having believed that his experiment failed, is a wondrous sight. The Creature—played by the very tall Australian ex-Elvis Jacob Elordi—hovers at the edge of the four-poster in the full sun, one arm on a bedpost, white bandages drifting gorgeously from his arms and shoulders, and wrapping his nethers like a loincloth. To put it bluntly, del Toro’s Creature is hot, an entity almost without precedent in the world of Frankenstein adaptations, but one uniquely suited for the age of romantasy. Filled with joy, Victor embraces his beautiful creation, as violins on the score signal a moment that feels like nothing so much as falling in love.
This is very different from how the Victor of Shelley’s book greets his own “monster.” When the doctor first beholds the Creature, on a “dreary night of November,” he is horrified. “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful,” he tells us, describing how much work he’s put into making sure that his guy will look like—well—Jacob Elordi. The results are anything but. Although his creation has “lustrous black” hair and teeth “of a pearly whiteness,” he also sports “yellow skin” that barely conceals the muscles and arteries underneath, “watery eyes” set in “dun white sockets,” a “shriveled complexion,” and “straight black lips.”
The ugliness of Shelley’s Creature marks him for life as different, and also sends Shelley’s Victor an immediate message: Only God can give a person the vital spark that makes them appealing to others. Del Toro’s Victor starts to get this message, instead, when he can’t get the Creature to say another word besides Victor, and begins to sour on his project. Other characters in the film feel differently, and in order to understand why they do, you yourself have to find this Creature at least a little bit beautiful.
Elizabeth (Mia Goth), who is engaged to Victor’s brother William, meets the Creature just twice before conceiving what Victor scornfully calls an “attraction” and she describes as an “understanding.” She says she believes in the purity of his soul, but it helps that the Creature’s design is alien, yes, but never quite repulsive. Its body is constructed with overlapping panels of skin, smoothly sutured. In a change to the source material, del Toro’s Creature possesses infinite self-healing capacity, which offers a narrative rationale for his body to be made up of those ridges and panels, like the amphibian scales of the Asset in del Toro’s The Shape of Water, instead of being marked with the visible sutures Boris Karloff sports in the 1930s Universal Pictures Frankenstein movies. The Creature’s skin color changes over the course of del Toro’s film—he’s sometimes alabaster, sometimes greenish like a fish, sometimes a little bit blue, like a corpse pulled from a river—but he doesn’t have the ridged brow and boxy head that Karloff’s Creature embedded into the popular imagining of the monster. Elordi’s cranial physiognomy is basically preserved—and his neck remains bolt-free.
Elordi is tall, like Frankenstein’s Creature has always been—Victor scavenges body parts from tall soldiers because, he says, it’s easier to work at scale. “The thing I love about Jacob is that he looks like an anatomical [drawing],” del Toro said in an interview. “He looks like The Human. He has the capacity to feel newly minted. He doesn’t feel like a repaired creature or a victim in the ICU. You can see his body in a Vesalius anatomical engraving. Very diagrammatic.” The Creature in comic artist Bernie Wrightson’s beautiful pen-and-ink drawings from the 1980s has this quality, with a cut, hulking torso, and a sad, skull-like, noseless face that has a terrible handsomeness to it. (Del Toro, a fan of the Wrightson drawings, at one point in his movie’s long development wanted Wrightson to design the Creature.)
Ask anyone to imitate “a Frankenstein,” and they’ll probably stick their arms out, stiffen their legs, and do a little shamble. He’s supposed to be ungainly, but although the Creature here has some early scenes in which he’s awkward, almost immediately his movements become fluid. Elordi said he studied the Japanese dance form butoh and the movements of his golden retriever in plotting out how the Creature might move. You see this in the early scenes when he’s chained in the basement and proceeds on all fours, crouched like a beast, along a gutter, following a leaf on the water’s current. Then there’s the violence he does at his fully realized strength, when he battles wolves and breaks a ship out of Arctic ice. Elordi’s creation, at his maturity, is coordinated, strong, and fast—intentional in his actions, in a way the Creature usually isn’t portrayed.
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This attractive Creature is an outlier among others in the long lineage of Frankenstein adaptations. As Joey Eschrich wrote in Slate in 2017, creatures inside stories that have Frankenstein-like plots, like the robot in Ex Machina, the human–animal hybrid in Splice, and the A.I. in Her, can be quite beautiful. Edward Scissorhands, as played by Johnny Depp in the 1990 Tim Burton movie, fell in love over the course of the story and became a lust object for teenagers at the time. But if you want to write a romantic tale that’s more loyal to Shelley’s text, the physicality of the Creature presents some inevitable problems, starting with the issue of decay.
An introductory note to a Frankenstein fic on the fan fiction library Archive of Our Own illustrates some of the challenges you might face if trying to create a truly handsome Creature. The fan fiction writer explains why she keeps her Creature disgusting: “I’m not into pretending he’s not a terrifying, 8 foot tall, walking corpse.” (I did read another Frankenstein romance novel I won’t name, because it was pretty bad, in which the Creature is just a really handsome tall guy, who’s more grateful than usual to the heroine because she’s the only one who loves him.)
In this fan fic writer’s story, the heroine falls in love with the Creature but must get past the smell of his decay in order to go to bed with him. Diablo Cody’s 2024 comedy Lisa Frankenstein, which featured a lurching, disgusting, almost nonverbal Creature (Cole Sprouse) who befriends a goth girl named Lisa (Kathryn Newton), also invokes this scent issue. When the Creature starts crying, Lisa retches: “Your tears smell so bad!”
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But Elordi’s Creature, at least from what the film shows us of other characters’ reactions to him, has no apparent smell, and we live in a world where people may develop a thirst for almost any male-coded monster if the vibes are right. Audiences reading and watching fantasy in the past 15 years have thirsted for sparkly vampires, alpha werewolves, powerful fae, and hulking blue aliens devoted to Her Pleasure. In last year’s Robert Eggers–directed Nosferatu, Bill Skarsgård’s undead vampire, who stalks, mentally manipulates, and coerces Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), wasn’t meant to be hot per se, but a lot of people online confessed themselves, well, moved by his obsessive nature and dominant attitude. Perhaps the time is exactly correct for a hot Creature.
After all, if you put aside the shambles, the bolts, and the stench of the grave, the Creature is a person who is rejected by most of the world, has epic physical strength, and, at his very soul, appreciates beauty, loves nature, and seeks human connection. As the Creature says in Shelley (and in del Toro’s film): “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” Infinite love, infinite power, a pure and yearning soul—who is this but a romantic hero for the ages?
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