Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein: A Requiem for the Dead, the Damned, and the Neapolitan Dawn of a Monster

Only monsters play God.

It feels strangely fitting that Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) premiered in November, the Church’s month of remembrance for the Poor and Forgotten Souls in Purgatory—and yet, at the same time, it's hauntingly odd that it did not open in theaters on Halloween. Perhaps that was by design. Del Toro’s reimagining is not about jump-scares and shrieks, but a lament for the lost—a requiem for the restless dead. It belongs to November’s cold breath, not October’s masquerade.

Del Toro, a master of the macabre, conjures a world where beauty festers and sorrow gleams. Every shot feels carved from marble and shadow. His creature—stitched together from ambition, grief, and the daemonic impulse to play God—is less a monster than a soul suspended between heaven and hell. Watching him stumble through his creator's ruins is like gazing into Purgatory itself, where love and sin burn side by side in the same flame.

Visually and audibly, the film is a triumph. The performances are uniformly superb, and the sets are grand yet desolate. The costumes seem woven from mourning veils and funeral silks, each rich with texture and sorrowful grace. The score hums with dread and pity, echoing like a hymn from a ruined chapel. Few recent films have looked or sounded so hauntingly beautiful.

There's a striking symmetry—almost providential—in this return to Frankenstein’s origins. Though conceived in Geneva, Mary Shelley’s novel gives life to its eponymous protagonist—the true monster—in Naples (a detail not depicted in del Toro's film), an ancient city where the sacred and profane share the same breath, where death is no stranger, and the stones seem to whisper with ghosts. Shelley was deeply inspired by the city’s vitality and decay, its charnel houses and shrines, its proximity to both beauty and oblivion—and it's said Naples helped influence her vision of life torn from death.

Naples, no stranger to monsters, is even said to cradle the bones—and perhaps the restless spirit—of Vlad Tepes, the Prince of Wallachia, whose dark legend would one day cast the shadow of Dracula. It's a city where resurrection feels possible, even perilous. Del Toro’s gothic sensibility seems to draw from that same well—the city’s volcanic heartbeat, its mingling of death and divinity.

Reanimated across genres and generations, the creature refuses to die

As someone who has loved Shelley’s masterpiece since childhood, I’ve spent a lifetime chasing its many incarnations across screen and shadow. I’ve seen Frankenstein reanimated in every form imaginable: humorous, as in Young Frankenstein; erotic, in Lady Frankenstein; set in the Wild West, in Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter; reborn as kaiju terror, in The War of the Gargantuas (the sequel to Frankenstein vs. Baragon); and rendered with tragic grandeur in gothic science fiction like Bride of Frankenstein.

But none of those countless incarnations prepared me for del Toro’s vision. Though it's not a faithful retelling, his film stays true to Shelley’s original spirit—its anguish, its wonder, its holy terror at the act of creation. His Frankenstein isn't just an adaptation but an exhumation—it digs into myth and memory, unearthing the moral bones Shelley buried two centuries ago.

It might not have been released on Halloween, but perhaps that is just as well. Halloween delights in shadows; Frankenstein listens to the voices that linger within them. In November’s fading light, del Toro’s creature stirs—not to terrify, but to remind us that even the dead dream of mercy and forgiveness.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, November 11th, Feast of San Martino di Tours