criterionforum.org

Mr Sausage wrote: Thu Jul 16, 2026 2:00 am I mean, I sympathize with you, FrauBlucher--del Toro's movie is explicit and heavy-handed with its moralizing, especially towards the end. But like knives is saying, the novel is a morality play through and through. Its themes of human over-reach, of the importance of kindness but the difficulty in finding it, of the responsibility of parents to children, of the caustic effects of revenge--these are classic moral issues, and they're central to the book. del Toro hasn't imported moralisms into the story, he's just amplified the ones that have always been there. Someone would actually have to go quite out of their way to make Frankenstein just entertainment.

I have to say that I've never read the novel. So, after you and knives' comments I decided to do some investigative work on Mary Shelly's novel. As you two stated that the novel is certainly a morality play. I had no idea and didn't realize how much so. As you said Mr Sausage, explicit and heavy-handed. Also, I thought the traipsing around the arctic hunting one another was strictly a GDT invention. So it seems GDT's screenplay mirrored the novel as close as possible. That being said it still hasn't changed my opinion about the film. And maybe it's because of how GDT handled the material. But it makes me appreciate the Universal/Karloff/Whale Frankenstein even more so. For me, as stated earlier, horror/monster movies are more about being entertained and not being hit over the head with sentimentality and morality. I'm sure you can find morals in the Universal Frankenstein like the don't-fcuk-with-nature ideals but it's not going to steer one through a looking glass of morality, at least for me. After the villagers burn the wind mill down with the Creature in it there is no morality in that