It’s no surprize that the 1818/31 novel Frankenstein: the Modern Prometheus concerns a teenage dirtbag’s idea of a good idea: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly was 21 when she published it, a famous factoid that contributes to the legendary novel’s mystique. Yet buried in its adaptations, a lotta people forget the novel itself presents a story about a teen parent. It’s a coming-of-age story, and if that’s not an obvious observation to you, that’s probably because every major adaptation drops this element, just like they largely nix the girl characters except for Elizabeth and maaaaaaaybe dead mom, and that’s probably because all these adaptations are made by middle-aged men. Leave it to the fellas to edit out the girls and the coming-of-age from a girl’s coming-of-age story. 

In Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 cinematic riff on Shelly’s novel, the youth of Victor Frankenstein is empathically replaced with old guy concerns. There’s a whole new character played by Christoph Waltz and his entire thing is, i’m an evil horny old guy and i don’t wanna die. Victor Frankenstein himself is played by a wonderful, crazy-eyed Oscar Isaac–but he’s like what? Coming on fifty, yeah? A very handsome fifty! I adore his performance too, so i’m not against the casting: he hobbles about the whole movie, he has like seven different ways of hobbling and lurking, and it’s fun. I don’t mean to be weird about age, but it’s central to what i’m writing about.

I’m also inspired by the adolescent new Wuthering Heights movie, although at time of this writing i have not yet seen it. It’s not a jibe to call it adolescent: the writer/director Emerald Fennell describes her movie as a presentation of her adolescent idea of the Brontë novel, not so much a straight go at the actual text. Might be a hoot and a good movie, but I dread to see it, not because i think it’ll be bad, exactly. Well, yes i’m worried i won’t like it, but more than that it’s just….i don’t know, girls, i really love these books, and i kind of enjoy these movies too, but it’s a fraught enjoyment, and it’s just as i reflect on it, i can’t help but ask… maybe i don’t like these movies actually?  

….let’s get back on track talking about Frankie. In every major adaptation (not counting the blessed Hallmark Channel miniseries), Frankenstein is pretty solidly a guy in his 30s-40s, he’s just, y’know, a normal-bormal regular-degular adult Man, an experienced scientist certainly nowhere near his teenage years. Here’s a rundown: in the 1931 James Whale movie, he’s played by Colin Clive, who was 30-years-old at the time but a hardcore 1930s 30, which means he looks like he’s a rough 50 and some fiveish years away from death (he was), which is all to say he looks great, iconic, best to ever do it, THE definitive mad scientist; in 1994, Kenneth Branagh treated audiences to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, casting himself, 34, in the lead, and he goes shirtless in so many scenes you could never mistake him for a young adult, no way, not an ounce of boy on him, he’s All. MAN; in the 2011 Danny Boyle play at London’s National Theater, there’s a dual performance by Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, who were both close to 40 and play the character as their age. 

When you think of Victor Frankenstein, you imagine a fully adult guy right? You think Doctor Frankenstein, not lil student Frankie. But not me. Not my Frankenstein.   

The original version of the character is the age of its writer: he’s basically a teen at the time of his oopsie Creation.  He realizes his tragic achievement after a mere two years of formal education at Ingolstadt, placing him somewhere between 19 and 21 years old (the book is a bit fuzzy on the timeline). He laments his instructor Krempe for laughingly dismissing his mystical ambitions  instead of engaging seriously with his radical ideas. He fixates somewhat on this perceived negligence. Poor little college boy couldn’t foresee the consequences of realizing his goal. He yearns for an adult to have set boundaries with him. 

Ok wait hold up! I’ve now seen 2026 Wuthering Heights. The time came. I’m glad i saw it because now i know what bothers me about these loose cinematic adaptations. Very loose adaptations. True not to the spirit of the original novels, nor the characters. Especially not the characters. I will throw hands over anyone saying these movies represent the essence of the characters; they don’t, and that’s not a bad thing, exactly, but it does mean these movies are empathically irrelevant to those of us who love the books. Nobody in either 2026 Wuthering Heights or 2025 Frankenstein at all closely resembles their original novel counterparts. They are essentially original characters.  

Del Toro’s Creature is not at all akin to the novel’s Creature. I will fight over this! The novel’s Creature is a crazy cruel jerk as much as he’s a tragic victim. In striking contrast, Del Toro’s Creature is the most beautiful high femme yet butch tranny bitch alive, i will die for that gentle bb magic boi–step aside, Mia Goth, that’s my spouse! Don’t you dare compare my tranny beau to Mary Shelly’s asshole. Shelly’s Creature fucking kills a kid! He kills Victor’s teeny tiny little brother William, an amazingly well-written scene of violent horror, and after his murder he frames it on a random girl, Justine, purely because she looks like a pleasant n’ pretty person. He plants evidence on her, and that’s how you know he’s devious: he thinks like a cop. These are his first crimes, and this violence proves a limitless capacity for cruelty. I’m sorry but killing a kid and framing it on a nice young gal, who dies for this crime, the most ignoble of deaths, public execution despised and ashamed, i mean that’s crazy! If you don’t think that’s crazy devious shit i’m afraid of you.

Frankenstein, the novel, is centered on resentment and the extreme loneliness it can bring about. Del Toro replaces this theme for a story concerning….forgiveness!? Yuck! In Shelly’s hardcore and cool book, Victor denies himself forgiveness because he fails to ever communicate his involvement with the horror. His silence goes to extreme measures. Remember how i just told you the Creature kills a kid and frames it on Justine, well that girl Justine is Elizabeth’s best friend, a quasi-adopted sister who long lived with her; her “more than sister,” as Elizabeth movingly puts it. When she’s arrested, Elizabeth at first does not believe it, but after she confesses under great duress, Elizabeth is presented with the apparent reality that her closest companion killed a child she had loved. It absolutely destroys her spirit. Even when he learns the truth that his Creature killed William, her beau Frankenstein says nothing to elucidate Elizabeth. 

While he joins Elizabeth to visit Julie in her cell, and as the girls weep lamenting over the surreal nightmare their lives have become, young Victor sits by in ashamed silence. He could try to explain, but he chooses to deny Elizabeth and Julie so much as basic communication. I think this is a believable mix of pride and cowardice. Young men are like that. Many such cases. For me, this is the most crucial scene in the novel. It’s my personal favorite moment, which is wild because the Creature is my favorite character and he’s not in it. It’s just so dramatically rich tough!

I love a death of the soul moment, and Vic’s soul dies by denying Justine and Elizabeth access to it when they could badly use it; this is where he becomes devoted to embittering solitude. Justine and Elizabeth devastate me, Shelley does an amazing job at maintaining Vic’s selfish narrative voice yet allowing enough of the girls to come through to suggest their deeper, off-stage relationship. The penal nightmare of it all is so stingingly bleak, anticipating Kafka. This scene culminates part I, suggesting its key dramatic importance. It’s never included in adaptations. Not even in the 3 hour Hallmark movie. In fact, in that movie Vic visits Justine without Elizabeth, and he does more to attempt her execution’s prevention.

Vic sullenly insists he suffers more than everyone, despite his actions ruining the lives of everyone around him. He abandons his Creature, and when  his Creature’s just resentment spirals into the cruelest, most unjust of murders, Frankenstein is pulled along in the tide of bitter cruelty. Shelly is quite clever in how she gives the Creature and Vic many of the same lines: they both often refer to themselves as wretches and the most miserable, lonely souls in existence. Victimizing himself, Vic lacks the ability to engage with his Creature as anything but an antagonist. Because he, the Creator, is a baby too. Not ready to be a parent. He grows into his mid-twenties, but he cannot truly grow. He cannot mature into marriage and a happy adult life. He is stuck alongside his Creature’s arrested develoipment.

Del Toro doesn’t want to tell a story about a young man and his Creature who, lacking parental guidance, each exist at the extremity of selfish resentment. He instead wants to tell a story about generational trauma and overcoming it through the purity of monstrosity. Sweet stuff, but i guess i’m not always in the mood.

Hey, wanna know how to identify a real lover of the novel Frankenstein? Bring up Safie. Not a single adaptation has bothered to so much as reference Safie. She’s a major supporting character in the novel, about equal in significance to the blind old man cottager, De Lacey. Uh huh, that’s right, i’m sure he rings a bell! No idea who Safie is but everyone knows about the kindly myopic old man who chats with the Creature.  

De Lacey  is sometimes depicted as a hermit, but in the novel he’s part of a family. Safie is the newest addition to the family, a Turkish immigrant in love with Felix, De Lacey’s son. The lovers have a whole history that takes up a few chapters, a particularly wild moment in the novel for the framing device of it all: Safie and Felix’s story of revolutionary, trans-national and trans-religious amour is presented to Victor by the Creature as, like, a supplement to his own story explaining what he did in the few years since his abandonment; which is all part of Victor telling his life story to arctic explorer Robert Walton, who is relating all this to his sister/the reader.

Safie learns to speak English at the De Lacey cottage. This is how the Creature knows how to talk! He gains his voice thanks to the education of an immigrant. He spends a solid year merely observing the De Lacey family, but once Safie is introduced, the Creature yearns to overcome communication barriers and connect with the people around him, just like she does. He learns the native language alongside her, following her diligent study. Shelly underlines an important similarity between the Creature and immigrints like Safie: they each must work to be understood by the people around them, and they each depend on other people actively wanting to understand them. You can put in the work, but people can choose to embrace or shun you.  

Safie is loved by Felix and accepted by his family. But totally abandoned, and with no homeland but death, the Creature tries, and fails, to replicate this situation for himself. In probably the novel’s most famous scene, the Creature enjoys a brief conversation with De Lacey. They bro out a bit. They chill. Alas, the brief good hang is interrupted by his family returning home. Safie, a potential ally to the Creature, screams horrified like most people would. Felix violently drives off the 7-foot-tall patchwork corpse like most people would. 

 It’s telling that in Del Toro’s Frankenstein, the Creature instead learns rudimentary language by first observing De Lacey’s lessons to a little girl, and then receiving the lessons directly himself, as if he were advancing from child to teen. The kindly old man educates the Creature once he reveals himself and they form a bond, a sweet parental type friendship. Unlike the novel, they’re offered plenty of privacy and they indulge plenty more than a brief convo. De Lacey gifts the Creature with a rich relationship. They read together. They laze through the days in philosophical discussions. The Creature is even treated to De Lacey’s profound deathbed speech urging him toward mercy and forgiveness. You know what actually? Fuck this! The goddamn Creature gets a deeper friendship than i’ve ever had! So much for the most brutally isolated character in English literature. Making friends can’t be that hard, though, when you’re such a sensitive sweetie, a tall blue and handsome hottie.

2025 Frankenstein is fine. I fell in love with it when i saw it because the sets and costumes are pretty and i want that beautiful sissy bitch of a creature to marry me.  To a lesser extent, i enjoyed Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Gorgeous sets. Enjoyable melodrama. Hey look, xcx is here. And wait is that John Cale and Sky Ferreira too? Woah, love the soundtrack. Emerald abandons the core theme of the novel. A grim focus on the resentment generated from denied desires is replaced with freaky fucking. I’m getting cranky, so i’ll keep the Wuthering Heights part short.

 I don’t mean it in a mean way when i say this movie should have taken a cue from Fennell’s collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Weber: name it Bad Wuthering Heights. Or like, Not your Mum’s Wuthering Heights, or Wuthering Heights that Fucks. Go for it, be the first Hollywood movie with “fuck” in the title. It will happen. It is inevitable. “Fuck” is in an increasingly accepted cuss–as in, Fuck ICE. You can say that on tv right? Since you can say “Fuck ICE” on TV, you can say Wuthering Heights That Fucks on TV too. You can put it on the posters, no asterisks necessary. It’s fine. This is what it’s like now.  

Let’s get the white Heathcliff issue out of the way. It didn’t bother me in terms of watching the movie, because this sweetie sub boi thing Elordi is doing, it’s so not Heathcliff, and the whole thing is so not Wuthering Heights. That Salburn movie Fennel made, which i didn’t see, probably has more in common with The Talented Mr. Ripley, the classic gay novel by problematic fav Patricia Highsmith.  I didn’t see Saltburn because i don’t know, i thought it looked…not for me. I would have been duped into seeing it, though, were it called The Talented Mr. Ripley. I guess i can’t complain: duping people into seeing shoddy adaptations of good books is kinda the genesis of popular cinema. 

So Elordi’s casting didn’t bother me in the context of like, the silly movie, but in the context of the real world, it’s upsetting. We should resign the term “white-washing.” It’s so polite, and it sounds constructive. What painter hasn’t needed to whitewash? Let’s call it KKKasting or something. Emerald Fennell’s KKKasting fits with her shallow movie, which adopts a racially ahistorical approach to casting, but in the context of the real world, in which Healthcliff, a non-white protagonist, has been made white through a century of KKK-friendly adaptations, the KKKasting is revolting. There are so few comparable POC characters in litterature: generally, if a character in a Victorian English novel is a POC, they will likely not be the complex protagonist afforded the space to be sexy, scary, tragic, attractive, repulsive, ironical, cruel, and sympathetic, but Heathcliff is all these things. In this regard, Andrea Arnold gave us a proper Heathcliff in her good 2011 movie adaptation. It’s sad and angering to see the regression.  

Look, i don’t want to write about stuff i think is bad, so i won’t. I’ll write about Wuthering Heights the novel a bit.

So in the novel, Heathcliff is a dark-skinned kid of the streets adopted by this guy Earnshaw. He is not white by the standards of the 1840s, so he could just be Italian or Greek; but it’s an important distinction that he is not white; it is important that is visibly othered from the culture that adopted him. He encounters racism from Nelly, for example, the servant who tells the story to our narrator, Lockwood, who’s basically just some guy who stumbles on a household of a bunch of moody, weirdo jerks, lorded over by the grim Heathcliff. Lockwood spends the night, encounters Cathy’s terrifying ghost, and relies on Nelly to tell him what the helly is going on.

He learns Heathcliff once enjoyed favor with the master of Wuthering Heights, Earnshaw, which spurred the jealous resentment of his bio son, Hindley (not even in Fennel’s movie). However, Earnshaw’s daughter, Cathy, takes quite a shine to the foundling lad. As kids, they’re playmates, but as they come of age, they develop the hots for each other. 

Remember, though, he’s a dark foundling direct from the streets, and it’s late 1700s rural England. He’s like extra out of bounds for a girl like Cathy. Cathy can’t consider him for a match. In the only scene Fennell really bothers to adapt (though she later frustratingly backtracks its impact), Cathy tells Nelly she could never marry Heathcliff due to the scandal of it all, therefore she must accept the advances of Edgar Linton, a wealthy and respectable neighbor. Nelly spots Heathcliff overhearing Cathy’s rejection, and she sees that he flees before he can hear Cathy go on to clarify how badly she loves him and how dearly she wishes they could be together. Here she drops the novel’s most romantic and more famous lines, like, oh our souls are the same and he’s more myself than I am.

Alas, Heathcliff never hears these poetical romantic sayings. Hurt by the rejection, he leaves for a few years, amasses some amount of fortune, then returns on a revenge mission of sorts. He takes over Wuthering Heights from the drunk fuck-up asshole Hindley. He antagonizes Edgar and flirts with Cathy, and in these scenes you root for the guy. Even though she dies before they can realize their love, does Heathcliff give up on their passion? No! He can still try to wed her daughter, Catherine, with his son, Linton, who he spitefully sires via Edgar’s sister, Isabella (much like Cathy relents to Edgar’s infatuation, Heathcliff relents to Isabella). A revenge fuck baby that Heathcliff devotes his life to torturing and manipulating to his will. He’s fiendishly funny as he goes about it too. 

Look, it’s a fucking bugnuts story. There’s a part where Hindley the drunk heel drops his baby son from the top of a stair landing, and Heathcliff happens to be directly beneath , in a position to catch the baby by pure reflex, although after his heroic save Nelly’s pretty sure he considers smashing the infant against the ground, and would have done so were he alone and she not there to bear witness (yea, way to make yourself important to the story Nelly). He probably would though! That baby would be nothing but a hindrance to him.  Of course he hates that baby. He hates everyone at this point. Denied love, he lives for resentment.  

Nelly hates Heathcliff in kind, and she hates Cathy too. Hates em both. As a servant, the two of them are nothing but trouble for her. They’re too darn manic. Cathy bangs her head against shit and throws fits when she doesn’t get her way. She throws hands at Edgar for insulting Heathcliff, and the guy’s so deep in her pussy he allows it. He also allows Heathcliff’s taunting visits to his wife, for a while, even though his wife is clearly emotionally cucking him with her childhood pal. He goes on to deny the visits, and it’s implied the separation may have expedited her young demise. Cathy is a ghost more than she’s a living character, she’s dead for most the book; like Shelly’s Creature, Cathy is an isolated being of fantasy, an impossible expression of love denied.  

I love these wild, nasty characters.  Brontë and Shelley’s characters attract, repulse, and convince our sympathy against our learned morality. We relate with them even as we’re disturbed by the cruel lengths their resentment takes them. Resentment can undo anyone after all.  

This is what we might call stage 2 of Gothic fiction. Gothic fiction begins in the 1700s as a prototype for both the horror novel and the mystery novel. I won’t get into my beloved Horace Walpole, Clara Reeves, and Ann Radcliff, but these writers introduce narratives based on a fraught reemergence of the past and extreme emotions usually involving lineage, like, oh some crazy queen wants to fuck her son; or, oh some scheming monk wants to kill or maybe fuck his maybe estranged daughter; and then there’s some surprizing revelations usually regarding lineage; like, oh, it seems some nobody-type person was the heir to a lordly estate, severed from his rightful property by some nefarious doings, and the truth is revealed thanks to some ghost knight shambling noisily about in its ghostly armor. I’ve tossed together a few Gothic titles in these cheeky summaries. If you know them, you get points.  

Brontë and Shellly developed this sort of book away from mysteries regarding ancestry, focusing on the weirdo character element. They’re more about the mysteries of the mind, man! Moody weird girls, they wrote about moody young people devoted to realizing something tangible out of their lively passions and love, and in the process devolving into deadly obsessions and hate. 

A bit presently lost in my own resentments, i’ve never been more in the mood for the bleak Gothic, and i mean the grim stuff. 

So if Del Toro makes a Mexican melodrama version of Frankenstein, i may like it, i may weep a million times and gush over his qt Creature, but it ultimately leaves me somewhat cold The coldness of being an adult. And if Emerald Fennel wants to make a horny basic British lady version of Wuthering Heights, my bestie and i can giggle at the old-timey S and M sex in a horse stable and at the Margot Barbie fingering a fish, but this enjoyment leaves me a whole different cold. Because it all takes place in this fantasy England where POC have status over white people and bully them, jealous of their sad middle-aged sexy wuv, the optics of it are just so tacky.  It leaves me with the coldness of cringe. The racial fantasy Victorian England casting works with Bridgerton because the producers, in particular Shonda Rimes, know what they’re doing. 2026 Wuthering Heights is really a disaster in this way.     

By the way, in the book Cathy dies at 21, and Fennell casts Margot Barbie, who is my age, so let’s just say she’s somewhat older than 21. It’s fitting these filmmakers age up their characters; they’re writing original characters closer to their present mindset. I hope the next Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights movies attempt to depict the spiteful freak youth in these books.  

Del Toro is an older gentleman who promotes parental kindness and forgiveness, and Fennel is a middle-aged lass who promotes middle-aged white people having sex. Come on, guys–aren’t we in some grim times? A more vicious tone would be such a refreshment. The youth are more likely to understand. If Fennel truly went adolescent with her movie, i’m surprized it’s not nastier.

Incidentally, here’s a cool way to cinematically portray Frankenstein’s Creature:  a stop-motion animated character blended into a live-action environment, y’know like in Monkeybone. Have him voiced by multiple people too, do some freaky vocal layering to imitate the idea of assembled vocal chords. Not even in artful makeup can a person replicate the uncanny inhuman wrongness of the Creature as Shelly writes him. In all these movies, don’t we always ask, damn, why is everyone so quick to attack some random butch with a skin condition? The Creature’s appearance must give that “Zero at the bone” feeling Emily Dickinson got from snakes. 

I may write more about Frankenstein, because you know what the Creature is kinda? That bitch is kind of a ghost baby. And i will write a log about ghost babies soon! It’s very much for real next on my list. Well, ok it might not happen. I’m impulsive about these logs. My next post might be about true horror, who knows. Deep in a lot of true horror this last year, christ, or two.