When we talk about Guillermo del Toro, we are not describing simple films: we are talking about black fables about the soul, allegories that use the monstrous to tell what is most human in existence. His version of Frankenstein is no exception. The director has always been convinced that what we call “monster” is only the deformed mirror of our wounds, and for this reason Mary Shelley’s story lends itself to becoming an emotional laboratory rich in psychological levels.
Gigantic, fragile, vulnerable creatures, who embody what human beings dare not confess: the fear of being rejected, the anxiety of not deserving love, the anger that arises from abandonment. His version of Frankenstein it promises to be all of this: not a story of fear, but a psychological parable of missed connections and dysfunctional attachments.
To truly understand the emotional depth of the film, the most effective support comes from the studio Creating a Monster: Attachment Theory and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Hannah Jackson. The text reconstructs Mary Shelley’s novel in the light of attachment theory, showing how the Creature does not become violent “by nature”, but because he is born and grows without a stable emotional relationship. A key that integrates perfectly with the sensitivity of Del Toro, a director who has always portrayed the monstrous as an extreme form of wounded innocence.
Because attachment theory is the perfect lens to read Del Toro’s film
Jackson’s study clearly shows that the emotional heart of the story is the parent-child relationship, not the scientific experiment. Victor Frankenstein, who grew up with a distant and empathetic father, develops an avoidant attachment: he doesn’t know how to accept emotions, he doesn’t know how to contain them, he doesn’t know how to recognize them.
When he becomes “father” of the Creature, he repeats the pattern: he creates life, but does not know how to love it. The result, explained by attachment theory, is dramatic:
Del Toro, who has made these dynamics his language, brings them to the center of the scene. The director will not show a monster, but a gigantic abandoned child the moment he opens his eyes for the first time.
Frankenstein as a tale of loneliness, rejection and the desire to be seen
The study claims that the Creature does not seek revenge, but connection. It seems violent, but what he really wants is only an emotional bond: a hand that touches him, a look that isn’t disgusted, someone who teaches him to understand the world. But Victor, in terror, immediately rejects him. It is the original trauma that determines everything that happens next. Del Toro amplifies this wound: in his poetics, rejection is always the beginning of every descent into darkness.
The Creature does not learn to speak with the heart, but with anger. It does not develop love, but desperation. It doesn’t build a self: it builds a void. Jackson demonstrates that all of the monster’s aggressive behaviors are a direct result of abandonment. The Creature kills not out of sadism, but to re-establish emotional contact with Victor, to make himself seen, to overturn the power relationship.
Del Toro, master of monstrous empathy, cannot help but embrace this reading: violence is not fear, it is pure pain.
Father and son prisoners of the same wound
Attachment theory also explains why Victor is unable to love: he has internalized his father’s coldness, his inability to accept emotions. So the Creature, despite hating him, always chases him: Victor is the only possible bond, the only source of identity.
Jackson’s study makes it clear that the Creature doesn’t want to kill Victor: it wants Victor to recognizeit wants to be the pain that the other cannot ignore. When Victor dies, the Creature loses his only “father”. And it is here that Del Toro will find one of his most emotional sequences, that of the monster no longer ferocious, but stripped of everything:
The hope I had, that anger, doesn’t count for anything.
Because, without a connection, it is nothing anymore.
A Frankenstein that talks about us
In this version, Frankenstein is not a gothic film, but an emotional tragedy. The real horror is not the resurrection of corpses, but the emotional loneliness that bends those who never learn to receive love.
Del Toro doesn’t tell a story about a monster. It tells what a human being can become when no one teaches him how to be human.
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