The English Department at UC Riverside gathered on April 1, 2026, for a roundtable on Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” and the conversation quickly moved past the basics of adaptation. English professor andre carrington led the discussion with a series of analytical questions, while three English doctoral students — Loren Barbour, Kris Lien and Rhiannon Rogers — weighed the film against Shelley’s story, del Toro’s earlier work and the long history of Frankenstein on screen and stage.
The strongest reaction came from Lien, who said he expected the film to probe the father-son bond between Victor Frankenstein and the creature, and also saw clear links to del Toro’s “Pinocchio.” Lien said Victor’s relationship with his mother sat at the center of the film, and that the animation sometimes awkwardly and rigidly echoed Victor’s own attempt to bring the monster to life. He said the creature’s journey also raised biological and ethical questions about what it means to be fully human.
Barbour focused on the casting of the creature and the way audiences respond to it. He said viewers familiar with del Toro’s films have become increasingly used to seeing Doug Jones inhabit the monster, a detail that shapes expectations before the first scene even lands. Rogers widened the lens by turning to “Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein,” the 1823 play that helped build the creature’s stage legacy and that Mary Shelley herself saw during its run.
That history matters because del Toro’s 2025 film strays far from the original source, a choice that has not sat well with some fans. The panel traced that break alongside other Frankenstein adaptation traditions, including the familiar question of how the monster should be portrayed and what the audience is meant to feel when it sees him. Carrington’s discussion gave the room a clear frame: del Toro is not simply revisiting a classic, but pushing it into territory where family, embodiment and authorship all collide.
The answer, at least for the scholars at UC Riverside, is that the film’s distance from Mary Shelley’s book is the point. Del Toro has made a Frankenstein that asks viewers to think about creation as inheritance, and about the monster not as an answer but as a problem that refuses to go away.