To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls. In that, it is no different, or less controversial, than humor, and no less intimate than sex. Our rejection or acceptance of a particular type of horror fiction can be as rarefied or kinky as any other phobia or fetish. Horror is made of such base material—so easily rejected or dismissed—that it may be hard to accept my postulate that within the genre lies one of the last refuges of spirituality in our materialistic world.
Through the ages, most storytellers have had to resort to the fantastic in order to elevate their discourse to the level of parable. At a primal level, we crave parables, because they allow us to grasp impossibly large concepts and to understand our universe without and within. These tales can make flesh what would otherwise be metaphor or allegory. The horror tale in particular becomes imprinted in us at an emotional level: Shiver by shiver, we gain insight.
But, at its root, frisson is a crucial element of this form of storytelling—because all spiritual experience requires faith, and faith requires abandonment: the humility to fully surrender to a tide of truths and wills much larger than ourselves. It is in this abandonment that we are allowed to witness phenomena that go beyond our nature, and that reveal the spiritual side of our existence.
We dislocate, for a moment, the rules of our universe, the laws that bind the rational and diminish the cosmos to our scale. And when the world becomes a vast, unruly place, a place where anything can happen, then—and only then—do we allow for miracles and angels, no matter how dark they may be.
I started purchasing and collecting fantastic literature when I was roughly 7 years old. The discovery of the horror tale at such an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of story serves, in many ways, the very same purpose fairy tales do for the very young: It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In horror we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. We are allowed to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety.
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And—again, like a fairy tale—horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it is birthed. In the 18th century, Romanticism—and with it, the Gothic tale—surged as a reaction against the suffocating dogmas of the Enlightenment. As reason and science were being enthroned, the Gothic Romance exploded, full of emotion and thrills. “The great object of life is Sensation—to feel that we exist—even though in pain,” said Lord Byron, enunciating a basic Romantic idea and, perhaps, hoping that goblins, ghosts, and demons provided some necessary release to a puritanical society. The innate necrophilia subjacent in the Gothic spirit is made manifest as a tribute to the eternal notion of love.
In other words, Romanticism was punk: emotional, savage, and iconoclastic. The stiff upper lip was snarling back! The enormous popularity of this genre produced a deluge of inferior titles, and toward the end of its run, the Gothic’s resistance to modernity gave way to a new set of devices: It began to utilize the shiny artifices of science, psychology, and other avant-garde tools to lend plausibility to its phantoms.
It is at this point, at the turn of the 19th century, that the modern horror tale, in the hands of young, skillful, and powerful writers, delivers bold works that shape the language in exciting and innovative ways. Mary Shelley was painfully young—a teenager, in fact—when she wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, and into the monster and his tale she was able to pour all her contradictions and her questions—her essential pleas and her feelings of disfranchisement and inadequacy.
While reading the novel as a child, I was arrested by the epistolary form Shelley had chosen, because it felt so immediate. I was overtaken by the Miltonian sense of abandonment, the absolute horror of a life without a reason. The tragedy of the tale was not dependent on evil. That’s the supreme pain of the novel—tragedy requires no villain. Just as Poe will prefigure the ambiguities of psychiatry, Shelley utilizes the most cutting-edge science and philosophy to drive her existential discourse home. Galvanism, chemistry, and surgery provide the alibi for the monster to gain life, to arise and question all of us.
The Faust-like thirst for knowledge and the arrogance of science are embodied in the character of the monster’s inventor, Victor Frankenstein. He becomes an uncaring god who can force dead flesh to be reanimated but cannot calculate the consequences of his creation. This leads to the infinite sorrow of his creation, who will experience the hunger, the loneliness, and the burden of existence, far removed from its creator. The Creature, like the wolf of Saint Francis, wanders through the world, encounters mostly evil and hatred, and learns of rage and pain. He becomes hardened and lonely. And I, at age 10, in a comfortable house in a suburb, felt exactly the same way.
The unnatural essence of the Creature is defined by his origins—by the god that gave him life—because Victor usurps not only the divine function of God, but also that of intercourse. Victor is childless and alone when he creates the Creature, and their final encounter brings it all full circle—they finally meet in a desolate, frozen landscape, which provides the perfect theater for the colloquy between the arid God and the abandoned Man.
In usurping the role of God, Victor is also faced with questions and reproach that far exceed his paternal capabilities and ultimately allow the Creature to see him, too, as just a man. Another abandoned man. So, as the tale ends, and as his god dies a simple man, the Creature will fade into the cold limbo with the sole desire to die himself. To be no more. Remote as Victor may have been, he was the only thing that gave sense to the Creature’s life, and with him gone, only oblivion remains. Frankenstein is the purest of parables—working both as a straight narrative and as a symbolic one. Shelley utilizes the Gothic model to tell a story not about the loss of a paradise but rather about the absence of one.
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The novel is so articulate and vibrant that it often surprises those who approach it for the first time. No adaptation—and there are some masterful ones—has ever captured it whole. Taking its rightful place among the essential characters in any narrative form, Frankenstein’s Creature will go beyond literature and will join Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Pinocchio, and Monte Cristo in embodying a concept, even in the minds of those who have never read the actual books.
There are two versions of the novel—the second revised and augmented and showing more of a regard for structure and theme than the first—but I, personally, love that first version the most. It dares to be unruly. It has the angst, the rage, and the urgency of the adolescent questioning of the world. And it holds the mystery of its own purpose—much as the Book of Job measures Man’s wants and perceptions against the Infinite and the Eternal.
The truth contained in this book still feels urgent and vibrant. Most of its questions still spark our souls and move our imagination, and, for me, their worth lies in the fact that they will forever remain unanswered—resonating with our very being and providing us with a cautionary tale and a parable of solitude and abandonment.
I have been blessed with the chance to create two films that echo each other and that came in rapid succession after decades of impossible obstacles. Both presented themselves when I was old enough and I had lived enough to identify themes that weigh heavily upon my soul. Pinocchio and Frankenstein are both stories of fathers and sons, the lineage of pain, and the eternal possibility of redemption. I read both books before I became a teenager, and both struck me as travelogues of the soul—the wanderings of a lost Adam who fell out of grace and had to search for truth in the madness of our world. May they, in some way, guide you like a North Star and make you believe again.
This article is from Guillermo del Toro’s introduction to a new edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, to be published on October 28th, 2025 by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Introduction copyright © 2023, 2025 by Necropia, Inc.
