Queering the Creature: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein through a queer, autistic lens

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By Shona Kelly

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Guillermo del Toro is a filmmaker celebrated for his ‘monster’ movies that challenge the notion of who exactly we consider to be the ‘monster’. The Shape of Water was born from his desire to see the titular Creature from the Black Lagoon be hailed as a romantic hero rather than a dangerous threat, and his latest film is no different in how it takes a story and characters that have been seen before, and studies them with his own signature compassion. His adaptation of Mary Shelley’s genre-establishing and all-time classic novel Frankenstein pulls on the source material to elevate the Creature to status of story hero in his own right.

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Something that, personally, strikes me about del Toro’s films is the way in which I can take my own experiences as a queer autistic person into the cinema with me and find a kinship with his characters, themes, and narratives. It is why The Shape of Water is one of my favourite films, and why, in this piece, I would like to discuss his treatment of the Creature in Frankenstein through a lens of neurodivergence and queerness. The Creature’s journey through the narrative, from his abusive relationship with his ‘father’ figure (Victor Frankenstein) to finding friendship and compassion in an elderly blind man, as he explores his sense of self, gains autonomy, and finds himself at odds with the rest of the world who deem him an outsider for features and characteristics entirely out of his control, replicates a journey of discovery that will be familiar to many queer and autistic people.

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Frankenstein is a film that Guillermo del Toro has spent his whole life trying to make, and you can see this clearly in the thematic underpinnings of all the work that has preceded it. Del Toro has always championed the underdog, the disenfranchised, the misunderstood, and elevated them to the spotlight. The Shape of Water is a story about outsiders – a mute protagonist in 1960s Baltimore whose two closest friends are a black woman and a gay man, falls in love with an imprisoned Amphibian Man who is being tortured and treated as filth. Pinocchio is about a peculiar wooden boy and Pan’s Labyrinth about a young girl during great personal and political upheaval. In each of them, the ‘monstrous’ are not that which meets the eye. Just as, with Frankenstein, the ‘real’ monster is not, well, the monster, but Frankenstein himself.

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We all know the story of Frankenstein – a brilliant man endeavours to build a man from nothing, but gets far more than he bargained for when the man comes to life and has a mind of his own – but in del Toro’s hand, this becomes not Frankenstein’s film, but the Creature’s. This is his story, as we quickly realise when we are shown his view of events after Victor has told his. This is a story, not of a mad scientist and his brilliance, but of the consequences of creating life and not taking care of them afterwards.

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Del Toro establishes Frankenstein and the Creature’s relationship as that of a father and a son, a creator and his creation, and this is thematically significant to a discussion of this film through a queer, neurodivergent lens. Victor has great expectations for his creation, his ‘son,’ but when he fails to meet them, he brands him as being unintelligent and a failure on his own part. Victor bases intelligence on the Creature’s ability or inability to speak, but instead of taking responsibility for his creation and putting in the effort to teach him, to help him learn, he instead belittles and chastises him, going as far as to physically abuse and attempt to kill him. In viewing the Creature as allegorically neurodivergent, Victor’s correlation between speech and intelligence feels particularly poignant. It is common for autistic people to have a delay in speech development, and it is true of society at large that nonverbal autistic people are treated as if they are less intelligent for their difference in speech, which is categorically untrue. This, considering the father/son dynamic at play here, highlights the ways in which parental expectations for their diagnosed or undiagnosed autistic children create conflict. The Creature is treated poorly by his father for displaying traits that align with neurodiversity and autism in the ‘real’ world, and the lack of acceptance for the Creature for being who he is from his father, leading to his leaving home to find something more for himself, reads like a familiar story for countless queer and trans people born into bigoted environments. Victor is violent and abusive towards the Creature, his son. He does not fit the mould, because he is not as he expected him to be – a tale as old as time.

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When the Creature does venture out on his own and meets David Bradley’s elderly blind character, he is shown a different type of love, finds a sort of community, and learns how to speak. As in The Shape of Water, the Creature grows and learns through the assistance of another disenfranchised person. He finds somebody who understands him in some way, who meets him on the same level, with dignity and respect. The blind man’s lack of sight and the Creature’s lack of speech allow them to connect and the Creature can only learn to speak when he is met with kindness. He learns to express himself, his thoughts, and his feelings, and comes to resemble a ‘normal’ man. This replicates the process of masking as an autistic person, and similarly for the Creature, no matter how much he strives to fit in, it does not matter to anyone other than the blind man. When the blind man’s kin return, they see the Creature only as a monster and try to kill him, and he must leave ‘home’ once more. The search for found family, kinship and acceptance can be never-ending for queer and neurodivergent people, and the Creature’s story makes that ever more real.

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One of the deeply heart wrenching moments in this film is the Creature’s expression of a desire for companionship from another who is like him – someone else who cannot die. This cements the Creature as an outsider, of being a man in a world that seems to speak the same language but neither seems to understand the other. Despite the fact that he has become ‘intelligent’ in Victor’s eyes now that he can speak, and despite the fact that he has done everything in his power to resemble a ‘real man,’ he is inherently different and is perceived as a threat because of this. He is monstrous, dangerous, and scary in the eyes of others and they refuse to see him as their equal. He is doomed to never fit in, to be a lone soul wandering the earth forever. It is quite an evocative parallel for being autistic in a neurotypical world, desperate for someone else who might understand you.

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But there is someone who seems to understand him. Elizabeth. Notably the only woman in a major role in the film (with the exception of Victor’s mother, who is also played by Mia Goth, and dies very early on), Elizabeth meets him immediately with compassion, tenderness and care, not with the aggression, fear and violence that the men approach him with. This also, like in The Shape of Water, places the ‘monster’ in a romantic role, in conflict with the true monster of the film. Victor is in love with Elizabeth, but to her, Victor is a monster, and instead, the Creature holds her heart. Despite this, their love ends in tragedy and can never be. Doomed star-crossed lovers whose ‘different’ relationship causes consternation and disapproval – thematically, that is a queer story.

The Creature is the unlikely hero of this story, an outsider who, following rejection from his father, goes on a journey to find himself and community, only to be met with rejection from all over. He finds kinship here and there – with a blind man and with Elizabeth – but no one can ever really understand him. He is the only man like him, and that is a feeling we can all relate to across the board. Del Toro knows that better than anyone and it is why his work resonates with so many, particularly with those disenfranchised by the real world. He takes his time to let the world see the othered as if they are not, as if the normal are the abnormal and as if peculiar is the best thing to be.