(MENAFN- The Conversation) In Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, the true horror lies in scientist Victor Frankenstein's hubris and refusal to care for The Creature he creates.

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein gave The Creature an eloquent voice - but cinema has often silenced him , rendering him mute, groaning and monstrous in both appearance and behaviour.

Del Toro's Frankenstein, which arrives in select theatres and on Netflix this fall , presents a Creature who thinks, feels, suffers and demands recognition.

The film, which I saw recently at its Toronto International Film Festival screening , restores to The Creature not only speech, but also, as some reviewers have noted, subjectivity .

Del Toro's Frankenstein offers audiences a chance to reconsider how we regard“the monster,” not just in horror cinema, but in stories that reflect attitudes about difference - especially difference in embodiment.

Depictions of bodily difference

The tendency for film to punish difference has long persisted. From the silent era onward, films have used bodily difference as shorthand for inner corruption : the scarred face, the twisted body, the corrupt mind.

Disability studies scholar Angela Smith argues that the horror genre's visual and narrative conventions were shaped by eugenic beliefs about bodily wholeness .

Another disability studies scholar, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has noted that disabled figures are often trapped as spectacles: seen but not heard, as well as pitied or feared.

By giving The Creature an interior life, del Toro insists on humanity where cinema once imposed monstrosity.

Shift is more than aesthetic

The shift matters for how popular culture links monstrosity and disability. For nearly a century, films like the 1931 Frankenstein , directed by James Whale, encoded the monster as“deformed,”“broken,” or pathologically violent.

Poster for the 1931 'Frankenstein' directed by James Whale. (Universal Pictures/Wikipedia)

Whale's Frankenstein is a landmark of horror cinema, but it also cemented some of the most troubling tropes about disability on screen.

The Creature (played by Boris Karloff) was made grotesque through design choices: a flat head, sunken eyes, heavy gait. These features mark him as visibly other, a body built for the audience to recoil from.

The film doubles down with plot devices: instead of receiving a“normal” brain, the monster is mistakenly given a“criminal brain.” Violence, the story suggests, is not the result of isolation or trauma but the natural consequence of defective biology. The message is clear: difference equals danger.

Difference as innate fault

From a disability studies perspective, this is called pathologization - the act of treating difference as if it were a medical defect that explains everything about a person. Whale's Creature's strangeness is presented as something built into his body. His scars, his staggered walk, his inability to communicate in words - all of these are framed as signs of an innate fault.

This is what theorists mean when they talk about“otherness.” Otherness refers to the way societies define who counts as normal, human or acceptable by pushing certain groups outside those boundaries. The Creature's stitched, scarred body signals that he is not simply different but a threatening body to fear and control.

Over time, these representations cemented a cultural shorthand : to be visibly different, to bear scars, to move awkwardly or speak strangely, was to embody danger. The monster on screen taught viewers to associate disability with deviance and fear.

Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailer for the 1931 'Frankenstein.' Looking 'wrong' and being 'dangerous'

The story tells us if someone looks or moves“wrong,” then violence or danger must be lurking inside them.

That way of thinking didn't come out of nowhere. It echoes early 20th-century ideas of eugenics , which tried to link disability and criminality. When you watch Whale's Frankenstein through this lens, The Creature is a cautionary tale about why difference itself must be feared, controlled or even eliminated.

Mary Shelley's original 1818 novel tells a much more complicated story. Her Creature is eloquent, self-aware and painfully conscious of how he is rejected by every human being he meets.

As noted by literary critic Harold Bloom, Shelley's narrative insists humans“can live only through communion with others; solitude, for her, represents death .” Shelley shows us the social roots of monstrosity: rejection and isolation, not biological fate.

Read more: Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' legacy lives through women's prison poetry project

But the 1931 film stripped that complexity away . Over time, audiences learned to read disability-coded traits - a limp, a scarred face, halting speech - as cinematic signs of danger.

Trailer for Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein.' A Creature with soul

Del Toro's narrative follows Shelley more closely than the 1931 film. The Creature learns to speak, contemplates justice and articulates the pain of being abandoned. His violence, when it occurs, is not framed as the inevitable product of a defective brain but as the consequence of rejection, loneliness and abuse.

Del Toro's version feels like a correction. Rather than leaning into horror, the film prioritizes tenderness, existentialism, love and understanding.

The design of The Creature reflects a shift in perspective. While his stitched body is unmistakably scarred, the makeup emphasizes vulnerability as much as grotesquerie. The Creature is unsettling because he is both human and not - beautiful, wounded and deeply present. The stitching and scars become traces of experience, history and survival.

From monstrosity to humanity

Movingly, the question becomes not“what is wrong with him?” but“why does society fail him?” This reorientation:

• Rejects the idea of defect as destiny. The Creature's tragedy comes from rejection, not innate flaw.

• Restores voice and agency. In del Toro's hands, The Creature is eloquent, thoughtful and capable of moral reasoning. That matters for audiences used to seeing disability-coded figures as voiceless.

• Shifts monstrosity onto society. The true horror is Victor Frankenstein's hubris and refusal to care for what he made. The violence arises from abandonment, not deformity.

This is a disability-affirming move. Rather than imagining disability as pathology, or the monster as metaphor for disability, the film asks audiences to look at the structures of exclusion. Representations shape perception . If difference is always framed as frightening or tragic, those ideas seep into how we treat real people.

The Creature becomes legible as disabled because he shows us what it is like to live in a body that others cannot accept. His tragedy mirrors the lived reality of many disabled people: not inherent brokenness, but the pain of exclusion .

Monsters, disability and empathy
Director Guillermo del Toro poses for photographers at the photo call for 'Frankenstein' during the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, in August 2025. (Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)

Frankenstein stories endure because they dramatize the question: What do we owe each other?

Whale's 1931 version presented the monster as proof that boundaries must be enforced because the abnormal body is a threat.

Del Toro answers differently. His Creature reveals that what makes us monstrous is not our difference but our refusal to accept others as fully human. We are asked to fear the consequences of our own failure to care.

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