How are monsters made? In Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein for Netflix , several people inform the title character, surgeon Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), that he, rather than the creature he assembled out of corpses, is the real monster. Many readers of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel have reached the same conclusion: Victor is one of the all-time assholes of British literature. But the various adaptations of the book take different, even opposed, views of what made him that way, and how his malignity infects the world around him, particularly his creature.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a tale of bad fathers. Victor’s imperious, cold, demanding physician father drums medical science into his son’s head, beats him when he makes a mistake, and mistreats the boy

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