On 22 February, 1815, Mary Shelley gave birth to her first child, two months premature. Born into precarious circumstances, her nameless daughter “died of convulsions” ten days later. Shelley’s writing records thoughts of her lost baby. One night she dreamed her awake again, warmed to life by fire.

Shelley began writing Frankenstein the following year, for a ghost-story contest between friends. Published in 1818, the sci-fi masterpiece centres on a student who pulls the spark of life into dead flesh via the macabre electricity of Galvanism. Expelled from human community and yearning to be loved by his creator, the monster haunts the fringes and struggles to exist.

Not every work by mothers is about motherhood, but there is maternal creation at the heart of Frankenstein, mingled with radical, poignant empathy for the Creature.

“I, the miserable and the abandoned, I am an abortion”, he says. The sentiment is echoed by Guillermo del Toro’s Creature, played by Jacob Elordi, in the 2025 Frankenstein: “I am the child of a charnel house … A monster”.

Del Toro speaks of monsters with awe and tenderness, giving them a home in stories and his personal “Bleak House” memorabilia. Although del Toro was inspired by the Creature of the 1931 Frankenstein (retaining the iconic lightning-struck-laboratory scene), he returns to Shelley’s material and refashions the “monster” with human traits of disability.

Because monsters are not “real”, Monster Studies scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen says these bodies of “pure culture” exist to be read, holding fears, anxieties and desires of their milieu. The messages of del Toro’s monsters are complicated. Representations of disability or dehumanised Others (this article included) must be cautious not to reinscribe prejudices described, particularly in horror aesthetics and the experience of disability itself, comprising both materiality (the physical embodiment) and “social models” of structures and access/inaccess creating disablement and oppression.

From Shelley to del Toro, Victor Frankenstein claims the (inescapably cisgender) powers of maternal generation. The Creature may speak of Paradise Lost, but God’s clay-and-breath creation is bloodless, and no visceral birthing-bed. Del Toro’s Victor (Oscar Isaac) doubles down on maternal obsession. Spurned by a cold father, he fixates on his mother, with whom he shared similarity of appearance and spirit. She dies giving birth to his brother: “She who was life, was now death”.

The maternal iconography is near-overbearing. Victor carries a pocket-sized pregnant anatomical figure. His milk consumption is so constant and conspicuous as to be unsettling. A red leitmotif carries from his mother’s uterine blood to his sartorial flourishes, the angel in his dreams and the hair of his desired Elizabeth (Mia Goth, who also plays Victor’s mother).

After the dramatic laboratory creation, Victor awakes in a birth-red bed, shocked to behold his Creature swaddled in bandages. Victor presses their hands, skin to skin, showing their sameness. The Creature’s first word is “Victor”, to the mother-father’s delight. The Creature experiences life as a newborn. Del Toro draws from the novel, the Creature later narrating his early days as helpless, learning to delineate sensation and objects.

“Everything was new to him”, Victor says. “And I was there to mould him”.

But Victor “never considered what would come after creation”, and del Toro clearly presents him as a “bad” mother. While in the book the Creature is rejected at the instant of his convulsive birth, the film is gradual. Victor becomes overwhelmed, exhausted and resentful, furious at the perceived absence of intelligence and humanity, disgusted at the Creature’s touch. The child learns no further language, moves with awkward strength and juvenile fidgeting. Victor chains him, rejects him, incapable of loving a child that does not resemble him or reach milestones and fulfil narratives of progress.

The Creature contains monstrous contradictions. Both too young and too old, a full-grown newborn. Too vulnerable, and frighteningly invulnerable. Composed of too many humans to be human. Born awry, he may have been given too little a spark by faulty equipment. He is alive, but not enough. Not subject, nor object, but abject.

Julia Kristeva’s 1980 essay Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection is foundational for studies of horror and monstrosity. The abject is neither subject nor object, a destabilising force disrupting categories of autonomous self, dissolving imaginary boundaries and presenting an existential threat to wholeness. Corpses, monsters, decay.

Her subsequent works extended the concept of abjection to disability. Her son, affected by a congenital condition, influenced her activism. In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and… Vulnerability, Kristeva says,

the disabled person opens a narcissistic identity wound in the person who is not disabled; he inflicts a threat of physical or psychical death, fear of collapse, and beyond that, the anxiety of seeing the very borders of the human species explode.

Victor is less repelled by handling corpses than he is by the living Other that fractures his “wholeness”. He becomes his father looking for a narcissistic reflection in his child and finding none. It’s contrasted with Elizabeth who, encountering the Creature in the tunnels below the castle, is mesmerised with wonder, reaching out with shared vulnerability. She pleads his worthiness to the creator, arguing that his one known word, “Victor”, is not a lack, but “means everything to him”.

Family is central here, from Victor’s parenting to the Creature’s intense focus on the kinship dynamics of the cottagers and his threat towards Victor’s kin. His Otherness excludes him from community, so he begs Victor to create another like him. Victor is horrified at the concept of “obscenity perpetuating itself”. The fear of a progenitive force that results in “aberration” is an underlying prejudice, feeding horror as the 1931 film spawned Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein.

Del Toro attempts to show “disabilities” not as shortcomings, but differences that can be met through mutual vulnerability or alternative forms of communication, such as lessons for a child watched by the escaped Creature through the cottage wall. He regains the subjectivity and eloquence of Shelley’s Creature rather than the nonverbal vocalisations of the 1931 iteration. But the disability device makes maltreatment difficult to watch. Violence against monsters feels abstract, violence against people with disability at the hands of carers is uncomfortably real.

Del Toro gives his Creature disability in an attempt to rehabilitate him towards humanity, but he also reinscribes damaging ableism. Aside from the brutal wolf-death bestowed on the Blind Man (nameless, no longer the DeLacey of the novel), there are tired tropes of disability in horror, noted by Kathryn Bromwich as “shorthand for moral depravity”. While the beautiful Elordi refashions “monstrous” into desirable shapes, Victor is “disabled” as he falls into darkness: amputation, scarring, limping.

Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) is Victor’s financial backer. His purpose is dramatically revealed with his wigless head, marked with lesions from the syphilis he hopes to escape by having his brain (“degrading” via disease and mercury) transferred to the Creature. Aside from syphilis’ moral connotations, Harlander continues Frankenstein’s cinematic tradition of assistants with physical differences: the “hunchbacked” Fritz and broken-necked Ygor. Disability, Bromwich says, is often given to villains as exposition, symbols of evil or “uncanny” aspects; thus horror cinema became the twentieth century’s “freak show”.

Such abjections are the result of representations without the inclusion of disabled actors and creatives: the disabled body becomes a rhetorical device. Disabled artists provide a necessary challenge, the potential for engagement and identification within arts where they are, as here, frequently excluded.

By making the monster human and the humans monstrous, del Toro draws us back to the radical empathy of Shelley’s novel, but into familiar ableist horror tropes. Empathetic, but not empowering. He’s a loving mother to the Creature, but his embrace excludes others from this family.