Guillermo del Toro’s 'Frankenstein' Plays It Too Safe

The Creature abides. Mary Shelley’s seminal Modern Gothic was published in 1818: a sci-fi gloss on Paradise Lost seasoned with the gore of several European wars. The first movie version came in 1910, five years before The Birth of a Nation suggested the powers of writing history in lightning. It was early enough in the medium’s history, in fact, that J. Searle Dawley’s 16-minute, single-reel version of Frankenstein is itself something of a monster. The methodical process by which the eponymous mad scientist (played by Augustus Phillips) turns a blazing cauldron’s worth of corpses into a single, sentient being represented state-of-the-art silent-era spectacle; it also suggested something of the then-nascent craft of film editing, the suturing together of self-contained shots and scenes into a larger narrative.