The love we all deserve
Rax King on the carnage, sensuality, and longing of Frankenstein
I had a dream just now that my dead friend was alive and well. I'm sure you've had one like it. Why did you let me think that you were dead this whole time I kept asking him. Why would you do that to all of us? He didn't have a good answer. Then we both had to go work a shift at the restaurant which is another kind of nightmare.
It was a lot more distressing than the dream I had the night before which was a post-podcast induced version of "Lauren Lapkus is my best friend." I'm sure you've had one like that too.
I wrote about the loss earlier this year.
Luke O’Neil
It is such a disorienting feeling when someone you care about but hadn't talked to that much in a couple of years dies suddenly because there is now a freshly dug hole inside of you and yet the day to day routine of your life has not been altered one bit. A new kind of absence has taken over for an older different shaped absence and the two are in conflict. Trying to fit a triangle shaped sadness into a rectangle shaped sadness.
It's 0° right now in Massachusetts in the coldest month in recorded history.
A friend texted me a couple days later about his own recent experience with a friend who had died by suicide and I said one thing I can't figure out is whether or not I have cried sufficiently. I have wept multiple times but I stopped after three or so days I said. What is that?
Is that enough?
The nightmares about it haven't stopped though.
Today Rax King returns to write about a different kind of reincarnation. On the carnage, sensuality, and longing of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.
Read a recent interview I did with her about her latest highly recommended book Sloppy Or: Doing It All Wrong.
Luke O’Neil
Paid subscribers can read more after that from me as well as a few readers writing in on their thoughts about the concept "we had it coming."
Or if you want a signed copy of my new book plus a year's subscription hit me up and we can sort it out. $80 out the door. Simple as.
The only inarguable language
by Rax King
Carnality is everywhere in Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Frankenstein. I use “carnality” here more for its associations with meat than with sex. I can’t remember another recent film that treats flesh with such overt, expressive sensuality. In one early scene, little Victor Frankenstein’s pregnant mother eats raw offal on the grounds that it’s good for the baby, and we cringe not only because we know this to be incorrect but because of the way the meat squelches between her teeth. Years later, Dr. Frankenstein combs a newly christened battlefield for corpses to build his famous creature. He slaps the dead with vigor, digs his fingers into their purpling thighs. His scalpel cutting through human tissue sounds uncannily like a steak knife slicing a buttery filet. This director demands that you love oozing, stinking, rotting life as much as he does. He knows you don’t know how, and he is going to spend the whole film showing you.
My first conscious encounter with del Toro did not happen via one of his films but, improbably, when I read his introduction to his personally curated Penguin Horror series of classic horror novels (including Mary Shelley’s 1813 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus).
“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are,” he wrote. “Horror is no different, or less controversial, than humor, and no less intimate than sex.”
Because horror is the genre most willing to “make flesh” our innermost fears, he argues, it’s also unusually able to imprint on our souls. We may not bother to catalog every little mundane lesson life teaches us, but most of us can vividly recall times we felt tickled, horny, or terrified, because our bodies impose those feelings on us against our will and beyond our judgment.
In that same introduction, del Toro coyly writes that no adaptation of Shelley’s book has ever captured it whole, though many have been masterful. His own adaptation does hit most of the narrative beats, but diverges anew in its own way by keeping little of its original imagined set dressing intact. The film is set several decades later than the book was even published, allowing del Toro access to the baroque aesthetics of the Victorian era. And these are some decidedly baroque aesthetics—it’s a thrill to see one of our most imaginative directors cashing a blank check. Ceilings in this film are uniformly frescoed and super high. No surface or cornice goes uncarved, and the sculptural detail on one coffin is so delicate that it more closely resembles a down comforter than a pine overcoat.
Updating his story to the Victorian era allows del Toro some irresistible settings and costumes, as well as the more competently harnessed electrical power that streamlines the creation of Victor Frankenstein’s creature onscreen. But the most important thing the era offers him is carnality, repressed and morbid. Victorians, after all, were the ones making jewelry out of their dead lovers’ hair. They ate arsenic and painted ammonia on their lips to achieve the beauty ideal of the day, meaning: to be as pale as a corpse. The newly invented X-ray allowed scientists to literally see through all the layers of crinoline and shame that women’s bodies were hidden under, and if that analysis sounds too on the nose, know that I could have paired any scientific advancement of the age with any sexual hang-up and accomplished much the same rhetorical effect. Bodies had become more knowable and more frightening than ever before—perfect for del Toro’s purposes.
All the while he maintains an admirable thematic balance between the frankness and the shame that characterized Victorians’ approach to bodies. One wonders how these characters can be as lively and lusty as they are, weighed down by all the plush velvet they wear—but of course, lustiness under twenty pounds of tactical velvet is what the era was all about. Christoph Waltz is a slimy pleasure as Henrich Harlander, Victor’s financial backer, who sneers and struts to mask his terror that syphilis will claim him before the doctor’s project can revive him. Oscar Isaac brings an unblinking boyish mania to Victor, so obsessed by his project to cure death that we almost believe in it ourselves; he seems, throughout the film, as if he’s always been up all night. The film’s only casting misstep is Mia Goth, who has the right angel face for her role as Victor’s other obsession Elizabeth Harlander, but never conveys the desperation in which Waltz and Isaac are so fluent. They marry the desirous tics and shivers of their bodies to the material in a way that Goth does not.
Luke O’Neil
But nobody, and no body, in del Toro’s entire canon has ever been as affecting or as tragic as the Creature’s, played to perfection by Jacob Elordi. The last time I saw Elordi, he was Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s 2023 Priscilla, (which I wrote about for Hell World here) and he brings some unexpected swagger to the Creature, too—more a rampaging toddler’s than a rock star’s, but with none of Boris Karloff’s inarticulate groaning in the same role. Even before Elordi’s Creature can speak fluently, he’s articulate. He’s all prowling, unconscious sensuality, a little sexy and a lot dangerous. His movements are shy but curious, like those of an animal that hasn’t yet learned to fear people. In an especially poignant early moment, the happy Creature plays with his chains without understanding that they exist to trap him. He’s still too full of babyish wonder at the world he’s been given. That world is nothing but a dank and unadorned dungeon, but he feels his way around it with pleasure, stroking surfaces and splashing in a stream too shallow to even submerge his feet. In his first several scenes, he’s all body, the way anyone living in chains is. But Elordi masterfully conveys the brain at work inside the striated corpse as we watch him learn to smile and feed animals. By the time it’s the Creature’s turn to tell his side of the story, we’ve been expecting it for some time, having watched him grow up.
Del Toro is occasionally guilty of sentimentality, gleefully taking every opportunity for softness offered by his source material and then some. His Creature is much gentler than Shelley’s original, which I suspect may be because del Toro just loves him too much to portray him as the furious spree killer he is in the book. Victor’s egomaniacal hubris, too, finds some justification in the form of a tragic backstory and a sinister financial backer, neither of which appear in the novel. There are other differences, but in those two del Toro’s flair for sentimentality is most obvious. He’s fond of his characters. He wants us to associate them with feeding their mouse friends, mourning their mommies. To me, that’s no weakness, but then I’m a sucker for a happy ending with a musical swell. I bet that’s true of del Toro, too, no matter how much he relishes blood and guts.
In fact, anyone as devoted as del Toro is to carnality might need simplified emotions declaimed extra loudly. The director believes in the simplicity of sensory data—that physical intuitions need no elaboration to be real and important. That may be why horror in one form or another is always real in his films: in literalizing our fears, it exposes the humanity that generated them.
“[Horror] operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out,”he wrote in the Penguin Horror introduction.
“It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety.”
In his love for his creations, even the most monstrous, especially the most monstrous, maybe del Toro isn’t being sentimental after all. He’s recognizing something simple about the love we all deserve as living beings, and he’s telling it to us in meat and flesh, bone and decay, the only inarguable language there is.
Rax King is the James Beard award-nominated author of the essay collections Sloppy Or: Doing It All Wrong, and Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer.
She has written for Hell World about Garth Hudson of The Band, her favorite Lana Del Rey songs, the film Anora, wanting and sobriety, expensive wedding traditions, the film Priscilla, another Lana one about Born to Die, the band Creed, and her favorite Weezer songs.
Here's one from We Had It Coming about a similar concept.
Humans
He was in the garage jigsaw-puzzling the architecture of the bones. After some doing he looked upon his works and thought well that’s sort of spooky. Not frightening yet but still. He rifled through the boxes and coolers of bullshit he had stashed out here from when he had last had to move in a hurry and went back to work fitting the joints and then stuffing it all with fistfuls of viscera and organs and when he had done that it still looked somehow slightly lacking. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Like all the meat had gone bad instantaneously. All of it everywhere. Never mind though he evened out the spread of gaseous organs from tip to tail and it was just about as ugly as you please but nonetheless wanting. Goddamnit he said and then laughed at himself. He fixed a two way hose rig and hydrated the guts with a taste of his own hot pumping fluid which yet again didn't sufficiently alter the level of sin and not knowing what to do and almost ready to punt on the whole thing he wrapped and dressed the entire heaving wound of the mess in some discarded skin and peppered it with miscellaneous hair he had lying around from another project and then feeling himself now kind of in the rhythm of the zone of creation he painted it with all of the hues of the universe and then plopped in the glistening globs of the eyes and brightened them into pools of infinity and reddened the lips with the blush of a billion burning stars and curled them up just so over the skull’s jagged hungry jaw and placed one of his own stabbing instruments in its grip to test out how it might be held later on when both officially existed and whispered something into its ear and he was after all of this labor satisfied. Finally it was the appropriate amount of terrifying.
Paid subscribers can keep reading below for a lot more.
Readers wrote in about what the concept of "we had it coming" means to them.
"But even us individuals will deserve some of the bad things, for not doing more; if there is so much suffering in this world, surely it can't be so imbalanced, surely I must feel it at some point, in this life or the next..." one wrote.
Plus some thoughts on the latest new low from the most disgusting most misogynist monster alive (It's not me so don't say it's me). Also a couple of sad songs to make you cry and a bunch of other shit. I don't know what yet.