The scariest scene in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein isn't about the Creature

“I cannot face such a vulgar demise,” Harlander says as he details the progression of his disease, then reveals the other half of his dark bargain. In exchange for his time, money, and vast logistical support, he would like Victor to place his brain in the “perfect body” of the Creature. He doesn’t just hope to be cured of syphilis. He hopes he can live forever.

In this scene, Harlander’s narrative purpose becomes clear. The horror of Victor’s reaction is both deeply relatable and, like so much of Frankenstein, timeless and timely all at once. Of course this was the deal. Of course Harlander wasn’t simply betting on a once-in-a-generation mind. Victor’s drive, his madness over his project, was a tool to be used by a capitalist the whole time, and as Victor’s face sinks, we sink with him. 

The monstrous nature of Victor Frankenstein is never in doubt. That’s why the story opens with a desperate, stammering Victor in the Arctic, fully aware of his sins and the price he will soon pay for them. Whatever his past, whatever good intentions he hoped to harness in the beginning, it has all been consumed by his desperate drive to create a masterwork that will change the world. He is damned, which is clear from the moment he first appears. 

But in this damnation, del Toro finds a parallel between Victor’s drive to create and his own. Frankenstein is a life’s work for him, just as Victor’s pursuits have consumed his entire adulthood (and much of his childhood). Anyone who’s carried a torch that long knows the danger of that passion—the sense of tunnel vision, of the rest of the world falling away. Carry that torch long enough and it will burn you, simply because you’ve grown accustomed to the heat. 

Guillermo del Toro, who has no shortage of dream projects he’s fought years to realize, has clearly felt this before, and Victor is his cautionary tale. He understands the Hollywood machine, and the reality that in order to make something grand and lavish, you’re going to have to cozy up to the money in the room. This is a filmmaker whose first Hollywood venture was Mimic, a dark dance with the Weinstein brothers that led to him disowning the final release. He’s a filmmaker who had a Lovecraftian epic starring Tom Cruise ready to go just before Universal pulled the plug; who, even after the Oscar-winning smash that was The Shape of Water, still had to go out, hat in hand, to find financing for his future endeavors. 

Guillermo del Toro has, without question, looked into the face of a Henrich Harlander before with horror in his eyes. The stakes might not have been quite as high—no Weinstein brain in Jacob Elordi’s body—but he knows the feeling. He also knows that he’s releasing his dream project through Netflix, a company with more than its fair share of creative compromises for the sake of the bottom line to its name. “The theatrical experience is very important. I believe in it,” del Toro told Variety while focusing on just one of these compromises. “But if the choice is between being able to make the movie and have portions of the release be theatrical and portions be streaming or not make the movie, that’s an easy decision to make.” He got to make his epic, but what did it cost him?

The filmmaker’s empathy for the mad scientist, for a man so blinded by ambition that he cannot see the consequences of his creation, is both staggering and frightening. Living in a capitalist hellscape—particularly at a time when lucrative tax write-offs, corporate mergers, and generative AI have hamstrung creators left and right—means that artists everywhere have had this dark deal dangled in front of us. What would we sacrifice for the ultimate validation, for the chance to make our wildest dreams come true? How many of our principles would fall away if someone promised to sign a check for just the right amount? We can’t know for sure until it happens to us.

That’s the most frightening thing about Frankenstein. Even after Harlander loses his mind and falls to his death, Victor presses on, ignoring yet another stain on his psyche because his creation is all he has left. He was already damned, but now he’s complicit in his damnation. Frankenstein, at its core, is a film about how we could be complicit in ours, too.