Just months after Guillermo del Toro unleashed Frankenstein on unsuspecting Netflix subscribers, Maggie Gyllenhaal gives a punk-rock spin on the same classic tale with The Bride!
While both movies are very different takes on the same material, Frankenstein is an iconic story that has been adapted by filmmakers many times over the years.
In honor of The Bride!’s release this weekend, Watch With Us looks back at our favorite times Frank hit the big screen.
From Frankenstein 2025 to Frankenstein 1931, we ranked the five best Frankenstein adaptations ever.
Tim Burton takes Frankenstein and turns it into a quirky story about a young boy who brings his dead pet back to life. Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) is a geeky outsider at his school, and his only friend is his beloved pit bull terrier, Sparky. When Victor’s father (Martin Short) encourages Victor to take up baseball, Victor ends up hitting a home run on his first game — but the fly ball makes Sparky chase after it, and he’s inadvertently hit by a car. With inspiration from his science teacher, Victor uses his smarts to bring Sparky back from the dead. But when Victor’s classmates use his secret to resurrect their own dead pets, chaos ensues.
Initially a 1984 live-action short starring Shelley Duvall, this charming, black-and-white stop-motion animated film is Burton at his very best: meticulous animation, gorgeous designs, cute, eccentric characters and a handful of his repeat collaborators like Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and Martin Landau. With Frankenweenie, Burton showcases an enthusiasm for form and creativity that has been largely absent from his other, more recent works.
4. ‘Young Frankenstein’ (1974)Mel Brooks gives Frankenstein an enduring comic twist with Young Frankenstein, starring Gene Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, who is trying desperately to shed the reputation of his grandfather Victor. But when he discovers that he’s inherited his grandfather’s massive Transylvania estate, he becomes intrigued by Victor’s various medical diaries and is committed to recreating his original experiments. Frederick reanimates his own monster (Peter Boyle), while unaware that the creature mistakenly has an “abnormal” brain instead of that of a respected scientist.
Young Frankenstein is handily one of the best parody movies of all time, and it’s also jut flat out one of the best comedies of all time too. So many lines are now iconic in comedy film history: “What hump?” “Abby…normal,” “Sed-a-give” and “He was my boyfriend!” just to name a few. For a comedy that was made in the mid-’70s, you might be shocked just how many of the jokes hold up. Brooks’ comedies tend to transcend eras, and Young Frankenstein is just as fresh, funny and surprising as it was when it came out.
3. ‘Frankenstein’ (2025)
Brilliant surgeon Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is highly respected, but his lofty ambitions lead him to explore the reanimation of corpses. Thus, he is subsequently expelled from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for his “sacrilegious” experiments. However, wealthy arms merchant Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) is impressed by Victor’s experiments and gives him unlimited funding to continue them. Victor successfully creates life from an undead Creature (Jacob Elordi), but he struggles to civilize it. After leaving it to die, the Creature escapes and sets off on a journey to understand its identity — and find the man who made it.
Frankenstein is openly one of Guillermo del Toro’s favorite stories, and it has remained a foundational work of the director’s whole career. It feels so right, then, to have del Toro finally helm his own adaptation of Mary Shelley’s famous novel, and he imbues his take with sumptuous production design, heartfelt emotion and the perfect gothic horror atmosphere. In addition to a terrific amount of scenery-chewing from Isaac as the fanatical Frankenstein, Elordi gives one of the best performances of his career as the Creature, evoking just the right amount of pathos despite an outward menace.
2. ‘Frankenstein’ (1931)The image of a flat-topped, dark-haired behemoth with bolts in its neck (and green skin, in the movie’s posters) has become so ubiquitous as the image of Frankenstein’s monster in popular culture, and it all started with Universal’s Frankenstein from 1931. The movie centers on obsessive scientist Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive), who is determined to create new life from the body parts of corpses. When he succeeds, the creature’s (Boris Karloff) struggle to adapt to its new life eventually leads to its escape, and an angry mob chases after the misunderstood creature.
Despite the success of del Toro’s Frankenstein adaptation, many still see Karloff’s portrayal as the definitive Frankenstein’s monster. Indeed, the 1931 film directed by James Whale may be approaching 100 years old, and yet it’s an entertaining and thought-provoking piece of entertainment to this day. In addition to being a great, creepy watch for spooky season, it also deftly explores the fine line between genius and madness, with a performance from Karloff that has remained legendary for a reason.
Bride of Frankenstein is that rare movie sequel that manages to surpass the original, and to this day it is regarded as an intelligent examination of isolation, the search for companionship and the dangers of playing God. This is in addition to a subtle queer subtext and a subversion of gender roles, thus making the film feel strikingly modern. The story follows Frankenstein’s Monster (Karloff) on the run from his creator, Henry (Clive), and the angered townspeople, while trying to understand his existence. Meanwhile, Henry is ultimately forced into resuming his experiments by creating a mate for the Monster.
The film features a fantastic blend of gothic horror, rich pathos and some surprisingly campy humor, all of which have helped to make Bride of Frankenstein endure as one of the best Universal Horror films of the Old Hollywood era. It has also aged remarkably well for a movie so old, a film that managed to smuggle in some shocking material for the infamous Hays Code by concealing it within horror tropes. In fact, it feels as if Bride of Frankenstein has only gotten better with age; if anything, Elsa Lanchester‘s iconic look as the Bride of Frankenstein definitely gets cooler every year.
