Guillermo del Toro brought Frankenstein back to the big screen with the most loyal adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel ever made. However, this was one of well over 50 different movies that involved Frankenstein’s Monster, with the earliest coming in the silent era and the most famous coming from Universal Studios in 1931.
However, when looking past the actual Frankenstein’s Monster movies, there have also been several films that were based on Mary Shelley’s novel and her creation. These include movies that actually take the plot of Shelley’s novel and revamp it, and others that pay homage to the Frankenstein story with unique tales of their own.
Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
Released in 2024, Lisa Frankenstein was clearly based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but in a very different way. Much like how the Hammer Films era of Frankenstein movies took the idea of the Monster and turned it into various forms, Lisa Frankenstein does that by delivering the story with a more young adult vibe.
Lisa Frankenstein follows a teenage girl named Lisa who is going through a tough time. A serial killer murdered her mother, and her father remarried a cruel woman with a daughter of her own. When sitting in a graveyard after a traumatic experience, and speaking at the grave of a dead man, lightning strikes, and he returns to life.
Of course, he is a zombie, and that is where the film sets itself apart. Lisa didn’t bring him back like Dr. Frankenstein, but she tried to help the zombie. Lisa and the Creature begin to kill people to replace his missing body parts. Lisa Frankenstein is a disturbing, quirky look at what Bride of Frankenstein could have been.
Mary Shelley (2017)
As the title suggests, Mary Shelley is based on the author of Frankenstein herself, and her time spent writing the horror novel. Elle Fanning stars as Mary Shelley, and the film shows her young adult years when she is sent to live on her own, meets poet Percy Bysse Shelley, and starts her life with him.
This eventually leads to her meeting the poet Lord Byron, and it was at a stay at his villa that they began to speak about creating a ghost story, which led to Shelley coming up with her idea for Frankenstein. The tale is primarily a love story, with the creation of the horror masterpiece as a secondary topic.
However, Elle Fanning was fantastic in her role as Mary Shelley, and the movie remains a good look at the struggles of female authors in that era, especially when not getting respect for work considered “unsuitable” for a lady to write.
Ex Machina (2014)
Ex Machina took the idea of Frankenstein’s Monster and flipped it on its head. While Frankenstein is considered a horror story, it is also one of the seminal sci-fi stories as well, with a mad scientist playing the role of God and creating a creature he has no possible way to control. Ex Machina goes full sci-fi with the idea.
Alex Garland directs Ex Machina, the story of a brilliant scientist who has found a way to create a humanoid robot with an AI brain. Naming his creation Ava, he invites one of the programmers for the company he owns to his secluded home to see his experiments. As expected, everything goes wrong.
Like Frankenstein, Ex Machina shows that if a human plays God and creates his own intelligent beings, he will likely lose control, and then he is doomed. Oscar Isaac is great as the brilliant CEO, while Alicia Vikander is fantastic as the AI robot, especially as she becomes self-aware and seeks her freedom.
Frankenweenie (2012)
The name makes it clear that Frankenweenie was obviously based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Tim Burton initially directed Frankenweenie as a short film in the 1980s, but Disney didn’t think the subject matter was proper for an animated movie. By the 2010s, they knew better, and Burton got to make his film.
Frankenweenie, shot in black and white as another homage to the original Universal Studios movie, is about a boy named Frankenstein whose dog dies when he is hit by a car. For his school science project, the boy brings his dog back to life, like in Frankenstein. However, when other kids resurrect their pets, chaos ensues.
The movie was a charming retelling of the Frankenstein story, and it was both a box office and a critical success for Tim Burton. It was full of Burton’s weird ideas and allowed him to show his love for the horror icon and earn an Oscar nomination for the final result.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of the most successful and longest-running movies of all time. Released in 1975, it still screens in theaters to this day, 50 years later. At its heart, this is a horror-comedy musical about an alien who comes to Earth and some weary travelers who encounter him in his mansion.
However, this is also a retelling of the Frankenstein story. Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) is a transvestite alien scientist who created his own Creature in Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood). However, things go wrong when Frank’s handyman and domestic servant decide that they are rebelling.
While the movie is named after Frank’s Creature, that is only a small part of this extravagant story. Despite that, everything about Frankenstein’s tale is in this movie, but with gloriously magnificent music and dance numbers.
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Edward Scissorhands is a Tim Burton movie from 1990 with Johnny Depp starring in the role of this story’s Frankenstein’s Monster. Made after Disney rejected Burton’s attempts to make Frankenweenie in the 1980s, he instead made a similar story as a live-action gothic romantic fantasy.
An inventor created Edward and brought him to life in his old mansion. He homeschooled Edward while he was finishing his body. However, the old man died before he gave Edward hands, so Edward ended up creating his own hands out of scissors. Sadly, some of the townspeople turned the sentiment against Edward, driving him away.
This movie plays fairly with the original Mary Shelley novel, as Edward is a good person who is driven away and into fear. However, Edward never lashes out like Frankenstein’s Monster, and instead remains a sympathetic and heartbreaking creation.
Re-Animator (1985)
Re-Animator owes its entire existence to Frankenstein, although it took things in a more graphic direction and used a lot more sci-fi tropes than the original novel or Universal movie did. Released in 1985 by director Stuart Gordon and starring Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, Re-Animator is one of horror’s most beloved cult classics.
The film follows Herbert as a scientist who has discovered a way to bring the dead back to life, although no one believes him since his early experiments had horrific side effects and died again. Just like Dr. Frankenstein, Herbert wants to play God and find a way to conquer death, at any cost.
For horror fans, Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs are equal to Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell when it comes to cult classics. With Re-Animator celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2025, anyone who hasn’t seen it should check out one of the most bizarre and gory Frankenstein homages ever made.
RoboCop (1987)
RoboCop is a dystopian sci-fi action thriller that borrows heavily from Frankenstein, but in a more high-tech way. In this movie, a police officer is brutally killed in action. The police department partners with a major company to take the dead cop and put him into a robot body, bringing him back to life as the unstoppable RoboCop.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop is a movie that is anti-capitalism and anti-fascism, although, like other Verhoeven films (like Starship Troopers), there are people who let that fact fly over their heads. In the end, Verhoeven not only made it clear that RoboCop was a bad idea, but that allowing companies to make these decisions was even worse.
The movie also played with the themes from Frankenstein, as RoboCop slowly understood that his internal programming was flawed, and there was still humanity living deep within his AI memory banks.
Poor Things (2023)
Yorgos Lanthimos is a filmmaker who doesn’t make easy movies. His 2023 film Poor Things was a challenging film for mainstream audiences, a retelling of Frankenstein, but done in a more fairy-tale aspect. Here, a mad scientist named Godwin Baxter brings a woman who died by suicide back to life.
There were disturbing moments in this film, including the fact that the woman was pregnant when she leaped to her death, so the scientist replaced her brain with that of her fetus. What resulted was a fully grown woman with a child’s mind, and that made the fact that men fought for her affection even more disturbing.
Emma Stone won an Oscar for her performance as Bella Baxter/Victoria Blessington, the Monster in the movie. Critics praised the story’s absurdist themes and the vibrant, eclectic look of the film.
Young Frankenstein (1974)
One of the funniest spoof movies in history was made in 1974 by filmmaker Mel Brooks. Young Frankenstein told the Frankenstein story, but in a comedic manner, with Gene Wilder both as the lead character of Dr. Frankenstein and as the co-writer of the film. Peter Boyle played the Monster in the movie.
There were so many great moments in this comedy, including a highlight where Frankenstein and his Monster donned top hats and performed a song and dance number to “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” There was also a brilliant cameo appearance by Gene Hackman, who played the old blind man.
Mel Brooks made a lot of great comedies over his career, but Young Frankenstein sits at the top as the best of the best. When it comes to movies like Frankenstein, there isn’t a better comedy anywhere than this 1970s spoof movie.
