Only Netflix will know why it chose to release Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein a week after Halloween. Perhaps the streaming giant reckoned the film’s target demographic would be too busy applying fake blood and fashioning last-minute costumes out of bed sheets to make time for the latest on-screen adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic, early-19^th-century horror novel (which kind of figures).

Whatever the strategy – on Halloween Netflix did, in fairness, create a simulated lightning storm above the Hollywood Forever Cemetery using 1,500 drones – after a limited cinematic release, del Toro’s two-and-a-half-hour blockbuster will be available to stream from Friday 7 November. Grab your popcorn.

The film, which received its UK premiere during October’s BFI London Film Festival, has been a labour of love for the three-time Academy Award-winning Mexican filmmaker, who spent the best part of two decades trying to bring his adaption to screen. Del Toro’s Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac as the eponymous egomaniacal scientist and Jacob Elordi as the beleaguered Creature, alongside an all-star cast including Charles Dance, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, Mia Goth and Ralph Ineson. Del Toro has said he’s wanted to make the film since he saw Boris Karloff’s classic 1931 version when he was just seven years old.

Shelley, the daughter of political radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, was just 11 years older when she began working on the novel that would become her masterpiece. Writing from the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, Frankenstein emerged as the result of a ghost-writing competition between the teenager, her newly-wed husband Percy Bysshe, and fellow romantic author, and friend, Lord Byron.

Shelley explained the idea for the story – in which an obsessive scientist, in an attempt to breathe new life into dead bodies, mistakenly creates a monster from diseased body parts – came to her during a bad dream. Since that (rather harrowing) nightmare, more than 150 versions of Frankenstein are thought to have appeared across stage and screen. Variously faithful to Shelley’s original novel (published when the author was just 20 years old), these are the films that have emerged as the most acclaimed adaptations among critics and audiences…  

10. The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957

The Curse of Frankenstein is a surprisingly dark and violent adaption of Shelley’s story, and that’s before you discover the film was made all the way back in 1957 – making it one of the earliest horror films to be shot in colour. Universal Studios, which had made earlier Frankenstein adaptions, had copyrighted the Creature’s look and makeup, making this the first time the monster had been seen with patchwork skin covered in scars. So successful was the film that it spawned six sequels, none of which matched the cinematic achievement of the original.

9. Frankenweenie, 2012

Arriving 22 years after Edward Scissorhands, and containing numerous references to Shelley’s original novel, as well as other features directed and produced by Tim Burton, Frankenweenie follows a boy (Victor Frankenstein) who uses electricity to resurrect his dead dog (Sparky). When his peers discover what he’s done and reanimate their own deceased pets, mayhem ensues. The animated, tongue-in-cheek comedy is partly voiced by Winona Ryder, who also appeared in Edward Scissorhands, and follows the Frankenstein theme of the pitfalls of playing God.  

8. Edward Scissorhands, 1990

Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands nearly never was. Warner Brothers had dropped the movie, and it wasn’t until the success of Burton’s Batman that 20^th Century Fox opted to pick it back up. Like Frankenstein, Edward Scissorhands is about creation, isolation, and what happens when society rejects something it doesn’t understand. Burton’s take – transforming Shelley’s Gothic tale into a tragic suburban fairy tale – mixes horror, romance and social satire. It remains one of the most commercially successful of all Frankenstein adaptations.

7. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975

Perhaps the most enduring cult film to emerge from the 1970s, The Rocky Horror Picture Show parodies Shelley’s story, subverting the horror genre and turning it into a campy, erotic comedy. Frank-N-Furter is a farcical Victor Frankenstein, ‘creating’ his own man – Rocky – in his laboratory, complete with lightning, a lab coat, and operatic declarations of triumph. But where Shelley’s Victor is tormented by guilt and fear, Frank revels in his power and sexuality. Rather than recoiling from his creation, he seduces it. 50 years on, the musical play that inspired the film continues to tour.  

6. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1994

An oft-forgotten film within the Robert De Niro oeuvre, and a multi-million dollar one at that. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh as Victor, and De Niro as the Creature, is one of the harder to pin down adaptations within the great Frankenstein canon. At times solemn and faithful, at others overblown and borderline homoerotic, the 1994 flick is gory, ambitious and shows De Niro as you’ve never seen him before.  

5. Young Frankenstein, 1974

Shot in black and white, and employing 1930s-style opening credits, Young Frankenstein comes across as much older than the film actually is. Yet it doesn’t take long to realise that Mel Brooks’ adaptation is a parody – like a lot of films on this list – that pays homage to earlier versions, while employing a healthy dollop of tongue-in-cheek irreverence for comedic effect. Interestingly, Peter Boyle’s Creature appears with a zip in his neck – Universal Studios holding the copyright to the signature bolts beloved by fancy dressers since they first appeared in 1931.

4. The Terminator, 1984

What’s The Terminator doing on a list of the best Frankenstein films, you might well ask. Artificial life. Overreaching science. The hubris of human innovation. The fallout of trying to transcend natural limits through technologic invention. Shelley subtitled her novel The Modern Prometheus. The Terminator is as much a Frankenstein film as any movie on this ranking. Indeed, James Cameron’s flick arguably does a better job of critiquing technological arrogance than any other movie ever made. Sound relevant right about now? We think so.

3. Frankenstein, 1931

Incredibly, Mary Shelley’s novel was already more than 100 years old when James Whale made his seminal film Frankenstein. Just as astoundingly, there had already been at least three silent movies based on the story prior to the 1931 release. It was Whale’s adaptation, however, that established the physical on-screen manifestation of the Creature in our collective imagination – with his flat head, straight fringe and bolted neck. Foreboding yet fantastic, eerie yet elegant – with the famous ‘It’s alive! It’s alive’ soundbite – the film is perhaps the most enduring of all Frankenstein adaptations.

2. The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935

Four years later, Whale followed his masterpiece with an equally accomplished sequel. In the follow-on, Karloff’s creature learns to speak and attempts to make friends, leaving a trail of destruction in the process. The film is the first to introduce the Bride (briefly), which is created by Frankenstein as a would-be suitor to his lonesome monster. More fully realised in terms of script and cinematography than its predecessor, the film is considered among the most pioneering movies of the 1930s.

1. Frankenstein, 2025

For sheer scale and cinematic ambition, del Toro’s Frankenstein tops anything that has come before it. Sure, the director is able to utilise the wonders of 21^st century filmmaking, but that doesn’t distract from the obvious levels of obsession he's poured into this project. It's brutal, it’s beautiful, it’s faithful to the original text, yet in its (minor) deviations it speaks of del Toro’s own takeaways from Shelley’s masterpiece. The filmmaker has described reading the teenager’s novel as “mind-blowing.” His modern-day re-telling of her ghost story is just as astonishing.

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