THE FANTASTIC MAGIC BABY REVIEW

I have a new review of Chang Cheh's 1975 film, The Fantastic Magic Baby HERE. The movie tells the story of Red Boy and his efforts to abduct the Longevity Monk so his parents, Bull King and Princess Iron Fan can eat him and gain immortality. Monkey and his companions must rescue and protect their master. It has very little dialogue and the fight choreography is quite true to the Peking Opera style. This is a very unusual movie which takes an episode from Journey to the West and presents it in the style of Peking Opera. While there are dashes of this in some of his earlier works The Fantastic Magic Baby is perhaps the most unique entry in Chang Cheh's catalog. That doesn't mean it is spectacular. I grappled with this movie and was really not sure what to think of it. There were aspects I loved, aspects I found frustrating, but I ultimately appreciate what he was trying to do. You can check out the review for the rest of my thoughts. 

HATE STAIN

My friend and sometimes co-host on the podcast, jim pinto, has a new Mork Borg expansion on kickstarter. Jim is the maker of 100s of games, and the man behind Postworldgames. His new offering is called Hate Stain. Check out the Kickstarter page HERE for a complete overview but here is a quick description of the project:

Hate Stain is a 70+ page expansion for Mörk Borg that brings hateful cults, corrupted magic, new player classes, and twisted monsters to your doompunk sessions. Back now to get the PDF immediately and claim a printed edition at your leisure. Mature themes. For experienced groups.

The Hate Stain explores the visceral and ever-expanding force of contempt and grief in Mork Borg. Hate is an infection that spreads like a plague, warping minds, bodies, and societies. Cults form around the poison of resentment, feeding on grievances and small injustices, turning them into all-consuming ideologies. The world is marked by the stain of this corruption, a force that twists reality itself, leaving destruction and ruin in its wake.

Players take on the roles of those marked by hate, or fighting against it.

The Hate Stain is my first attempt to make a Mork Borg expansion. It adds hateful cults to the doom and death of Mork Borg, with new spells, two new classes, new monsters, and helpful tips on how to make a hate-based cult.

It also includes rules for how grief and sorrow leads to corruption and how corruption manifests as mutations and deformities.

This book explores how hate manifests in your world and spreads through its own misery. These cults are not bent on death and killing, but in spreading their poison into the hearts of others. And ultimately, into the world. The game even comes with several cults to show you how it's done.

MONSTER RALLIES IN STRANGE TALES OF NEW ENGLAND

One of the methods I started using for playtesting and proofreading games is the Monster Rally adventure. This allows me to take a closer look, with more eyes at the Threats chapter of a book, by having the players assume the role of monsters in a wild creature feature mash-up. For those not familiar with Monster Rallies they are movies featuring multiple iconic monsters, and the first film of this type is usually considered Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). In these films monsters can team up, be pitted against one another, and they also often have more of a silly tone to them (or they are at least capable of veering into comedy and very campy horror). This makes the Monster Rally perfect for an off-the-cuff adventure using a party of monsters. In some of my monster rally playtests, the monsters are fighting one another, but they often have goals and work together. As Strange Tales of New England is in the final stage of layout (I just did my last real proofread), the monster rally has been a useful method for vetting the monster chapter and the gazetteer section. Here I want to talk about one method I recently drew upon to quickly assemble a monster rally adventure that focuses on monsters working as a team. 

Art by Jackie Musto

The first step is to give players the rulebook and tell them to peruse the monster chapter with instruction to pick a monster they can see serving as a fleshed out character. This can be opened up to other areas of the book (for example in Strange Tales of New England I can let players pick entries from the Gazetteer that are oriented around a monstrous villain). This can also be determined randomly for each player. 

The second step is to have them flesh out the characters, giving them names, adding 3 ranks to skills (they can pick new skills too if they want), and describing a brief background/character sketch. They also need some general goals. In my last session, one player chose to be a Skadegamutc (a ghost witch) named Helen, who had been born left-handed but was beaten by her puritan teachers to use her right. This led to resentment against all puritans she took to her death and when she rose that was the focus of her ire. Another player was Ruth, a hag, who worked with Helen, because it gave her easy access to human flesh. The third player chose a less orthodox giant snake, a 50-foot long reptile named Ted who was more intelligent than other giant snakes and could write out words with its tail. 

Once this is done, the part decides on a shared goal for which they need one another to succeed. This goal should be pretty specific, and the players must hash out exactly how they know each other, if they are together or if any of the adventure will involve them assembling as a team. In our session, the person playing Helen decided the goal could be they wanted to dig up the body of her teacher, Sarah Jacobs, in order to raise and torment her. To help with this goal, the player who was Ruth, chose a malignant spell that resurrects the dead. 

With that detail out of the way, the GM then needs to flesh out some background around it. First the GM creates an obstacle or obstacles to the goal. I decided an obvious obstacle was the body had been moved from its grave. I drew on a recent news story about a curiosity shop that had been illegally buying human remains and wrote down that the Cemetery Manager at Dartmouth Cemetery sold Sarah Jacobs' corpse to Maria's Curiosity Shop in Salem six months ago. Since the players were based in Amherst New Hampshire, but Sarah Jacob's was buried in Hanover New Hampshire, this would mean a big of trouble. 

After this the GM creatures a foe for the party. This will often be a Van Helsing type. But I decided to have Maria of Maria's Curiosity Shop be a witch who was interested in capturing Helen and punshing her for her crimes. So the body had been purchased as a lure, with the intent of capturing Helen in a Canopic Jar. However simply throwing a party of monster hunters in the mix is perfectly viable. 

During the session, the players went to Dartmouth Cemetery after learning the details of Sarah Jacobs' burial from the town hall archives. This was somewhat tricky because Ted is a massive snake the size of Titanoboa, and it was an hour and a half to get to Hanover. It was decided at the start of the session that they used a large box truck to transport Ted (flying was an option too as Ruth knew how to make flying ointment, but that was too slow). At the cemetery they found the grave was empty when they dug it up, so they broke into the Cemetery office and Ruth searched the computer. She was able to find email exchanges between the Cemetery Manager and Maria of the curiosity shop. So they drove to Salem. But before they left, Helen cursed Isaac Roberts, the Cemetery Manager to suffer credit card decline for the rest of his days. 

When they reached Maria's Curiosity Shop, it was nearly  midnight and everything was closed, but the shop had a light on inside, which they could see through the storefront window. Ted smashed though the window, letting the alarm go off, and found Maria in a backroom office. There he bit her and drained her life, killing her instantly (Giant Snakes drain life-force in the setting). Helen, who was in her luminous spectral form*, went inside and found a set of stairs leading down. Ted was able to sense a waft of death from beyond the door at the bottom of the stairs and indicated this to Helen. She opened the door and walked in, seeing rows of canopic jars on either wall and a giant sarcophagus at the end of the chamber. As soon as she moved towards it, she was drawn into one of the canopic jars and imprisoned. Sirens began to flare as Ted and Ruth waited in the truck outside, realizing Helen was taking too long. This is where the session ended. 

This was a quick monster rally adventure. We spent an hour or so setting up and about 2 hours playing. We will continue the session next week and it happened to fall on a cliff-hanger moment when we ended. 

Monster rallies are fun because there is no strict tone. They can be horror blended with comedy, and they can also be a bit schlocky. It is also a chance for players take on the roles of monsters in a more casual adventure structure. Something I am thinking of doing is coming up with goal lists to help give players ideas. The main benefit I use them for is an easy and fast way to re-read monster entries. But they are a great option if you don't have anything planned but want to do a quick pick-up game. 

 *During the day she reverted to an inert corpse

THE BLACK ENFORCER

Check out my review of The Black Enforcer at easternKicks. This is a surprisingly good movie, despite a number of production issues. I think it may be my new favorite Ho Meng-Hua film.  It is a story of revenge but also the cost of revenge, vividly painted with an artful eye and heart. In the film, a man wrongly imprisoned by his family's killer, seeks revenge years later when he is released, but discovers the task will have greater consequences than he first imagined. This is a masterpiece. A must watch.  

VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN IS NOT THE REAL MONSTER

This began as a review of Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, but I found my critiques were conveyed too harshly by text, so I recorded a podcast discussion on the subject (HERE). After that podcast, this post changed, exploring the popular saying "Frankenstein is the real monster" (which was one of the core ideas of the del Toro movie and became the focus of a lot of online conversation around the film and book). In order to make this post, I have re-read the Frankenstein novel, using the 1816-17 manuscript available in special editions of the book (which shows Percy Shelley's changes and contributions). Because I am using the 1816-17 manuscript, it is always possible I am missing a crucial detail found in the 1818 edition (which is the one del Toro based his film on). The 1818 edition is the version I grew up reading, and one that I revisited about 1 1/2 to 2 years ago. It has been long enough that I could have forgotten something important in it, but I had a strong desire to read the original Bodleian Manuscript (the version I used is the first in The Original Frankenstein by Vintage Classics). 

Before I start, a caveat: when it comes to Frankenstein, I am very biased. It was my favorite book when I was young, and while I usually am the one to say a movie should not be like the novel because it is a different medium, with this story, I have a harder time letting the source material go. I also have very strong opinions of the source material, sometimes holding views that run counter to popular sentiment, but I understand it is ultimately a work of art that can be read a number of different ways. And I don't think I have any special access to its meaning. I realize that I am just a fan of the novel, perhaps overly confident in his conclusions, and that there are alternative arguments to contend with on the subject. I am not an academic either. So take this post with a grain of salt. I have some forcefully expressed opinions here. That doesn't mean I think different views on the book or movie are worse than my own or wrong. I just want to put my cards on the table and be as honest I can about how I feel. 

"Victor is the real monster" has become a truism. And that admonition makes a certain amount of sense given how much our view of the book has been shaped by movies where The Creature is often presented as a lumbering, inarticulate and murderous beast. And so it does help draw peoples' attention to how sympathetic The Creature is in the in book. But the truth is the book is much more complicated than "Creature Bad, Victor Good" or "Victor Bad, Creature Good". And if you read it, you have to contend with the failings of both characters (and an honest reading, in my opinion, reveals significant failings on the part Victor and his Creature). 

But before I address that, another point: The Creature has been portrayed sympathetically and Victor villainously many times before in films. So my above point needs to be tempered by this reminder. The 1957 Curse of Frankenstein starring Peter Cushing, with Christopher Lee as the Monster, depicts Victor in very unflattering light. Cushing is brilliant in the role and plays him as jerk and fiend. And as the series continues (Hammer made a number of Frankenstein films starring Cushing) his crimes only get worse and worse. And the original James Whale Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935) both portray the Creature very sympathetically, with Victor, particularly in the first film, as unhinged. And while Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) certainly makes Victor more sympathetic and less flawed than he was in the book, it is largely, with some notable exceptions, a faithful adaptation of the source material, presenting the Creature as sympathetic, if not quite as fully eloquent as he is in the novel. And if we venture into less well known films or into made-for-tv movie versions, we find some that are arguably even more faithful than the Branagh film. So I think it is also an error to speak as if audiences have been completely unaware the Creature is a sympathetic and tragic character to this point (anyone who watches the 1931 Frankenstein, would certainly pause if asked the question: who is the real monster?). 

And it is worth discussing sympathetic monsters in general. Sometimes, not always, there is a sense that people think this is a new phenomenon or a revolutionary way of thinking that begins with works like Wicked, the novel about the Wicked Witch of the West from 1995. But that was written in a decade that was overrun with sympathetic villains, particularly in horror, both on screen and in books. You can point quickly to the 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula, but also to Nightbreed (1990) and the 1988 Clive Barker novella it was based on, Cabal.  Perhaps most well-known was Interview with a Vampire (1994). And it is notable that Anne Rice, who wrote the book it was based on in 1976, has remarked that one of things that motivated her to write from the Vampire's perspective was Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein novel. But you can go back further than Interview. Creature from the Black Lagoon's Gil-man was a sympathetic figure, and so too was the The Phantom of the Opera (in most movie versions, and the musical, but also in Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel). And then there are films like Dracula's Daughter (1936) where you have a remorseful vampire who desperately wants to change her ways and be human, or Cat People (1942), a movie following a similar theme, except instead of a Vampiress, it is about a cat woman. It can also be seen in world cinema, in movies like The Enchanting Shadow (1960). Sympathetic monsters have been around at least as long as the novel Frankenstein, but even longer than that for sure. The book includes many references to John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) for example, and that is an epic poem from the perspective of The Devil (something that clearly influenced Shelley's thinking in Frankenstein as there are many parallels with the characters and the Creature reads it and makes reference to it). In Paradise Lost he is still evil, but it is a sympathetic portrayal of evil. 

This is a something that recurs again and again. It isn't new. And sometimes we find ourselves at different different turning points in the pendulum swing. One could argue that we went too far making villain's sympathetic in the 1990s, as it does take away the power of monsters when we turn them into misunderstood people or even into objects of romance. I have vivid memories of people growing weary of the sympathetic villain in that decade. The pendulum is always swinging for this reason. When villains speak, we listen because they are usually the most fascinating characters in stories and movies, so it makes sense we find ourselves wanting to hear their point of view. There is something powerful about a figure of menace giving their side or simply conversing with the protagonist. Silence of the Lambs (1991) is a clear example of how this fascinates us. But when we come to understand them too much, they cease to be monsters at all (and we resort to devices like making ourselves the monsters). 

Allow me to cut right to the point before going deeper: the question "who is the real villain of Frankenstein" itself greatly simplifies a complex tale of tragic falls from grace. Frankenstein is about big themes like pride, wrath, and man's reckless desire for immortality. It is also about personal responsibility, both the Creature's and Victor's. "Victor is the real monster" simplifies the complexity of the characters. This is a story, in my opinion, that describes two men who become monstrous, but do not have to be so. We can debate who is more monstrous, we can even debate whether Victor or the Creature are monsters at all, but I don't really think that is the point of the book. It isn't about who is the monster. And when we answer that question, I think it leads to moral conclusions that don't hold under scrutiny. 

But since the question is raised, let's take a look at each character. 

Victor commits the ultimate crime against the natural order, and the Creature commits the ultimate crime by killing a child (and more murders besides). Both take actions that are an affront to life. Yet, we care about Victor and we care about the Creature. We come to understand the suffering of both and get clear accounts of each figure's descent. And the book does not conceal how sympathetic the creature is. It isn't a mark of intelligence or wisdom to read it and see the creature has humanity (it is pretty obvious because the Creature is given enormous space to tell his own story and delivers it like a poet). But the book also shows us Victor's humanity as well as his flaws (and his flaws are notable). And there are parallels between both characters we are meant to pick up on. 

Victor's crimes are pretty clear in the book. He violates the dead by using them as raw parts for his creation, he violates nature by trying to defeat death. He arguably rebels against God by trying to defeat death in this way and by trying to make himself the creator of a new race. He is filled with hubris and becomes obsessed with his project, to the exclusion of other concerns. When things go awry he dwells on his own pain, and sometimes seems to think it is greater than the pain of those who fall victim to his Creature. He also is guilty of the sin of omission. When he realizes the Creature has killed his brother, and Justine is wrongfully charged with the crime, he says nothing about having made the Creature, partly because he thinks people will see him as crazy, partly because he feels there is no hope people will believe, but the bottom line is he watches and allows her to die, even if he feels bad about it, he does not intervene. And this kind of behavior continues in the book. He is also reckless and endangers everyone around him with his actions. His big sin in the book in terms of the Creature is rejecting and abandoning his own creation (and one could argue his other sin was making him in the first place). He does not take responsibility for or show kindness towards the creature he creates. Later in the book, when the creature pleads with him after having killed his brother William, Victor feels a slight twinge of parental responsibility, but I think on the whole he fails to understand how much he owes his own creation. This is a key source of the tragedy that follows. We don't know what would happen if he had reared the Creature, shown it love and given it an education about life and its place in the world. But it is safe to assume, things would have ended very differently, or at the very least, the Creature would have been better equipped to deal with the later rejection the world gave to it. 

Victor also denies the Creature a companion after hearing his tale. Initially he agrees, but when he thinks through the implications, he changes his mind and this is what sets the Creature on the path that results in his murder of Elizabeth. It is easy to sympathize with the creature here, but Victor raises rather good points on why he shouldn't create a companion (including the possible destruction of humanity as they are replaced by his new race of beings). And the Creature is not just making a demand of Victor, but making a demand on the potential companion he asks to be created. He shows almost no regard for her or her wishes (even whether she wants to be created and condemned to the life he has experienced). He views himself as a wretch at this point and is asking Victor to make another wretch to keep him company. 

I have already hinted at the Creature's crimes but we should go over those as well, because in many adaptations these are explained away or ignored (in the del Toro Frankenstein that are almost entirely washed away or shifted to mishap or Victor himself). The creature kills Victor's Brother William, who in the book is a child. He does so knowingly and feels exalted by it when it is done (later he does express remorse for his deeds when his long road of vengeance is complete but in the moment he is very bent on his path against Victor). After the killing he takes a locket that was around William's neck and places it in the dress fold of Justine, William's caretaker, to frame her for the crime. I don't think I need to get into how much deliberate intent and scheming this demonstrates. These are acts of a person who knows what they are doing, and understands what the consequences for the victims will be. 

Both characters know better and have their own form of ignorance. Victor for example, is led astray as a youth when he begins reading the works of alchemists and his father fails to clarify why he should not waste his time with them, save saying the works are trash. But both characters also clearly know right from wrong very early. Victor is raised in a loving family and given a thorough education. The creature is more innocent, finding himself alone in the wilderness after his creation, but even before he fully understands the world, he demonstrates a moral understanding in how he interacts with the family he attaches himself to in a rural homestead (in the book, like the del Toro movie and the Branagh movie, he resides secretly in a hovel adjoining a county house). One example of this is he initially steals food from them to survive, until he sees the pain it causes them and stops. After learning to read he finds a volume by Plutarch and speaks of how he came to admire the more "peaceable lawgivers" and after hearing the cottagers read Ruins of Empire, he weeps for the suffering of natives killed by invasion and expresses "disgust and loathing" towards men's capacity to murder each other. Not only do we see him adopting moral positions, but we see him ruminating and grappling with their complexity. And he demonstrates an understanding of other peoples ability to experience the pain he does. This internal world of the Creature and its eloquence is something even many of the most sympathetic adaptations fail to capture. 

And let's be clear, the Creature's suffering is immense in the book. He is rejected by the cottagers when he finally approaches them. And later after saving a young girl from downing he is rewarded by the father with a gunshot. He feels thoroughly rejected and after finding Victor's Journal he very deliberately sets his mind on vengeance. 

But is he thoroughly rejected? He has a glimmer of hope with the old blind man, before the son, Felix, beats him away. And afterwards he realizes this may have just been a setback and plans to approach them again, until he learns they have vacated the place in fear. So clearly there is the possibility of acceptance, even if for him it is more remote than others. And before he kills William, who he happens upon by accident while trying to find Victor, he intends at first to abduct him, believing a child is not biased against his deformity, and it is when William reacts with horror at his appearance and tells him he is the son of a Frankenstein that the Creature kills him. And it is very intentional:

"Frankenstein!" Cried I, "You belong then to my enemy, to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge, and you shall be my first victim."

This is not a misunderstanding like the accidental drowning of the girl in the 1931 Frankenstein, this is very much a deliberate act, and one we would never excuse in real life, no matter how tragic or sad the life of the person responsible. Again, Mary Shelley chose this. She could have have had his first victim be anyone else and chose to make it the worst kind of killing imaginable. So I think it is important to balance that against the sympathy the creature generates in his narrative (and it is important to remember that the Creature is just as self-absorbed and unreliable a narrator as Victor is). 

Soon after the murder, he places the boy's locket on Justine, William's caretaker. It is also very clear that the Creature knows what he is doing and that he knows it is wrong. While living in the Hovel, he hears a story of a man wrongly condemned to death who is liberated by Felix (the young man who lives at the homestead). He understands justice and injustice (much of his pleading with Victor is about how unjustly he feels the world treats him). And so when he plants the locket on Justine to frame her, this is not the act of a child behaving from impulse without thought to the full weight of consequence. He knows what will happen and he understands Justine will die, and what death means. 

And the Creature goes on to murder more people, including Clerval and Elizabeth (both of whom are completely innocent and kind). He becomes as obsessed about harming Victor and having his revenge, as Victor was about creating him in the first place. He also has the same trouble seeing and understanding his own culpability as Victor does (and always seems to prioritize his own suffering the way Victor does). 

Also while he begins with a love and fondness for humanity, we see how quickly that shifts when his own pain consumes him. He speaks lovingly of Felix and the other cottagers, but when he addresses Captain Walton at the end of the book after Victor has died he says 

“You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured wasting in impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice."

Not only does this passage demonstrate the Creature's eloquence, it also shows how out of proportion his anger is. Had he limited his hatred to just Victor, that would be understandable. But here he blames all humanity for the rejection of a few, and how quickly his love for Felix evaporates in his anger (when it was equally clear earlier in the book that the Creature comprehended it could have been a simple misunderstanding because he inadvertently frightened the cottagers). 

Also his conception of his own pain mirrors Victor's, where he can't conceive that anyone else has experienced the kind of pain he has. 

Now let's look at what del Toro has to do in order to make the Creature largely blameless, and to make Victor the sole monster of the story. You will hear a lot of people say this movie makes a case for Frankenstein being the real monster, and it does. But it does so by making significant changes to his character and background. In the books, Victor is not an abuse victim. His parents are both loving, and his family all seem to be good and adoring people in his life. His friend Clerval is incredibly supportive. In del Toro's Franknstein, Victor is subject to a father's abuse, and the next we see of him, he is arrogantly and openly bringing half a cadaver to life at University. In the book he conducts his experiments in secret and is reticent to speak of them even when the cost of silence is life and death. Once the creature is brought to life, the movie gives us very important changes. First, he chains the Creature in the basement of the tower, then proceeds to mock it, abuse it, harass it, and just generally mistreat it. Finally he tries to destroy it in a fiery explosion, which fails. In the book, Victor is horrified the moment the Creature comes to life and flees, returning only after it has left and not seeing it again until after the death of his brother William at the Creature's hand.  

The Creature's story in del Toro's version, starts out, once freed from the tower, similar to its tale in the book, finding a homestead and spying on the family there, hoping to become one of them. However the movie takes a brief positive interaction with the old blind patriarch and transforms it into a weeks/months long relationship (which I thought was very interesting). This radically changes the character of the Creature. Importantly, the movie presents us with a William who is fully grown and married to Elizabeth (who in the novel marries Victor). William is killed somewhat indirectly by the monster in a scene of chaos that takes place after Elizabeth is murdered. And who murders her? Not the monster, like in the book, but Victor, who recklessly fires a shot at the Monster after Elizabeth steps before him to intervene (I watched the scene twice and it looks to me like he fires the gun after she steps in the way of it). And then he blames the Creature for her murder (something he keeps doing in the movie, which I think is del Toro's way of emphasizing Victor's failure to understand his own responsibility for the situation in the novel). Elizabeth dies but not before declaring her love for the Creature (something that never happens or is even hinted at in the book). And Victor then begins a hunt to destroy his creation (and in the book, after the Creature murders Elizabeth that is what sets off their chase into the arctic). Most of the crimes in the book that the Creature commits are not present or radically altered (even shifted to other people). His worst act in the film is the killing of crewmen aboard the ship at the start of the movie (and while this is bad, it does not rise to the same level of murdering William or condemning Justine to death). 

By making William an adult, and making his killing more a product of a confused brawl in the wake of Elizabeth's death and by shifting Elizabeth's death into the hands of Victor, del Toro completely changes the culpability of the Creature. By having Victor frantically blame others for his own misdeeds and mistakes, and by having him abuse the Creature viciously (when his crime agains the Creature in the book is one of neglect and rejection), it turns Victor into a completely different character. 

We have to ask ourselves, why didn't del Toro keep the crimes of the monster intact to make his argument. If the book is presenting us with a more heroic monster, and painting Victor as the Villain, surely we can leave the monster's crimes in the story, but explain them. And I think the reason is very simple. While the monster is a sympathetic figure in the book, it is impossible to sympathize with him as much as del Toro does if he remains a child killer and murderer/framer of innocent women. People might be able to overlook Clerval. But they can't overlook the killing of a child, the framing and death of Justine, and the murder of Elizabeth. Del Toro removes and changes all of those, shifting the killing of Elizabeth to Victor, making William an adult rather than child and his death more understandable. He even has William accuse Victor of being the real monster as he is dying in his arms. 

The reason I bring this up, is the del Toro movie lays bare what contortions one must go through to fully embrace the idea that "Victor is the real monster". I think it is useful in illustrating how shallow this idea really is. 

There is saying about the story that goes something like "Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein is not the monster, wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is the monster". I think this reflects more an understanding informed by the movies. No one who reads the book mistakes Frankenstein for the Creature's name. But more significantly, it reflects an adolescent reading of the book. Most people on their first reading, probably sympathize more with the Creature than with Victor. When I first read it in high school I was an angry adolescent and I largely identified with the Creature, who I saw as misunderstood and as an almost romantic figure. I excused and ignored his crimes, and I largely blamed Victor. As I got older though, I saw the creature's sins more clearly and I came to have sympathy for Victor as well, seeing the tragedy and sins of both figures in equal measure. 

FRANKENSTEIN 2025