In late 2025, Guillermo del Toro\u2019s long-awaited Frankenstein landed on Netflix like a bolt of lightning into a forgotten laboratory. It was an instant triumph\u2014a lavish, soulful adaptation that finally did justice to Mary Shelley\u2019s 1818 novel. For weeks, living rooms across the globe were lit by the film\u2019s candlelit laboratories and frozen wastelands. But as the credits rolled, a hunger stirred in many viewers. They craved more of that same Gothic dread, more of the Romantic agony, more monsters born not of evil but of lonely obsession.
What if you could chase that feeling through a whole season\u2014or several? While there is no dedicated Frankenstein television series that matches Del Toro\u2019s vision, the streaming era has gifted us with an embarrassment of dark, atmospheric treasures. Five shows in particular echo the film\u2019s themes of forbidden creation, arctic despair, and the monstrous beauty of things that should not be alive. Come, let us walk through the dim corridors of modern Gothic television.
1. Servant: A Modern Reborn Doll Tale
Deep in a Philadelphia townhouse, something impossible stirs. M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s Servant may unfold in the present day, but its soul belongs to the same dark fairy-tale tradition that Del Toro so loves. The Turners, a wealthy couple shattered by the loss of their infant son, turn to a lifelike \u201creborn doll\u201d as a coping mechanism. Then, one day, the doll opens its eyes.
What follows is a slow, clammy unravelling that shares its DNA with Frankenstein. Here, the act of creation is not scientific but psychological, the creature not stitched from corpses but summoned from grief. The house itself becomes a character, its creaks and shadows punctuating a growing sense of dread. As the nanny Leanne\u2019s mysterious powers grow, the series asks the same question Victor Frankenstein faced: what happens when you get what you wished for? Over four seasons on Apple TV+, Servant tightens its grip until you can barely breathe, proving that the Gothic can thrive in a smart home just as it did in a castle.
2. 1899: A Sea of Dark Ambition
Imagine Victor Frankenstein as a passenger on a steamship at the turn of the 20th century, adrift in a fog that hides not ice but the entire nature of reality. That is the disorienting thrill of 1899, the ambitious German-language series from the creators of Dark. Though Netflix cancelled it after one season, the journey remains a complete, mind-shattering experience.
The plot is a Gothic puzzle box: the ship Kerberos steams toward New York when it picks up a distress signal from the Prometheus, its sister vessel lost four months earlier. Boarding the ghostly ship unleashes a cascade of impossible events that tangle science, memory, and horror into one seafaring nightmare. The relentless pursuit of knowledge that drives Frankenstein is mirrored here in every passenger\u2019s search for truth, only to find that some truths are designed to destroy. Foggy decks, creaking metal, and a sense of cosmic wrongness make 1899 the ocean voyage Victor might have taken if he\u2019d fled Ingolstadt by sea instead of into the mountains.
3. Penny Dreadful: Where the Creature Walks Again
Sometimes the best way to savor Frankenstein is to spend time with the Creature himself. Showtime\u2019s Penny Dreadful does exactly that, weaving Mary Shelley\u2019s characters into a rich, bloody tapestry of 19th-century terror. Here, Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and his immortal creation (Rory Kinnear) share the stage with Dorian Gray, Dracula, and Vanessa Ives.
The show takes liberating liberties with the source material, yet it captures the novel\u2019s soul in every rain-soaked London alley. The Creature here is no mere grunting monster; he is a poet, a tortured son demanding love from a father who cannot give it. The scenes between him and Victor crackle with the same tragic electricity that Del Toro channels so beautifully. Across three seasons, Penny Dreadful reminds us that Frankenstein\u2019s legacy is not confined to one laboratory\u2014it seeps into every gaslit corner where humanity confronts its own grotesque reflection.
4. The Terror: An Arctic Nightmare
The opening pages of Shelley\u2019s novel are drenched in ice. Captain Walton\u2019s ship, trapped in the Arctic, encounters a desperate, half-frozen Victor Frankenstein pursuing his creation across the floes. AMC\u2019s The Terror expands that frozen opening into an entire season of exquisite, hopeless horror.
Based on Dan Simmons\u2019s novel, the first season follows two Royal Navy ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, as they search for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s. The ice closes in, food dwindles, and then the Tuunbaq emerges\u2014a mythic, bear-like entity that hunts the men as punishment for their trespass. This is Frankenstein\u2019s cold dread pushed to its extreme. The obsession with achieving a goal that becomes meaningless, the isolation of a world reduced to white and shadow, the feeling that nature itself is a sentient, vengeful force\u2014all of it echoes the novel\u2019s frozen soul. Watching The Terror is like stepping into the very landscape that shaped Victor\u2019s final, doomed pursuit.
5. Cabinet of Curiosities: A Gallery of Beautiful Monsters
Finally, we return to Guillermo del Toro himself\u2014not as director, but as master of ceremonies. Guillermo del Toro\u2019s Cabinet of Curiosities is a Netflix anthology of eight standalone horror tales, each one a meticulously crafted jewel that gleams with his signature love for the weird, the decaying, and the transcendently strange.
Set mostly in the early 20th century, the episodes feel like lost fairy tales whispered in dark parlors. Stories based on H.P. Lovecraft and original nightmares unfold with a patient, creeping menace\u2014the kind that makes you aware of every shadow in your own room. There are no stitches-and-lightning monsters here, but every tale breathes the same air as Frankenstein: the terror of the unknown, the beauty of the grotesque, the human need to open doors that were meant to stay locked. It is the perfect chaser after Del Toro\u2019s film, a variety box of horrors that all lead back to the same aching truth\u2014that the real monsters are almost always born of love twisted into something unrecognizable.
So, when the final reel of Frankenstein has run and the house falls silent, you need not leave the Gothic chamber. These five series are waiting in the darkness, each one a different mirror held up to Mary Shelley\u2019s immortal nightmare. Whether you choose the modern parlor of Servant, the frozen hell of The Terror, or the candlelit poetry of Penny Dreadful, you will find yourself once again asking the question that has haunted readers for two centuries: who is truly the monster, and who is the man?
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