For over two centuries, Frankenstein has been a story that we just haven’t been able to let go of. Not because it’s scary, but because it asks a question that we’re still struggling to answer ourselves: what happens when humans create something they don’t understand?
Mary Shelley was just 18 years old when she came up with the idea during the dark summer of 1816. She and her friends challenged each other to write ghost stories, and Shelley ended up inventing the first science fiction novel. It’s a story about ambition, human curiosity, and the dangers of trying to play God.
Most film adaptations fail to capture these complexities. The figure we know from pop culture, with green skin, bolts in the neck, grunting like a caveman with an inexplicable fear of fire, is always cast as the monster, but the true threat is far more complicated.
The true danger in Shelley’s novel is Victor. He creates life without understanding the implications, neglecting the moral and practical weight of his actions. The creature, by contrast, is reflective, articulate, and innocently aware of the world around him.
Victor mirrors humanity itself: obsessed with control, prone to his pride, and blind to how his inventions shape reality. This is what makes him truly unsettling. Shelley’s caution is about the unintended consequences of creation, not a stitched-together figure.
We’re still struggling with the same questions today. Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are generating music, images, and writing, and are quickly developing tools that we still barely understand. Self-driving cars, biotech innovations, and large-scale automation are all tools humanity is building faster than we can fully grasp.
Like Victor, we’re creating things at a speed and scale that outpaces our understanding, and the results can be unpredictable, astonishing, or even dangerous. Shelley’s novel reads as a cautionary tale for the modern age: just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming adaptation of Frankenstein finally seems poised to capture this. Jacob Elordi’s creature isn’t just a monstrous caricature; he embodies intelligence, awareness, and lost innocence. Oscar Isaac’s Victor is consumed by obsession and the thrill of discovery, a human mirror to the ambitions that drive our modern world. Del Toro has always been drawn to the line between the human and the extraordinary, and here he has a story that’s literally built on that tension.
Del Toro films, from The Shape of Water to Pan’s Labyrinth, have always explored humanity’s relationship to the extraordinary. His Frankenstein adaptation is a meditation on ambition, ethics, and empathy, showing how creation can reflect both our brilliance and our blind spots.
Shelley’s novel might’ve been written in 1816, but its themes resonate today: when humans innovate without fully understanding the consequences, the results are unpredictable, and the responsibility falls squarely on the creator.
What makes del Toro’s Frankenstein exciting is that it refuses to reduce the story to monsters and scares. Instead, it interrogates the human drive to innovate, the thrill of creating the unknown, and the dangers of moving faster than we can fully understand.
Victor’s mistakes are unnerving because we recognize the same impulses in ourselves: a desire to control, a hunger for discovery, and the temptation to push boundaries without fully predicting the outcome. Shelley’s tale isn’t about a creature to fear. It’s a reflection of human ambition and the dilemmas that come with technological innovation.
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