Facing Monsters with Frankenstein

In an age of AI and outrage, Frankenstein still knows us best.

Frankenstein.

The green-faced Halloween monster with a bolt through his forehead is one of the most enduring imaginary characters this side of Santa Claus. Everyone knows Frankenstein’s creation, though his creator—Dr. Victor Frankenstein—gets less attention.

The story of Frankenstein, then, is easily read as a warning about the potential of new and fearsome technologies to wreak havoc on the humanity of its creator, on the world at large, and on our conception of “life itself.”

The 1821 novel Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus was written by the 19th-century literary genius Mary Shelley, on a bet among herself, Percy Blythe Shelley, Lord Gyron, and John Polider over who could write the best horror story.

This crew was, for the non-uber-lit-nerds out there, a who’s who of British Romanticism. Given the timing of del Toro’s remake of Frankenstein, it’s particularly interesting to consider the story’s roots in Romantic thought, a (complicated and certainly not stainless) movement that arose in response to the ongoing industrial revolution and the associated shifting of human experience from farm and village to factory and city.

To put a finer point on it: given the AI-driven world-transformation currently underway, Guillermo del Toro’s masterfully haunted reboot of Frankenstein brings that angle into particularly sharp relief.

It’s only kinda theoretical to say that the OpenAIs of the world are out there testing Dr. Frankenstein’s hypothesis: can life be created from machinery?

Plus, Oscar Issac’s brilliantly acted Doctor Frankenstein does not birth his creature (aka Jacob ElordiStein) for the betterment of humanity—he probably says he’s doing that, sure, at some point in the film—but it’s narratively evident Victor F. does it to mitigate his fear of death and meet the mandate of his own pride.

Which, from the vantage point of 2025, sounds a lot like Silicon Valley’s techno-transcendentalism. Plus, when Dr. Frankenstein loses control of his creation, he ghosts out and washes his hands of responsibility...a move that seems lifted straight out of the tech-oligarch-in-PR-crisis playbook.

But to reduce Frankenstein to a modern parable about the god-playing of the presently powerful is to ignore the little Dr. Victor Frankenstein in all of us.

To our unwise eyes at The Cure, del Toro’s rendition of the Frankenstein story is a particularly sharp distillation of the warning Friedrich Nietzsche famously delivered:

“Beware that when fighting monsters, you do not yourself become a monster.”

Del Toro’s take on the creature—his choice of the famously handsome Elordi and fundamentally elegant visual rendering of the creature—emphasizes the narrative truth that Frankenstein’s creature does not wreak violence because it is evil, or deranged, or sadistic.

Rather, the creature lashes out because it is lonely and in pain.

It exists unloved in an uncertain world. And because the world sees Frankenstein’s creation as a monster, it treats him as a threat to be rid of rather than a being in pain.

Which is a helpful if uncomfortable PSA in a world that seems increasingly full of monsters.

Seems is the keyword there, by the way.

It’s easier than ever to ghost, to shun, to dismiss, or ignore those we regard as monstrous. More than any of us like to admit, we give ourselves permission to ignore the full humanity of those we don’t understand or are threatened by. To cast them as irredeemable and place them beyond the pale.

A world where it’s simply Good Humans vs. Bad Monsters is easier and cleaner than a messy world where hurt people hurt people.

Perversely, acknowledging that the negative actions of others (which are not excusable, by the way) come from a place of pain and isolation is often too heavy for our own egos to handle. It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge this truth, because it calls our self-conception as good people into question.

We forgive our own missteps every day and generally have sound self-justifications for ‘em all too. We recognize that we (ourselves, as individuals) are basically trying our best to make it through a hard world and sometimes fuck up.

The good news is: that proves we’re capable of that kind of thinking. The trick is just doing a better job of extending that thinking towards others. That’s all.

Which is a lifelong pursuit that’s easier said than done, of course.

But the truth Shelley wrote towards and del Toro restitches is that our own humanity isn’t actualized through our own goodness or self-regard or individual achievements…but through our compassion towards the misunderstood things in both self and others.

It’s our ability to confront whatever or whomever we regard as monstrous with humanity that makes us fully human. When we fall short of that, we become the monster we fear.

And we won’t even wake up looking like Jacob Elordi, either.

Stay kind out there,

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