Why Frankenstein Keeps Coming Back — and Why It Still Matters Today
We keep resurrecting Frankenstein, not just for the horror, but for the quiet confession beneath it — a story about creation, wounds, and the things we pass on without meaning to.
This content is also available in Bahasa Indonesia. You can read it here.
Netflix has just released Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited passion project — a film he spent decades dreaming about. When the movie finally premiered, del Toro said he felt something empty inside him, as if he had reached the end of the world and didn’t know what came next.
Interestingly, this feeling is echoed in the film itself. In one scene, Victor sits on a staircase and murmurs:
“I never considered what would come after creation. And having reached the edge of the earth, there was no horizon left. The achievement felt unnatural. Void of meaning. And this troubled me so.”
It is both a line of dialogue and a confession. Victor speaks for del Toro — a creator staring at his own creation, trembling at what it reveals about him.
Del Toro honors the spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel, but he reshapes it with his own cinematic obsessions: emotional inheritance, wounds handed down across generations, the longing for love, and the terror of the unknown. Frankenstein has always been a philosophical story, but del Toro turns it into something intimate — a mirror for our own wounds.
Here are three themes that stand out the most.
1. The Ethics of Invention
In Shelley’s era, electricity was what AI is today — a dazzling, unsettling force that felt both miraculous and dangerous. Galvanism experiments made dead frogs twitch and corpses move. People wondered:
What are the limits of science? What happens when humans try to play God?
The Industrial Revolution only heightened the fear. Machines replaced jobs. Society changed too fast. Victor Frankenstein became the symbol of the ambitious creator who forgets the moral weight of his creation. Shelley’s warning is clear: Creation without ethics leads to destruction.
And if we’re honest, we are living through a similar anxiety now. AI, robotics, gene editing, synthetic biology — all of it fascinates us and frightens us. People worry about being replaced. Others fear a world where humans lose control over what they create.
We survived the disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. But we need awareness, responsibility, and ethical imagination. Innovation should create justice, not deepen the gap between those who have power and those who do not.
2. The Curse of Inheritance
Del Toro adds a theme that does not exist in Shelley’s novel — one drawn from his own life: how emotional wounds pass from parents to children, generation after generation.
In the novel, Victor’s father is Alphonse Frankenstein: gentle, respectable, loving. Del Toro changes him to Leopold Frankenstein: harsh, domineering, emotionally damaging. This single decision reframes the entire story. Victor’s obsession, fear, and emotional collapse are no longer just ambition — they are inherited wounds.
This resonates deeply with me. In my video essay, I talk about how the creature symbolizes the inner wounds we all carry. Wounds we never asked for. Wounds shaped by those who shaped us — or failed to.
Most of us try to escape these wounds.
We deny them.
We fear them.
We try to kill them off.
But like the creature, our wounds chase us. They demand recognition. They want resolution, acknowledgement, love. And this is where the endings diverge.
In Shelley’s novel, Victor dies full of hatred and vengeance. There is no healing. When the creature finds him, he mourns — a grief unresolved. The pain hangs in the air, unfinished.
Del Toro chooses a different ending. As the creature carries Victor in the final scene, Victor whispers, “Forgive me, my son.” And the creature replies softly, “I forgive you.”
The man who sought immortality finally accepts his limits. The being abandoned at birth is finally seen as human. Del Toro transforms punishment into forgiveness — a grace most of us never experience in real life.
Unfortunately, most of us live with the ache of Shelley’s ending: the unresolved, the unanswered, the unfinished.
3. The Fear of the Unknown
Out of curiosity, I rewatched the 1931 Universal film — the version that gave the world its collective image of the monster: the flat head, the bolts, the stitches. As a piece of art from its time, I can appreciate it. But thematically, it barely resembles Shelley’s work.
It’s fast, simple, made for entertainment. The creature is violent and dim-witted — nothing like the articulate, philosophical figure Shelley wrote. As horror, it hasn’t aged well. What terrified audiences in 1931 now feels almost charming.
Yet one message remains: humans fear what they don’t understand — and the mob is often more monstrous than the monster.
The creature, newly awakened, reacts from fear and pain. But the mob acts with certainty, torches in hand, attacking without thought.
Prejudice + fear + collective certainty = moral violence.
When someone becomes part of a crowd, their individual sense of responsibility dissolves. Fear becomes righteousness. Othering becomes easy. And history shows us again and again that the mob causes more harm than the monster ever could.
This message is still painfully relevant today — in xenophobia, moral panic, fear-driven violence, and the treatment of anyone deemed “different.”
Why Frankenstein Still Matters
After Shelley’s novel came out, the story spread through theater and then film. Every era reshaped Frankenstein to reflect its own fears.
Shelley: horror as philosophy
1931: horror as spectacle
Del Toro: horror with empathy
Del Toro’s version doesn’t replace the others — it adds to a long conversation about humanity, responsibility, and the wounds we inherit and pass on. If you’re curious, these adaptations are worth watching. They reveal how elastic this story is, how each generation finds a different truth inside it.
Because in the end, Frankenstein is not just a monster story. It’s a story about creation and abandonment, loneliness and longing, moral responsibility and emotional inheritance — and the fragile borders of our humanity. The creature holds a mirror to our fears, our failures, and our hope for redemption.
And maybe that’s why Frankenstein never dies.
We keep resurrecting him — not because he’s a monster, but because he helps us understand what it means to be human.
If you’re curious how these ideas unfold visually, I also created a video essay that explores the themes of creation, inheritance, and the monsters we carry. You can watch it here.