Before horror had soundtracks, there was Frankenstein, a gothic fever dream that birthed modern science fiction before anyone knew what electricity could really do. Mary Shelley, barely twenty, turned a sleepless night and a few lightning bolts into the most enduring metaphor for human arrogance ever penned. It was not just a monster story; it was a mirror showing what happens when genius forgets empathy, and invention forgets consequence.

As Shelley’s lightning struck literature, it also sparked a question that still haunts us: what happens when creators play gods and forget to love their creations?

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus tells the tale of Victor Frankenstein, a man so obsessed with defying death that he forgets how to live. He stitches together intelligence, sorrow, and flesh into one doomed experiment, only to recoil from what he has made. The Creature, rejected yet eloquent, becomes both victim and villain. It is a cautionary symphony about ambition’s dark side, a philosophical mic drop reminding us that progress without compassion is just another form of destruction.

While Victor played scientist with lightning and ego, modern culture now toys with algorithms and AI, different lab, same monster, new chaos loading.

No, not even close, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was never a true story, and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) on Netflix is not one either. Shelley’s gothic vision was born from 19th-century science gossip, especially the Galvanism craze, where corpses jolted under electric shocks. That haunting image of a trembling creation became legend. Del Toro revives it, trading fact for feeling and proving that fiction, when done right, can feel frighteningly real.

As men zapped dead frogs for science, Mary Shelley zapped the patriarchy with fiction, proving imagination can resurrect ideas more powerfully than any electric current.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein is less a remake and more a requiem. He trades Mary Shelley’s horror for heartbreak, crafting a film where creation and creator are bound by trauma, not thunder. Victor’s cruelty is generational, his obsession paternal. The Creature, gentle yet monstrous by design, becomes innocently weaponized by neglect. Del Toro’s Arctic skies echo Shelley’s pages, but the moral inversion is pure 2025: empathy becomes rebellion, and monstrosity is just misunderstood humanity wearing stitched skin.

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What are your thoughts on whether Frankenstein draws more from science or superstition? Was Mary Shelley predicting the future or simply reflecting her fears? Let us know in the comments below.